CMW IV: Life on the Medieval Margins Panel Video

[Jubal]

In this panel, we moved the focus from monsters to those people on the edges of medieval societies and their lives on the margins. Our different panelists considered how social class, law, and identity were among elements that could leave people outside society's boundaries, and will share different perspectives from practical game development to academic research on how we express those marginalisations in modern games.


This panel featured the following people:

Michelle M Sauer is the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Dakota. She is a medievalist who specializes in early Christian devotional literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race studies. She is also one of the founding members of an organization called Medievalists of Color, and part of our mission is to counteract the "inherent" whiteness of representations of the Middle Ages. Currently she is working on a number of collections on materiality, critical race theory and religion, as well as the history of sexuality. She is also working on a monograph about solitary sexuality involving religiously enclosed peoples, including issues like monastic masturbation. She enjoys playing video games, particularly fantasy-setting games such as RPGs set in medieval-esque worlds and is interested in the relationship between medieval stereotypes and Victorian conceptions of the era.

Owen Goddard (Priory Games) is a solo hobbyist developer from the UK. His current project, Under The Yoke, is a multi-generational medieval life-sim told from the perspective of a family of peasants from 1085-1335 as they strike out a living in medieval England. The game intentionally centres the lives of everyday people as they navigate the oppressive feudal system of the period. Throughout Under The Yoke are player-choice moments designed to reveal the conditions of those who are cast to the margins of society, whether it be by their occupation, religious affiliation, or health, among other factors.

Thom Gobbitt is an early medievalist whose research focus stands at the intersection of the history of law and the history of the book, and who is steadily expanding into ludology. On the gaming front, he is currently editing a collected volume of chapters on the representation of the medieval past in analogue/tabletop games, and is preparing a TTRPG based on the seventh-century Lombard laws in the Edictus Rothari of 643 CE.  Thom is also a part-time postdoctoral researcher on the ERC PresentDead project, in the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, Vienna, which explores grave reopenings and human interactions with materials relating to the dead, from the fifth to eighth centuries.

The panel was chaired by Blair Apgar.



Links
Under the Yoke: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2592060/Under_The_Yoke/