Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming. The workshops have been run as a collaboration between the University of Vienna Digital Humanities group (for CMW 1-4) and then the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Iranian Studies (for CMW5 onwards) and the Exilian creative and game development collective.
CMW is at the academic and professional forefront of examining these areas, with academics specialising on medievalism in games as regular attendees and keynote guests from major studios such as Obsidian and Paradox Interactive. Injecting new ideas and inviting new faces is just as important, however, and we also include postgraduate students, smaller independent game developers, and people from neighbouring disciplines in our mix of attendees each year.
The Coding Medieval Worlds workshop format is based on having discussion groups on a range of topics, with a number of keynote talks and panels throughout the weekend and surrounding events to help provoke further thought. The community around the workshops is ongoing between events, including a discord server for attendees and a public web forum space maintained for ongoing discussions.
Our last event was Coding Medieval Worlds 6, in February 2026. Stay tuned for announcements of future events!
Useful key links:
Find out more about past workshops, their programmes, and other details via the below pages.
- Coding Medieval Worlds 6: Manuscripts and Mechanics (2026)
- Coding Medieval Worlds 5: Power and Institution (2025)
- Coding Medieval Worlds 4: Outcasts and Monsters (2024)
- Coding Medieval Worlds 3: Landscapes and Backgrounds (2023)
- Coding Medieval Worlds 2: Networks and Connections (2022)
- Coding Medieval Worlds (2021)