Antiquity for Sale: Game Engines, Asset Stores, and the Platformization of the Classical Imagination
Channel: Digital Classicist London Seminars
Date: 2023-06-16

Kevin Wong (Harvard)
Friday, Jun 16 2023, 17:00-18:00
Antiquity for Sale: Game Engines, Asset Stores, and the Platformization of the Classical Imagination in Videogame Development

Digital Classicist London seminar
Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Ancient Greece and Rome offer an influential imaginative frame for the videogame industry, with recent years seeing the continued popularity of videogames that directly adapt the classical world and its mythology (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Hades, God of War). Beyond these, classical resonances are regularly deployed (alongside those of other cultures and histories) as transmutable source material for more generic fantasy worldbuilding (for instance, in the Final Fantasy franchise). Looking beyond visual and narrative in-game representations, this paper aims to peer behind the curtain: to examine some of the sociotechnical processes through which ancient Greco-Roman discourses are integrated into the commercial realities and creative possibilities of modern videogame development.

Accordingly, this paper examines some of the most important software tools employed by videogame developers: game engines and, more specifically, their asset stores. Game engines are software development platforms that facilitate the collaboration of designers, programmers, artists, and writers in the making of videogames, while asset stores are online marketplaces for the sale of game assets which are already optimized for integration with their respective game engines. Taking the Unity Asset Store and the Unreal Engine Marketplace as case studies, I chart a narrative of classical reception across three related developments: (1) the platformization of game engines, (2) the concept of searchability in the context of asset stores, and (3) the selective reception of antiquity in game development.

Commercial path dependencies have channeled creative production onto dominant and hegemonic platforms like Unity and Unreal Engine. The sociotechnical workings of their asset stores lead them to ontologically generate a selective vision of ‘the classical’ in contemporary videogame development. Accordingly, they do much more than mechanically facilitate the sale of classically-inspired game assets; they actively mediate the flow of historical material, trafficking in cultural signals of demand, availability, and imaginative possibility.