Greek Game Developers' Opinions on the Representation andReception of (Ancient) Greece in Games: An ExploratoryInterview Pilot Study

Recent years have seen rising academic interest into how video games engage with classical antiquity.Parallel to the release of commercially, critically, and scholarly acclaimed games such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft Quebec 2018) or Hades (Supergiant 2020), a rising amount of articles, volumes, and monographs appeared that investigate how Greco-Roman antiquity is represented, simulated, depicted, or 'received' (Hardwick 2003) in games (Rollinger 2020;Clare 2021; Draycott & Cook 2022).Scholarship applying such 'classical reception studies' to video games has, for example, focused on the audiovisual reconstruction of antiquity (e.g., Andr 2016), the representation of ethnic/demographic groups (e.g., Draycott & Cook 2022), narrative and mechanics (e.g., Cole 2022), the simulation of history (e.g., Flegler 2020), among various other topics.Simultaneously to these developments, game studies has seen increased attention into local game production contexts.Liboriussen & Martin (2016) conceptualize such 'regional game studies' as the body of research investigating game development in "areas outside of Western Europe and North America".In addition to individual studies of production in industries such as Czechia and Iran (isler et al. 2017), Poland (Felczak &Garda 2023) or Australia (Keogh 2023), collections as those by Wolf (2015) and Swalwell ( 2021) have greatly expanded our understanding of game production on an international scale.Until now, regional game studies and classical reception studies have not met.With the exception of Lowe's (2022) analysis of the Japanese game Athena (SNK 1986), studies on classical reception in games have generally focused on games by North American or Western European studios (e.g., Creative Assembly, Santa Monica Studio, Supergiant, Ubisoft).However, since it has both been argued that the contexts in which antiquity games are made are in need of further investigation (Chapman 2020, 242), and that regional game studies should be an important aspect of game studies going forward (Cullen et al. 2022, 203), it seems relevant for both