Summoning Rebels With Historical Video Games
Context and design ideas for a game about 14th century Italian heretics.
(This is my first post on Substack, which replaces my previous Mailchimp’s Design A Game mailing list.)
Some games are set in the past. “A” past?
A form of the past that I absorbed a long, long time ago is as a sequence of kings and wars, decorated castles and ships, white heroes and darker devils, and it all has its fascination and beauty… for an eight-year-old.
And that can be all. The fact that these forms of the past are the projection of an ideology that can shape a collective present may never become clear to you; you have this fog within your cognition that someday you may want to dissipate, of course to find a new, more elusive fog. When you design a game set in history, the kind of image of the past that lives in you is what you’ll project into the game.
Who and what makes history? Is it the kings, the queens, a few heroes, saints? Or the cruellest among humans, which is mostly that very same people? In games there is a popular genre sheepishly shortened in 4X, which actually stands for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate!
Well, that seems a fit description of the intent of most large power domains throughout history, and a perfect fit for the policies of any expanding power today and yesterday, be it the USA, China, Russia, Israel, Turkey… and one could go on. All large powers are colonial when they can, and always have been. Games can be subservient to that, and proclaim it as the natural and sanctified order of things by identifying history with the hegemonic narrative and celebrating it. To say that this is all there is in war games today, would be misleading and reductive; but the unreflected side of it, shall be revealed and anathematized!
Here is what comes out by searching for the “historical” tag on Steam:
The games that show up should be called pseudo-historical games, as they are not meant to be edu tools, they are not meant to be accurate, and they are not meant to teach, nurture, cultivate, train, tutor, enlighten, or guide… well what are they there for then? Whatever.
One thing I’ve become progressively aware about games is that you either marry the medium as it is, or subverse it declaratively and clearly, and players are a conservative crowd that seem to dislike anything in between.
In Oskar Stålberg’s beautiful talk Developing The Bad North Look, there is a remark about axes. Wikipedia tells us that
The most common hand weapon among Vikings was the axe.
And…
Ha! This Wikipedia editor did not read Femina! Those females maybe had axes because they simply were warriors, damn it!
Again, there is that story eight-year-old you heard that keeps rolling in your head that mis-leads. (Read Femina if you are strong-willed and patient, a bit looong.)
"I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon and stars" - Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179)
So back to Oskar, who worried, will players complain about my two-dimensional Vikings not having axes? Seems that nobody cared, everybody played. Immersion (another shaky concept) is then what matters?
The unreflected discourse about history many in the West received is as the glorious world conquest by the… West, and about history as shaped and controlled by concentrated political power, one good, others bad. Sometimes there is some awareness about there being capital (now cloud barons) and finance on the side of it, or on top or behind but never below political power, sometimes identified with it sometimes in attrition, but never for long, and then of course organised, institutionalised religion, again on the side, back, top or below, in front or back, but never far.
But there are other ways of analysing the past, there can be other narratives that reveal different personal and shared paths. And evoking and projecting different stories on the ever-changing present can shape it and trace a different path.
About two years ago I went to Assisi, a small town in central Italy, where Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, known as Francis of Assisi was born (c. 1181 – 3 October 1226 in the year of the nice, delirious guy from Nazareth). There I saw the Porziuncola: a tiny church, built by Francis' first followers, and obtorto collo (“own nothing, nothing, you heard me?”) finally adopted by himself, close to where he settled at the end of his life.
I was touched by the beauty and magic of this small stack of stones, that proclaims its heretical force through humility.
In his first attempt at a career, Francis tried cavalier, fighting for his town Assisi against Perugia, probably foreseeing the low-quality chocolate the despicable Perugians would end up producing in the future 😋. Unsuccessful, turned to Christian preaching, and surprised, shocked and startled fellow Italians by actually trying to follow the Gospels’ message in his daily life, bizarre as that may seem for a Christian.
Francis and his followers have always been perceived as a great danger for and by the Church, a small-minded institution nonsensically in love with privilege and any form of power. So all around and on top of Francis’ Porziuncola, after his death, loud sigh of relief from the prelates, and over the small church they built this terrifying sarcophagus of a cathedral, this Santa Maria degli Angeli, a generic name that says nothing, built in shining white and gold: St. Francis Exploded Nuclear Power Plant Sarcophagus. The words of this free thinker, all that remained, had to be paraphrased, disciplined, censored and aligned with the politics of power of the Church Of Rome.
