Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KC: D) began in early 2014 as a modest Kickstarter-funded passion project imagined by newcomer Czech developer Warhorse Studios. Rather than tell a cliched medieval-inspired narrative like the bland fantasies that preceded it, KC: D would be “a strong story rooted in the height of the Middle Ages, brought to life in all its glory.” Warhorse Studios promised its prospective financial backers “majestic, armored knights, large, open field battles, and political intrigue set in a vast, emergent world” that contains “real castles that don’t look like something from Disneyland, period-accurate armors and costumes . . . skillful swordsmen . . . and a story based on actual, historic events.” Intrigued by a project based in medieval Bohemia that sought to ditch apocryphal stories about armored knights fighting dragons and instead immerse players in an authentic and “real” moment of the past, nearly forty-thousand donors backed the project with $1.5 million. It more than covered the development costs.
According to the Kickstarter description, the project, which released in early 2018, is as much an effort to spark a new movement in video game realism as it is a repudiation of narratives that fill their medieval settings with magic, dragons, and steepled castles. Ditching the familiar trappings of superhero narratives about ordinary people elevated by supernatural forces to preternatural strength, the protagonist’s ambitious heroism would be offset by poor nutritional standards of the time and an interface that demands when the player nourish their avatar, a deliberately messy and slow-paced hack-and-slash battle system, and an intricate leveling interface that allows vanishingly small improvements to the protagonist’s physical power and survival skills. Story and setting were mere garnishes to game mechanics that constrained the character’s–and the player’s–movement at every turn. The player’s emotional investment would be enhanced by authentic medieval limitations.
On the surface, Warhorse Studios’ promised strict adherence to historical accuracy seems mercifully innovative in a pop cultural environment brimful of overpowered superheroes, urban destruction, and alternate universes. Why shouldn’t a game–like a book about medieval Bohemia, or a well-researched historical fiction, or a documentary–sit the player down and teach them about a past that has long since fallen out of cultural memory? Wouldn’t video games be uniquely suited to immerse curious learners in history through the lens of ordinary citizens? Historical accuracy and realism in video games could create new pedagogical possibilities, where the spectator gets promoted from passive consumer of history to active historical participant.
But history is not an objective document of the past, and those who produce historical knowledge do so from their point of view. Whose stories make it into a historical text depend upon the historian’s process of selection–what they include and exclude. We should, therefore, be suspicious of Warhorse Studios’ claim that their game is historically accurate, since we’re left to wonder what the developers really mean by the term. As Howard Zinn explains at the end of his seminal book A People’s History of the United States, the academic standard of objective history “meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.” The natural byproduct of this insight is that a story can claim to be historically accurate in what it reports while actually dispensing with politically subversive details. Likewise, a storyteller can foreground some histories and cut those that depict dominant groups (i.e. whites) unfavorably. In other words, both story and storyteller cannot be disentangled from the political ideology or motivation behind a text. The refrain of historical accuracy should therefore create suspicion in us. Warhorse Studios’ promises of historical accuracy raises vital questions about who gets included and excluded from historical narratives, whose stories gain visibility and whose get submerged. In other words, one can claim historical accuracy to prop up white supremacy just as filling in the historical blanks–as Zinn did–can challenge it.
When I first encountered KC: D in early 2018 Warhorse Studios had already been embroiled in a controversy for using this excuse of historical accuracy in order to absolve itself of whitewashing history. Kotaku and The Daily Dot reported in 2014 about a harassment campaign against an amateur internet historian who responded to a gamer’s academic question about the game. Within KC: D‘s months-long Kickstarter funding window the inquisitive gamer observed the proposed project looked too white. Assuming Warhorse Studios could explain, the hopeful gamer asked the developers if they intended to include people of color in the finished product. They wrote back:
We left ethnicities just because there were none in Bohemia those times. That’s all. Or better: they were a (sic) very very rare. Game will take place in 9 square kilometers so there’s no real chance you can meet some of them there.
Suspicious and unsatisfied with the response, the gamer enlisted the help of the amateur internet historian who runs MedievalPoC, a Tumblr blog whose stated mission is to
showcase works of art from European history that feature People of Color. All too often, these works go unseen in museums, Art History classes, online galleries, and other venues because of retroactive whitewashing of Medieval Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia . . . My purpose in creating this blog is to address common misconceptions that People of Color did not exist in Europe before the Enlightenment, and to emphasize the cognitive dissonance in the way this is reflected in media produced today.
