What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames

leidenmedievalistsblog.nl

799 points_emacsomancer_353 comments

Pigs were recorded in Domesday as having woodland to support them. Note that woodlands supporting pigs was primarily comprised of oak, since the pigs fed on the acorns they dropped.

Source 1: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/discover-domesd...

In the modern world, you can manage about 5 pigs per acre. You should be able to do that many pigs or more per acre in the medieval world since the animals were physically smaller for the most part. So in an 80 acre pannage woodland, expect about 400 swine.

Some tree types are far more damaged by pig foraging than others since, if they don't get the yummy acorns, they tend to dig up roots, eat the saplings and do other damage. So the oak and the pig are good neighbors. The elder or the olive tree, or even the wild apple tree, all tend to suffer far more damage when used as pannage.

Source 2: https://acrcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Pigs-and-Trees....

Why does a marketing manager at Scylla know so much about pannage lmao

Answer one: we all have our hobbies; actually pig rearing is a bit quaint but perhaps not as obscure a hobbie as you might think. Like competitive marrow growing or something.

Answer two: pig farmers have sons and daughters who don't necessarily follow in their footsteps, just as you and I probably know more about <what our parents did/do> than the average <what we did/do>.

I used to actively design roleplaying games, and medieval agricultural yields have been a passion of mine since the original Chivalry & Sorcery Sourceboook (1978)[1]. In particular, in the 1990s I wanted to understand Domesday Book in detail to project what a medieval farm would look like as part of Pendragon roleplaying game, which I owned the rights to for a time when I had a company called Green Knight Publishing. The game is back with Chaosium these days, and I remain a fan of the RPG.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chivalry-Sorcery-Sourcebook-Edward-Si...

> pigs fed on the acorns they dropped

I walked some extremely undulating oak woodland valleys recently, which seemed oddly absent of squirrels but perhaps that's normal close to a windy coastline - as a result the floor was completely coated with acorns. I can imagine the more agile swine depicted would be far more suited to gobbling them up in such a challenging landscape; I'm pretty sure a modern pig would have little chance of safely navigating the slopes.

A pig gone feral will adapt very very quickly. The'll get fitter, their hide and hair thicker. Within a year a pink factory pig will be quickly transformed. They're very intelligent and would have no trouble handling that terrain.

Oh interesting, I had assumed some level of gradual genetic changes in domestication were responsible. So you are suggesting it's mostly phenotypical changes that could even be somewhat reversed in an individual... I wonder how far a new born would revert to what is being depicted in the illustrations.

I can only speak from personal experience (what I've seen), but I googled and found this:

> "Any pig that gets out can revert back in a matter of months to a state where it can exist in the wild," said Brown. "It will get hairy, grow tusks and get aggressive. They're so good at adapting, and with their scavenging nature, they can get by pretty much anywhere."

https://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/outdoors/2007/11/domestic...

even grow tusks? that's crazy

Domestic pigs grow tusks. People file them down or rip them out because, well, humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig#Care

Wow. Do you have a reference for this? That is interesting!

Just personal experience. I googled and found this:

https://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/outdoors/2007/11/domestic...

Margaret Atwood's book Oryx and Crake references this. I don't remember the exact plot, but somewhere in there civilization collapses and pigs go feral within years.

In Spain now the best pigs (for eating) are fed foraging on acorns.

Yes, I'm from Extremadura (west of Spain), and we have a lot of pigs roaming on the fields. Cows and sheep too, just drive down any road and you will see them.

Iberico ham is quite fascinating (and tasty). Interesting mandates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam%C3%B3n_ib%C3%A9rico

I imagine a pig won't get acorns the whole year round - so outside acorn season there will be enough damage done.

The Hundred Acre Wood can support 500 Piglets

Well, we do have the Cinta Senese breed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Il_Pa...

that is (still today) actually very similar to what the Author describes as "medieval pigs".

That's a better role model indeed.

But the author doesn't say that medieval-looking pigs are uncommon around the world right now.

They say that pigs in medieval themed games are represented by pigs as seen in intensive pig farming: confined, fast growing, furless and pink.

Yep, they (the videogame designers) got the wrong models, in case any of them read the comments here (and accept the critique in the article), the Cinta Senese is proposed as an alternative model.

To be fair, if you quickly look for pigs breeds, you will probably find images like this one:

https://www.breedslist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Types-...

where all breeds seem rather chunky and short-legged.

Aw. The Gloucestershire Old Spot looks kind of like a floppy-eared puppy. Very cute.

Also they’re delicious. Our local farmer had some of them and it’s the best bacon I’ve ever eaten.

Purely from a visual standpoint it's also pretty much the only one that still looks to have somewhat natural proportions and skin. The rest just look adipose and/or at risk of sunburn to me.

Also what they’re fed on makes a huge difference, for any breed.

these look much cuter than the farm variety

Di Young - Pixel Pig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiC7_167hQ0

I thought one of the most interesting points of the article was towards the bottom. Part of inaccuracy is that you'll be wandering around the village in the game and you'll find adult pigs in pens. It sounds like pigs were mostly free-range and in the woods for their adult life. Later on, as the "wilderness" shrank they transitioned to more of a farm animal.

Not medieval times, but when my grandfather was a kid (nearly 100 years ago now), the pigs would roam his Sicilian town and its outskirts. He was about 6 when he decided to piss off a sow in a field. It mauled him and near killed him.

That's still standard in Corsica (and I think Sicily though less sure), local pigs are partially feral.

Parts of Corsica, other parts seem to be run by a small breed of cattle who keep pockets of human tenders around.

Observing the pigs at the Col de Vergio I imagined to notice a pattern of the bigger/older pigs venturing further away into the wild, as if they eventually developed a certain nagging suspicion but were too trusting minds to really act on it.

I love this on a deep level. Great writing.

‘Imagined to notice’ is a lovely way of embracing those flights of fancy.

The imagery of the older pigs subconsciously coming to a conclusion they’ll never quite get to really touched me.

Thank you.

Not exactly "roaming in the town", but just last week I was talking with someone that remembered how - in the late 1950's or early '60's - her family (in Tuscany countryside) had usually three or four pigs that were routinely brought (by her, at the time 8 or 9 years old) to the nearby woods and it happened more than once that one of them would flee and get to the village, and be later brought back by this or that neighbour.

On an extended visit to a small village in Mexico where the pigs would wander, I made a sport of stalking the piglets and attempting to pick them up. I achieved my aim once and the mother sow came charging at me & thereby convinced me to yield up the piglet toot suite. No mauling ensued thank goodness.

FYI, tout suite is a French term meaning immediately. The toot suite sounds like where the hogs go on holiday.

If I may invoke Muphry's law, the french term is "tout de suite"

Then I'll happily contribute my second improvement of french: suivite.

(For the curious, the first one is "toujourd'hui". And yes, this is tongue-in-cheek -- until these catch on and I'm celebrated by the Academy Francaise. Then it's Very Serious Business and was always intended as such, this post notwithstanding)

I did not know it was a thing in English! This said, in French it is "tout de suite", but apparently both are correct in English.

Since the second 't' in tout isn't voiced and the 'de' is very quick and blended in, "tout de suite" sounds like "toot suite" to an English ear, hence the 'de' often being dropped (as well as spellings like the above).

Yes, in French it tends to be pronounced "tou tsuit" (if I can spell it this way :D).

Calling it “correct” is maybe an exaggeration. It’s an extremely colloquial, jokey intentional misspelling.

> The toot suite

Claiming as my band^h^h^h^hMastodon app name.

"toot suite" is slang in English, an intentionally incorrect derivation from the French. But it probably is where the hogs go as well :)

It's actually "Toot Sweets" :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMFha1nmeXc

The song "Toot Sweets" from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"

oh boy, arent they like 200 kg of angry meat?

Big enough that when the cousin he was with returned with adult help, the sow had shredded all of his clothes and he had bites all over his body.

As a kid I briefly lived in a rented trailer on a smallish farm which grew mustard greens and raised hogs. The owner was missing half an ear, taken by a hog. At least, that was the story he told when he caught me one day about to stick my hand into the hog pen. True account or not, the lesson is true all the same: hogs eat people, and angry or hungry hogs are not to be trifled with.

But some can be truffled with.

The largest domestic breeds push up to 300 to 400 kilos. We had one free-range pig on our farm that was certainly over a quarter-tonne, and she was agile enough that she'd occasionally run down chickens and eat them, and jaws strong enough to chew up cow skulls left over from home-kill.

Pigs are generally smart and friendly if they haven't been mistreated. I would not want to mess with one.

People like to joke about all the native Australian animals that can kill you, but the animal I was most afraid of as a farm kid was the feral pigs. I saw photos of recently shot pigs that were too big to fit on the back of a ute, and often found small trees completely uprooted by them.

Fortunately the largest feral pigs I ever ran into were a litter and a small sow that preferred to scatter than stand their ground.

I've seen wild hog videos of them charging forward, full tilt against much larger animals. Things that would eat pigs for dinner, I tell you, they don't care and their charges mess you up.

It is a funny quirk of evolution that herbivores or mostly herbivorous omnivores often end up being more aggressive than predators. The predator would prefer dinner that doesn't fight back!

I visited Georgia (the country) a few years ago and their pigs were roaming freely around the villages.

Here's a photo I took: https://imgur.com/a/ehETWOK

You could have also looked for pigs and cows at their tea plantations. Kinda surreal view.

I had no idea they had tea plantations, that's kinda surprising. Seems I need to go back.

They are probably much harder to come by than in my days, but still exist:

https://www.teaandcoffee.net/feature/2061/georgia-works-revi...

With government support and private-sector interest, Georgia aims to rebuild its once highly regarded and significant tea industry – dating back to the Russian Empire – that was destroyed following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In its history, first in the Russian Empire, then in the Soviet Union, Georgia played a crucial role in the tea market, producing at its peak up to 133,000 tonnes of packed tea per year from nearly 70 species, enjoying demand not only within the country, but also in some export destinations, including Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan. However, this ended with the collapse of Soviet Union, when communism-style, tea-growing cooperatives appeared not to be ready for any competition with import supplies.

