Greek Mythology in Video Games

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Transcript:

 We have such an exciting episode for you today with one of our guest experts.  Can you please introduce yourself?   

Yeah, hi everyone.  I'm Alexander Vanderwalle, or Alex for short.  I'm a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, where I specialize in the reception  of mythology, primarily Greek mythology in video games.  This was also the topic of my PhD research, which I finished in 2024, but this is the  first time I'm saying that and not saying last year, so I'm getting old.  But so yeah, for my PhD was a collaboration between Ghent University and the University  of Antwerp here in Belgium, where I looked at the topic of characterization specifically,  so how characters are represented in a text through the lens of classical reception studies  of Greek mythological characters in video games.  So we're sort of combining different things together.  Aside from that, I've also been working on other media, the types of media or genres  of media.  I've been working on superhero fiction in Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example.  I've worked on Star Wars, things like that.  I'm very fortunate to have been able to turn my geeky side things into my actual  job and sort of combine the passions that I've had throughout my life in this sort of  academic way.  

Yeah, it's certainly more interesting than looking at pot sherds.  

Some would argue, but yeah, I'm aware that I'm very fortunate that I can play games  for work.  Although it's not just playing games.  Some people think that if I introduce myself, hey, I'm a video game scholar, I play  games for my job, that that's all I'm doing, which is not the case.  If anything, I would like to play more, but it's, yeah, it's finding a balance between  actually playing and writing and reading and teaching and things like that.  

So for any listeners unaware of this academic discipline, classical reception, and we  are going to have a full episode on what is classical reception coming up, you  might be glad to know.  For now, let's summarise, classical reception is how the ancient world has been portrayed  in subsequent years in art and in literature and movies and music, et cetera, and in  video games, and how it's been depicted and how we've engaged with it through  these depictions.  Would I be right in saying that because video games are so popular now, that  video games are one of the main ways now that people engage with ancient  Greece and Rome, et cetera?  

Yeah, I think for sure.  I mean, I don't know if you have any data on that, but I think it's undeniable.  So, I mean, the cliche opening of any video game paper, antiquity related or  not, is by saying that video games are the largest entertainment media of  today, they're bigger than film, bigger than TV, bigger than music even.  I think all of those three combined even.  So video games have this huge, huge audience and they reach a certain  large part of the demographic.  And in that sense, I think any successfully mythological or historical or  ancient project is going to have a large following, a large audience.  And we see that with many projects like Assassin's Creed Odyssey or the  Hades games, Total War, things like that.  But at the same time, I find it intriguing that even if they are this  huge entertainment industry, there's a lot of people who've never touched the  game in their lives or who don't know what the medium is.  And that's different from things like film.  I think most people grow up watching at least one film in their life or  they read novels or they read a comic book, but they don't necessarily  play a game.  So even if there's this huge following for games in general, there's certain  demographics who just never interact with it and that sort of limits the  exposure that the medium can have, I think in a little bit.  

So for people who may watch the ancient world in a movie, they might play a  game, whereas people who watch the ancient world in games, they're  definitely also watching movies, right?

  The problem is that I think for like mythology, for example, like Greek  mythology, there hasn't really been a big mythology film over the past 10  years, I mean, like one of the status of like Wolfgang Peterson, Troy, for  example, like, I mean, of course the Odyssey Christopher Nolan's one is  coming out this year.  I don't think there's been that huge, I mean, Percy Jackson, I guess,  is the one and not a TV show.  Percy Jackson is oriented towards a younger demographic, I would say.  I think that demographic would be faster to play games and play games like  Fortnite, for example, which had a Greek mythology event in 2024, but for  example, the audience of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey might be older  than the Percy Jackson audience, and they would watch that more quickly  than they would play a game, I think.  Video games are a huge following, but they don't hit all demographics,  I think, to the same extent.  

Right, okay.  So when we're seeing Greek mythology being portrayed in these video games,  is it something that scholars and academics would recognize?  Is it something that we can see that there's a lot of detail being  put in, a lot of thought behind it?  

Increasingly so.  It's so it's this research field.  I think at this point, we can say it's a field, like there's  historical game studies, there's archaeogaming, antiquity game  studies, classical reception.  There's all these different titles.  At this point, it's a research field, and I think it started  around the late 2000s, Dunstan Lowe's book or co-edited volume,  Antiquity in Mass Culture, Mass Popular Culture, has a chapter of his  that is, I think, one of the first chapters or academic analyses of  video games and classical reception, a great overview chapter that I think  even now, 17 years later, is still very relevant and very appropriate.  And then in the 2010s, I think it just started snowballing and  there were these books on history and games coming out.  By the end of the decade, near the 2020s, there was this huge explosion  of interest, I think driven primarily by that game I mentioned,  the South Street Odyssey.  And then in the 2020s, basically every year, there's been a plethora  of conferences of books, of articles, of publications, of podcasts,  and video essays on YouTube and Twitch streams and Discord servers.  They've started popping up and it's this huge thing now, up to the point  where I don't think we can say that the reception of antiquity in video  games is understudied anymore.  I think it is pretty studied at this, not to the extent that there's  nothing else to be done because there's so much to be done, but we can  say that it's a new topic anymore, I think, at least for the people  who are really doing this on a very consistent basis.  In terms of like, because you use the word recognize, in terms of  like legitimacy, I think that's still a struggle sometimes.  I've had people react very, what's the diplomatic word, negatively,  depreciatingly, is that a word in English?  I don't know, I'm not a native speaker.  With a certain degree of skepticism, to put it mildly, where people  ask me, aren't we being a little bit, I think the words one person  used was naughty if we're using like this serious frame of Greek antiquity  and we're imposing it on these, you know, unserious entertainment  products, like clearly made for, you know, to make a quick buck  for commercializing purposes and to entertain without really  going into all that much depth.  And I just think that's just the case of people not knowing what  the medium is or does that.  Well, I think the way video games are represented in popular  journalism, popular news media, it's always from a, usually from  a bad angle, you know, like there's still that idea that video games  make people violent and they're turning all of our kids into  aggressive introverts, which is not the case.  It's been disproven for decades, I think, at this point.  But that reputation, that idea still exists.  

