Kingdom come: representações históricas nos jogos eletrônicos

Abstract

Kingdom Come Deliverance was a game released in February of 2018 by the Czech games developer Warhorse Studios. Set in the Kingdom of Bohemia at the beginning of fifteen century, it aims to create a historical experience from the narrative, space and from the rules that made it up. Its developers pointed to Kingdom Come as the game that best represented the past in the last twenty years. This research start from this statement. Having the game as the principal source of this monograph, the main objective was think the possibilities of historical research from the digital games. By having the main narrative of the document in focus, we question about the political representations of power constructed from the figure of the King Wenceslas IV and the bohemian nobility in the fourteen and fifteen centuries. The question revolved around the problem: if this was the game that best portrayed the past in decades, how far can this representation be compared with researches made by historians? We tried to work the representations in the source from the concept of “representation” of the historian Roger Chartier, dialoging with the work of the scholars from other sciences that had focused on such type of object. In the first chapter there was a presentation of the documental type: what is an eletronic game? What are the research currents with focus on the object besides presenting the conceptions from narrative and space around the games? In chapter two we worked on the representations and their comparasion of these with the works of historians. The chapter was subdivided into three: the first sought to reflect on specific themes of the main plot; in the second we opted to analyze of the representation of the King Wenceslas IV, your construction in the source and in the historiographical researchs; in the third there was the analysis of the passages that made it possible to discuss about social elements of a nobility surrounded by chivalry values. The hypothesis that started the research was that the developers, while trying to recreate the past in the virtual world, had represented the development of this world from distinct precepts of those of historians research, therefore, presenting this past to a consuming public through a game’s own language, focusing on their preferences, thus generating profit for the company. Finally, it was realized that although the developers used documents of the period to create the space and the main narrative, it didn’t explain the relationships presented there, leaving open for countless interpretations about the relationships between members of different layers of the nobility of the Low Middle Age.