1.#MAMG22 Fallout: New Vegas takes the player to the post-apocalyptic wastelands surrounding New Vegas—the desert, the hills, the neon lights guarded by robot sentinels, the forces of the NCR stretched on Hoover Dam, and the looming menace of the fascist Caesar’s Legion.
2.#MAMG22 Fallout games truck in neo-medievalism & Americana—retrofuturistic 1950s sci-fi Americana crumbling under the radiation, and the knights of the Brotherhood of Steel, in their plate man, paladins armed with laser gatlings, reminding us of the core fantasies of genre.
3.#MAMG22 The DLC “Honest Hearts,” though, takes the player out of the New Vegas Wasteland into Zion National Park, inhabited by a number of groups that the Fallout Universe describes as “tribals,” at term as problematic as you can imagine, & features extensive rock art.
4.#MAMG22 The “native”—so problematic, this has been acknowledged and discussed by the director at length—group living in Zion in the game are the “Sorrows,” a group descended from children who wandered in shortly after the apocalypse, protected by the "Father of the Caves".
5.#MAMG22 The Sorrows make rock art, found throughout Zion—and that rock art is in itself a neomedieval bit of Americana, replicating the “medieval” art of the region itself, products of the ancestral Puebloan peoples, the Fremont, and others, like this from Zion National Park.
6.#MAMG22 The term “medieval” is of course problematic to use outside of Afro-Eurasia (read @siwaratrikalpa ‘s brilliant indomedieval.medium.com/the-hemispheri… ) but as a shorthand for a period, it is useful to remind students and players that there is a world outside of Europe in that period.
7.#MAMG22 The American Southwest is filled with incredible artwork from numerous groups—for example, the richness of Chaco Canyon’s artwork (read.upcolorado.com/read/the-great… ) or the so-called “Hunter Panel” in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah from the Fremont culture.
8.#MAMG22 Honest Hearts uses a different style, but still places rock art throughout the map of Zion. The images are a combination of “medieval” examples with modern ideas—tall human figures, hand prints, an assault rifle and the number 22, all relevant to the Sorrows' history.
9.#MAMG22 Tall human figures are found throughout the region, for example in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah (smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new… and also capitolreef.org/blog/the-horse… ). Handprint rock art is common, like this from Fish Canyon, Utah. Rock art motifs are used, manipulated, for the game.
10.#MAMG22 This is, essentially, neo-medievalism. In the same way that the Brotherhood of Steel’s plate mail and “knights” give a refracted vision of the past in the game, so too does the rock art, create an image/identity for the Sorrows of the "medieval" American Southwest.
11.#MAMG22 This is neo-medievalism in games, a flavor of the past divorced from context to sell contemporary narratives—and we are good at identifying it when it is medieval European imagery, but we need to remember this is also true with examples from the “global Middle Ages."
12.#MAMG22 Honest Hearts is fun, but it reinforces stereotypes about Natives in the same vein as Fallout’s repeated problematic use of “tribals,” and even its art is using problematic neomedieval tropes to build identities and rhetoric.
13.#MAMG22 We need to study and teach “medieval” America more, in history alongside anthropology and archaeology, in medieval history surveys, so games like this are not the only place students, gamers, readers, and the public encounter Native history pre-occupation. Thank you.
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