Medieval II: Total War
Game
2 documents in the library are about Medieval II: Total War, from writers such as DiGRA and Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Medieval II: Total War, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Medieval II: Total War
Cultivating History: Gender, Power, and Reflection in Cozy Botanical Games
This paper examines how two recent cozy botanical games, Botany Manor and The Abbess Garden, represent historical realities when their emphasis on safety, softness, and nurturing renders the past comfortable.
- The paper argues that cozy botanical games such as Botany Manor and The Abbess Garden use gentle, nurturing design to make historically violent or unequal settings (Victorian England, Grand Siècle France) feel comfortable, with the authors calling cozy games a potential "new mode of doing history in games."
- Rather than dramatizing danger through gameplay, these titles displace historical inequality into letters, books, and dialogue; for example, Botany Manor conveys institutional sexism through correspondence, and The Abbess Garden hints at threats to the abbey through conversation.
- The authors contend this indirect design lets players inhabit historically informed worlds without firsthand peril, which is central to how the games mediate the past.
God's Playground: On Polish History, Games, and Discourses
This paper examines Polish discourse surrounding digital and tabletop games set in Polish history, framing the topic through Norman Davies's notion of Poland as "God's Playground" and the tension between game conventions and dominant narratives of Polish cultural memory.
- The paper is a meta-study based on preliminary research and analysis of critical commentary and existing scholarship, not a large-scale empirical survey, so its findings are interpretive rather than statistically grounded.
- Polish debates on historical accuracy in games centre on two periods: the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (e.g., Medieval II: Total War, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, Hellish Quart) and the Second World War, especially the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
- Critics praise the seventeenth-century games for accurate events, maps of real Polish cities, and atmosphere, but the authors argue this praise overlooks how the vision draws on romanticized literature such as Henryk Sienkiewicz and nostalgic 'retrotopia' that sustains national myths.