And I think it's slowly changing, slowly turning.  I think COVID actually had a positive influence on that because  all of a sudden everything had to be online, everything had to be digital.  And teachers were looking for, you know, alternative ways of doing  pedagogy, of educating their classes.  And video games were this medium that was ready at hand to be able  to use, to be used for that kind of purpose and games like  Assassin's Creed Odyssey, games like Hades that came out, I think  immediately served that purpose of education.  So I think at that point, popular perception started  shifting a little bit, but we cannot say at this point that the  road is done and we're there.  And, you know, we're still fighting an uphill battle, I think.  

Yeah, I think there are definitely some academics who think that  video games are superficial in their content, but I've played some.  And I can safely say that some of the details in these games,  there's clearly a lot of research that's gone into the games themselves.  

Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, Hades 2, for example, like the protagonist of Hades 2 is  this very, very obscure character called  Melinoë, who I think we  know from literally one ancient text, an obscure Orphic fragment.  And then there's also some archeological evidence, I think, for her.  But I think one of the differences between, for example, games and  film or TV is that games take longer than a film, right?  A film is two hours, three hours at most.  A game can last you a hundred hours or more.  And so to be able to serve that 50, 60, 80 or 100 hour experience,  games present a lot of material, material that is increasingly  sophisticated and I think intricate.  Games can now draw on very obscure references or they collaborate with academics.  That's been the case, for example, for a lot of projects where academics  work either through freelance contracts or through consultancy projects, or  even are just hired full-time to work on a game.  And that is something that the public doesn't know yet, I think.  At the same time, I also think that the work is not finished.  We can still go beyond this and go further and deepen our engagement.  I think more references doesn't necessarily equal a better game or  more research doesn't necessarily make it a fun and entertaining game.  But I think we're on the right track to sort of veer away or get  rid of that reputation of video games are superficial, video games are  stereotypical, and they only represent the most traditional or  hegemonic type of experiences.  

Sure.  I've seen that there are lots and lots of games about the ancient world, but  the fact that some of them incorporate myths specifically seems really  interesting to me because everyone loves the idea of myths, right?  They remain so eternally popular.  What are some really interesting examples of myths in  various games that you've studied?  

That's a fun question.  So basically you're asking my favorite games.  

Yeah!  

I think, yeah, I keep coming back to it, but like the Hades games  for me are one of my most favorite examples, I think.  It's like this really interesting blend between deep mythological  engagement, by which I mean like engagement with sources, Homeric  texts, but also these Orphic myths and just like a lot of very  cool niche references that other games or projects or films or  books or TV shows don't make.  But at the same time, it's also a fun gameplay product.  Like it's just a very, so basically I should explain.  So in the Hades games, Hades games are what are called  rogue-like games.  So literally a game like Rogue, which is a game from the 1980s,  which sort of popularized the idea of an adventure where every  level or every room that you go into is randomized and it's procedural.  So you never know what's going to happen in the next room, for example.  So you need to sort of be prepared for anything that might come your way.  If you fail and if you die, you go back all the way to the  beginning and for many titles historically that meant resetting  all of your progress because you failed.  So you need to start again and the entire story starts anew.  

But the interesting thing about Hades, which came out in 2020, is that because  it was set in the Greek underworld and you play as Zagreus is again, in the  version that the game tells, so the son of Hades and Persephone, again,  an obscure character, I think based on this fragment from that we think  is a tragedy by Aeschylus, because it is set in that underworld, you know,  the characters are already dead.  So if, even if you die, like the story keeps progressing, like  that becomes a part of the story.  So it's integrated within the gameplay loop.  It isn't necessarily imposed on the story.  It actually is the story in a sense.  It then offers you the opportunity to talk to and fight, of course,  because it's a game, but many mythological characters like Sisyphus  or Eurydice and Orpheus and Patroclus and Achilles, all these  characters that are appropriate to that underworld setting, but it does  so with an intense amount of detail and sophistication and emotional  resonance, I think as well.  These aren't just hastily written NPCs or non-playable characters in a game.  They're actually well-formed, well-characterized,  charmingly characterized entities, referencing a broad variety of popular  discourses around them or other media tropes.  

I think Sisyphus is a good example where many people have drawn the  connections between Sisyphus in Hades and Albert Camus, the myth of  Sisyphus, you know, the famous quote of, one must imagine Sisyphus happy,  which I think the developer has said that they hadn't read or weren't aware  of when they made the game, but so the fact that you're able to draw these  connections means that there's something there, right, that the  character is written in a certain way that is characterized to a certain  extent and I think that's just really, really cool and it all feels  very alive, it feels very deliberately designed, not that there's no issues  with it because there are people who have criticized the game for various  contexts, but I think for me, that's sort of my favorite, yeah, reception  or representation of mythology.  It combines the love that many people have for mythology with, you  know, the entertaining fun of a video game and it does so with great  depth and very sophisticated references, I think.  

The Hades games specifically, they're all in the underworld, which is  really, really interesting.  You've mentioned that the two protagonists are minor characters from  Greek myths, what about the characters that people are more  familiar with in the Hades games?  Do we spend a lot of time with them?  What's their characterization like?  

Yeah, I think all other characters in the Hades games are, or, you know,  aside from like smaller enemies, are well-known characters like  Achilles, like Odysseus, like Heracles, like Zeus, Poseidon,  Hades, Persephone, and so on.  And this is actually something that happens quite a lot in video  games as a whole and is different from other media, I think, is  that we don't play as Achilles or Odysseus or Heracles.  In many games we play like here, like in the Hades games as Zagreus  or as Melinoë or in Immortal Fenyx Rising, we're playing as a  new character named Fenyx.  In the Age of Mythology, we're playing as Arkantos, a fictional hero.  In God of War, we're playing as Kratos, who has no relationship to the  ancient character from tragedies called Kratos.  So we're playing as this new act and that allows us to inhabit our  own position because we're starting with a blank slate.  If we were already playing as Achilles, we might have our  own expectations of what that character would be. 

