“But that’s how it was back then,” comes the familiar response to these observations. We’re presented a world where men were still men, where peasants and women still knew their places in society, where wise lords and knights protected their people from barbaric hordes threatening a well-ordered nation from without, and whose foreign ethnicity is conveniently marked by language and costumes. KCD looks at medieval society through a lens of patriarchy, and the various -isms it’s associated with: sexism, classism, and chauvinism. Kingdom Come: Deliverance isn’t propaganda, but there’s still a semi-coherent ideological framework at its core. If, on the other hand, you’re after objective truth and look at your inherited sources and historical writings as gospel, there's a good chance you're going to perpetuate harmful and distorting biases. Challenge them, or explore their implications either way, you have to deal with them. Owning up to your prejudices and recognising them as such is one of the first steps to creating an interesting interpretation of the past. This is not a cause for the gnashing of teeth or the throwing of towels, however. Once that's done, any creator is going to add their personal preconceptions to the mix, whether intentionally or not. Today’s trendy biases are very different from the biases of 19th century historians, who focused mostly on the deeds of ‘great men’ and, in the wake of nationalism, on such important concerns as the essential differences between, say, the German and French peoples.Īttempting to create a historically accurate game set in the Middle Ages necessitates wading through a mire of biases that has been accumulating over the span of centuries. To make things more complicated, these preconceptions change with time. A good historian interrogates their sources from very specific angles that necessarily exclude many other considerations, which often says as much about them and their attitudes as it does about the period they’re studying. Simply speaking, historians are not perfect. If we take into consideration deliberate lies, as well as errors and misunderstandings, the picture becomes even more confused. It’s educated guesswork, and the pieces that have been handed down have been largely (de)formed by the prejudices of those that came before.Įven if we treat every historical source and piece of research as acting in good faith, there will always be contradictions and gaps. What we know about the lives of these people has been pieced together by researchers trying to create a whole from puzzle pieces that were never really meant to fit together. Medieval writers weren’t, for the most part, in the habit of recording the lives or circumstances of peasants, the poor, children, women, or outsiders like the Romani. And, more metaphorically, there are those gaps produced by the collectively upheld blind spots of earlier societies. ![]() There are gaps where historical sources have been lost, discarded or destroyed in the intervening centuries. History is messy and full of gaps into which we necessarily stumble. ![]() It’s important to remember that the past is never presented to us on a silver tablet and we should be wary of any version of past events which claims to be the absolute truth. ![]() The game’s problems (and there are many) aren’t a symptom of a list of inaccuracies that could be fixed, but are rooted in the shaky, dangerous foundations on which those claims were built. It’s a natural question, but perhaps a better one might be: does the promise of historical accuracy make sense in the first place? In the wake its release, there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not Warhorse Studios had been able to make good on their ambitions to deliver an RPG grounded in historical reality. If you’ve been following the debates around Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you'll have seen these words a lot, as well as others, like representation, racism and diversity.
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