As a result, the tea industry was almost completely ruined, as annual volume of production dropped to nearly 4,000 tonnes. Approximately 95 percent of tea plantations have been closed, while out of nearly 100 tea factories, only 12 are operating now.

It sounds a lot like sheep and shepherds. Hopefully, modern ideas of how sheep were taken care of are more accurate?

I suspect that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has the pigs in their work accurate to what it was at the time and the author is taking sources about specific regions and then extrapolating over all of Europe. Yes, there are inaccuracies in most games, but I suspect that the author is also themselves inaccurate.

What do you base that on? This seems like a pretty long bow to draw; pigs didn’t look like they do now, that’s a pretty accepted fact, even if you might quibble with their other points.

Probably based on the sheer level of detail and research that went into making that game.

It’s easy to overlook something and get it wrong. And they also took plenty of artistic liberties, like having highly anachronistic clothing and armor for Hungarian Cumans in the setting.

And it's very easy for an author of an opinion piece such as this to overlook something or over extrapolate something or assume that medieval drawings are accurate. In the case of this article, most of what the author has cited is information about the British Isles and then extrapolated that information to cover all of Europe even though regional differences almost certainly existed and things likely changed over time as well. It's not like the world was just static for 600+ years.

These are expert historians, not random people posting an "opinion piece". Do you have information they don't that shows that they're wrong here?

Part of this is because without full-time pig herders, the pigs tend to go feral and cause a hell of a lot of damage. There are huge numbers of feral pigs in America. They can be quite dangerous:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/pigs-san-francisco-cal...

I once read about a medieval case where a sow and her piglets attacked and killed a random villager. The medieval court sentenced the mother to death but concluded that the offspring were too young to know right from wrong and were acting under the influence of their mother, ruling them innocent.

There's an old book from about 1906 where the author goes through a bunch of old European cases of animals being tried in court for crimes. It's an interesting and bizarre read.

https://archive.org/details/criminalprosecut00evaniala

It also is one of the (potential) bases for laws regarding self-driving vehicles/robots/drones.

Because law builds on precedent. And it can be argued that self-driving vehicles are a bit like an animal (has a "mind" of its own, but has a human owner responsible for it).

I'm sure it was just a suspended sentence.

The practice, and the woodland used for it, is called pannage. Somebody below pointed out that it's still done in the New Forest in England.

You used to have the right to fatten your pigs by letting them go root around in the forest during the late summer/early autumn. Pigs can eat acorns and beechmast just fine without processing; and in the late fall they get brought in and slaughtered. This also keeps underbrush down, fertilizes the forest floor, and is less smelly than keeping the pigs confined. Nicer for the pigs, too.

There are lots of places around New England called "hog island", which was usually the place the farmer would row the pigs out to-uninhabited, and filled with oaks and beeches. Pigs are unwilling to swim too far from shore, keeping them on the island (and away from crops!) until bacon time.

(Here is an article touching on the practice of pannage, and how it was related to the first indian wars in New England, as well as the Hog Island that I grew up near!)

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/ruma.chopra/courses/h170_MW_S13/...

In villages they probably managed to mostly keep the pigs under control, but in towns and cities there do seem to have been free-roaming pigs. They were known to eat babies on occasion, and the French, at least, liked to put them on trial for this (and execute them).

That article also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinta_Senese#/media/File:Ambro... which is an actual medieval picture with a very recognizable Cinta Senese pig in it. Which is a testimony that at least some medieval pigs looked exactly like that.

Reminds me of a passage in Jesse Schell's game design book. Playtesters were confused seeing flags of pirate ships blow forward, toward the front of the ship. They were told that sailing ships have the wind at their backs, so everything blows forward. However, so many playtesters were confused and made comments that they just made the flags blow back.

Maybe it was the same with the pigs; people just want to see pigs squealing around town, adding to the atmosphere of the game.

That would also throw me, it seems intuitive from our land based experience that the flag blows backward with moving things as they push through the air. Like flags on cars. But sailing vessels are propelled by the wind, and usually move slower than the wind as well, so the flags would blow with the wind, forward. I'm sure sailors would not get confused about it, but for people who don't have that experience it seems counter-intuitive. Now if you had a sailing ship moving faster the wind, which is actually possible, I guess the flag would blow backward, well at an angle, because I think you have to be moving at an angle to the wind to go faster than it.

For sailing maybe not, but a vehicle can in fact be made that can go downwind faster than the wind https://youtu.be/yCsgoLc_fzI

Sailing downwind faster than the wind is possible. "Apparent wind sailing" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing

Even more astonishingly are the remote controlled sail planes than not only exceed the speed of the wind, their performance is limited by the sound barrier. "Dynamic soaring" https://newatlas.com/aircraft/dynamic-soaring-speed-record-s...

I think it's important to distinguish between downwind sailing and sailing before the wind, which is straight downwind, and cannot possibly go faster than the wind (you'd have a perpetuum mobile if you could do that).

From what I understand, faster-than-the-wind downwind sailing involves tacking between broad reaches, where the wind still comes in at an angle.

Modern sailing boats sail windward too, usually at an angle not greater than 45 degrees. Flags blow 45 degrees backward. Old ocean vessel didn't sail much against the wind. They were not built for that, hull and sails.

America's Cup foiling boats sail faster than the real wind in any direction (even 3 times as much) so they always experience an apparent wind against them, same as a car or to a lesser degree a bicycle. However they don't have flags, I just checked on videos. They would blow backwards at a small angle, just as on cars.

> America's Cup foiling boats sail faster than the real wind in any direction

Against the wind maybe, but I don't see how that's possible sailing before the wind. They're probably never going completely before the wind but instead alternating between broad reaches[0].

[0] I had to look that one up. Sailing terms are one of those things I only know in Dutch, and the English terms are completely alien to me in a way almost nothing else is.

You might want to check the diagrams and animations at https://sailing-blog.nauticed.org/americas-cup-apparent-wind...

Nice animations! They explain a lot. And this is exactly what I mean: they're going from broad reach to broad reach (and not even that broad a reach!) instead of going straight before the wind, because they need a sideward component to the wind force.

So pirates only sailed in one direction?

Sailing ships have to tack to sail against the wind, so to an extent, yes

Huh? How did you conclude that from what you read?

No, with skillful use of sails and maneuvering you can go any direction, even into the wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)

That applies to any sailing ship, whether it is manned by pirates or not, of course.

It’s often described that way, but tacking doesn’t really let you sail directly into the wind.

Instead you combine two vectors which on net result in the ship moving in the direction you want on average. But, with noticeable limitations if you also want to avoid obstacles etc.

The flags wouldn't be blowing straight to the bow of the boat tbough. On a tacking course, they'd be blowing towards the stern +/- 20 degrees.

They won’t blow forward if you’re tacking into the wind though.

Square rigged ships (the pirate ship most people imagine) are designed primarily for speed running with the wind. They would sail more or less down a line of longitude to a trade wind and then sail in the direction of that wind. They could tack of course but they were really not very good at sailing upwind and that was essentially a design trade off to make them better at sailing in the trade wind.

Ship builders of that time did, of course, know how to make more maneuverable ships with different types of rigging. These would all be used for different jobs, eg coastal and fishing.

But for long distance transport, speed with the trade wind was the most important consideration.

What a tough choice: make it correct, or pander to the ignorant? /s

Yeah that seems like a strange choice. Why not just keep it in and let people figure out eventually that they just don't know how boats work?

There's a ton of compromises like this in video games. Like "shotgun=short range damage" or the ability for players to alter their trajectory mid-air. Similar changes are often made in the name of atmosphere.

Even AC: Black Flag does this the "wrong" way: https://youtu.be/6JwjuwPW8hg?t=891

Everyone does it the 'wrong' way, and we end up with a bunch of ignorant people who don't understand that a flag on a sailing boat indicates apparent wind [0].

It's all very well to claim 'atmosphere', but shit like this ruins the atmosphere for people who notice the details.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_wind

> It's all very well to claim 'atmosphere', but shit like this ruins the atmosphere for people who notice the details.

Alas, you are in minority there.

Clearly this needs to be a config option!

Shotguns being the way they are is less about sticking to what people believe to be true and more about making them feel significantly different to other types of fire arm. If you were to have a shotgun with a realistic spread in most games the gameplay would suffer.

Because instead of assuming the game is correct and assuming their understanding is wrong, they would complain the game got it wrong.

Have it be correct. Then include a short dialog Where a salior me asks about it and the captain makes fun of him

I love this!

It is a tough choice! See also foley work for nature documentaries. I don't even think it's ignorance so much as intuition - even if mistaken - is a central component of aesthetics. There's an expectation that it should sound like this, it should blow that way, etc.

Damn in my next game I'll have to make all the NPCs unvaccinated and afraid of radiation in nuclear power plant cooling tower vapor

This is why bathrooms on ships are called the head. They were placed at the front of sailing ships so the wind would blow the smells away.

So, the idea that sails work by the wind blowing on them from behind is a common misconception. They actually work like an airplane wing in some ways.

I'm going to skip trying to remember all the technical details from the last time I sailed anything and just say that the head is at the head of the boat, but it has nothing to do with "blowing the smells away". Boats do not always sail the direction the wind is blowing. We'd have never got anywhere before marine engines if that were the case.

You're speaking universally, but what you're describing is only true about fore-and-aft rigged sails.

During the "Age of Sail" those were not common for oceangoing ships, which predominately used square rigged sails and would primarily or exclusively run downwind.

Square rigs do not sail directly downwind, at least not if they have multiple masts. You always sail at an angle and tack the yards appropriately. Otherwise the foremast’s sails would luff.

