Women in Classical Video Games

Draycott, J. and Cook, K. (Eds.) (2022) Women in Classical Video Games. Series: Imagines - classical receptions in the visual and performing arts. Bloomsbury: London. ISBN 9781350241916

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Publisher's URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/women-in-classical-video-games-9781350241916/

Abstract

To date, with the notable exception of Christian Rollinger’s recently published Classical Antiquity in Video Games: Playing with the Ancient World (2020), video games have been understudied in the disciplines of Classics and Ancient History, and the role of women in these video games has been even more understudied – Rollinger’s volume contains only one chapter on the subject, Sian Beavers’ ‘The Representation of Women in Ryse: Son of Rome’. In any case, since the volume went to press, a number of other significant video games set in classical antiquity either have been or are due to be released, and these need to be scrutinised. Women in Classical Video Games seeks to address this imbalance. It will be the first full-length work of scholarship to examine aspects of the depiction of women in video games set in classical antiquity, indispensable to reception studies and gender studies. It will survey the history of women in these games from the 1980s to the present and explore the different types of women included in these games (e.g. female deities, monsters, and mortals ranging across the entire social hierarchy). It will explore pertinent issues such as historical accuracy, authenticity, gender, sexuality, monstrosity, hegemony, race and ethnicity, and the use of tropes. It will pay particular attention to the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s recent ventures into classical antiquity, first in Origins (2017), set in Hellenistic Egypt, and then in Odyssey (2018), set in Classical Greece, as these games have caught the imagination not only of gamers, but also of school pupils, university students, and academics, particularly in relation to their accompanying educational Discovery Modes. In the process, it will answer the following questions: How are women portrayed in these video games? Why are they portrayed in these ways? Are these portrayals authentic and/or accurate? Does this authenticity/accuracy matter? What do female characters allow a video game to do that male ones don’t? And what types of stories do these video games tell using their female characters?

Item Type:Edited Books
Status:Published
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Draycott, Jane
Authors:
Subjects:D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D051 Ancient History
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > Classics
Publisher:Bloomsbury
ISBN:9781350241916

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