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Technophilia and Technophobia in Online Medieval Fantasy Games

Having worked for several years in administration and management roles following the completion of a PhD in medieval history, I recently returned to academic research, albeit in a new disciplinary area. As an early career researcher, I am developing research focused on games culture and on media history, and this chapter is something of an attempt to reconcile these two themes, and to start to make sense of where I find myself as a scholar. It was written as a contribution to an edited collection of studies of medievalism in videogames, part of the Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture series. The book aims to address a notable gap in the field, given the volume of such analysis that exists for other media forms, film being a primary example. The chapter draws out themes from my other work on games, in concentrating on the culture of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), and some of my recent historical work, on which I collaborated with centre colleague Tim Wall to explore the cultural history of mobile music technology. My current work extends these ideas into a more general engagement with MMOGs and/as history, alongside an exploration of the games industry as a context of cultural work, in collaboration with colleagues from BCU’s vocationally orientated GamerCamp.