Galar (Chapter 1)

Galar (Irish for “disease”) is a visual novel about the historical memory of the Black Death in Ireland.

Rather than focusing directly on the plight of humans, it addresses the fact that a pandemic is a much more complex entity than we give it credit for. It involves bacteria and humans, but also trade networks (that facilitate the circulation of infected people), inanimate matter (that can carry insects and microbes unsuspecting), the weather (which might affect the lifecycle of microbes and vectors, as well as agricultural production and nutrition), ideas (which can lead certain people to become stigmatized or certain facts to be denied).

Galar is about how humans, past and present, have tried to make sense of this complexity. It's about people dealing with the uncanniness of the ecological weave: the more-than-human worlds of arthropods and microbes, wind and pressure fluctuations, individuals and global communities. And about what is gained - and what is lost - when this overwhelming totality is reduced to a linear, human narrative.

The game is an annal and historiography simulator. It starts with the unbridled chaos of nature and asks players to confine it to some sort of order: first as a medieval writer chronicling the plague years, then as a modern historian subjecting the past to the lens of science.

It follows the process through which the planetary system at the time of the plague was appropriated by human storytellers – and how subsequent human narratives became so mired in its parts (“nature”, “culture”; “biology”, “society”) that they forgot, or failed to grasp, the big picture.

Structure:

The visual novel is divided into three chapters, each with a different player agent and gameplay loop:

Chapter 1 is told from the point of view of "nature" itself. The avatar is a more-than-human entity whose every choice creates (or destroys) something. We witness the results of our actions, not entirely sure of what we are doing - or even who we are supposed to be, if there is a "we" at all.

Some of our choices affect humans - a person dies, another is born. Others might provoke epidemics or drastic weather variations. Some straddle the line between what humans, with their finite imagination, call 'natural' and 'supernatural'.

Chapter 2 follows an ollamh (a high member of the Irish learned classes) tasked of compiling a set of annals - a genre of medieval writing consisting in short notices of events that happened each year.

The 'choices' taken by the abstract avatar during the first chapter make up the pool of events the ollamh can add to their narrative. It is up to the player, however, to decide if - and how - to incorporate them. Will you blame a harvest failure on a military defeat by the local ruler? Or take an unexpected halestorm as a sign of displeasure following the theft of a saint's relic? 

Chapter 3 is set centuries later. Its protagonist is a PhD student writing a dissertation on the environmental history of Ireland, using the ollamh's book as their main source.

Unlike chapter 2's avatar, the student isn't free to write what they want. They have a hypothesis to test - and people to please, both in their department and in the broader historiographical community. To 'win' the chapter and produce an impactful dissertation, the avatar will have to read the annals in a very specific way. We will be forced to reinterpret (and misinterpret) our choices in the previous chapter, and 'explain' the ineffable chaos of chapter 1 in a manner that strips it of any sense of mystery.

Project status

This is a *super rough* prototype designed for the Playtesting the Middle Ages special session at the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference (King's College London, 2025).

So far, it covers only the first chapter, lacks animations, and uses placeholder artwork taken from public domain and/or non-commercial collections. (See Credits page for a list of artwork used). 

Galar is under active development, and I will share subsequent prototypes as soon as they are minimally playable.

Background

This entire project is a by-product of my ongoing research on the environmental history of Late Medieval Ireland. My goal is to analyze some examples of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish material-semiotic production and what they say about more-than-human entanglements in the period between the Black Death and the Tudor Conquest.

It is also a continuation of my theoretical interest in historical agency in games. This is a topic I first approached in my 2016 paper "History and Human Agency in Videogames", and which I'm developing in a forthcoming sequel, "History and More-than-Human Agency in Videogames".

My work is funded by a post-doctoral scholarship granted by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Process No 2024/06824-0)