On Screen · Antiquity · Ancient Mediterranean, Mediterranean and Near East
Students pitch video games about the Delphic oracle and Persian tailors in university course
Eduardo M. García-Molina describes his course on the ancient world in video games, where students end by pitching games built on historical and archaeological evidence.
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Ancient Mediterranean, Mediterranean and Near East A university course called "The Ancient World in Video Games" ends with students pitching their own games set in antiquity. Eduardo M. García-Molina, who teaches it, described the course in a post on the Peopling the Past blog on 27 March 2026. He also listed resources for teachers who want to use games in a single class.
The course treats games in two ways. They are receptions of antiquity. They are also a space where historical and archaeological questions are worked out in digital form. García-Molina writes that many of his students now meet the ancient world digitally.
A 1964 game about a Sumerian city
García-Molina points to The Sumerian Game of 1964 as an early game set in antiquity. Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade teacher in New York, made it with IBM programmers. He writes that she is largely credited as the first video game writer and the inventor of the strategy genre.
The game has the player run the city of Lagash. Its scenarios were meant to teach maths, agriculture and trade. Lagash was a real Sumerian city-state in what is now southern Iraq. García-Molina uses the game to raise design questions, such as what a designer would include, from food and housing to economies and social classes. He also asks what story about early cities the game tells.
The class meets twice a week. Each week has a theme, such as violence, urbanism, religion and mythology, or monsters. Tuesday sessions cover the history. Thursday sessions look at how those historical and archaeological problems are turned into digital worlds.
He draws on two works. Andrew Reinhard's monograph Archaeogaming traces how real material culture shapes fictional worlds and applies archaeological practice to them. Jeremiah McCall's Gaming the Past treats games as historical problem spaces.
The students skew more towards STEM than humanities majors. García-Molina first has to bring everyone up to a conversational level on history, archaeology and the general chronology of the ancient Mediterranean.
Access to the games was the largest hurdle. Some are not cheap, and even cheap ones need a console or computer. Gameplay videos on YouTube and wikis help. The course also has five computers in a campus lab with the games installed.
Persian tailors and the Pythia
Students keep weekly journals and end with a game pitch. It has an oral presentation and a short written part. One student pitched "Silks of the Shah", in which the player is an apprentice tailor building a business across the Achaemenid Empire. The goal is to become clothier to Darius I himself.
The stages follow known satrapies, the provinces of the Persian empire. The player cannot move on until a region is finished. The province that includes Phoenicia might have more purple cloth. This reflects the dye made there from the local murex snail.
In the written part, the student described working with material evidence for these provinces. They also described how hard it is to read Achaemenid material culture through imperial imagery.
Another student pitched "Oracles of Delphi". The player takes the role of the Pythia, the priestess who gave Apollo's prophecies at Delphi. Ancient sources mention her often, but never tell her own story. The player goes through the divination ceremony, then searches the sanctuary for clues to decode visions.
The student meant this to copy the vague, double-edged nature of Delphic prophecies. The player's answers could then affect the states and figures from Greek history who visited Delphi.
It is not a miracle cure for declining enrollments or some sort of technological innovation that we must incorporate or risk lagging behind
Eduardo M. García-Molina, instructor of "The Ancient World in Video Games"
García-Molina writes that the approach is not for every instructor. He also reports that some colleagues have dismissed games. In his view, some do so from unfamiliarity and some because they see the medium as lesser than, for example, a play.
His resource list includes Paizomen, a database of games about Greek and Roman antiquity created by Alexander Vandewalle. It also includes class modules from the Save Ancient Studies Alliance based on Assassin's Creed and Pharaoh. Another entry is a tour of ancient Olympia in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, made by Ubisoft and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens with John Camp.
Other entries are a coin game from the University of Tübingen and Valete Vos Viatores, a Universidad de Navarra game about how stonecutters made Roman inscriptions. Danger in Pompeii, made in Switzerland for younger players, invites teachers to request classroom copies.
Sources
- Let's play antiquity with Eduardo M. García-Molina (Peopling the Past)
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