Master’s in Social Work candidate Nicholas Holterman’s love for medieval literature was partially inspired by his childhood toys, such as Playmobil and a Fisher-Price castle. He has a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, where he wrote his dissertation, “Old French Narrative Lays and the Video Games We Play,” which we discuss in this interview. The dissertation combines lays, which are works of medieval French literature, with modern-day gaming. [Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Tell me a little about your scholarly background and research.
In 2023, I finished my PhD in Romance Languages (French). My dissertation looked at medieval French literature and how we can put it in conversation with video games, as each brings out elements of the other. The main takeaway is that those two things, medieval lays and video games, are a lot more similar than we might initially think. We can look to the past through the lens of video games and find that medieval writers and the fictional world are very playful and gameful in ways that might not be apparent at first. Medieval people liked to play just like we do in the modern age, and that reads in a lot of the literature, especially the lays. Conversely, we can look to the medieval past and see how certain trends and themes have continued from around 800 years ago. Looking at the past through this modern lens makes us realize we’re not so different.
For example, the second chapter of my dissertation takes up a medieval translation of the Narcissus myth. I use the idea of Narcissus looking into the fountain as a metaphor for gaming and essentially how avatars—the digital representation of us on screen—can be used to explore different identities in the digital gaming world. Immersion also ties together video games and medieval literature. One theory we have is that medieval literature was read aloud in groups of people, usually with music and some other performance, so it’s multimodal and immersive, and it presents opportunities for us to explore ourselves.
What attracted you to DSI at U-M?
I have always been interested in digital studies. I was in one of the first cohorts to take graduate classes through DSI, so I was excited when there was a more formal place to explore digital studies and make it more explicitly part of my research curriculum and trajectory.
What inspired your research about medieval and gaming studies?
Probably my childhood—a lot of the video games I played as a kid were highly medievalized. I remember Age of Empires and a bunch of RPG video games that had a medieval flair to them. I wasn’t originally going to research video games alongside my medieval studies. I was looking at gender, queer theory, and ecocriticism, and how nature presents itself in medieval literature, but then I took a hard left toward games. I thought this would keep my interest a little more over the long process of writing.
I’ll admit that when I was an undergrad and I had my first medieval literature course, I was not into it at all! My advisor at the time was a medievalist, and her passion for it greatly influenced me. Because it’s such a broad field, I feel like there’s something amazing in everything you read from the Middle Ages, and it tapped into my childhood imagination.
What’s something you wish that everyone knew/kept in mind regarding gaming and the digital world?
It’s both an intensely personal endeavor and a great community builder. I think especially after the pandemic, a lot of people turned to games. Outside of the trade and supply shortage, people were demanding video games, and I think that was a really nice way to create community and connection while being able to express yourself.
How has your research experience influenced your teaching and academic work?
I’ve taught a course on Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages with my dissertation advisor, Peggy McCracken. We look at the Game of Thrones TV series and hold that in conversation with medieval literature. They’re not like each other, but they are very much like each other.
I’m also interested in play and how play as a category and modality of being in the world can impact mental health. There’s play therapy, which is usually for children. But I am interested in seeing how we can also incorporate play into therapy for adults as a way to explore personal identity—how we move around the world and through the world with other people. I am particularly interested in eating disorder treatment as a specialization; I’m curious to see how people who are maybe struggling with body image can explore different ways of inhabiting the world and themselves, testing the boundaries and limits of our personhood, taking yourself, becoming digital, and seeing what happens. I think the intensely personal and community-building aspects of video games can create possibilities for that.
Have you ever thought about creating your own video game, and what would that look like?
Around 2015, I had the opportunity to work on a video game. It was through a grant program, and I helped create a second language acquisition game based on medieval text, breaking it down so that students could learn the actual language of old French. I was a level designer, and we used the game engine Unity to put together our levels. The game was based on a text I mentioned in my dissertation—The Legend of St. Brendan—who arguably was one of the first Europeans to reach North America back in the 9th or 10th century. He sails around to different islands, and each island corresponds to different levels. We had to design both the physical island landscape and a puzzle-like task to complete using a grammatical lesson. That was so fun and different from everything else I had been doing up to that point.
I have thought about what it would be like to make my own game, but I’m not a very good coder. I had thought of applying for narrative design and being a writer or historical consultant for video games. I know some of my colleagues in medieval studies have done Old Norse translations for Civilization Six and things like that, and I thought, What a fun thing to be able to do with your research degree! Maybe someday, if someone asked me to be part of their video game, I would do it.