  And that means that when we're talking with these established  characters is that we can enter that mythological fantasy through our  own eyes and speak with them from a perspective that is still new in a sense.  If we would have been playing as Odysseus and we're talking to  Athena, then there's already that connection between the two in a  certain extent, like because Athena and Odysseus converse in the Odyssey.  Whereas we're doing this as Melinoë or as Zagreus, we don't  know what that connection is.  It's sort of the perspective that we're playing as mirrors our  own subject position in the game itself as newcomers to the  story that the game is telling.  And then the cast of characters that we're talking with, the sort  of celebrity cast of characters, you know, like the big names of Greek  myth, we're approaching them as we would approach them ourselves through  a kid's book, for example, or a film or an animated TV show that we  watched while we were kids, like being able to talk to them in a certain way.  So I think the characters that we see frequently offer the sort of  engagement that we would like to have had through certain media, but couldn't  because we can't interact with the film, we can't interact with the  novel to the extent that we do with a video game.  So they become this sort of celebrity conversationalists in a way that  we can help or oppose and so on.  That is a lot of fun, I think.  And that is something that scholars have pointed out about game characters.  They make for an important element of our engagement with the game.  They can drive our fascination with it.  We can select it to play a game because of the characters in them.  They create a sort of the appeal for a game like this.   So they serve to offer a foundation for the appeal of the game and to  establish our engagement with it at the same time.  

Now I want to talk briefly, if you don't mind, about Assassin's Creed Odyssey,  which I have actually played badly, but I've played it.  Because the use of myth in that game, I thought was particularly  interesting because it's all optional.  Engaging with the mythological aspects is not part of the main story at all.  And there will be an episode listeners can look out for an  episode about Assassin's Creed, as in how it depicts the second Peloponnesian War.  But we're talking about myth today.  So I want to talk about that.  How does Assassin's Creed Odyssey approach myth?  

What does it do that's interesting compared to some of these other  games where we do talk to characters a lot?  Yeah, that's a great question.  I think Odyssey is a, so maybe I should introduce the game a  little bit for the audience.  So Odyssey is a game from Ubisoft, I think it released in 2018.  It's set in the Peloponnesian War.  You play as a Spartan mercenary, either male or female, depending  on your choice, and you sort of travel across Greece.  You're looking for your family.  You're basically doing an Odyssey because you're traveling, you know,  DG and you're traveling Greece in search of your family and try to  reunite them during this sort of heroic quest.  But throughout the world, you find many mythological or mythologized  characters or experiences like you can fight Medusa, you can fight the  Minotaur, you can fight Cyclopes, for example, or there's these  characters that sort of, because you're inhabiting this supernatural position  where you're ultra powerful and you can have these divine abilities and  these legendary weapons, that sort of think you are a mythological  character and that, you know, approach you and say things like,  oh, wow, you must have been sent by the gods to help me.  Thank you so much for turning up.  I will pray to Zeus and thank him for your appearance here.  And that is, I think, really interesting engagement because you  wouldn't necessarily expect to find that in the historical game, but  sort of parallels the writings or thinking of several Greek thinkers  who try to rationalize what all of these mythological fantasy.  There were writers like Euhemerus or Polyphotus who are well known  for their attempts to sort of make all that fantastical mythology make sense.  For example, Euhemerus said that the Greek gods were initially,  long, long time ago, they were kings who were later revered and  come to be seen as gods or Polyphotus said that I think the  minotaur, you know, the minotaur is an obvious biological impossibility, right?  Like half man, half bull, like that's not possible.  We know that to be true.  So what is actually true then, there was this person named Taurus who  lived in the palace of Minos on Crete and there was this big story around him.  And then ultimately he was named the Minotaurus because he was  named Taurus and lived near Minos.  So he tried to do logically explain it.  And that's what we see in Odyssey quite often is that you're doing  these pseudo legendary things, but then characters approach you thinking  that you are this mythological person.  And then because this is a game and you get to choose how you reply,  you can decide to go with it or not.  Like when someone tells you, you must have been sent by the gods.  You can choose as Alexios or Cassandra to say, yes, I am this divine  hero and you're very welcome and I'm here to help you.  Or you can be like, what?  No, there are no gods.  Like I was just here, you know, right place, right time to help you.  So you can sort of choose yourself to rationalize those experiences or just  to imbue them with all that mythological epic fantasy that, you know, many  people attribute to the mythological stories.  

So I think it's really interesting that because the game is set in  a historical story world, unlike Hades or Immortals Fenyx Rising, that it  then offers that kind of historical or historicizing mode of mythology  where we know that what happens in these myths isn't true, isn't historical.  So it offers you the tools to either do that yourself in the game or just  create your own mythological power fantasy as you see fit.  

Yeah, I think it's really interesting how Ubisoft have created their own  mythology through all of the Assassin's Creed games and kind of  chosen to graft Greek mythology onto their version of what came before  humans and that's their explanation.  

It's interesting, right, that Assassin's Creed has been around  for, I think next year it will be 20 years, it's been around for a  long time and ever increasingly they are deciding to embed mythological  characters or quests or creatures in their games with fewer narrative  restrictions, I think even in Assassin's Creed 2, you had characters  like Juno or Jupiter or Minerva, but they were these sort of hologram  entities, like there was this big technological explanation for it.  And then in 2017 with Assassin's Creed Origins, they had characters  like Sobek, like Egyptian gods or monsters like Apophis, but they  were all in this hallucination sequences or dreams that you don't  want. In Odyssey, there's none of that.  You're in Greece and in Greece, there's the Cyclops and there's the  Minotaur and there's Medusa, although they have explanations for it  and so on, but they exist in the main story world.  You don't need to have this sort of hallucinogenic drug to see them.  They just exist there.  So even for a series that has been historically so renowned for its  level of historical detail and so on, Ancient Greece is too  mythological or too fantastical to just avoid that.  Apparently you almost, you cannot have Ancient Greece without mythological  fantasy to a certain extent.  