The gamer wondered if MedievalPoC could fact-check Warhorse Studios’ claims that medieval Bohemia was all white. MedievalPoC analyzed the lengthy Kickstarter proposal and noticed that “representation isn’t really a priority there” because in addition to the game’s racial and ethnic exclusions, Warhorse Studios didn’t plan to design a playable female character until they raised around $750,000, yet “‘seduce local women’ is already part of the base game.” The developers literally planned to code these racial and gender exclusions into the game, making the spurious claim of “historical accuracy” seem suddenly like a public relations pretext to absolve Warhorse Studios of any wrongdoing. In fact, MedievalPoC debunked the “historical accuracy” argument with a list of helpful historical resources, including the following contemporaneous paintings that seem to contradict Warhorse Studios’ claims:
Historical scholarship also contradicts Warhorse Studios and supports an ethnically diverse medieval Bohemia. It is worth noting first that race and ethnicity as we understand them in American culture and in much of Europe was based in medieval Bohemia on political affiliation, language, and religion, not skin color or nation of origin. As a consequence, much of the history produced about medieval Bohemia’s ethnic diversity is expressed in those terms. What historians like Jean Sedlar and Nora Berend observe, however, is that medieval Bohemia was a region that witnessed travel from populations as diverse as Turks and Central and South Asians.
MedievalPoC’s answer to an academic question seemed innocent enough, yet within days a bitter discussion thread about the Tumblr blogger appeared on the Reddit community /r/TumblrInAction, whose wiki page describes a group of almost half a million members who oppose social justice activists for pursuing “anything that allows them to frame white men as the ultimate evil, because that gives them a group to despise.” That one would choose to despise an entire group of people for no reason seems unlikely, but this /r/TumblrInAction philosophy explains the thread’s unambiguous title, “Idiot SJW bothers RPG company because their game set in Medieval Central Europe doesn’t have any POC,” followed by one conspicuously acrid comment that is worth quoting at length. It reads:
[MedievalPoC is] like the whiny cunts that bitch that LOTR [Lord of the Rings] was all white or that Frozen was all white. And since when was including this bullshit, along with proper amounts of female characters an actual concern for videogames? This sort of shit has only popped up recently in the past decade and it pisses me the fuck off to no end.
Another commenter rejects MedievalPoC’s thesis with all-or-nothing language, writing “so wait because the wealthy nobility and trades classes were aware of black people existing, the area must be filled to the brim with them? Fucking idiots [Emphasis mine].” Still others denied the authenticity of the paintings altogether, suggesting the subjects in them were either figments of medieval artists’ imaginations, image-scanned and then doctored to make the subjects look blacker, or the result of color degradation over time. Not only did the community not accept MedievalPoC’s thesis, they were willing to bend logic to their will to keep a medieval game white.
MedievalPoC subsequently received hate mail. One message asked the blogger(s) to kill themselves, while others accused MedievalPoC of stoking public hate against a humble studio’s passion project and harming the independent gaming market in the process. The mere suggestion that representing an all-white history may be problematic inspired these gamers not only to reject those histories outright without any honest engagement with MedievalPoC’s challenge, but also to defer to the economic health of the market in order to distract from real racial and gender inequalities. Never mind that the market Warhorse Studios accesses is a global, transnational one, with players of various races, ethnicities, and genders wishing to see people like themselves represented.
These ethnic erasures extend well beyond the developers’ creative decisions and /r/TumblrInAction’s apoplectic reaction to MedievalPoC. The online vitriol directed at MedievalPoC serves larger white nationalist aims to take control of medieval history and construct the apocryphal narrative that white men created the so-called Western world. Contextualizing the game within a worldwide white supremacist project to whitewash medieval European history, medievalist Sarah Lomuto writes that the co-founder of Warhorse Studios, Daniel Vavra, spent his time on a panel at a medievalist conference justifying KC: D‘s lack of ethnic diversity. He was
entirely comfortable designing the game with zero racial diversity, despite its genre of fantasy and the very real presence of people of color in the Middle Ages. Clearly they didn’t envision an audience of non-white gamers during their design meetings; perhaps they weren’t interested in one. Whatever their motivations, they imagined the Middle Ages—as does much of our popular culture—as a space of whiteness.
