CMW5: Power and Courts Panel Video

[Jubal]

This panel focuses on royal and imperial courts, and their position in game cultures. As a location of power, the court is often key to medievalist settings, but often only as a direct location in which to talk directly to figures of power such as kings and emperors. In the discussion panellists explore different ways that courts could function in all their social and material complexity, and reflect on the possibilities for games and game design which that might open up.

This panel featured the following people:

Blair Apgar is an art historian focusing on high medieval Italy and especially the courts of Matilda of Canossa. Their work looks at how Matilda's material patronage intersected with issues of authority, agency, and gender, and how it intersects with the wider development of the Investiture Controversy. They currently teach at Elon University, North Carolina, and have worked extensively on ludic receptions of the Middle Ages including as one of the convenors of the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference series.

Andreas Kjeldsen is an indie game developer currently developing The Knight And The Maiden: A Modern Medieval Folk Tale, which mixes visual novel and adventure game mechanics in a story based around the court of the fictional principality of Castamont. In a fairytale beginning, our protagonist dresses as a knight to enter a tourney and save her father from unjust imprisonment, but romance, court politics, and intrigue make things a little more complicated after that...

François Alliot is a game developer and the design director at Nerial. He is best known for his game Reigns, which focuses on simple swipe-decision mechanics to take the player through a variety of medieval courtly decisions and strategically balance different priorities. The Reigns system has also been applied to a range of different courtly settings including Reigns: Her Majesty, Reigns: Game of Thrones, and Reigns: Three Kingdoms.

Hirohito Tsuji is a specialist on the Imperial family of Japan, currently working at the University of East Anglia. His work covers genealogical aspects of branches of the family, but also the history, historiography, and public reception of Imperial Japanese history more widely. His diverse interests have also included citizen science projects on art history and analysing game representations of late medieval Japan, and he is a licensed Shinto priest and an amateur Enka singer.

The panel was chaired by Madeline Sterns.