That's interesting.  Do you think the decision was made because as far as most Ancient  Greeks were concerned, all of these mythical, fantastical creatures  were absolutely historical and real?  

I can only guess what the decision was.  I think I would like for there to be this sort of ancient reasoning behind it.  I don't think there is.  I think it all has to do with this element that people in the  game studies are writing about called authenticity.  In order for a game to be successful for many players, it will  need to be sort of authentic.  It will need to respond to their preset ideas of what the particular  historical period is like or a particular character is like.  And you can of course do new things, which Odyssey did with its Greek  temples, for example, like they're all painted and there's  statues that are painted and they're not all just marble white.  But then you can see players on like Reddit forums or Steam posts,  like, wait, why is this statue painted?  Why is this temple pink, you know, like red or blue?  Like that is not historically accurate, but it is, we know that  there was polychromy in the ancient world, but that's not how  people decode it necessarily.  So I think I've looked at sort of the design documents that Ubisoft  has made available for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and I think what they  just wanted to do was have the player embark on this sort of epic  journey throughout ancient Greece.  And that just is hard to do without that level of mythological fantasy.  I think they thought they wanted this to be this sort of  mythological element from the outset.  Even the world is designed to support that mythological ambience.  I think like, I think from any point in the game, no matter if  you're in Crete or in Gethallonia or Santorini, you can always  see Olympus, I think.  I think that's like the highest point that you can, I mean,  you always see it, you can't reach it.  So you're always like sort of surrounded by this divine  atmosphere and then there's these huge statues of like Zeus  and Artemis and I think Prometheus or Atlas even.  I don't think Atlas, but definitely Prometheus, which are  the pinnacle of historical inaccuracy, I guess, in the game,  because they're just ridiculously big.  And then like the first thing you see too, right?  Like the game starts, I mean, after the prologue, like the  statue of Zeus in Kephallonia and it sort of wants you to  think that it is real, but it sort of supports this mythological  ambience from the get-go and it wants you to carry that with  you throughout its 60, 80 hour play time.  

So you've mentioned the myths in this particular episode of  the Assassin's Creed franchise are more in your face than they  have been previously.  

Definitely.  

I think it's fair to say, would you agree that not everyone  that was a fan of the franchise was pleased at the myths being  put into the game?  

Absolutely.  Yeah, that's something that I think people really talked  about and equally so with subsequent games, like after  Odyssey came Assassin's Creed Valhalla set in Viking  England, then it had this Ragnarok Asgard storyline again  through hallucinogenic means, then this sort of DLC Dawn of  Ragnarok.  I rewatched a trailer recently for, or an IGN review, I think  for Dawn of Ragnarok and I think the top comment on that  video is something, imagine going back in time in 2007  when the first AC game came out and showing them this  trailer, like this is what the franchise had to come in a  sort of derogatory way.  And I think it's sort of this impossible question.  So they rebooted their franchise in 2017.  They shifted from these sort of stealth based action games to  more open world role playing games with large country size  game maps, basically, and more customization possibilities.  And I think by doing that, they refreshed their franchise,  but they also split their fan base in two.  I think there's now the fan base that keeps asking for them  to return to what they did previously.  And there's a fan base that asks them to keep doing what  they've been doing since then.  The more casual games that don't fail you if you get spotted or,  you know, that allow you to do what you want to do a little bit more.  So I also, at the same time, I sort of disagree with those  comments in that it's a game and you can play however you like,  you know, like just because the game offers you the  possibility to do something doesn't mean that you should  object to being given the possibility to do that.  There's these various player groups and more work needs to be done  exactly identifying who those player groups are that keep  coming back to this idea that Assassin's Creed needs to be  historically 100% accurate, which is impossible and  ridiculous to ask.  And then anything that deviates from that sort of  historical expectation, like these mythological traditions  should be omitted or deleted from the game.  And that's not going to happen, I think, anytime soon.  I think the next Assassin's Creed is going to have a lot  of fantastical elements.  I think it's going to be set around the witch hunts in  medieval Europe.  They're going to keep progressing in that direction,  I think, but it's interesting to see what they're doing for  that audience.  And I don't think Ubisoft necessarily wants to appeal to  that hardcore, let's go back to the ancient ways of  Assassin's Creed fan base anymore.  I think they know their audience is increasingly casual  gamers who want to spend a lot of time on a certain  game who aren't necessarily interested in high stakes  combat and just want to experience a story on the  game world.  And I think that's the direction they want to go.  And I think it will be smarter for them to pick one  audience and stick with it instead of trying to please  everyone, because that's never a good idea.  Because in the end, you'll end up pleasing no one.  

Yeah, I think that's accurate to say.  I played Valhalla.  I don't think it was as good as Origins and Odyssey.  I haven't even had a chance to get into the most  recent games.  I'm excited for Hex.

  Yeah, I think Hex is going to be interesting.  What I like is that after Valhalla came Mirage,  sort of Islamic golden age in Baghdad, that was  a much shorter game.  And I think that's sort of the direction they should be  going in, like these 20, 30 hour experiences that cost  less money, that don't cost you 80 euros or pounds  or dollars, you know, you can actually complete in a  reason about a time and that you can put more  detail in that you don't have to replicate all of  the game, because after a while, like in Odyssey,  Cephalonia has this sort of distinct feel.  Athens has this distinct feel.  Delphi has that distinct feel.  But once you started going to like Messenia  or Macedonia, I think it sort of loses  that distinctiveness in a sense, because you  keep seeing the same temples.  You keep seeing the same houses.  Also, like since Origins, I don't think they've  actually changed the way they visualized crates  or tents or boxes.  Like they're always the exact same.  And after 80 hours, it sort of becomes the same.  So I think reducing the size and reducing the  complexity of that would work in their favor and  sort of tell a more, what's the word?  Concise and directed story instead of, you  know, just this big, big, big thing where no  one, except maybe the one or two percent can  finish it all.  Yeah, I'm not one of those one percent that  can finish it all.  I like having options, easy options.  I like being able to cheese things.  

