Gaming Antiquity to Critique Modern Ideologies
In this blog, UG student Isabelle Meadows-Gibb discusses what she has learnt about Applied Classics by designing an interactive RPG (role-playing game) based on ancient women’s experiences of war and designed to prompt critical reflection on contemporary political belief systems and widespread misogyny.
An introduction to Applied Classics
When applying to study Classical Studies, I wrote that I was drawn to the paradox that ancient cultures were both alien and familiar to us, discussing theatre and the schema’s role in shaping ideology. Little did I know—through opportunities within the St Andrews Honours module ‘Classics for the Modern World’— that such surface-level interdisciplinary interest would evolve into the unsettling recognition that this familiarity was structured by imperial legacies and ideological projection. It is this paradox that has come to frame my understanding of Classics as both a humanist inquiry and political minefield, and precisely this duality that grounds the necessity of Applied Classics. Applied Classics provides a powerful framework in bridging antiquity with the contemporary world, and an opportunity for critical reflection, cultural reckoning, and social engagement. However, it is not without risk.
My initial interest in it stemmed from a desire to a better the world through Classical Studies, as opposed to graduating university with a purely academic—and retrospectively, passive—degree. I had skimmed the module’s webpage but was unprepared for its theoretical and emotional rigour. Previously, I had aligned with Hayne’s view that ‘as is so often the way with excellent things, we need to go back to [antiquity] to see how it began[i]’. I now recognise the opposite also, and often more frequently, stands as true. Most notably, I hadn’t realised how deeply Classics shapes contemporary socio-cultural and political discourse[ii]—for better or worse. Indeed classical rhetoric and iconography permeates everyday life; Achilles heel, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, Nike, and Neoclassical architecture. Likewise, whilst it can serve as a seemingly neutral projected frameworks for geo-political anxieties—such as the Thucydides’ Trap—, it has been historically weaponised in reinforcing colonialism[iii], white supremacy[iv], eugenics[v], misogyny[vi] and social hierarchies[vii]. Thus, I began to recognise Classics’ ‘crisis of identity[viii]’—functioning both as an anthropological study and a cultural weapon wielded by the West to justify egregious acts and ideology.
Hope is not lost. The ‘Classics for the Modern World’ module reveals that Applied Classics can leverage the emotional and symbolic weight of antiquity to shed light upon – and make positive interventions in – contemporary concerns, encompassing a broad spectrum of global human experience, both individual and collectivist, whilst also illuminating the deep-rooted frameworks that endure in their influence. In recognising that Applied Classics is not a neutral field, I observed that academic engagement must be conscious and ethical, lest we inadvertently perpetuate the very ideologies we seek to critique.
Early classroom discussions revealed patterns of weaponised Classical misappropriations within the ‘Manosphere’—reactionary online communities promoting hyper-masculinity, sexual entitlement and historical revisionism—that permeate broader alt-right discourse. I initially believed far-right engagement to be cherry-picked (quotes from Marcus Aurelius; lionisation of Sparta). It soon became apparent that the Manosphere’s appropriation of ancient material was not meme-deep but a systematic gateway to radical ideological machinery. Tracing tropes across white nationalist spaces, I encountered the frequent use of Greco-Roman models as ‘self-mythologising’ armour[ix] against the premise that ‘white Western civilisation [is] under threat[x]’, an expansion upon the 19th century construction of the concept of ‘Western Civilisation’[xi]. Online spaces, particularly X/Twitter, are increasingly weaponised: @Identiy_Evropa’s ‘White Culture Matters’ campaign, @modrnspartanism’s war glorification and emotional suppression, and the Tate brothers’ invocation of pseudo-Roman masculinity to legitimise misogyny and masculine dominance. Beard’s interpretation of Trump as Perseus holding Clinton’s (Medusa’s) head encapsulates alt-right’s visual rhetoric; filtering ‘man’s own monstrosity’ through the ‘lens of misogyny’[xii]. Such examples are not fringe anomalies, but emblematic of how embedded Classics is in the architecture of contemporary reactionary politics. When Capitol rioters donned pseudo-Spartan helmets and chanted ‘molon labe,’ they were claiming lineage, not cosplaying[xiii]. I was struck by how fear-mongering such language is, the use of sensationalising material disturbing not only in content but in its diluted familiarity among peers and online discourse. This left a sour taste; and a realisation that I risked complicity by virtue of study, and that Classical education required systematic reevaluation.