Square masts can sail upwind, it's not as effective but you can get 50 or 55° into the wind.

Sure, they “primarily run downwind”... the same way cars “primarily drive on asphalt.” It's not that they can't drive on gravel or brick or off-road, it's that during the Age of Sail the main priority was swift conveyance and obviously if that's your priority you try to get back on the highway as soon as you can.

One time sailing with my dad we tried to launch from a sand spit after the wind came up. Each time we tried we'd get blown back on. We then tried doing it with the sails down and paddling like mad and we made it. We found we could point about 45 degrees into the wind with the sails still down. And so we just tacked across the bay to the dock like that.

I once tried tacking against the wind through a gap between two lakes that acted like a funnel. The funnel effect created such strong waves that I couldn't get my boat to turn into the wind. Eventually I gave up and tried it on the motor, but it was too weak to power against the waves and the wind. So what I ended up doing was sailing, tacking, but using the motor to force the boat through the wind for the tack. That worked, but it was one of the weirder hacks I've done in sailing.

(My English sailing terminology might be incorrect; I'm Dutch, and sailing terminology is the only area of language that I only know in Dutch.)

Not sure why you're objecting, here. No one said "directly," and "primarily" specifically leaves room for the fact that they could sail into the wind.

Maybe you missed the context: the comment responded to the claim that it's a "misconception" that "sails work by the wind blowing on them from behind."

> Boats do not always sail the direction the wind is blowing. We'd have never got anywhere before marine engines if that were the case.

Seafarers would not learn how to sail against the wind until the early Christian era. Still, they got somewhere even before that.

Polynesian expansion to Eastern Islands and Hawaii wasn't a small feat.

> Seafarers would not learn how to sail against the wind until the early Christian era. Still, they got somewhere even before that.

You're referring to the Lateen sail that appeared in the eastern Mediterranean as early as 100AD, but it was imported from possibly Egypt or the Persian Gulf, so its origin is older and elusive. But the spritsail can also sail upwind and is far older, only appearing in Greco-Roman navigation in the 2nd century BC.

I did a quick survey of boat games.

sea of thieves (rare) does it right. flags fly with the wind.

black wake (mastfire) wrong. flags fly with the boat.

skull and bones (ubisoft) wrong flags fly with boat.

ac black flag (ubisoft) wrong flags fly with boat.

Okay, lot of bad takes here. As a real-world sailor, here is how this works. A flag will only stream forwards in the special case of sailing dead down wind (DDW). An even in this case, the flag will tend to be limp as the boat will likely accelerate to close to the speed of the wind (dependent on length/hullspeed of the tall ship relative to wind strength etc.). Sailing ships don't often sail DDW because this is not the fastest point of sail. It is usually advantageous, and common, to sail at a slight angle to the wind.

On all these other points of sail, the sails are bending the wind around the boat and there is a generally smooth, attached, laminar flow of air on both sides of the sail (if you are doing it right). Even square sails work like this, even though they are not an ideal airfoil shape. This mean the airflow is parallel to the sails. And the flag would also follow this direction and flow close to parallel to the sails as well.

There is a concept of apparent wind. The flags will follow apparent wind which is the vector sum of the true wind plus the boat's velocity. That wind direction, combined with the sails effect of twisting the local wind direction, is the wind that the flag is experiencing.

Generally the play testers are right, blowing straight forward is usually wrong.

here is a picture of a flag blowing on a tall ship that is sailing across the wind: https://sailtraininginternational.org/app/uploads/2016/06/ve...

A Pelton water wheel uses a similar effect as sailing perpendicular to the wind.

A normal water wheel moves at nearly the same speed as the water and extracts little useful energy, like sailing DDW.

Note that the energy of the wind is kinetic energy, so taking energy from the wind slows it down.

A Pelton wheel has bowl shaped paddles that, like a spoon under a faucet, redirect the water into the exact opposite direction. The wheel runs so that the rim speed is half the water speed. From the perspective of a single paddle, the water is moving half as fast. From this perspective, the water hits the paddle and reverses to leave at the same speed. From an outside perspective, water hits the wheel and basically stops, transferring all its momentum to the wheel.

Conservation of momentum also explains how Veritasium was able to ~sail DDW faster than the wind with a land propeller craft. The propeller spun fast enough to slow down the wind behind the craft, meaning energy was extracted.

Medievalists are going to medieval, but I can't help but feel like the framing is strange...

An article that describes how today's pigs are different from yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs; neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more entertaining game for them...

no one cares about medieval pigs, and it won't get clicks, so the video game angle is there to draw interest from more normal people.

You have no idea about how much Tuscan municipialities care about medieval pigs, especially if they can get a protected designation of origin out of them (also not everyone is willfully ignorant, but I support accurate medieval pigs in videogames, too).

if you have to live off selling articles that only Tuscan municipality staff care about, you're going to be eating a lot of beans and rice.

> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are?

Details like this are a big part of what makes historical fiction compelling! The more things one encounters that diverge unexpectedly, yet believably from the present day, the greater the sense of immersion.

And the more we can learn from it! Ubisoft has shown an interest in using this series to teach history, with museum modes where you can harmlessly walk around, appreciate the architecture, and talk to locals about what life was like at the time.

Too bad their games are wildly inaccurate to the point of being another hollywodification of what we know it to be like https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...

The way we perceive the past informs our perception of the present. Of course there are elements of fantasy in fiction, but the conceit is that outside of what is clearly fictional everything is real.

In the case of Assassin's Creed, there is a special draw regarding historical accuracy since the game purports to tell the "real" story, so everything that's immediately outside the fiction should be accurate -- and in fact the games have been noted as arousing interest in history among players.

This is why this kind of approximation can be problematic: if you play the original game from 2007, sure you'll disregard the conspiracy theory story, but will you notice that there are buildings in Jerusalem that didn't appear until centuries later, making the city look much more "arabic" looking than it historically was at the time? And if you think the modern pig is in its natural state, won't you have a subtly different outlook on modern animal husbandry?

I like to start from historically accurate then go from there in my hobby games.

My friends ask why I care about accuracy. It's really simple! The world 1,000 or 2,000 years ago was VERY different than today, and trying to replicate it is usually enough to create an interesting and foreign world.

If you want to morph things for gameplay's sake, you still can. But there's a difference between purposefully introducing inaccuracies and ignorantly doing so.

For Kingdom Come Deliverance I thoroughly enjoyed the focus on historical detail. It gives the game a creative edge and for me also an educational edge “a glimpse of medieval life.”

I know the leader of the project, Daniel Vávra.

They dedicated a lot of time to getting all the details right.

It really has enabled me to “get” medieval life more. How people and society worked together and what was important to them. And by proxy how my ancestors lived. Absolutely one of the best games!

This is my all time favorite game. Every few months I remember to look if they've announced KCD2 yet.

I'm enamored with this game. Its focus on historical accuracy is unmatched, and it has actually taught me a lot on medival life in Europe.

Well, it's not exactly the only blog post on this site about medieval pigs. At the bottom of the post there is a link to their other posts about those animals[0], of which there are 12 at this moment. It seems like some medievalists at Universiteit Leiden are interested in pigs, and that looking at medieval video game pigs is just one of the ways they talk about them.

[0] https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/tags/medieval%20pigs

My opinion is: make it correct unless it distracts from the story/gameplay. Most people won't notice but those who do will be happy. On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of medievalists and get these details correct.

Sometimes, factual errors are actually deliberate in order to improve gameplay. For example, accurate architecture may take a back seat to level design. Weapons may react in completely unrealistic ways, but it is understandable because in real life, people didn't fight with controllers. People go much faster than they should, distances are shortened, there is either too much or too little variety because having too much of the same thing is boring and having variation is every small detail is too expensive. All that is not just excusable, it is actually good design, it is a game, not a history lesson. Sometimes, though it is more relevant in movies, there is a deliberate inaccuracy just because that's what people expect and doing it differently would make the audience focus on an unimportant detail or mess with the pacing. And sometimes, it is just to save money that is better spend elsewhere.

I don't think having period accurate pigs is any of these, so for me, it is a mistake, no more, no less. Not the worst, but it deserves a "bug report".

> Weapons may react in completely unrealistic ways

And your character is also likely carrying more of them than their period counterparts, or in some cases, is humanly possible

Loadouts in most RPGs are so absurd even with limits. I'm surprised no game (that I know of) capitalizes on this issue by giving you access to stuff but making you stage it strategically, eg leaving ammo along your line of retreat so you can surprise your pursuers. Maybe designers have found that it's too much prep and planning whereas players want action, but then again the From Software * Souls games suggests many players enjoy having to work at it.

Most games try really hard to make it impossible to paint yourself into a corner where you have to re-do a large stretch because you messed up. I guess somthing like this would be a great difficulty option - much better than bloated HP enemies.

Most weapons are fairly light. Could easily lug around a diablo inventory of swords in a large sturdy backpack.

For how long? Over what type of terrain? How would it impact your stamina level? Could you fight with the backpack on? When you set it down to fight, could an opponent steal it?

A sword can weigh as little as 1 lbs. On average maybe 2-2.5. If the weight is sensibly allocated, that is not something that will significantly bog you down. If it is, you really need cardio.

> it is a game, not a history lesson

In the case of recent Assassins Creed games, it's both.

"...freely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...

Regarding the latest Assassin's Creed, that reminded me of a (long) blog post [0] by a historian, though it deals more in themes than all the historical inaccuracies present in the game. He then did another post on Expeditions: Rome, a game that claimed historical verisimilitude and all the mistakes it made [1].

[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/04/15/collections-expeditions-rome-a...

Thank you for the links. From [0]:

The first two mission chains in England involve replacing the ‘bad guy’ anti-pagan king of Mercia with a good guy reasonable king Ceolwulf (and his good guy reasonable son) and rescuing the Dane-ruled settlement of Grantebridge where, I kid you not, we are told that this settlement was just a tiny village when the Danes moved in and built it up into a big, multi-cultural trading town and all of the local English folks are just totally OK with this and it is just the mean nasty Saxon army (led by a bad guy member of an evil conspiracy) who are ruining everything. Apparently all of the Danish vikings only really came by for infrastructure week.

