Thread by @digitalmedieval

2. Natural nerdiness and the research that developed from it, or, Games and the Middle Ages 🧵

Hi, I'm a nerd. As a kid, I loved to read and as soon I got a computer in the glorious year 2000, I was glued to the screen.

My hobbies always revolved around literature and gaming. Fictional worlds are awesome. So one passion became my profession and soon I thought, why not include the other?

In traditional German medievalist research, games are still frowned upon. They are seen as silly entertainment and as inferior to *LItEraTuRe*.

So it didn't occur to me until after I joined Twitter and met cool people there and had my PhD safely in my pocket that I could research games and movies, too!

I wrote a paper about the reception of @neilhimself's "Beowulf" movie and the monsters' genitalia: Hypersexualized Monsters in ›Beowulf‹ Director’s Cut bit.ly/3j4ZFLl

I was working a lecture about unicorns in medieval literature while playing #TheWitcher3 and reading Sapkowski's books and many things just clicked.

It resulted in this paper: Unicorn Symbolism in ‚The Witcher‘ Storyworld over @PAIDIA1 Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung paidia.de/unicorn-symbol…

I argue that Sapkoswki is super aware of religious symbolism and medieval unicorn discourses involved in The Witcher storyworld. Ciri, one the protagonists, has a strong connection to unicorns because of her virginity in relation to mariology.

A paper I am working on now will be called „Can Alistair be gay?“ Mods as Queer Empowerment in ‚Dragon Age: Origins‘. I will be talking about it here at gamesfestival.de @ComputerSAk

It will focus on Alistair, a character in a digital game, only being available as a straight romance option and people not being OK with mods making him gay, even going so far as arguing with "historical authenticity" and "rape".

Speaking of games: I owe a lot of my courage to go down this line of research at all to @AK_GWDS, a German network of historians researching digital games. Follow the collective if you are interested in games and history! gespielt.hypotheses.org/tag/akgwds

Sometimes I do twitch streams over at twitch.tv/thiliel, so follow me there for some fun with games.

But that's already branching into #scicomm, which I want to talk about later this afternoon. Thanks for reading! I'm going to go to the office now, see you later.

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