But – unless games are just a place where we go to feel comfortable and reassured – it’s equally important to have games which remind us how uncomfortable history is. (But nor does the medieval era fit neatly into the narratives of the various flavours of modern misogynist, really.) It’s worthy to reframe a historical era into a playground that’s comfortable for everyone, sometimes. Sexism wasn’t incidental to the medieval mindset: it was deeply embedded in its core values of faith and honour. CK2 is very committed to the idea that history is interesting in large part because it was fucking terrible.Īnd, lest we forget, the medieval period was – to varying degrees, because we’re talking hundreds of years and a big, culturally varied region here – really fucking sexist. To be clear: we are talking about an era in which it was considered morally instructive to put on a play in which a pubescent girl seduces her helpless father, instigates a succession of murders to cover it up, then is dragged off to hell while the father repents and is saved. You can brutally drive the Jews from your country in order to get out of an inconvenient debt. You are going to be oppressing peasants, fighting religious wars by choice, picking on weak and vulnerable nations, forcibly converting people to your creed and culture, and waging war purely to become rich, powerful and respected. It has done its homework, and it wants you to know that history was really nasty, and certainly never fair, and definitely didn’t match up with what you need it to be. If you want full plate and roads that work, aren’t too worried if all the horses are the same size, and don’t consider fleas and open sewers an essential part of your fantasy world, you have zero business crying historical accuracy when a girl gets a sword.Īlas: I have had no ladypopes yet in CK2.īut Crusader Kings plays Connie Willis to the Tolkien of fantasy-medieval games. In very loose, fantastic treatments like (say) Skyrim, there’s no very good reason for women not to have roles in governance and war that are more in line with modern values after all, these interpretations are perfectly happy to soft-pedal serfdom, vagrancy laws and smallpox for the comfort and fun of its players. Much of the appeal of Crusader Kings is that its treatment of the medieval period hews much closer to real history than is normal in videogames. (It took longer than I expected, largely because CK2 updates faster than I can play it.) Some years back I wrote about how bizarrely, buggily horrible it was to try and play a non-Virgin Queen woman in Crusader Kings. A lot changed between the original Crusader Kings and its sequel, so I figured it was time for an update.

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