This problem is infinitely compounded by the way the game treats, or more correctly does not treat, the Norse practice of slavery.

This, for me, is a much bigger - history-wise - problem than a color of pigs.

Among things that if done realistic, might take you out of the game experience, I'd also expect dialog. Leaving out how any given vocabulary and pronunciation has radically changed, I'd also expect just the flow of a conversation, what people valued and what they took for granted for things like social hierarchy and everyday customs would be completely alienating. I have no concrete examples, but I am sure that just observing interactions within a family or between a store keeper and a customer would be totally alien to anyone playing a modern video game.

>… what people valued and what they took for granted for things like social hierarchy and everyday customs would be completely alienating

One such historical custom which has gone by the wayside: an entire family used to share a single bed. If you had a stranger over, they were likely to hop in as well for the night.

So, co-sleeping is totally consistent with the Lindy effect!

> On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of medievalists and get these details correct.

The financing of AAA titles is actually rather tight; the fact that AAA titles hardly ever do experiments in gameplay and the fact that in many studios crunch time happens show how tight the financial planning of AAA titles has to be to work out.

This is not because the publishers can't afford to spend a bit more. But because they would rather capture every last dollar of profit.

There's an argument to be made that getting some of these details right would improve their profitability. For sure people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering around outside the villages.

I would love to know what percentage of that budget has anything to do with development vs advertising. I see ads for games on buses, billboards, tv commercials, etc that do not seem cheap.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... for a list of estimated development and marketing costs for various AAA games.

A lot of the marketing happens post launch and is thus low risk as you can adjust the budget based on sales performance. The same isn’t true for game development itself, which must be limited to a fixed budget based on anticipated future sales.

Some people certainly will.

My wife trains horses. It irritates her to no end seeing characters in movies who supposedly spend their lives in the saddle, played by an actor who has clearly never been on horseback before.

Having done tech support I think it’s possible they made the decision deliberately on the assumption that users would complain the (period correct) swine looked wrong.

FTA: With their ability to digitally animate fantastical fauna, videogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger public.

I agree.

Even ignoring that, there’s a relatively broad interest in movie bloopers, where people complain about such things as “2011 Chargers were replaced by the earlier models. You can easily tell it by the taillights” (https://www.carthrottle.com/post/alqlmmp/) or “Both Apatosaurs and Stegosaurs went extinct before the point of divergence of this alternate history” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1979388/goofs/). I think that naturally extends to game bloopers, and this is one.

> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs

Of course, but this particular author chooses to focus on the pigs. Possibly because of personal expertise? The fact that other errors exist does not mean this one should be ignored.

In any case, it's an interesting thing to learn about.

Don’t think this is important for gameplay at all, not like I expect skyrim to be historically correct, but as a random trivia and kinda of a tongue-in-cheek article I find this super interesting.

Yesterpig is a great word

We could make it the catalyst for a whole new vocabulary. Yesterman. Yesterland. Yesterlore. Yestergames. Yesterfood. Yestersex. Yesterlife. Yesterdeath. Yesterdog. Yestercow. Yestertech. Yesterworld.

Or not.

I'm (badly) paraphrasing Brett Devereaux, but for most people, knowledge of the past comes not from history books, but from popular culture. When pop culture is wrong about some aspect, the collective mental representation gets a little more distant from the historical reality.

In particular, no, most people don't care about the accuracy of medieval pigs. In general though, realism is often important for its consistency and for the ability to link the game to outside resources.

A lot of writers, artists, worldbuilders, etc like to incorporate realism into their creations, but in my opinion the more important part is having consistent systems, and realism is just used as a shortcut to consistency. Obviously a fantasy story with dragons isn't realistic, nor is a sci-fi story with superluminal starships. But what good media does is ensure that what it shows is consistent, that there's no magic or technology that would break the system or create a plot hole, and that in general what you see on the screen or read on the page is the natural result of background systems. Like, the article says that mature male pigs were rarely found in pens in the village; this is the result of the background system of how pigs are farmed. If you're watching a movie or playing a game and see a pigpen in a village and it only has sows and piglets (assuming you can somehow tell male and female pigs apart), then that hints that the creator knows about those background systems and takes them into account in their works.

The second reason that realism is values, especially in games, is that it means that you can use your existing knowledge of real systems in game, and similarly use your game knowledge to better understand real systems. For example, I play a game called Hell Let Loose, a WWII multiplayer shooter whose maps are created with period maps and aerial footage. Going into the game for the first time, I may not know how the game plays or what its specific mechanics are, but I know that, for example, Pavlov's House is going to be a great defensive position. Similarly, when I watch a WWII documentary or show like Band of Brothers, I can see where they're fighting and recognize the location from my experience on the Normandy maps, and think about how difficult it is to take those objectives in the game. Of course, the game is a game, its systems aren't directly transferable to real life, and playing a game isn't nearly as difficult as real life would be, but because the core of the game system and the real system are the same, the game helps me better appreciate what the real soldiers went through.

In my opinion, people fundamentally like making connections between things they know. Novelty is appreciated as a way to form new connections. If people can look at a piece of media and make connections to it, they'll enjoy it more. Similarly, if people can look at a piece of media and make connections within that media, making predictions as to what's going to happen, or connecting the actions of two characters when the media doesn't make an explicit connection, then they'll enjoy it more as well. These connections are facilitated by consistency and accurately following the rules of the systems in play. If the show is realistic, then people have an intuitive better understanding of those systems and can make more connections, increasing their enjoyment of the piece. Realism isn't required, but it offers more potential connections and helps ensure the background systems are being followed.

My understanding is that domesticated pigs quickly revert to growing fur and tusks within months when feral - effectively becoming more like the pictures in the article.

I wonder what causes this change to their “natural” appearance when raised in captivity.

It's not that they revert, it's that the care and feeding is a part of this. Most hogs grow tusks, but they are docked or trimmed in some fashion. All pigs, even the "classic" pink cute ones you might think of when you think farm pig are covered in coarse "fur" though it is not as thick as you find on a feral hog like a razorback or some other such thing.

Source; was a farmer.

Edit: also, I didn't even think about this when I first wrote this, but we also butcher hogs VERY young, so they haven't had time to develop those "wild" traits yet by the time they are market size. So that might be part of it, too.

That explains the tusks, but AFAIK even very young wild hogs have proper feral fur, not the thin coat of bristles you get on a farm pig. I wonder if there isn't an environmental component there, not just age... or it might just be genetics from interbreeding with wild species.

Yeah, I've always been curious about this too. The article describes 3-year-old pigs roaming the forest, so that sounds very close to a wild lifestyle compared to a modern pig that spends its whole life in a small pen and is slaughtered at 6 months old.

I wonder is it just age that causes fur growth? Hunger? Not having 4 walls an siblings to rub against? Exposure to the elements?

I'm not sure we should trust medieval artwork to provide anatomically correct depictions of much of anything. See, for example, the Bayeux Tapestry [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry

Imagine if there was a whole group of people who specifically study historical records and have figured out ways to tell how accurate the depictions of various things may be.

You mean Laravel and VueJS developers, right?

Those people are going to have fun with our era, now that AI-generated images are a thing.

Imagine if those people are not infallible.

Total tangent, but you just made me realize how fast humans could have lost our fur in our past. This is a contentious issue in the debate between hypotheses of savannah and semi-aquatic ecological orgigins. But wow, it could have happened quick.

Note that pigs are sexually mature around 1 year old, so their generations are rather shorter than ours (especially domesticated pigs, which we tend to kill young). If it took pigs 500 years to lose their fur, it might have taken humans 10,000.

10000 years is not that long in evolutionary terms either.

But not unprecedented either. Tibetans got their high-altitude adaptation in perhaps as short as 3000 years. Andeans have a different high altitude adaptation which took no more than 11,000 years.

The common ancestor from which all of today's Homo sapiens can trace a shared lineage to (i.e. the oldest branch point) is thought to be only 5,000 to 15,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point#Of_H...

This is absurd. You are citing computer models that assume no geography and random mating. The MRCA is around 150,000 years old and probably from east Asia, and the identical ancestors point must be older than that and originating in Africa.

When a sentence starts with “given the false assumption…” it is best not to adopt the conclusion as a fact.

I think this is right by the other propositions in the wiki articles, but was surprised to find out we don't know the MCRA.

"The age of the MRCA of all living humans is unknown. It is necessarily younger than the age of either the matrilinear or the patrilinear MRCA, both of which have an estimated age of between roughly 100,000 and 200,000 years ago."

"The identical ancestors point is a point in the past more remote than the MRCA at which time there are no longer organisms which are ancestral to some but not all of the modern population."

So the MCRA is < 100kya, and IAP > MCRA, so 100kya > IAP > MCRA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

And it is clear we still have the genes for full-body fur, they are just turned off normally. They can still be turned on in some cases (hypertrichosis)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrichosis

Disclaimer: IANAF, this info comes from pure curiosity and reading.

He was describing wild boar interbreeding as being the source of fur and tusks but AFAIK any hog allowed to mature in nature instead of captivity will develop fur and tusks. I haven't found clear explanations as to why the fur happens (weather? Food? Sessile vs active lifestyle?), but any hog allowed to go feral in the wild will look like a hairy, angry, dangerous animal. edit: The tusks differ just because of trimming and age.

Which fits with the description of the pigs being allowed to roam in captive forests.

One thing that stands out is the timeline - the article describes 3 years to mature enough to be allowed into the forest.

In modern factory farming, pigs are generally slaughtered at 6 months, and if they're being bred they start breeding at around a year. Treating pigs as immature at below 3 years is a staggering difference.

