Universitatea de Arte “G. Enescu” Iaşi

Centrul de Cercetare a Artei Medievale “Vasile Drăguţ”

READING CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARIES INSPIRED BY MIDDLE AGES NARRATIVES

THROUGH MASS MEDIA IMAGES

READING CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARIES INSPIRED BY MIDDLE AGES NARRATIVES

THROUGH MASS MEDIA IMAGES

Teresa Torres EçaInternational Society for Education

Through Artwww.insea.org

Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS), School of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal

Rosângela ApCAT e GIIP, Instituto de Artes da UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil.

Keywords: Contemporary

imaginaries, Middle Ages

narratives, mass media images,

MMORPG (Multi Massive

Online Role-Playing Games)

● A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.

● There are several forms of RPG. The original form, sometimes called the tabletop RPG, is conducted through discussion, whereas in live action role-playing games (LARP) players physically perform their characters' actions. In both of these forms, an arranger called a game master (GM) usually decides on the rules and setting to be used and acts as referee, while each of the other players plays the role of a single character.

● Several varieties of RPG also exist in electronic media, such as multi-player text-based MUDs and their graphics-based successors, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Role-playing games also include single-player offline role-playing video games in which players control a character or team who undertake quests, and may include capabilities that advance using statistical mechanics. These games often share settings and rules with tabletop RPGs, but emphasize character advancement more than collaborative storytelling

● Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of role-playing video games or web browser based games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world.

● A MUD (/ˈmʌd/; originally Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain), is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.

Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice-rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.

Are young people and young adults interested in images and games influenced by narratives influenced by Middle age?

How?

Where?

Why?

From the moment you begin to play Agamemnon you become a part of ancient medieval life. The time when medieval Knights were the icons of valour and protectors of their home-land. You will find the time of the Middle Ages here in all its glory. You would do well to

dig deeply into this website, especially if you have not played a MUD or an online RPG before: Agamemnon can be thought of as a part of these categories. The textual aspect of Agamemnon can often

be very daunting. However, do not let this dissuade you. (RPG Agamemnon. (2003 c). Retrieved from http://www.agamemnon-

rpg.com/introduction.html)

Visual image research

By means of images we engage with widely shared social assumptions about the way the world is, should be, or should not be. All imagery is ideological in the sense that imagery arises from a matrix of competing ideas, values and beliefs and is always made with a purpose (Duncum, 2010, p.10).

Images often express ideologies through metaphors and metonyms. Through metaphors and metonyms we make sense of the world and we make relationships accessible to our senses. 

Images are often inspired in other images and stories.

Stories of art are narratives profusely used and abused by media products in the entertainment industries, and the so called 'creative industries’.

when we use film images or play virtual games embodied in stories and images evoking a certain period of time, we make a unique appropriation of the imaginaries of that time, through the lens and mediation of what other imagined about that time. We experience collective metaphors in the 'in-between' space of interpretation

“we are chimeras theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (Haraway, p. 150).

We are creatures of both fiction and lived social reality, playing our different identities, our different avatars using hybrid technologies to understand and recreate the world. And in that way we built our worlds with intertextual information conveyed by available narratives.

Films, comics, video games are constantly referring to images from stories of art, and from all periods of western culture. Myths and legends which are evocated by literature, film and theatre are re-interpreted in the so called re-mix culture re-mix culture adapted with digital tools through collaboration and sharing process used by individuals groups or companies (Lessig, 2008).

Middle Ages artifacts, images, tales and stories evoked in these media products are reinterpreted according to contemporary concerns and conflicts

Although popular media products do not directly acknowledge Middle Ages sources - they don't claim to depict this period in time - , they often are produced using extensively searches on Middle Ages stories and images

Neomedieval attraction in gaming—for example —creates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts. And video and internet players of such games do not only buy products associated to the brand or game, but they also produce them in edupunk learning processes. Individually players search for tutorials and information in Internet forums to build what they need to perform the virtual experiences of the game in real life

It is interesting to observe how

chivalric codes of behavior are

reproduced and recreated in

contemporary internet and video

games (MMO and MMORPG

games) where the players assume

roles explicitly inspired by

knighthood orders codes of

behavior.

Assassin's Creed is a video and internet game series published by Ubisoft Montreal and consisting of five main games and a number of supporting materials. The series took inspiration from the novel Alamut by the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol

ReferencesCollier, M. (2002). Approaches to analysis in visual anthropology. In: van Leeuwen, T. &

Jewitt, C. (Eds.) Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage Publications. pp. 35-60.

Duncum, P. (2010). Seven principles for visual culture education. Art Education, 6-10.

Haraway, Donna (1991). "A Cyborg Manifesto Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in

the Late Twentieth Century," In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

New York: Routledge. pp.149-181.

Kline, D.T. (2013). Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge.

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. London:

Bloomsbury. Retrieved from:

http://ia600204.us.archive.org/13/items/LawrenceLessigRemix/Remix-o.pdf, accessed 22-02-13