Playing the Crusades

Engaging the Crusades, Volume Five

Robert Houghton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000360288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation.

This volume considers the appearance and use of the crusades in modern games; demonstrating that popular memory of the crusades is intrinsically and mutually linked with the design and play of these games. The essays engage with uses of crusading rhetoric and imagery within a range of genres – including roleplaying, action, strategy, and casual games – and from a variety of theoretical perspectives drawing on gender and race studies, game design and theory, and broader discussions on medievalism. Cumulatively, the authors reveal the complex position of the crusades within digital games, highlight the impact of these games on popular understanding of the crusades, and underline the connection between the portrayal of the crusades in digital games and academic crusade historiography.

Playing the Crusades is invaluable for scholars and students interested in the crusades, popular representations of the crusades, historical games, and collective memory.

1 A sacred task, no cross required

The image of crusading in computer gaming-related non-Christian science fiction universes

Roland Wenskus

Popular culture is a vastly complex field which tends to be underestimated by researchers; several calls to action by historians to remedy this defect highlight the urgency of the matter.¹ Equally, the dynamics of public discourse around the theme of crusading are hard to follow and sometimes violent enough to give even the professional historian grounds to halt and self-reflect.² The digital age has increased the frequency of both transmission and modification of relevant material to a degree that the academic discourse is struggling to keep pace with. For instance, the present chapter hit a significant problem in its early conception when the subject matter, the examination of the image of crusading in non-Christian science fiction settings, was limited to the field of computer games.

What might sound like a trivial restriction presents the researcher with a complicated dilemma – the complexity of popular culture and the possible sub-fields. Nowadays, examining the role of a phenomenon ‘in computer games’ is a less than straightforward matter. The days when a video game was a hermetic thing which did not branch into any other aspect of popular culture are long gone; virtual gaming is often but one aspect of a franchise. In the case of Star Wars, video games were based on movies, whereas in the case of Resident Evil, movies were based on video games. Looking at a phenomenon like Star Trek, one has a set of TV series and cinematic movies influencing a nigh-uncountable number of computer games, comics, board games, novels, and so forth (without counting unlicensed content such as fan fiction), which are still all, in one way or another, part of Star Trek. In short, examining the previously defined role of ‘crusades’ in video games requires a precise working definition, so as not to lose oneself in the labyrinthine pathways of any given pop-culture franchise.

Hence, when we examine the image of crusading in video games, two criteria are set to define a thematically relevant reference, of which at least one must be fulfilled. Either the background from which a video game is derived features crusading references to a degree that they are themselves crucial to the portion of the background featured in the game (for instance, the universe of Warhammer 40,000 and the sub-franchise-turned-video-game Battlefleet Gothic), or clear references must be made within a video game itself.

On topic, the notion of the crusades is a metaphor which comfortably exceeds its original definition, evolving beyond the need of a connection with Christianity.³ This deserves a degree of scholarly attention well beyond the scope of this chapter. Hence, I have limited myself to a brief overview and analysis of this phenomenon in one of most influential aspects of popular culture – the field of science fiction ‒ using some of the most poignant examples.

Generally, crusading references are abundant in science fiction – be it movie, TV series, or computer or tabletop game – that is, set in a hypothetical future of our own history which retains elements of our present culture. However, they are also to be found in such franchises where non-humans with no connection to Christianity employ the term, or where Earth’s past history has been largely consigned to oblivion, or even in franchises set in an entirely different galaxy or universe with no possible ties to Christian religion. To examine crusading as a cultural image, be it beyond its original meaning or as an allusion to the same, it is these worlds we must turn to. The question being – if there is no connection to Christianity, what role or symbolism does the use of the word ‘crusade’ imply?

In the field of science fiction, one of the richest sources is the Star Wars franchise. With its dualism of a cosmic Force consisting of a light and dark side, the setting carries strong religious undertones. Further, the groups accessing this Force – chiefly the Jedi Knights for the Light Side and the Sith Order for the Dark Side – bear characteristics of religious organisations and even military orders. The setting is ideal for something like a holy war – or, specifically, a crusade – to occur. While only one explicit reference has so far been made in the canonical ten movies,⁴ there are oblique references in all parts of the franchise, which in turn draw material from the so-called ‘Legends’ universe.

In April 2014, after Walt Disney acquired Lucasfilm, everything hitherto known as the ‘Expanded Universe’ (EU), that is, all licensed content beyond the cinematic movies and the CGI Clone Wars TV series by Lucasfilm Animation, was declared non-canonical and would henceforth be referred to as Star Wars: Legends, whereas only material released henceforth would be considered canon.⁵ Making this distinction is important, considering that canonicity equates to the continued support of licensed products as well as a greater reach to a larger audience. While some of this new lore indeed referenced old canon, the bulk of crusading references are to be found in the old EU, which includes over 100 different computer games.

