So I thought I'd share this one with you - I'm hopefully going to be designing and then, in the winter semester later this year, teaching a course on game development and medieval history and digital humanities and how all of those intersect.
My rough plan is to take a set of thematic topics and then look at each from two angles: firstly, a "thinking critically" section where we discuss how current games present that topic, what the medieval source material or evidence might imply about it, and how those connect up. Then it'd lead on to a "making models" section on the theme where we discuss the challenges and simplifications needed to model the concept in a computer setting and some ways of doing that.
So for example a theme section on travel would be fun - we could look a bit at medieval travel narratives, the actual issues and realities of medieval travel, and compare both to how travel is presented in medieval/ancient/fantasy themed games. Then we'd move on to looking at how historians model historical travelling routes (like
al-Thurayya, a mapping system for the medieval Islamic world) and the challenges of representing medieval travel in both digital history and gaming contexts. Other probable themes could be material objects, medieval aesthetics and art, race/ethnicity, heroism and the hero in society, warfare, gender, power & rulership, etc.
I dunno if this is too ambitious, but it'll be really fun if I can pull it off and I thought I'd drop a post here to see if anyone here had thoughts given this is probably on the crossover of other peoples' interests too.