Reconstructing The Ancient World Through Video Games and 3D Technology

Ubisoft has long stated that one of their greatest strengths in creating the worlds of Assassin’s Creed has been the close collaborations fostered between their artists, programmers, and game developers with historians, archaeologists and other experts across different fields. 

The results have been nothing short of impressive, culminating in the creation of the stunning landscapes and incredibly detailed cities of various ancient locales. 

Two of the most recent games in particular, Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, have been especially successful in their recreations. The dazzling reconstructions of Pericles’ Athens in Greece (Odyssey) and Cleopatra’s Alexandria in Egypt (Origins) are true testaments to the power of the collaborations between scholars and game developers. 

The precision of detail at every game level showcases just how much care and thought goes into creating these worlds. From the characters’ clothing, to the furnishings in their houses, and even scattered objects in city streets, no detail of what we know about the ancient world was overlooked in the creation of these games. 

Yet, these worlds are not reserved for avid gamers. In both Origins and Odyssey, new non-combat modes of play were introduced, so players can simply explore and learn about the recreated ancient worlds. 

Even for those without gaming capabilities or interests, Ubisoft North America’s YouTube channel released a series of “Discovery Tour” videos showcasing the historical aspects of their games through jaunts around the ancient cities and vignettes into different aspects of ancient life— from urban living to textile production and agricultural practices. 

Games such as Assassin’s Creed, however, can only take historical accuracy so far. Ubisoft has acknowledged that while accuracy is a goal of theirs, it is not their sole purpose. After all, it is not likely that mercenaries in ancient Greece were speed-running through the Peloponnese, fighting secret cults and hunting down fragments of alien technology and the lost city of Atlantis. 

It is also important to understand that the lens through which players experience the ancient world of games is typically one of able-bodied, adult characters. A more diverse array of NPCs (non-playable characters) does exist in these worlds, but only in peripheral ways. 

There are, however, other projects utilizing similar technologies that aim to fill in some of the accuracy gaps left open by video game reconstructions. They also seek to take things further by producing experiential reconstructions in virtual reality.

The Casa della Regina Carolina Project (Cornell University; Università di Bologna)* in Pompeii, Italy, for example, has been working to produce a virtual reality, 3D reconstruction of one of Pompeii’s largest Roman gardens.

In collaboration with AOROC-CNRS-ENS-PSL**,  the 3Di program at the University of UCO Laval*** and UCO Nantes/ CJB-CNRS****, the reconstructions of the garden aim to not only showcase how the space might have looked prior to the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but also to demonstrate the various ways in which the space might have been experienced by individuals of all ages, genders, body types, and social statuses. 

At the heart of this goal is the desire to incorporate a myriad of embodied identities that are reflective of the diverse reality we know antiquity to have been, and not the elite, white-washed version previous generations of scholarship painted it out to be.

“When we try to imagine ourselves into the ancient world of Pompeii, we run the risk of introducing modern implicit biases,” says CRC Co-Director and National Geographic Explorer Caitie Barrett (Cornell University). 

“The imagined ‘ancient individual' becomes a mirror of the scholar who is writing the paper— and given historical structural imbalances within academia, that has often meant privileging the experiences of male, white, able-bodied, upper-middle-class adults over others.” 

The power of 3D modeling, combined with virtual simulation, allows for a diverse array of digital avatars, enabling the project to circumnavigate these traditional biases and investigate the ancient space through any number of differently-abled individuals. 

Although, as Professor Barrett points out, there are still limitations to how the modern, conditioned individual approaches ancient spaces. Regardless, the hope of the project is to make their virtual reconstruction widely available to the public across digital platforms, garnering a larger array of responses and reactions from individuals of a range of backgrounds. 

In the long term, the CRC Project hopes to share its growing corpus of digital ancient objects— including furnishings, clothing, as well as the botanical reproductions from the garden itself— by contributing to the Digital Topiarius Project**, a digital archive of ancient plants. 

Open-access databases such as these not only benefit other scholars, but also provide resources for digital design students, artists, and video game developers, allowing for the creation of reconstructions that can be enjoyed and learned from by all. 

*Caitie E. Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics, Cornell University; Kathryn Gleason, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University; Annalisa Marzano, Professor of Classical Achaeology, Università di Bologna 

**Amina-Aïcha Malek, CNRS Laboratory “Archéologie et Philologie d'Orient et d’Occident" (AOROC) of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL Research University)

***Guillaume Boissinot, Wilfried Thierry, Andrea Trapnell;  Students: Louan Blin, Theo Coutant, Orlane Guillon, Luis Pecot, Western Catholic University of Laval

****Anselme Cormier, Western Catholic University of Nantes/Centre Jean Berard - CNRS