Dunstan Lowe, University of Kent
The Work of Play: Ancient Worlds in Digital Gaming
In the past few decades, classical antiquity has undergone two transformations. Digital tools and methods have changed how we study it; digital media have changed how we imagine it. This paper argues that these processes have many intersections, to such a degree that ancient-world games should be included in the repertoire of digital tools for classicists.
The flourishing scholarship on ancient worlds in digital media reflects older disciplinary traditions that must still be transcended. On the one hand, most recent work on ancient-world gaming focuses on ancient history and mythology (Lowe, Rollinger, Clare, Draycott & Cook). On the other hand, studies of archaeology and visualisation focus more on methodology and data gathering (Gutierrez et al., Reinhard). Treating games as digital resources can move us past this distinction, as a few case studies (Cole) have already begun to show.
There are two reasons to include digital gaming as a form of digital classics. (The fact that is a technological medium, becoming embedded in many areas of modern society, is not in itself interesting.) One is that many digital research methods, from data visualisation and virtual reconstruction to procedural programming and AI, are commonly used in gaming and game-like applications. The other is that gaming is more than just another category of reception studies. It offers new ways of experiencing and imagining the ancient world—in other words, it enables qualitatively different forms of history, archaeology, and classical studies. To sum up: gaming has close relatives in digital classics, but at the same time is sui generis in another sense.
Two popular ancient-world games, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft 2018) and The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller 2021), will be used as case studies. Both games incorporate both tangible and intangible heritage in building fictionalized, story-driven reconstructions of antiquity. They will be used to demonstrate that digital gaming is both a research tool and a rewarding object of inquiry.