We mentioned Assassin's Creed Odyssey and we  mentioned that they put in a little bit of  myth, not too much, a lot for them, but  compared to other games based in the ancient  world, not a lot.  And then Ubisoft decided to launch a  completely different game to Assassin's Creed  Odyssey, but at the same time has a lot in  common.  Can you talk a little bit about Fenyx?

  Yeah, Immortals Fenyx Rising.  I enjoyed the game.  I know not everyone enjoyed it.  It also got like very, not very, but  relatively mediocre-ish reviews.  I think it wasn't reviewed as, as  highly as Odyssey was.  It came out in 2020.  You play as a shield bearer, storyteller,  farmer character called Fenyx from Argos,  who is shipwrecked on the Isle of the  Gods, I think the Golden Isle.  And the Gods need her help to thwart  the threat of Typhon who has come back  after his imprisonment, as we know it  from Big Myth.  And so you go around the island, you  help the Gods return to their formal  power and abilities and become more  powerful.  Ultimately, you can defeat Typhon.  What I like about Fenyx is that  it's, it's a funny game, right?  It's completely different in tone.  All the Gods have been metamorphosized  or transformed into this sort of  non-threatening shape.  The best one is Ares who's turned  into a chicken and you have to sort  of restore him to this God of War  like power again.  And then again, so I've, I've  written an article on this with  Ajay Paprotsky in 2024 on how that  reception of mythology is actually not  that far off from ancient Greek  comedies like Athenian comedy or  humorous treatments of the Gods in  authors like Lucian in his Isles of  the Gods, like these sort of family  snapshots, like almost like an  anthology series or like a sitcom  basically where the Gods enter the  scene and they complain.  I think there's one dialogue by  Lucian where Hermes complains that  he's so sleek to prides and he  has all these things to do and he  just wants a little bit of rest.  And that's basically what happens  in Immortals Fenyx Rising.  It's like completely subverting this  sort of epic idea or grandiose  idea of the Gods and just viewing  them with these very human traits.  I think one of the screenwriters  for the game naturally said,  like, we didn't want the Gods  to be these all powerful figures.  We wanted them to be human, to  be true to the sort of emotional  humanized state and they  succeeded very well in that.  And I think that's, I think my  favorite part of it.  I know there's some criticism  about the world and how the  world feels a bit empty to me  compared to Odyssey.  Like there's no one to really  talk to except for the handful  of Gods that you meet and the  puzzles get a bit, not stale  after a while, but repetitive,  I think, but it's, it's  lushly designed.  There's also a lot of, and a  lot of references to obscure  myths and also not so obscure  ones, but I really liked what it  did and I hoped it would have  gotten better reviews because  they apparently have plans for a  sequel that wouldn't have focused  on Greek myth, but on  Polynesian mythology.  And it would have been a  gameplay mix of Legend of Zelda,  Wind Waker and Elden Ring.  I don't know how, but so what,  what it would have asked you to  do is like navigate the ocean,  the Pacific ocean and navigate  based on the direction of the  stars, for example, like that  would have been your mode of  traversal and that would have  been so cool, I think, because  it would have to be completely  different from the Ubisoft  approach of like, okay, welcome  in this new place.  Here's 200 question marks and  chests for you to spend 20  hours doing that.  But then they only that was  canceled and I will forever  miss that game.  But yeah, I loved it and I hope  more people would try to play it.  

I mean, it's pure myth, right?  There's no historical aspects  to it at all.  Pure myth, but you're right.  There are fewer people to talk to.  What I really did enjoy about  it is that, because my  daughter, she's little, but  she can play it and just the  volume of stories that she now  knows because she's encountered  them in this game.  It's astonishing how many  myths they've managed to  cram into quite a small map. 

 Absolutely.  

As well as the boss fights  that you've got, I think  they've got all of the  Cyclops, haven't they?  

Yeah, they've got a lot of  obscure ones too, I think.  They even name some of the hekatonkheires, I think.  Like they're all named and  then the Cyclops's are all  named and there's some names  for the Harpies, I think as  well, like one of them is  named Aello, I think.  I mean, I've also written  about this about how games  basically constitute this sort  of modern mythographies for  popular audiences.  Like we have ancient texts  like Apollodorus or Hyginus,  which are these catalogs of  mythological stories and sort  of trying to make sense of  it all, how the cosmology  works, how the family  relationships work, who is  related to whom and so on.  Now we have modern  mythographies by people  like Stephen Fry or Edith  Hamilton or Liv Albert, for  example, but I think games  do that too.  Many games, I don't think  Fenyx Rising has that,  or at least not in the  game, it does have a  physical book that came with  it a couple of years after.  But many games have these sort  of myth codexes that allow  you to read up on all of  the characters.  And that's basically what,  you know, the sort of  mythographical collection  is, right?  It collects and it  combines and it presents  you all of the mythological  stories that you could  also find in books, but  this time it's in a game  and it's entertaining and  it's fun to play around  with.  And the world map is the  same but on a spatial  dimension, I think.  Like the entire world is  a sort of environmental  mythography of what Greek  mythology is and you  journey around it, you  find these characters, you  complete their puzzles, you  help them in their quest  and that helps you  understand who these  characters are, or at least  partly who they are.  And that I think is  great and it helps them,  it helps audiences, I  think young and not  young, to sort of grasp  interrelationships or  the dynamics of this  mythic story world.  So purely out of  interest, we've talked  about how these myths  are portrayed and how  they would have been  portrayed in the ancient  world as well.  