This reminds me of the other day at a "medieval" festival we were offered turkey legs, which I have seen before on TV perhaps, and didn't ponder at the moment. A few hours later thought... wait a minute, turkeys are from North America? Why are these faux Europeans walking around with turkey legs?

And where is rest of the animals? Meat didn't preserve well, so you eat more of it at time to not waste it.

Wait I thought Turkeys were from near Turkey.

They're native to Northeastern United States and Southeastern Canada, although there is a peninsula in Mexico that has a different species of turkey.

The reason why turkey is traditional at the US Thanksgiving holiday is to honor the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in Plymouth, MA. I live near Plymouth and there are tons of wild turkeys running around here. (Yesterday there were 11 grazing in my back yard.)

It's a very beautiful animal, the male makes a display similar to a peacock.

The proper noun "Turkey" is very different from a turkey leg.

A turkey leg fits our perception of medieval people walking around eating a huge chunk of flesh, though that is also a misnomer unless you're thinking of the nobility.

I thought it looked funny, but couldn't put my finger on why.

To be fair, a disproportionate number of visitors in any sort of vaguely historic costume at a Renfest/Mittelaltermarkt are cosplaying at least minor nobility, in the US or Germany.

Imagine it's a wood grouse leg instead.

I had a similar experience. (Turkey legs are delicious, BTW.)

I suspect the turkey was quickly introduced as a domesticated bird in Europe shortly after contact with the Americas.

Otherwise, the turkey may be the closest cost-sensitive equivalent of whatever bird people at a lot of back then. Maybe it was a goose?

Hmm, medieval period was over by 1492. No mention of Vikings returning with them that I have found.

Wikipedia says the rumor is that Spain brought them to the middle-east, where they came back to England with a "meat from Turkey" label. Perhaps before the English settlements of 1620- expanded trade from the region.

Definitely an example of the Coconut Effect [1]. If they had consulted a historian versed in swine culture and produced period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look. People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations.

Suspension of disbelief is the operative word here. Trying to fight against it is tilting at windmills.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect

But just like we’ve now come to accept again, through modern productions, that horses’ hooves don’t sound like coconut when running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs looked different.

The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with consistency.

The phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one.

It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just seems ridiculous.

However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so.

This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And therefore his audience would have been expected to understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the people"!

No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.

I love this.

Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.

I do love these. I wonder if there is a collection of these sayings that have shifted entirely to mean something else.

Like "blood is thicker than water" was originally "blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb." The meaning is literally the opposite, but it got co-opted and changed at some point.

These things are fascinating.

That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without much evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

That might be even better! Now there's no meaning other than what you, individually, choose to attribute to it.

I love living languages.

Another one I've seen recently circulating on the Internet is an idea that "The customer is always right" was originally "The customer is always right, in matters of taste". Also not true.

I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. Eggcorns aren't quite right, as they're more about mishearing a word or phrase in a way that still makes sense in context (e.g. Alzheimer's disease -> old-timers' disease). Mondegreens are about mishearing a word or phrase and substituting them for something different. Those are errors in interpreting phonic elements, but there's no misinterpretation of the words for these phrases/idioms; it's just disregarding the meaning entirely and substituting a new meaning.

A pair of examples: “bought a pig in a poke” and “let the cat out of the bag.” “Poke” is an archaic term for “bag” [0], related to “pocket.”

Apparently a common medieval scam was to try to sell a cat as a suckling pig, concealing the cat in a bag [1]. One who buys such a pig in a poke is cheated. One who lets the cat out of the bag reveals a secret too soon.

Note however that [2] argues that this etymology for lack out of the bag” is not plausible.

[0] Etymology 2, https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/poke

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag..., referenced from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_the_cat_out_of_the_b...

Poke means bag in Scotland. You get a poke of chips for example.

"Gangbusters" has become a sort of generic intensifier but the original phrase was something like "to come on like Gangbusters", referring to a radio show with an obnoxiously-noisy intro (it's on Youtube if you're curious). Increasingly distant metaphorical use and people falling out of familiarity with the origin of the phrase led us to modern constructions like "my tomatoes are going gangbusters!" which don't really fit with the original usage.

I am often amused and frustrated at the common institutional excuse of misbehavior being due to "a few bad apples" as though the saying were "a few bad apples are no big deal, get rid of them (or hide them elsewhere in the barrel) if anyone happens to notice them."

I've heard that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" tends to differ in sense between the UK and the US as to whether "moss" is desirable.

The few bad apples saying actually dramatically reversed meaning.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/one-bad-apple-...

Right, that was my point exactly.

I have never heard that expression used unironically. I feel like the idea that there are people out there saying it in earnest is itself a meme that was never true.

I believe it's the origin of "bootstrapping" as a verb, in which it immediately becomes unironic technical jargon.

i.e. as in getting a start-up off the ground or, when shortened further, "booting" a computer.

I think you're correct about the origins. That said, a typically ironic idiom can still give rise to non-ironic derivative words.

I don't think it's entirely non-ironic. I think the term acknowledges the inherent risk in the situation. You are attempting something statistically impossible. So many of these ventures do not pan out.

I think we are obviously quibbling, but that's okay. I think it's not about risk but the meaning is simply making something from nothing, or making much from very little.

I don't think booting my computer is inherently risky or statistically impossible

Sorry, I was referring to the term bootstrapping with regards to startup companies.

I agree that in reference to computer startup, it's just being cheeky.

You’ve never heard of a bootstrapped startup? On this site?

The term itself is not sarcastic but the concept acknowledges the inherent sarcasm of it, since the chain of programs must have an initial mover

At least according to a few internet sources, it was in initially invented as a critique with the irony intended.

Over time it became idiomatic speech for initiating something difficult

It can and is used with both opposite meanings.

The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively", depending on the context.

> The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively", depending on the context.

I disagree with that analysis. It's true that "literally" is often used when the modified phrase is figurative, but that's not quite the same thing is it meaning "figuratively" - were we to remove the "literally" the utterance would not be more likely to be interpreted as literal. The role it's serving is as an intensifier, and I contend that it's a fairly ordinary example of hyperbole. In the same way, when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say that sometimes days means a handful of minutes depending on context, but that sometimes people exaggerate.

(And I recognize that at least one sufficiently respected dictionary disagrees with me; I think they got it wrong.)

On a similar theme I always liked Sir Winston Churchill on taxes:

>We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

It's a great line, but it's highly misleading. You don't tax Nations, you tax richer individuals (more). So it's like asking a strongman to lift a child.

The child is weak through no fault of it's own, and the strongman is well fed because the child spends all day preparing food for them.

Instead we demand the children to carry oneanother.

Sorry, but this sort of comment (Churchill's) smarts, as in the UK we've just faced a budget that very negatively impacted the poor and gave more to the wealthy. Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson was a noted lover of Churchill, and I can't help feel that this sort of empty rhetoric would have been his (Johnson's) answer to why it was fine to reduce taxation on Champagne at a time of increasing poverty and after his government had spent years increasing the wealth gap.

I don't see why (or in what) it is misleading.

The sentence (which is smart) can be read either as a funny, smart one or taken seriously, if you do the latter, you need to put it in its context, Free-Trade vs. Protectionism in very early 20th century:

https://richardlangworth.com/taxprosperity

BTW the sentence has been paraphrased from the original one.

I think it's still used that way. Exclusively. Someone saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is not claiming that it is possible to do so, they are cynically disclaiming their own responsibility in the act.

Pretty sure the origin of this in tech came from compilers, where it actually is almost magical which the analogy does drive home pretty well (though exaggerating a tiny bit).

Don't know about that but the origin I'm aware of for "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" are the tales of Baron Munchhausen, who is supposed to be a fantastical liar telling tall tales that are clearly ridiculous. Specifically I think he retells an adventure that involves him pulling himself out of quicksand (which btw also does not behave in reality as it does in fiction) by pulling on his own bootstraps.

So I guess the original use does kinda resemble "an incredible feat that strains belief" with the difference that it is supposed to be incredible because it's physically impossible to pull off. The current use for "making sensible spending decisions" seems to be the result of the phrase being overused to the point where the feats it describes become increasingly mundane.

I don't have experience with quicksand, but one can retrieve a stuck boot (that you're still standing in) from thick mud by pulling up on your bootstrap (or where it would be). You break the suction by lifting the heel, but the foot itself pulls out of the boot, so you have to free yourself by your bootstrap ... you just can lift yourself into the air that way!

The idea with quicksand was that you would keep sinking in it until you drown (imagine it as a bottomless pit). So pushing down on it would only get you stuck further. Pulling on your bootstraps would do nothing because by pulling on them you would need to push down elsewhere and thus still continue to sink.

In reality you can't drown in quicksand because it's more dense than the human body. To avoid getting stuck it's entirely sufficient to just move slowly to loosen it and break the suction as with mud. Pulling on your bootstraps is useful to free your boots but entirely unnecessary to simply free yourself. But this expression refers to escaping the fictional trope, not the real thing.

Well that's pretty wild, I can now add "windmills were a tax thing" to the pile of random facts I never thought I'd know.

Are you sure? If the windmill didn't make milling more efficient, and if hand milling at home was an effective tax dodge, people would avoid using the windmills.

And the tax collector coming to the house is just as oppressive as being taxed at the windmill.

A quick web search suggests windmills increased grain production by a factor of 5.

> However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there.

I think you’re mixing cause (larger windmills are more efficient, making it a win to centralize them) with effect (that makes it easier to tax flour production).

If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any.

(I also think, but am not sure, milling already was centralized before the introduction of wind power)

It'd be interesting to see if the initial windmills when introduced were more efficient, post-tax and capex, than traditional methods.

There's a parallel with grains: staples like rice and wheat are more legible to states than other alternatives like legumes, tubers, and starch plants, even though the latter were comparable in terms of calories generated by unit labor. E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. States which enforced cultivation of the legible grains had a greater tax base and outcompeted those that didn't.

