The primary text of this thesis is Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game released in 2011 to huge commercial success and critical acclaim. Through this text, the project explores the intersection of medievalist fantasy, politics, and whiteness. It investigates the parallels between political medievalisms, playful medievalisms, and the ways in which medieval fantasy is used to reinvent or reaffirm white identities. The Middle Ages, as a time period, an imagined geographic space, and an ideological concept, is often nostalgically recalled as a key element in Western nationalism and identity formation. Skyrim provides a major case study through which to interrogate the tropes of medieval fantasy in order to understand how the genre situates itself as a space of creativity and resistance, but in fact maintains conservative social values. Furthermore, it asks how players engage in identity play in medieval fantasy games, and to what extent Skyrim’s politics encourage discussion and reflection. This thesis is highly interdisciplinary in its form and utilises multiple methodologies to explore the construction of the self and the other through medievalism in fantasy. Traditional humanities methods are combined with a survey of players’ narrative choices and modes of identification with characters and factions within Skyrim, as well as analysis of ‘gamer’-activism in popular politics. Ultimately, although the games explored are established to be highly conservative in their modes of racial representation, the thesis finds that players are actively engaged in identity play. Although this is limited in many ways by game design—especially where medieval fantasy genre conventions are heeded—the potential for game worlds to destabilise racial boundaries and provide a space for identity play is acknowledged, opening up several avenues for further research in the fields of enquiry.

This thesis describes the development, implementation and evaluation of a model of game education, here understood as the process of educating about digital games. The pivotal characteristic of this model is in placing the claimed influences of gaming (e.g. cognitive gains, increase of aggression) at the centre of the content to be learnt. It is based on five principles, namely, that game education can be Informative, Critical, Empowering, Emancipatory, and Dialogic, hence the ICEED Game Education Model. The ICEED model was inspired by both the academic literature and the first study of this thesis, in which 15 University students were interviewed regarding the influences of their gaming practices. Later the model was operationalised in a course named Reflective Gaming Course (RGC), which addresses a series of positive and negative influences of gaming according to the ICEED model. Using a Design Based Research methodological framework, the course was implemented, evaluated and improved as an extracurricular course for adolescents in a secondary school and then in a college, in the second and third study of this thesis. The contributions of the thesis can be divided into four sections. The first is the ICEED Game Education Model, which offers a novel and useful conceptual understanding of what game education can be, hence expanding the possibilities of how game education is conceived. The second section is the Reflective Gaming Course, which is a concrete course plan that can be reproduced or adapted by researchers or practitioners. This course was improved through two implementations, and it was found to be a useful and promising practice. By providing accounts of the course, the process involved, the outcomes achieved, the successes and failures, it is hoped to provide detailed information to inform future projects. The third section is a discussion of the findings with regard to the difficulty of transforming the academic literature on the influences of gaming into useful content for players. This highlights a limitation on the part of research in this area, which often overlooks the potential of its claims to inform players and encourage them to improve their gaming practices. The fourth section concerns knowledge about players’ perspectives about the influences of their gaming practices, complementing other similar studies. In the perspective of participants, some of the topics were perceived as more important (e.g. tangential learning, cognitive gains, excessive gaming) others less so (e.g. connections with school, aggression, stereotypes). Their perspectives also illustrate the recurring absence of opportunities in which players can problematize their perspectives on the influences of gaming.