You mentioned that the  various writers compiling  lists of myths, you've  mentioned that there  were writers who were  making gods into  sitcom characters.  If you sat an ancient  Greek in front of an  Xbox and gave them a  joystick and got them  to play any of these  games, do you think  that they would be able  to recognize a lot of  what they see or would  it be too 21st century  for them to understand?  

That's a great question.  Short answer is I don't  know. A long answer is  I'm going to try.  I think it depends on  the game and on  particular dimensions of it.  There's some games that  are more modernized  than others, and I  don't mean that in a  sort of hierarchical  way. I don't think that  it's necessarily better  for a game to go back  to the sources or worse.  If it deviates from it,  I think every game  it should be studied  in its own right.  But for example,  there's a game like  Apotheon, which is  from 2015.  It was created by  the small studio in,  I think, in Canada.  And it's stylized  completely as this  sort of Greek vase painting.  So you play as this  black figure on his vase  like background and  you're working with Hera  to topple the reign of Zeus  and you're killing  most of the Greek gods  and acquiring their powers.  And I think something  like that could work  well for this sort of  tragic, prejudic  frame of storytelling.  You're trying to fight  the gods because  you've been wronged by them  and so on.  The ending is different  because, you know, in  the end, in a video game,  you often succeed in  killing the gods and  toppling them.  Whereas in antiquity,  that is not something  that we know happened  particularly different from  Egyptian or Norse myth,  where we know  some gods did die.  But in Greek myth,  that is hinted at,  but it's never really  actualized, I think.  Then there's other titles  like one from 2024,  Mythwrecked, Ambrosia Island  by a studio from Dundee,  I think,  where the gods are  basically all stand-ins  for highly contemporary issues  like Poseidon is an avatar  to talk about the  climate change.  Ares stands in for  man's mental health.  Hephaestus is a metaphor  for always being stuck  in your work and for burnout  and things like that.  In those cases,  that would be more obscure  or more difficult to understand  for an ancient Greek person  without the highly  contemporary context.  But yeah, I guess  let's find out.  Let's build a time machine  and get an ancient Greek person  to play some of these games.  

Yeah, as long as I'm not  the one with the screwdriver,  I'm down.  So I want to talk about a game  that is kind of a  mishmash of genres  because I grew up  as a theatre kid.  Have you played Stray Gods?  And can you talk about  the use of myth in Stray Gods?  

I have.  I love Stray Gods.  It's a game from 2023  by this Australian studio,  I think Summerfall Studios,  I think it's called.  It needs like a  mishmash of genres.  On the one hand,  it's this visual novel.  So you don't walk around  in Stray Gods,  like you're watching  the sort of story unfold.  But you can choose  in particular directions  where the story goes,  like an interactive movie  almost.  But at the same time,  it's a musical version of it.  There's songs that you can choose  where to go,  how the story unfolds  during songs.  And you can choose  the style of it,  which is really interesting.  It doesn't always work that well.  I think if you if you  pick too many different  musical styles in one song,  I don't think it always makes  for a coherent one.  But it's a very fun idea.  What's interesting with that one  is that I think it Stray Gods  to me sort of  showcases how different types  of mythology coexist  in that sense.  There is the Greek tragedy frame  of you fighting against the gods  because Athena is suspecting you  of having killed the Muse Calliope  and you're having to  prove your innocence.  So like you're a human act  and fighting against  this sort of divine authority,  which is something that we find  in various Greek tragedies  like the Bacchae, for example.  But at the same time,  there's a lot of comedy too.  Like what we said with  Lucian-like subversion  of epic traits.  What we find with the Minotaur  in that game, for example,  like the Minotaur is not  this angry beast that you have  to slay on this heroic quest.  The Minotaur is this character  who just wants to profess  his love for Hecate.  And I think in one of the endings  or maybe even in the DLC,  he then goes on to go  on a dating show,  I think, to a certain extent.  There's also like  a mythographical collection  with the side character  Freddy, who knows all of the myths  and is sort of your guide  through this mythological  story world.  So it is very diverse  and varied approach to mythology.  And that's what I like about it.  

I also like how you can play  the game many different times  and still not have seen  all of the different endings.  Like truly very different ending  because Odyssey also has  different endings,  but, you know, they're different,  but they're not that different  from each other.  But in Stray Gods,  there's some tough decisions  to make, to say the least.  

What I really thought  was interesting about Stray Gods  is because all of the sets,  all of the costumes,  all of the language,  it's all 21st century.  So you've got ancient gods  dressed in modern clothes.  Is there anything that you think  was really interesting  about how they chose  the look, the vibe  for each of these ancient  re-gods transported  into a modern setting?  

Yeah, that's a good question.  I think Athena, for example,  is one who isn't that modernized.  I think she's still wearing  like sort of Toga-like clothes,  if I'm not mistaken.  I'm not 100% sure.  There is Apollo,  who is somehow allergic  to buttoning his shirt.  

Yeah, he's like a surfer guy.  

When I first saw him,  I thought he was Poseidon,  because normally you have Poseidon,  who's like the surfer dude.  Kira Jones has this great term  of 'bro-seidon' in Hades.  I think Hermes is also interesting  because Hermes is a non-binary character  in Stray Gods, I think, right?  So they use they them pronouns,  which I think is really fitting  or interesting with Hermes,  because Hermes is always this character  who crosses boundaries,  who lives in different dimensions.  He can travel between the underworld  and he can travel in Olympus.  He has this large multiplicity of roles.  So I think he is this sort of diverse character  and that opens him up  to non-binary representation  in something like Stray Gods.  But yeah, I love what they did with it.  It's interesting to see them sort of diversifying  the cast of Greek myth,  just something that games  have increasingly been doing  in Mythwrecked as well,  or in Hades and Hades 2.  Like there's a lot more diversity  in terms of disability,  in terms of race,  in terms of sexuality.  And that's this sort of increasing trend  that we're seeing where,  yeah, Myth, I mean, many people,  again, these toxic player bases,  object to that  because they have this idea of Greek myth is white, it's male,  it's able-bodied, muscular men.  That's not a canonical story world.  Myth is a vehicle for cultural expression.  Myth is a sort of language  that we use to talk about everyday life.  You know, society has been,  you know, more opening up more  over the past 10 years or 20 years  towards more diverse representation.  And then it's only logical  if that happens that mythology,  our cultural language,  our vehicle, evolves too.  I think that's always been  the case throughout time.  So I think it's really interesting  that in that medium of video games,  the medium that many people still  consider this unserious,  frivolous, you know,  entertainment medium,  that they're evolving  in that same direction  because not many people  realize that or give them  credit for doing so.  

