March 2, 2023

Video Games and Medieval History: Here We Go Again

The producer of Final Fantasy XVI defends an all white fantasy game by citing "medieval history." This is, of course, bullshit.

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Last year, Naoki Yoshida, producer of Final Fantasy XVI, the latest installment of the legendary game franchise, defended the whiteness of his imagined world by saying:

“Our design concept from the earliest stages of development has always heavily featured medieval Europe, incorporating historical, cultural, political, and anthropological standards that were prevalent at the time… Ultimately, we felt that while incorporating ethnic diversity into Valisthea was important, an over-incorporation into this single corner of a much larger world could end up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries we originally set for ourselves. The story we are telling is fantasy, yes, but it is also rooted in reality.”

Despite plenty of public pushback, as reported by Ash Parrish in The Verge, nothing has really changed over the last year. Parrish writes:

Yoshida talked about how “over-inclusion” of people of color would “violate narrative boundaries” and, in his answer to my follow-up, brought up the different peoples and cultures the development team included in FFXVI. In introducing the game, he gave an overview of the different kingdoms and factions vying for control of the all-powerful mothercrystals.

One such kingdom, The Dhalmekian Republic, has an aesthetic and architectural style that doesn’t fit with the flying buttresses and gothic cathedrals of the rest. It’s an arid desert nation, and screenshots of the land feature domed structures that kinda look like mosques one might find in North Africa or the Middle East. A description of Dhalmekia shared during the Final Fantasy XVI press event called it a desert kingdom that thrives via trade, bringing to mind the west African kingdom of Mali and the great caravan of Mansa Musa.

This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t just a problem for Japanese games (we have covered before the particular fascination, fueled by classic games like the Ultima franchise, with the European Middle Ages in JRPGs). The designer of Kingdom Come: Deliverance (an interesting game to be sure - there’s a scene in which you can only advance the plot by delivering a Wycliffite/Hussite sermon because the priest is too hungover), Daniel Vávra claimed “there were no black people in medieval Bohemia. Period.” And Tauriq Moosa wrote about The Witcher III which cited the designer’s (mistaken) presumptions about medieval Poland as a justification for including dragons and walking ancient tree gods, but making sure the all humans there are white.

What connects the problem with these games and the designers behind them (and many other medieval-ish fantasy) is not just a misunderstanding of the European Middle Ages but also a deeper idea about the ways peoples and places actually work. Historically speaking, peoples were just not sealed off from each other. A hermetically-sealed population with no contact with the broader world is an anomaly. And even in places when peoples were less likely to move, things and ideas did.

Sometimes that movement brought violence and sometimes that movement made the world a little smaller, even in the distant past. But in every case, the physical and intellectual world was permeable and filled with human beings who made choices about how to engage the new worlds they encountered.

Related to medieval Europe, we write in The Bright Ages:

And so we look. We also listen to the mixing of languages in the sailors’ patois and to the commonality of multilingualism across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. We find marketplaces where Jews spoke Latin, Christians spoke Greek, and everyone spoke Arabic. We find coconuts, ginger, and parrots coming in on Venetian ships that would eventually reach the ports of medieval England. We mark the brown skin on the faces of North Africans who always lived in Britain, as well as on French Mediterranean peasants telling dirty stories about horny priests, raunchy women, and easily fooled husbands.

Here’s one amazing example.

Bohemia in 1403, contra Vávra, was a cross-roads, with peoples and goods traveling in all directions. In fact the new book Roma in the Middle Ages by Kristina Richardson concludes with a band of traveling people arriving in Central Europe from, they said, “Lesser Egypt.” They won protection from the very rulers who are features (off-stage mostly) in Kingdom Come and brought print technology to the very places that would soon after produce Johannes Gutenberg.

A game designer can, of course, include dragons but make everyone phenotypically homogenous. What we need to understand is that these choices are not governed by historical reality, but in fact run counter to historical reality.

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