Why Am I Doing This?

I’m really interested in a lot of the details of early, everyday life -- the kinds of things that no one things about, everyone takes for granted and that so many people dismiss our early ancestors for. I want to see early village or farmstead life as a complex system of struggle against nature, time, resources, law, tradition, overlords and invaders. I want to understand the personal, social and technological institutions that help regulate and manage those struggles. I want to see what those coping mechanisms were and how they worked.

I want to understand it because it interests me, but also because I want to write a game about it. Or should I say I want to write a _good_, historically accurate (at least sort of) game about it. I can’t count how many games I’ve seen brag about the “realistic medieval economy” only then to put a general store and a mercenaries guild in every village. Or even more prevalent, to have the common villager be the “damsel in distress” figure, in need of rescue by the daring hero.

I want to understand why people bake bread instead of just cooking the wheat berries. I want to understand to movement away from individual preparing of food (milling and baking) to the communal manorial monopolies. I want to understand early medieval trade, especially in important natural resources like salt and iron. I want to learn more about the shift from Roman-style slave-run villas to the serf-inhabited manor of the medieval age.

But there is so little written about the common man and woman. So little written a the time results in little to write about today. Even if there was a good, definitive book that answered all of these questions, I think I’d still be doing this. I’m loving it. It’s pushing my personal boundaries and forcing me to grow.