How to survive a plague of flesh-eating rats: An introductory guide to studying remediated ‎gameplay imaginations of medieval folklore and beliefs in A Plague Tale: Innocence

Abstract

Popular digital games such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017), Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), and Red: Dead Redemption (2010) possess merit for their faithful and authentic interactive representations of elements of the past that furnish games with pedagogical value. Both digital game studies and historical game studies have contributed research furthering understanding of the pedagogical value and applications of historical games for students’ learning of history in school education, particularly secondary schools and universities (Kee, 2014, McCall, 2013, & Schrier, 2014). Despite the growing interest in the new forms of knowledge contained within games, and gameplay, the educational application of historical digital games can be limited to supplementary visual aids that do not fully account for the range and forms of historical investigation associated with the game development process. We forward a multi-modal perspective on the varied ways in which historical knowledge is present in both game design and the gameplay experience. Our approach is demonstrated with one of several under-investigated (yet valuable) modes of historical exploration, namely ‘Imaginative History.’ This is achieved using images from several sequences of recorded game footage in the Medieval historical fantasy game A Plague Tale: Innocence as a case example alongside supporting historical literature. This Medieval game is suitable for addressing this conference’s theme of crises or disasters as it is set in a re-imagination of the Black Death plague roughly within the south-western region of fourteenth century France, but one that personifies the real Black Death with a plague of supernatural flesh-eating rats and places players into the role of two fictional orphan children. This presentation seeks to demonstrate historical games’ value for teaching and learning by discussing A Plague Tale: Innocence’s fantastical adaptation of the plague as a model for exploring the role of re-mediation, and subversion, of past pre-modern folklore imaginations and beliefs. Fantasy or folkloric treatment of historical events or periods can provide insight into the experiential dimensions of a period in history re-told as an interactive folktale.