I'm designing a course on game development & the middle ages - ideas!

[Clockwork]

Game to check out is Darklands (1992) by Microprose. Reason to check this out, it's a historical RPG, magic is more like alchemy. A fireball is really just an explosive concoction and a cleric is a religious person who knows how to bandage etc. It's also set during HRE 15th C. You can be a lawyer afaik. Well, at least you can take latin as a language and argue in court. (All based on second hand knowledge, don't quote me )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darklands_(video_game)

[Jubal]

Course syllabus submitted! Hopefully I'll be teaching this come winter semester (I'll be compiling most of the material in late summer so I may be asking for more opinions/advice at that point!)

[Glaurung]

Would you mind posting the syllabus here? After it's been approved, if necessary. It would be interesting to see what you think should (and can!) be included, and it might help spark some suggestions for potential content.

[Jubal]

Yes - I'll probably do it when I hear back about approval. In the end I've gone for six topics, each of which will be considered within each of the two strands. It's a rather random selection and those that got in are not necessarily the most important ones, but perhaps leaving me leeway to do another semester's worth of this if I end up writing a ton more material than I need.

The topics I selected for submission are dictated perhaps more by the DH than the gaming side - for example, Travel got in whereas Gender didn't, despite the fact I think gender is a significantly more meaty topic to discuss from a game design perspective. The thing is that on a technical level, a lot of the problems you'd discuss in a Gender subtopic also appear in the Race/Ethnicity topic which is in there r.e. "how do you encode identity sensibly in a computer system". Travel meanwhile gives me tons of stuff to discuss from the technical side r.e. pathfinding and historical route mapping, and given I've actually worked on building a generic historical route mapping system I've got plenty to talk about there.