So we've just hit a point  in the conversation there.  The point that you've made  about the diversification  of characters,  different styles of clothing,  different identities,  different body shapes even.  Now that we've talked about  some examples that includes that,  I haven't played the next game  that I want to talk about,  but I have seen a few images  and a few clips.  Let's talk about Smite.  

Ah, Smite.  Yeah, there we go.  

Yeah.  Because when I've seen the photos  of various characters from Smite,  all of the men are huge,  bigger than Hercules.  All of the women look like  they're not there to fight,  they're there for…  The clothing that's chosen,  the styling of each character  that's chosen is very,  very different from the other  games that we've mentioned.  Do you want to talk a little bit  about Smite?  

Yeah, Smite is this sort of,  if anyone in the audience  has played League of Legends,  Smite is basically that.  So it's a sort of 5v5  player game, online game  that you play.  But it's all  mythological characters  and it's all third person.  So you're not looking down  on the map from above.  You're sort of controlling  your character like in Odyssey  or like in Fenyx Rising.  And it is, as far as I know,  the most expansive  mythological game ever developed.  I think there's 16 pantheons  in the game with 130  different characters.  So everything from Greek myth  to Slavic myth, to Polynesian,  to Hindu, to Japanese,  West African deities, for example.  But you're right,  especially when it comes  to the Greek gods,  some Norse too, Egyptian too.  And there's a lot of, let's say,  early video game culture  stereotyping that's going on there.  And the opposite of the diversification  that we've just mentioned.  It's still a pervasive style  of representing these characters,  like the sexualization,  like the hyper male  formability, for example.  I do think as Smite has gone on,  that they have gotten  a little bit better at that.  But you don't really see that  with the Greek pantheon.  The developers sits down  to make a game of mythology.  Greek myth is usually  the first thing they turn to.  If you look at the development  history of Smite,  if you look at when different  pathos have been introduced,  Greek myth has been there  from the beginning.  And it's the most predominant  pantheon in that game.  Like, you know, the Polynesian ones,  the Slavic ones that I mentioned,  they come much later  because they needed to find  new things to keep people interested.  So there's sort of this sort of  element of primacy that is going on  in that development process.  And because they were made  much more long time ago  when these revolutions  weren't as striking as they are now.  I think they're stuck in that sort of,  yeah, traditional frame of representation.  And it's not something that, I mean,  we, we often tend to differentiate  between the niche indie project  and the big AAA games where,  and we tend to say that  indie games are more diverse,  AAA games are always more traditional.  And to a certain extent, that is true,  but it's not always the case.  And I think it's much more  complicated than that.  The more diverse titles  that we've mentioned,  like Stray Gods,  like Mythwrecked, like Hades,  they are all indie titles,  but not all indie titles are that diverse.  And there's hundreds and hundreds of games,  like B-list games,  or even some A-list ones,  that just replicate what they see  in the big Hollywood blockbuster  style of representation.  I just replicate that.  At the same time, I think AAA  is slowly but gradually moving  into more diverse territory.  Although we're not necessarily  already seeing that with Greek myth.  I'm actually working on that right now  in my current work,  this sort of hegemonic  versus counter hegemonic styles  of doing Greek myth,  representing Greek myth in reception.  Are you adhering to the most traditional  frames of how these characters  and stories have been represented?  Or are you trying to do something  new with that, in my view,  potentially more interesting?  And basically the Greek mythology  equivalent of culture wars, right?  I mean, there's this discussions online,  like, why is Hephaestus in a wheelchair  in Hades 2?  Like, I don't want that.  He's a god, you know, like,  and then there's people saying,  yeah, but no, Hephaestus was disabled  in the Greek myth.  This is, you know,  what we know from certain Greek authors.  So, yeah, it's this dominant  versus subversive culture war,  I think, that we're seeing.  And it will be interesting,  given the absolute state of the world,  how that will keep evolving  or not in the years to come.  But I think indie projects  will continue to drive these evolutions.  I don't know what the future is going to hold.  

OK, so two final questions.  Firstly, are there any games  involving Greek myths  that you think you've played them  and you think, what the hell  are the developers doing here?  This is not anything  that any ancient historian would recognize.  