That's not very convincing. Before the introduction of the potato, there were no below-ground alternatives that were superior to cereals in Europe and Northern Africa.

> E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors.

Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?

> Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?

It's a combination of factors. Cereals like wheat and rice tend to ripen seasonally and simultaneously. They do so visibly, and must be harvested soon after. So a state sends its tax collectors around when the grains are ready to be harvested, and the amount that was generated is immediately visible. They also keep well: tubers go bad relatively quickly (and can be kept underground until actually needed for consumption), while rice and wheat can be transported over long distances and times with an order of magnitude less loss.

Consider the case of the Incas. As a civilization, they relied on two crops for calories and nutrition: maize and potatoes. Despite that, efforts at taxation primarily focused on maize, because it was so much better suited for taxes and commerce (though they did eventually invent a way to freeze dry potatoes).

I assume people didn't have mills at home for the same reason most people of today don't have full blown data centers at home. People did have mortars though like today's people have PCs and smartphones.

I think you're wrong to assume that of two things that co-evolved, one thing had to cause the other.

People didn't have giant millstones at home, but (IIUC) had various forms of handmill at home at various times and places.

Interestingly, per https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-... several Mediterranean cultures equipped their soldiers with handmills, with the Romans also including sickles so they could process grain from the fields they were marching near, allowing an earlier campaign season then were they forced to wait for it to be harvested.

You'd have a quern at home, at least in Scotland, probably most of England too.

> If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quern-stone#Laws_against_use

Laws against a thing often indicate that it was common enough to be a problem, although there are exceptions.

Thanks!

Home mills -- that were small enough to keep hidden from a surprise inspection -- might be fine for small amounts but unlikely efficient enough for full harvests.

Flour spoils much faster then unmilled grain. So the bulk of the grain would always be left as grain for storage. Armies would be the ones who would want to bulk mill an entire harvest taken from a region.

For those without access to windmills, the daily grind would produce flour/ meal for that day.

People did clandestinely mill at home. It was treated as a serious crime. There are specific historical laws about this and the punishments were pretty severe. It was something the lords were quite concerned about.

Reading Don Quixote was fairly mindblowing in general because the humor seemed so modern... in a time when the novel as we know it was itself a recent invention.

Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.

Today in the US the 3 music industry giants tax(via legally required license fees) the venues where musicians play instead of taxing the musicians for the exact same reason. The venue doesn't come and go as quickly and has a set location. Musicians change band names, people, etc often and are harder to track.

> tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there

I suspect that this individual collection raised the risk of getting a beating if the peasantry was in dire straits. (drought, raiding, over taxation, etc.).

Inefficiency isn’t all bad.

Do you have a citation? I'm not nearly confident enough to think you're wrong, but I'm surprised early 1600s Spain wasn't already provisioned with wind- or watermills and I'd be curious to learn more of the context.

It was from in a philosophy course I took 30 years ago. I didn't keep the textbook, but I wish I had.

Its kind of funny, but that article itself has some misconceptions. Bullets flying overhead don't sound like that. Its more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0

the period accurate pigs don't look that weird.

Off topic, but this is why all guns sound like they are just a bucket of screws being shaken around. It may surprise movie goers to realize that guns don't make noise unless you cycle the action or fire them.

"I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie

I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head, do you have one?

I'm just coming up with a lot of counter-examples - anytime a character with a gun is sneaking around in silence, when not actively using the gun. Like, I can't think of a time a character tried to sneak around but took a step and their gun rattled...

I think he's referring to the ka-clack of gun cocking noises that is used when a weapon is drawn, even if it's a weapon that doesn't have to be cocked.

Sometimes, if the other person doesn't get the hint, they cock it again!

It's the sound they make when they are picked up or handed out.

Guns being handled (picked up, shifted to the other shoulder, handed out, just any time they're being handled) tend to make lots of little clacking noises in movies and TV, as if all the parts are really loose and rattling against one another.

It's the little subtle clacking sound that some games play when player moves around or a gun is handled in some way. Like here: https://twitter.com/intellegint/status/1576087308121432065 - when the player starts running there's a rattling noise

This is one of those things that's hard to recall, but impossible to miss once it's pointed out. In that respect, I'm sorry. Watch this video from the otherwise-on-point John Wick.

Everything just .. rattles. Even the magazines, like they're just bags of bullets or something.

Nevermind the noises the knives make when he picks them up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIalODmFrZk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IDtenBMN0o

The noise when he tilts the rifle is a really good illustration, thanks.

Some of the other ones I honestly never even noticed, like picking it up off the stand - I would've thought that was just the stand shaking from having it taken off.

The simple "punch" sound is even more obvious example of movie sound design tropes. I remember getting into a fight as a child and being surprised at how quiet hitting a dude was.

As a side note, the apex of coconut use is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...

>Originally the knight characters were going to ride real horses, but after it became clear that the film's small budget precluded real horses (except for a lone horse appearing in a couple of scenes), the Pythons decided their characters would mime horse-riding while their porters trotted behind them banging coconut shells together. The joke was derived from the old-fashioned sound effect used by radio shows to convey the sound of hooves clattering.

And on the same subject, quoting the tvtropes article linked above:

> Ironically, in a major sense-of-humour failure, Monty Python founder Eric Idle threatened to sue an independent film-maker who used the "that's not a horse - you're using coconuts!" gag, claiming he had originated it for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Saner counsel prevailed, when it was pointed out to him exactly how old the gag was, and that (for instance) a radio comedy show Idle himself had written for had used this gag way back in the 1960's - ten years before the Holy Grail movie. And the BBC radio comedy archives preserved older examples still...

>People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations.

Then let's not educate people as they might get upset to discover their assumptions were false.

What if people start believing 2 + 2 = 5?

Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.

I wasn't saying video games should educate people, I was referring about not meeting demands of the people with absurd expectation about reality.

But the education will happen, whether you mean it to or not. Most people have nothing but what they see to base they're expectations on, so if they see your game, and don't specifically read about pig herding in the middle ages, your game comprises the total information in their head on the topic. Congratulations, you're an educator! Now take some responsibility.

Your point about authentic fabrication methods is entirely orthogonal. It's really hard to see why you brought that up.

That responsibility is optional and it's fine for people to decline. It is also fine for someone like the author of this blog to highlight the topic so that some people may make choices to accurately depict pigs.

It Is entirely unnecessary to bring morality into it.

The thing about morality is that the details can differ from person to person, including what should or should not be covered by morality. Nothing wrong with advocating for your beliefs, especially if it comes with an argument about the impact on others.

Perhaps you didn't mean to, but I think you've made an even stronger claim than @DeathArrow was trying to make. Following your logic, you have an obligation to all the English-learners who may believe your English errors are the proper way to write in English.

Yes, I did, but not quite as strong as you're portraying it either. As an artist or other creator, you have to balance the inevitable impressions people will get against other concerns, notably that of never finishing. But you absolutely can't ignore it.

If your statement does not apply to your post, then the lines are blurry enough that your demand that people "take responsibility for it" seems far too prescriptive. Even claiming one "absolutely can't ignore it" (emphasis added) seem unsupportable.

Do you want to point out a specific error in my use of English that's bad enough to make me a hypocrite, or are you just being pedantic for the hell of it? Bright-line rules about what you must or mustn't do are an unreasonable expectation in the domain of creating complex artistic artifacts. But if you know that what you create has an effect on people, and you don't care whether that effect is good or bad, well, I don't see what other possible basis you could have for morality or ethics.

This is barely debatable when it comes to chemical pollution, or building technology that enables predatory businesses, or even mental and ideological concerns like carelessly spreading falsehood because it benefits your political allies. Fiction is not so different, and in some ways just as powerful, just as dangerous. Why is it even a question whether this should be taken seriously?

First, I'm going to address your tone, because you are coming across as unnecessarily hostile and rude, not just to me, but also to the first poster you responded to.

My criticism in my follow up post is because you're offering a bright line rule but being very murky about when that rule applies.

You were offered my example, which was not pedantic but silly in order to make a point. You also rejected the Renaissance fair example which seems a pretty decent analog to the pigs because it is both a creative endeavor and meant to be authentic. Why precisely you rejected that idea isn't clear; my best guess is that you rejected it because the method of creation doesn't matter to you. I think, though, that there is some argument to be made either way on whether an item can be authentic if created without using authentic methods.

> But if you know that what you create has an effect on people, and you don't care whether that effect is good or bad, well, I don't see what other possible basis you could have for morality or ethics.

We are talking about misrepresenting medieval pigs, so if you want people to buy this appeal, you better explain what effect you think this will have on people's lives. (And you should then also explain why thinking an English mistake is correct won't have an equal or stronger effect on people's lives).

> This is barely debatable when it comes to chemical pollution, or building technology that enables predatory businesses, or even mental and ideological concerns like carelessly spreading falsehood because it benefits your political allies.

These are intentional acts that are completely different than ignorantly or apathetically meeting an existing expectation of how pigs look as a small piece of a larger work.

> Fiction is not so different, and in some ways just as powerful, just as dangerous. Why is it even a question whether this should be taken seriously?

This isn't the same claim. Maybe this is what you originally meant, but what you said is that people have an obligation to educate rather than lean into existing expectations when endeavoring creatively; and you said it in the context of the pigs.

There are over 300 comments in this thread alone. There are only so many big budget medieval video games. The impact of a single comment on the english education of a random reader is simply not comparable to that of a game getting the pigs wrong.

If everyone believes 2+2=5 and a video game tells them otherwise I think they would rather trust their gut than assume a video game of all things is correct.

That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial tone when someone hangs up.

Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the audience can read at a glance?

I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."

DNS resolvers can be slow, ya know.

I believe Matrix 2 had an actual proper hacking scene. All command line, showing a script exploiting some ssh vulnerability that was actually real at the time they filmed.

https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hac...

> But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."

Zalewski here is a security analyst.

