Pedagogical Problems: Classical Reception of Videogames

Undergraduate courses looking at aspects of the reception of the classical world in modern popular culture are becoming increasingly more attractive to both lecturers and students. However, this can lead to the situation where non-experts are teaching students on topics which, while on the surface may seem relatively simple, are in fact much more complicated. Further issues arise when one is teaching what has been referred to as "new media", where the knowledge of those in the class can vary widely.


One such new media is videogames. While a medium since the 1970s, it has only really been with the explosion of heavily advertised consoles and certain games from the late 1990s onwards that the way in which videogames have appropriated aspects of the ancient world has started to be looked at by classical scholars. This almost lack of scholarly interest leads to the first problem of any course which includes videogames - a near complete lack of relevant secondary literature. But this is perhaps the least of our problems as lecturers, classicists, and (for me, anyway) gamers.

This paper will draw on my recent experience of lecturing about the classical reception within videogames, advising dissertation students, and general conversations with undergraduate Classics students. I will briefly identify the problems associated with the inclusion of new media in undergraduate courses, and, more specifically, introduce some of the particular problems associated with the inclusion of videogames on such Classical Reception courses.