Francis when alive and well also went to Egypt to preach, expand his brand, see what was happening, and there, abhorred, told the crusaders, inventors of the holy war or jihad against the inclusive (but of course still colonial) empire of the Sultan al-Kamil, that they should stop the killing, for God’s sake. Was of course ignored and this is a typical story not to be included in the Western version of all of it, as dispensed to eight-year-olds and forming for many their definitive picture as “adults”. As much as Francis was against colonial enterprises, and the Porziuncola a symbol of humility, this did not stop colonialist conquerors from giving as name to Los Angeles “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina Virgen de los Ángeles del Rio de la Porciúncula de Asís”; but the Angelenos villas didn’t end up resembling that 15x15 feet church.
I found Francis’ story and the media manipulation around it quite inspiring in conceiving a pseudo-pseudo historical game. I was also inspired by other sparse para heretical sources: all over central Italy and also in the south and even in the north everywhere actually there are miracles and saints, i.e. local deities, all incompatible with a monotheistic religion, which Roman Catholics is in theory but, thank to many gods, not in fact.
The managerial genius of the early Italic Christians told them to absorb paganism, whose forms and idols have survived up to today. I am an animist at times, and I wanted to celebrate forms of paganism through the unlikely forms of a video game. Also, these Catholic-embedded pagan-derived forms are in danger of disappearing, with Hollywood’s false prophets that impose their charmless divinities, so celebrating gods, saints, icons, witches and unlikely miracles is my Pasolinian path to give it all another day of life.
So in Becoming Saint, the game I’m designing, we have Demartinian tarantulated witches, cursing nuns, exorcists and perplexed peasants and converting each other in a general brawl.
And then, I want to homage the “heretic” of the 13th century that is in the background of The Name Of The Rose, Fra Dolcino The Great, who rejected the Church's hierarchy, denied the validity of sacraments, advocated a communal way of life, stirred up a popular rebellion, and finally was tortured and killed by the ferocious Raniero da Vercelli, a pious bishop, of course. Dolcino is also celebrated as a revolutionary by Dante, believe me here, you naive and lazy reader under the thumb of my deceptive manipulation. Eco makes a companion of Dolcino say:
On the mountains with Dolcino, before we were reduced to eating the flesh of our companions killed in battle, before so many died of hardship that we couldn’t eat them all, and they were thrown to the birds and the wild animals on the slopes of Rebello … or maybe in those moments, too … there was an atmosphere … can I say of freedom? I didn’t know, before, what freedom was; the preachers said to us, ‘The truth will make you free.’ [...] But it’s a way of living, and it is … it was … a new experience…. There were no more masters; and God, we were told, was with us.
(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
Thanks to those “heroic” cavaliers video games celebrate, power at the end gets at Dolcino:
that pestiferous demon, son of Belial, the most horrendous heresiarch Dolcino, after many dangers, long efforts, massacres, and frequent battles, is finally incarcerated
(still Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
😬
I am designing a game, “Becoming Saint”, where you can be many forms of Fra Dolcino. Becoming Saint’s gameplay loops through a series of bizarre choices, that are answers to nocturnal visions and doubts.
In the game you define a path through medieval hereticism and politics, choosing between being a Cerseian, Daenerian queen, a Franciscan-like preacher, a Dolcinian revolutionary or a cult leader, establishing a religion not even yourself likes.
Media at all times need to put a face on a movement, even when you shun the notion of a heroine, so you will play the Naomi Klein of some kind of heretics movement. You may build a cult or stay in the background and enable social justice, playing irresponsibly with something as serious as everyone’s happiness, what is called politics.
Discipline and punish today is socially densely practiced from the couch, so for sure about this game, if not deservedly ignored, there will be whining, Becoming Saint is blasphemous, it’s not blasphemous enough, it’s communist propaganda, it’s not communist enough. Told by a crew of idiots, the game will be full of sound and fury, while Brother Sun, beautiful and radiant in all his splendour, Sister Moon, and the stars, clear and precious and beautiful, watch with supposedly benign intent, as our dear Francis told us.
[The game I am developing with Open Lab, Vic Macioci and Verena Kyratzes is Becoming Saint, and will be out in 2025. Here on Substack I will keep posting news about it.]
Molto interessante Becoming Saint