At least that's one thing that's improved, but I suppose this was the era of SQL injections in every second website.

Interactible computers in general are common in video games. But rarely does the interface even have nearly the complexity as a real OS. I imagine there must be some games that go all the way and run an actual OS in a VM or emulator though. Similarly to some games that let you play the predecessor/inspiration from an in-game device like e.g. Day of the Tentacle which includes a fully playable Maniac Mansion.

Total off topic, but I followed the link to read about the Coconut Effect. Not looking at the URL, I ended up about 10 tabs deep before I realized it was friggin tvtropes!! I haven't been over there in a while, but I'm glad to see that site still has that effect on people.

> period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look.

That apparently wasn't a problem for the listed counter-example: "Kingdom Come: Deliverance"

I don't know how truthfully they've handled it, but historical accuracy is one of the main selling points of KC:D. I've only heard about the game through word-of-mouth, but that's been the most repeated detail I've heard. Less fantasy and hollywood, and a more accurate representation of the time period.

One of the main features listed on their Steam page:

> Historical accuracy: Meet real historical characters and experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia.

It's worth pointing out that the "historical accuracy" comes less from a medievalist perspective and more of an appeal to tradition. The characters and setting are often amazingly historically accurate in some parts while following the same old revisionist tropes in others. Given some of the political statements of the developers, this isn't all too surprising.

It's a bit like reconstructing a vision of the 1950s US by exclusively looking at 1950s TV ads. Yes, you'll get a lot of details right to an astonishing extent but the result will not at all be representative of what living in the 1950s was actually like.

The kung-foley point is the best example for me because I've seen fight scenes in old films that didn't have any of the sound effects. It was unsettling how quiet it was and it actually felt (more) fake.

Except of course the very coconut that this effect is named after has long since died: TV and film doesn't use cococnuts for hooves anymore except when warranted, and people aren't weirded out by horse tread sounding like what horses sound like.

The coconut effect exists as a self-reinforcing problem that is easily broken but for people going "but the coconut effect!". Repetition familiarises: if all the games you play start showing period-accurate pigs, then after a few games that force a bit more realism into your experience you stop going "my immersion!" and instead go "oh neat, this is what they looked like in the era this game is set in?" and then immediately move on because you're not here to start a period-accurate pig farming business.

...usually...

Representations of computer screens in movies generally fall under this category

Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game.

Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of these two groups is pretty much just a circle.

I want my spaceships to rumble and whoosh.

Not a gamer, but aren't games trying to differentiate themselves? A weird pig would be good thing.

Next article will be about how the inventory capacity of ancient warriors is grossly misrepresented.

You're missing the difference between being unrealistic to improve gameplay, and unrealistic because someone forgot to check the historical details. Everyone knows that video game characters have an unreasonable ability to carry stuff; they do that not because they imagined that ancient people had larger pockets, but because the game would suck to play if they didn't do it. The wrong pig model doesn't affect gameplay, it's just something that nobody thought to check. If they had used the right one, it would still be the same game.

Similar pig lifestyles found a second wind:

Hogs of New York https://qz.com/1025640/hogs

acoup blog is great for this kind of thing, I've spent hours reading about all the inaccuracies in historical stuff.

https://acoup.blog/ - For those as lazy (or lazier) than I

Very interesting. It's good to be often reminded how things pop culture representations of historical times can present something that I as a layman would consider plausible (pig rolling in the mud in a medieval town? checks out!), but is not really accurate. Of course the pig is just one symptom and there will be many more such things.

Probably increasing use of AI to generate art may amplify such things. Not quite the same, but think AI colorization of historical photographs that just need to look plausible - correctness is not the objective.

If anything, A"I" would make the problem worse as it depends only on prior art and is not capable of any critical thinking.

This doesn't deserve downvotes. AI just regurgitates what it's been taught. It doesn't care about "correctness" in any capacity, only in conformity to the training set.

It should be pointed out that other animals are famously distorted in medieval artwork: https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-medieval-lions-so-bad/, https://mossandfog.com/the-comically-bad-way-medieval-art-po...

Otherwise, fascinating details on communal foraging, laws, and husbandry.

One video game pig I really enjoy is the giant hog enemies in Bloodborne, the first you encounter being in a sewer of Central Yharnam. Imagine my surprise when I found out that this pig was actually based on an urban legend from the era of feral hogs in the sewers of London (victorian era London being the model for Yharnam in the game). It's these kinds of details in From Software games that really make me appreciate the lengths they go to and the effort involved in creating the worlds for their games.

They state with only a few examples that medieval pigs were different. Pigs come with such variety it is hard to say that current depictions are wrong based on such a small sample.

It's wrong if modern pigs are the result of modern breeding and breeding techniques. Modern pigs are often (usually? almost always?) purebred, for instance, which isn't something you're going to get with pigs that wander around the woods herded like sheep.

No. Modern intensive training of pigs is a change that’s well within historical periods with extensive records. I guarantee you pigs are like dogs in that the huge majority of modern breeds are less than 200 (250 to be conservative) years old. Before that there were landraces and we know what they look like, at least roughly.

Using modern pigs gives a false impression even if I’m wrong about that because until after WW2 pigs in the West that were raised industrially were raised for lard more than lean meat. There have been huge changes in what most pigs look like in living human memory.

They also state that the games are wrong despite many of these games having put in farm more period and location specific research than the author. The author cites a few translations of a few summaries of laws and a bunch of stuff about England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and then extrapolates across the entire medieval period and all of Europe.

What might even be weirder is if you take modern pigs and let them run wild for just a few weeks they'll start looking very feral. It's bizarre.

> Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink at all, but covered in long dark hairs. In appearance, it was therefore not dissimilar to a boar with which it was often cross-bred. Even in the seventeenth century - long after the middle ages - domestic pigs retained some of these traits, as the drawing below from 1610 shows.

This seems uncomfortably close to perpetuating falsehoods about modern pigs, which are not uniformly "naked and pink" but in fact often are covered in hair and come in many colors. And I'm not talking about cross-bred boars. I'm talking about pigs. I've seen pitch black pigs with more hair than a bear. Hairy pigs spotted like dalmatians. Pigs with hair as red as a ginger's. Pigs that are mostly pink with black splotches, or mostly black with pink splotches.

As for pigs being fast, pig racing is a sport today. Some pigs today are athletic with long legs and move very fast. The fat and lazy ones are probably that way due to their lifestyle as much as their genetics.

Right now the New Forest not far from where I live has pannage.

https://www.thenewforest.co.uk/explore/wildlife-and-nature/p...

[The word "Forest" in "The New Forest" does not refer to what you'd call a forest today, at that time it would be understood similar to "Nature Reserve" today and its actual purpose was somewhere for the King to hunt deer as recreation. So there are a lot of trees, but not as many as the word "forest" might cause you to expect]

Excellent work, and a great point that games' educational potential is often wasted. Modern agriculture tends to select for monoculture or prioritize one particular variety that maximizes something (Holstein cows for milk volume, or yellow bananas, or russet potatoes). We have abundance, but often of lowest-common-denominator options whereas periodic scarcity often means richer variety and greater resilience.

It's also startling how focused on system sustainability medieval legal systems were, and how profoundly enclosure/privatization laws cannibalized formerly common resources.

Most old food is going to be inaccurate. Everything has been selectively bred since then, and it's easy to forget how many plants were only found in the Americas.

Google says potatoes are from South America and only came to Europe in the 1500s.

TIL!

And tomatoes!

Which are both nightshades, even of the same genus along with eggplants.

And ... conversely the pigs that we know came to North America from Europe around that same time.

The early settlers brought them over and released them thinking the pigs would just do the 'pannage' thing in the vast unmapped, unbordered and unfenced forests of America and they'd collect them come winter time at will. Instead, they ran off and procreated and went feral, and rest is history.

Yeah, breed improvement was a major landowner hobby in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Britain's King George III was nicknamed "Farmer George" because he understood the importance of food for national security.

There's also a story about a German prince trying to get his subjects to grow potatoes, and when they wouldn't, he made potatoes a royal vegetable, only to be grown in one royal garden. The garden was carefully arranged to be laxly guarded. Sure enough, potatoes took off.

Most of our modern farm animals (and crops) look a lot different to their medieval forebears.

1.https://georgianpapers.com/2017/01/19/farmer-georges-notes-a...

Very interesting article, but as these games are fiction, they do not necessarily need to be accurate, otherwise there are many more utter inaccuracies to be corrected, not to mention the fact that a young girl can freely hang around with her little brother in the 1300s while having her haircut always perfect. Let games be and enjoy the wonderful pictures.

videogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger public

Ever since sophisticated real-time 3D graphics became a thing, I've often heard the idea expressed that we could learn about history by experiencing it "first hand". An incredible VR experience, surely.

The problem is that a meticulous recreation is really hard even if you have a bunch of historians doing the work, and very likely to reproduce a ton of modern biases without good documentation of every tiny detail. For medieval Europe, it's probably simply impossible to get right. The written record just isn't good enough.

Although I agree with the problem you’ve framed. I still think the idea of building VR experiences to learn and educate about ancient times has a lot of potential.

Since, to a great extent, the problem you’ve outlined extends to every medium. And I still believe that movies and books that try to capture the state of the art in our understanding of previous civilizations play a major role in getting people interested and to care about digging deeper into the topics.

Defile what I defile, Lisa.

Assasin's Creed odyssey actually has a "Tour Mode" where you can get a tour of Athens or other open world locations. They tried to make it accurate.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/9/10/20859403/assassins...

Of course then you get a bunch of historians on youtube complaining that this or that detail isn't 100% correct ... But thats just people

There's also an aspect of "reality is unrealistic". A modern audience would likely be baffled, by, say, brightly painted ancient Roman statues and buildings; while that was the contemporary reality, it's not at all what people expect.