Separating computer game content from (former) canon outside this medium presents the researcher with the initial problem of the interaction of these media. Even with the initially pre-set criteria, drawing a line between which material to include and which to avoid is no easy task. While any Star Wars game can be played with little to no previous knowledge of the franchise’s background, the amount of detailed and even minuscule references for the benefit of well-read fans requires elucidation by elaborating on the original material.

The number of banal medievalisms in any given part of the background is legion. Turning to the portion of the old EU set in the timespan around the canonical movies, one encounters a range of warships named ‘Crusader’⁶ or the like, without any further context, objects and vessels referencing in-universe undertakings called ‘crusades’⁷ (about which more anon), and a cavalry unit of the Royal Naboo Security Forces bizarrely named ‘Royal Crusaders’ created for a strategy game.⁸ Of all the crusade-referencing medievalisms of the entire franchise, the latter is perhaps the least appropriate. The planet Naboo, a constitutional monarchy in the Galactic Republic, is one of the most pacifistic societies of the entire franchise.⁹ For them to name an elite unit of their token armed forces – which never left the planetary system, let alone embarked on religious conquest – ‘Crusaders’ seems utterly out of character. If read as ‘persons valiantly striving for good’, it could be said to reflect the more archaic and ethically naïve streak in Naboo society. However, with these troops appearing only in a now non-canonical computer game, their cultural significance remains minor at best.

Moving on from what may be considered the ‘present’ of this timeline, nowhere else are ‘crusading’ references more in-depth than in the timeframe of the Star Wars chronology known as the Old Republic Era,¹⁰ an age pre-dating the current live-action movies by several millennia. For one, crusades were a particularly popular namesake for weapons available to players in the Star Wars: The Old Republic massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).¹¹ Unsurprisingly, we again find a thusly named starship.¹² However, the Old Republic Era also features several warlike undertakings and groups referred to as ‘crusades’¹³ or ‘crusaders’,¹⁴ generally featuring a religious motivation of varying degrees. The term ‘crusade’ is applied with little discrimination, serving to establish the settings as either valiantly noble or grimly fanatical.

One narrative arc, which has seen at least an implied re-introduction into canon, deserves our attention, the so-called Mandalorian Crusades. These serve as the primordial deed of probably the most important faction aside from Sith and Jedi, namely the Mandalorians: a human-dominated but originally multi-species warrior culture, Mandalorians and Mandalorian-influenced characters like the Republican Clone Troopers have featured prominently in a multitude of video games.¹⁵ The Legends background shows them to be quite religious originally, using their crusades to forcibly spread their soteriological ideology of Resol’Nare.¹⁶ It can also hardly be considered coincidence that, during their campaigns, the Mandalorians nearly wiped out a species of feline humanoids known as the Cathar.¹⁷

What makes these crusades so interesting is that background on Mandalorian culture is much more extensive, thus potentially offering us more insight into what might justify the name ‘crusade’. This even includes a proper constructed language, or conlang, named Mando’a: first developed by British author Karen Traviss, the language is still basically considered canon, although official support has been rather muted in the last decade.¹⁸ Yet, despite the conlang having a very active fan community, there is one very noticeable gap – namely there being no Mando’a word for the Mandalorian Crusades.¹⁹ There is a term for the battle which ended the campaigns of a Neo-Crusader resurgence movement, namely Ani’la Akaan ‘the Great Last Battle’²⁰ – but neither campaigns nor campaigners have a corresponding Mando’a word, making the choice of the name ‘crusade’, again, a metaphor for a religious conflict.

The question that presents itself is obvious – what justifies such a mass of references to an event the Star Wars universe could have no possible link to? First off, the franchise is defined by basic concepts of chivalry, with the Jedi acting as embodiments of virtue, though not infallible, similar to Arthurian protagonists, and the Sith cast in a role akin to supernaturally evil antagonists, such as the Black Knight of Chrétien de Troyes Yvain. It is thus no wonder that commonly accepted synonyms for ‘knight’ – Crusader, Paladin, Knight Errant, Gallant, Chevalier – are virtually ubiquitous in every aspect of the universe. Second, the large number of military endeavours classified as ‘crusades’ in the Old Republic Era is surely not a coincidence either. In the narrative of the Star Wars timeline, this part takes the place of an Arthurian-style medieval period, which portrays both antagonists and protagonists as much greater in power and more numerous than in the franchise’s ‘present’, whereas the precedin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: crusades and crusading in modern games
• 1 A sacred task, no cross required: the image of crusading in computer gaming-related non-Christian science fiction universes
• 2 ‘I’m not responsible for the man you are!’: crusading and masculinities in Dante’s Inferno
• 3 ‘Show this fool knight what it is to have no fear’: freedom and oppression in Assassin’s Creed (2007)
• 4 Crusader kings too? (Mis)Representations of the crusades in strategy games
• 5 Learning to think historically: some theoretical challenges when playing the crusades
• Index