Good question.  Huh.  I mean, yes, I just don't know which...  There's different dimensions to take, right?  Usually it's these B-list indie titles  that no one is actually playing,  that I'm like, why would you make this?  I think there's titles,  like there's one game Minotaur from 2017,  I think, that was never finished,  where you play as the Minotaur,  which is interesting because, you know,  you're not playing as Theseus for once.  And then you sort of escape the labyrinth  and you have to kill everything you see in sight,  I think, and the game rewards you  for eating 100 hearts  or 1,000 hearts or 10,000 hearts.  Like, it's a very gruesome thing.  And I'm like, why would you make this?  Or there's also a genre of games  that I generally don't like that much.  A bullet hell or bullet heaven game  where basically you don't attack that much,  so your character automatically attacks,  but you walk around the map,  try and find upgrades so you have more powerful attacks,  and there's these hordes and hordes  of hundreds or thousands of enemies coming at you  aiming to survive for as long as you can.  And there's this one game,  Achilles' Survivor from last year,  which is a sequel to Achilles' Legends of Toll.  And I see why they went for the mythological setting  because for many developers,  Greek myth or any mythology is a sort of...  It's a free IP, right?  It's a free story world.  It's like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars,  but you don't have to pay royalties.  You don't have to pay copyright.  You know, it's there.  People know it.  It's free for you to use.  So I know why they use it.  But then the gameplay is so repetitive,  it's so stale,  and it's so derivative of other projects  that I'm like, just give me something that is new,  that is interesting,  that does something that we haven't seen before.  But where the mythology matters to it,  it's not tangential to it that you can look at,  that is substantiated, that is detailed.  That's what I'm looking for when I play games  for my own entertainment,  but that's not something that games like Minotaur  or Achilles' Survivor.  There's also one that I found a couple of months ago.  It's, what's it called?  Champion Shift or something.  It's from 2024.  It's this game where you play as a god  from a couple of different mythologies.  Athena is in there.  Gilgamesh is there.  Sun Wukong and some other characters.  And it's also this sort of bullet heaven,  roguelike thing where you don't attack,  like there's just hordes of enemies  and you survive as long as you can.  But for some reason,  so it's called Champion Shift,  and the shift, it refers to you being able  to transform into a car,  and then you drive around, yeah,  you drive around the map as a car,  and the Athena one is an armored car  that deflects incoming weaponry or attacks.  And it's such a crazy idea,  and it doesn't make any,  maybe that's the one I should be talking about.  Like the one that made me think like, why?  It's really, I mean, I wouldn't recommend it  unless you can get it for like an 80% discount.  It exists for better or worse.  And that's maybe one that I would think like,  what were they thinking?  What if we're making this?  

If I hadn't known you for so long  and trusted you as much as I do,  I would think that you were trying to prank me.  

No, it exists.  It's a real thing.  It's not a little prank.  

Wow, I won't be buying that one.  So final question.  You've played dozens of games,  ones that you really like, ones that you don't.  All of them treat myth in a slightly different way.  If you were to be given the keys to a developer's studio,  what kind of game would you build  using what kind of elements from games that already exist  to make the perfect Greek myth game?  

Oh, that's a lot of pressure and responsibility.  

I know!  

First off, if I was given the opportunity  to make a game that is mythological in nature,  I don't think I would go for Greek myth.  Yeah, because I think we already have so much of that.  There's so many other mythologies in the world  that we don't see anything about,  don't see anything from,  that we should try to represent more,  which yeah, might be the heretic answer.  But yeah, this is a question that I think about a lot  like when I'm walking to work,  but I don't know if I can do better  than people have already done.  I think Hades 2, for example, for me,  maybe that's a thing.  Maybe I would go to work on Hades 2  and change certain things in there  and keep what they already have  instead of trying to do something from scratch,  because there are some issues with it,  especially regarding the ending  or certain things that have happened  that I maybe try to work on.  But if I was given the opportunity  to build a game completely by myself,  then I would do something that doesn't exist yet.  And I think that's hard to do  with something like Greek myth,  because there's already so much that's out there.  I think I would go for,  maybe I would buy the riot suit  at Immortals Fenyx Rising Sequel  and see what they were doing there.  What I think we're missing,  not mythologically speaking,  but like in relation to ancient Greece,  it's like this sort of ancient Greek  historical everyday life simulator,  like something like where you're just,  you're not this sort of Spartan warrior  or you're not this soldier,  you're not a mythological hero.  You're just a farmer or a poet or a politician,  like just trying to make it in the world,  like having these everyday issues.  That's maybe what I would like.  Maybe that could be a mythological game too.  Maybe that's what we don't have.  Maybe you're like this sort of character  in the ancient mythological Arcadia, for example,  and you're just trying to make it,  but all of a sudden this god shows up  and he's stealing your cattle or the rains don't come,  you need to pay.  Maybe that's something I would like to build.  Like this sort of, we have the power of fantasy.  We already have that.  We don't have the everyday struggles  and the everyday life of these people.  

So like the cosy games.  

Yeah, maybe like a cosy game.  You're a poet trying to make it  and you want to recite your work  at the Olympic Games, for example,  like how did you get it?  Then you know, like who do you need to know?  What do you need to write?  What are the dynamics of writing a victory ode, for example?  Like something like that,  that would be fun that we haven't seen.  Maybe like Pentiment, Ancient Greek or something. 

 Pentiment is fantastic.  Yes, an Ancient Greek Pentiment would,  I would play the hell out of that game.  

Yeah, me too.  And even we can go so further than Pentiment  because I think one of the things it missed was,  so you're witnessing your character  working on this medieval manuscript,  but you're not actually working on them yourself  as a player.  Like maybe like having that in there,  I think could be really, really fun.  And education at the same time  without being overly, you know,  serious or pedagogical.  Maybe that.  Yeah, have it all like an Athenian vase painter  instead of a manuscript artist.  Yeah, for sure.  Yeah, that's what I would like to do. 

 So if any developers are listening...  

Yeah, you can find my email  on the Ghent University website!! 

Okay, well, thank you so much  for coming to our show  to talk about Greek mythology in video games.  I'm sure that listeners have played at least one,  but now you have a whole raft of games to go out and try.  Do you have anything that you wish to tell us about?  

Yeah, so I'm on Blue Sky.  I'm on Discord.  Richard Cole from the University of Bristol.  I have a monthly Discord event series  called Antiquity Games Night  where we play antiquity games together.  So if you wanna join us in the Discord server,  then you can look for Antiquity Games Night  to link it somewhere on the internet.  If you have anything you'd like to talk to about,  you could find my email or DM messages somewhere.  I also have my first monograph.  It's called Characters and Characterization  in Mythological Video Games.  And many of the things that I said today  about like the rationalization  or the comedy in Fenyx writing actually  are from that book.  So yeah, let me know if you wanna learn more about that.  Other than that, I just wanna say thank you,  Alexandra, for having me on.  I'm really, it was really fun  to talk about all this with you.  And yeah, I'm looking forward to everything  you'll be doing with this fantastic podcast.  Oh, thank you.  It was our pleasure to have you.