I can only imagine it's incredibly difficult and would require quite a bit of subjectivity, even for academics. I don't have any insight into that. However, being a game designer, I have a related point to make: "game" output should be separated into two distinct categories when considering accuracy. They are:

1) Video games geared towards entertainment:

Historical accuracy will ALWAYS take second fiddle to providing a great gaming experience, as it should.

2) "Serious" games and simulations:

Some of the same academics that do all of the other research on these topics are now using game engines and 3D modelling tools to make accompanying models, and though I haven't seen any personally, probably more involved simulations. They're no more or less likely to be accurate than any other academic work on the topic. Critique by other academics seems like a pretty traditional way to advance a field even if the medium is pretty new.

Assessing the historical accuracy of an entertainment-based medium seems to me a bit like assessing jokes for factual accuracy: perhaps useful as a qualitative study, but probably missing the point if it's a quantitative measure of value. That said, if the marketing copy makes specific claims, then those claims absolutely deserve to be evaluated for accuracy.

The article mentions pigs wouldn’t be wandering the village streets, but as a counter example there were the “St Anthony’s pigs” owned by the friars that were legally protected and had free run of the city. Dante alludes to these in Paradiso, where they took on a metaphor of some friars’ greed.

And you can still find loose pigs in some places. I personally know the one in La Alberca, Salamanca, Spain, named San Anton (from Antonius/Anthony), the pig wanders the streets for months being fed by random villagers until it's raffled on San Antonio's day.

I have read that perceptions of pigs as dirty differing in various cultures comes back to whether pigs in that region were raised as garbage-scavengers or as wild-feeders. Fun to think about!

Great article. Loved the illustrations and references to specific medieval laws. A good example of how an earlier generation's "common sense" was totally different from ours today.

Your telling me this wasn’t a historically accurate depiction? https://youtu.be/4ST_ON9Xm7Q

Domestic pigs will grow tusks and thick hair if left to go feral. Curious how much of the visual change in medieval pigs is due to the fact that they were free range, more or less.

Looks like a great opportunity for a community driven patch to provide period accurate pig renderings... wait that didn't come out right =)

knowing the gaming and mod community, it would just be 3D models of Blizzard execs

Slightly off topic, but it makes me wonder if free range forest pigs could help prevent major forest fires by keeping brush down.

They don't stay in forests hence "feral pigs are widely considered to be the most destructive invasive species in the United States": https://nyti.ms/3TLKZRy

Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeGyVrcS9eo

A long as dinosaurs don't have feathers, I'm happy to have some historical inaccuracy in my entertainment.

I'd venture to guess that the way pigs looked in the Middle Ages is not the only historical oversight in video games.

I think this strikes a common theme throughout much of the gaming and production industry.

Those aren't chubby pigs in modern video games, they're humans!

Those pigs aren't inaccurately modeled. Of course they are just time travelling pigs!

I can't help but feel we've entered into a perverse loop where we make movies / games only pander to stereotypes of their viewers, and we breed ignorance.

First of all art seems to be obsessed with medieval European, and all other periods and places are forgotten. The only other period that gets showtime is antiquity in rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period).

We have a catch 22, that noone knows whats been happening in ancient China or India, and so movies about them are few and far between.

Art is meant to elevate and educate.

Perhaps this has entered terminal stage because holywood and AAA studios cant even bothered to write a new plot any more, they just make endless remakes

Insert some grumble about late stage capitalism

https://witcher-games.fandom.com/wiki/Baked_potato

The same kind of "and not even accurate medieval Europe" complaint as the article, when I do agree with you that the myopic focus on Europe is more important, but... the introduction of the potato was so influential to social relations that it is kind of appalling to consider how casually it's used in supposedly pre-Columbian settings!

Isn't the Witcher set in a wholly fantastic, non-European, realm? Like, obviously to some degree inspired by European fantasy, but it's not like there's an America to go to and bring back the potato from.

Correct, it makes as much sense to complain that Hobbits like potatoes.

When the media is based around folklore from a particular region, it's understandable to want it to match the region. I don't care about the casting, but if there were redcoat musketeers and samurai-looking warriors in a movie loosely based on old German fairy-tales, it'd be weird.

The Witcher is my specifically chosen example because people famously lost their minds about the Netflix adaptation moving to cast characters in it as nonwhite. ...because It Is Supposed To Be Based On Medieval Poland, Of Course. So you can see the weird tensions around the "historical accuracy" of fantasy – people have strong reactions, pretty high-stakes stuff.

If you hadn't heard of this, there's a lot of press coverage, but here's a petition with 50k signatories. https://www.change.org/p/lauren-s-hissrich-don-t-limit-ciri-...

(If anyone is considering commenting about their opinions on this kind of casting being Good or Bad, let's not – the point is that the Witcher's "historical accuracy" is something people have a lot of feelings about.)

Which is a hilarious detail to protest about. Given the whole antagonist fraction was changed from a corporatist technocracy to a theocracy.

Fun fact, Andrzej Sapkowski only specified a few characters' skin color when it was important to note that they were from the same region as Geralt of Rivia. Otherwise, the only big note is that Zerrikanians have sun-blackened skin (as in deep black like you'd find in many parts of central Africa). Everything else is basically just commentary on hair styles and especially hair dyes. Very little time is spent in his books discussing natural hair colors or skin color with the exception of people very far to the north, Geralt, and the Zerrikanians. In interviews back before the video games were made, (I'm going to paraphrase here), he basically said that the skin colors and hair colors were as diverse if not more diverse than Earth and because of the ease of travel for anyone aided by magic users, you could expect to find tons of diversities in any of the cities and even in large towns. As for the magic users and witchers, they'd be as diverse as the world itself as they were trained from all parts of the world.

Are movies about ancient China or India made in China and India? Is the claim that they aren't made, or that "noone" knows about it, itself myopic?

Obviously trying to get Hollywood stories to cover broader things is a big topic, and one I think is important for people in the US, but Hollywood is also not the be-all-and-end-all of the world.

And the Romans are British-looking people who wear nothing but red, while Egypt's contemporary Ptolemaic period often gets mixed up with some much older era.

Btw, there are 11 Spiderman movies by now. Wtf.

There are plenty of films produced in China and India about historical periods in China and India... watch them?

Likewise there are few films in those markets set in historical European eras.

A place tends to make films regarding their own cultural heritage, is this a problem or are you going to start complaining about the lack of Bollywood productions about King Arthur?

I would bet China and India's film industries aren't great on historical accuracy either. The past tends to be a strange, different country, where people care about a ton of unsexy stuff which we don't care for, and vice versa.

That's not ideal for engaging stories, let alone courting nationalist audiences.

India has booming film industries, but I haven't looked into historical film. I'm normally there for the escapism. The fact that it's considered A place or A heritage is another problem. It's more diverse than Europe. Heck, often languages are closer to European languages than they are to the neighboring region. I wish I knew a lot more about that than I do.

China has some pretty serious issues with the government's projection on their own history and their ability to dictate what is or is not made. Minor example: a Tang period film required a change to not period-accurate clothing because it was too immodest. Sorry, I can't remember the name.

What's crazy to me is Hollywood is more focused on casting non-white actors in medeival fantasy roles rather than actually making culturally diverse movies. Chinese, Indian, and African history is fascinating and I would love to see more media exploring those settings.

Just setting something in a powerful nation of early medieval or pre-Roman times would make it naturally non-Eurocentric. Eastern Roman empire, Sasanian or older Persian empires, Alexander's Asia, Ethiopia, Pontus, Artaxiad Armenia, Baktria, pre-delenda'd Carthage, golden age Islamic empires, archaic Mesopotamian kingdoms, (further eastern empires that I'm honestly not educated about), ...

"Córdoba was a city that had street lighting and paved streets while London was still just a village." - Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia

My wild guess is that most AAA/Hollywood creators are completely clueless about those cultures and histories and the effort required to do research to hit a level of accuracy outweighs the budgets they have, so we're stuck with culturally diverse medieval ages. furthermore, i imagine the PR agencies that tell them that they're going to be wrecked and dragged all over the internet if they do some Persian themed thing and get something wrong. add that all up and they probably decide it ain't worth it.

I'm sure they can figure out the history well enough to depict it, or punt on the accuracy. They probably figured it wouldn't be a popular enough setting for the intended audience.

It's been done a few times. Prince of Persia was set in a fantasy land without a real attempt at historical accuracy, but it was sorta Sasanid Persia. Similarly, Aladdin in Iraq. There was also the 2004 Alexander which was quite accurate, but it wasn't a good movie. And Lawrence of Arabia, sorta fictionalized but accurate in spirit, which was the best.

300 was interesting cause they made it clear the story was being told from the Greek perspective by having Dilios narrate it, and he hyped it up even more than the actual Greek historians did, instead of the movie presenting it as a factual view. The movie still pissed off the Iranian government, but whatever.

Oh yeah, Mulan too.

I have a thing for filling in gaps in my knowledge. Eventually one will bother me and I'll have to learn. Just before COVID started, it was non-Eurocentric history. I realized I knew the world as seeing the Persians as the decadent outsiders and didn't know anything "east" of there.

I've spent a lot of time learning about China, the Mongols, Persia, and actual Ancient Egypt. I've dabbled in general Islamic history. I have so much more to cover, but it's what I could find thorough work on easily. I like to start with pre-history and go forward where I can.

It's crazy to me. There are so many compelling stories. And what we have in our media is so insanely off-base.

Side request: Any recommendations for podcasts and resources for some of the various Indian cultures and Russia would be much appreciated. I prefer a bias of "from their eyes" to "from a Western perspective."

> rome/egypt/greece (which is more or less one period).

That's like saying Moghul India and Raj India and British-era Hong Kong were "all one period" because they kind of sort of overlapped in space and time.

When people think of Rome, they tend to unknowingly think of a period of Roman expansion from like 200BC to 1AD where Egypt and Greece were independently ruled for some time before Rome conquered both, which also happens to be near the start of Christianity. That's why "Rome/Egypt/Greece" is a thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com