Vavra and his studio are by no means unique, but their game and the popularity the controversy surrounding it afforded does fulfill the white nationalist mission of preserving what racist agitator Richard Spencer’s own far-right National Policy Institute calls the “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” This innocuous language mirrors Warhorse Studios’ seemingly benign but ultimately false assertion that historical evidence suggests medieval Europe was all white, thereby explicitly claiming not only that there were no people of color in medieval Bohemia, but that the entire geographical region was a space of white heritage. By falling back on “historical accuracy” as a blanket justification for ethnic homogeneity, Warhorse Studios can outsource their creative decisions to a spurious, performative kind of “objectivity” (i.e. “historical accuracy” becomes a shorthand for “trust us that this is true,” even if it’s not) and sweep up consumers who either don’t know any better, or whose interests align with such white nationalist projects.
In fact, excluding nonwhites, white women, and women of color from medieval history using such scientific, or “objective,” justifications has unfortunately been standard practice since the discipline flourished as a method in the nineteenth century to prop up white male supremacy. In an article that appeared in the American Historical Association’s open-access magazine Perspectives on History, medievalist Carol Symes upbraids her colleagues for teaching a “fictive, hermetically sealed” Western European Christian version of medieval history and “not the history of a multiethnic, culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, interconnected medieval world.” Not only were the earliest days of medievalist studies trenched in European white supremacist ideology, she argues, but the sources from which contemporary medievalists draw were all written and disseminated by white men. To map uniformly white skin onto medieval populations is therefore to continue the project of white nationalism.
In nineteenth century America specifically the scientific method buttressed white supremacist studies of medieval Europe. In the nineteenth century American white male medieval historians associated the Anglo-Saxon tongue with a “general cultural belief in the superiority” of white Northern Europe. Anglo-Saxon was infused with privilege and social mobility. This aligned with widespread racist beliefs that free Africans, Native Americans, and Mexicans were savage primitives who did not–and could not–meet the standards of whiteness. Aiming to mimic the work and methods of racial scientists of the time, nineteenth century medievalists supposed the Anglo-Saxon tongue could be objectively, scientifically known, thereby constructing a limited white past through the very sources they wrote and disseminated.
Additionally, academic institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries excluded women from medieval history departments wherever possible. While white women (but never women of color) were invited to contribute to the discipline during these centuries they were kept at arms’ length, consigned only to women’s institutions, and rarely given control of curricula for men.
Medievalists of color have recently begun resisting these limited historical representations and challenging the lack of diversity in their discipline. In an open letter released in 2017 to their professional colleagues around the world, Medievalists of Color write that
Medieval studies is increasingly acknowledging realities of race and racism in the profession—reflected in everything from the call to recognize that racism is inherent in the very use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”; to Richard Spencer and the so-called alt-right’s cooptation of Western European medieval studies to buttress their white supremacist ideology
The Medievalists of Color assert that their white colleagues are not–and therefore ought to be–adequately trained in “critical discourses that address systemic racism” in order to separate the discipline “from its links to nationalist and white supremacist impulses.” Consider this revelation in relationship to Warhorse Studios’ defense that the professional historians they hired found no evidence of nonwhite people in medieval Bohemia. Those historians presumably exist within the very same academic tradition that Medievalists of Color problematize for its racial and ethnic myopia. If that academic tradition was shaped and continues to be shaped by white supremacy, consumers of KC: D who are not trained historians would be unlikely to know the details of that white supremacist history unless they did the requisite research. Hence, when such seemingly niche academic conflicts make their way into mainstream transnational pop cultural products like KC: D, there is very real danger involved in inculcating the false narrative that Western civilization was created by white men.
These acts of resistance from historians like MedievalPoC and Medievalists of Color, to both the limitations of the discipline itself and to popular entertainments like KC: D that falsely claim to be historically accurate, are essential to teaching the correct lessons about history. Diversifying history–teaching from other standpoints that rarely get a say–resists contemporary exponents of hateful rhetoric like Spencer and his white supremacist acolytes. While KC: D is by no means unique among the larger history of medieval studies, the game taps into a new market–the gaming public–that rallies its collective wealth behind whitewashing projects of its historical scope. That market of gamers is not to be underestimated. As the almost half-a-million-member group /r/TumblrInAction’s swift and very public response to MedievalPoC illustrates, gamers do have influence, and they can wield it accordingly. By pushing rhetoric similar to Spencer’s call to preserve European “white heritage”–a euphemism for “historical accuracy” in the vein of nineteenth century medievalists–Warhorse Studios can stoke racial discord in gamer communities and beyond through the seemingly benign but false claim that there were, unfortunately, almost no people of color in medieval Europe.