Abstract

Since the explosion of popularity of video games in the late 1990s, it was not long before these games began to chime with a general cultural and popular fascination with both history in general and the Middle Ages in particular. Not only do many of the most popular video games take place in historical settings (such as the Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor franchises), but of the 25 most popular video games ever made, several take place within a medieval, or pseudo-medieval, setting, such as Skyrim, World of Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed II. This chapter argues that rather than being distractions, video games can offer academic medievalists an exciting opportunity. Seen as a way of using win conditions to replicate the goals of medievalists, video games become not a means of teaching history but an entry point leading to sophisticated methodologies and an understanding of contingency and teleology. As tools used to teach not history but a kind of transhistorical historiography, they can be embraced as a powerful tool for medieval studies.