I was forced to confront the difficult truth that, as a Classics student, I could no longer view such appropriations as external distortions. Without critical intervention, I risked becoming complicit in the ideologies that such rhetoric continued to perpetuate—especially in having the privilege of studying classics at such an elite institution as the University of St Andrews. At what point does academic neutrality become abdication? I resolved myself to create a project targeting where Classics is wielded to conduct the most harm, and thus influence the most positive change: politics, specifically the alt-right adoption of classical rhetoric.
Gaming Antiquity
My team and I identified our target audience as 15-25 year olds—those most vulnerable to alt-right radicalisation[xiv] through media usage and digital echo chambers[xv]. Our first challenge was developing a medium that would provoke critical reflection without didactic alienation. I dismissed mediums such as podcasts, theatre, or magazines to prevent our audiences being dissuaded through passivity or a lack of a classical background. A teammate’s suggestion of gaming met all of our aims, through offering immersion without didacticism and independence from prior classical knowledge. Gaming would enable us to educate from within classical material rather than remaining on the margins, looking in. This evoked some personal reevaluation of what constitutes ‘academic’ material, recognising—thanks to my team’s interdisciplinary strengths—that mediums I once would have dismissed can facilitate profound critical engagement. In future teamwork, I would more actively seek out such diverse perspectives earlier, rather than relying on my own conventional instincts.
Initially, I proposed Minecraft, inspired by Classicist Jessie Craft’s work on Minecraft’s pedagogical uses[xvi]. A global user base of over 204 million monthly users, predominately male and aged 15-21[xvii], made it appealing. However, I soon realised that this was the extent to which Minecraft could benefit our aim; its visual construction focus lacked the ideological and narrative fiction required to embed reflection, therefore keeping students ‘submerged’ in uncritical passivity[xviii]. Subsequently, I recognised such surface level Classical engagement risked reproducing the ideologies we hoped to subvert.
Instead, a teammate suggested tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), particularly Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). RPGs’ scaffolding would allow us to generate games rooted in historical narratives. Indeed, Morales’ assertion that ‘telling new stories… [whilst] viewing our worlds through the lens of… myths is… meaningful[xix]’ resonated with the project’s ethos. Rather than rewriting antiquity, we could reframe it to generate new interpretations and conversations, whilst retaining fidelity to the source material. However, I was nervous to undertake such a monumental task, unfamiliar with RPGs and hesitant I would fall into simply retellings.
Encouraged by Dr König, I began looking into the uses of speculative and useful fiction[xx]. This and Paulo Freire’s model of critical pedagogy helped me consolidate and clarify my design intentions, ensuring it remained dialogic and ethics-driven, encouraging a ‘critical consciousness… [that] enrols [participants] in the search for self-affirmation’, avoiding fanaticism[xxi]. Indeed, I wanted an emotional response from players, rather than performative ethics. I expanded research onto RPGs within Classics. Cameron argues that RPGs, alongside ‘traditional classical primary and secondary sources… [introduces] ideas about cultural influence on texts, the reception ideas from the past into contemporary media, and… historical game analysis[xxii]’. Designing this game was an exercise in reception scholarship that demanded active engagement with the thought systems surrounding it. I remained wary of the ‘aesthetic’ reception that flattens antiquity to a ‘thematic veneer’ observed in many Classical games[xxiii]. Thus, I designed game-mechanics aligning with ‘a game’s system [that] articulates how conflicts and uncertainties with the fiction are resolved and how narrative authority is distributed[xxiv]’; my game was required to redistribute narrative power to silenced characters, forcing players to empathise with what it means to be denied agency.
Tackling Misogyny
Inspired by Zuckerberg, I recognised misogyny as a core tenet of alt-right radicalisation—particularly within Red-Pilled communities— and thus chose it as my individual game’s focus. In its most weaponised forms, misogyny is mythologised[xxv]—legitimising hierarchy and violence, fuelling radicalised worldviews. I considered the Battle of Actium as my pedagogical vehicle, Cleopatra embodying a victim of patriarchal propaganda vilified through gender and foreignness. Compelling in theory, I struggled to develop a narrative that balanced player autonomy with source fidelity. That failure taught me that fidelity to source material can constrain applied work, and that effective application requires not structural openness to adaptation alongside thematic resonance.
Baker’s Silence of the Girls[xxvi] shifted my focus towards gendered horrors at the heart of the Trojan war. Despite predominately male-centric narratives, women reside at the war’s centre[xxvii]; as catalysts, victims, and embodiments of power. The Iliad stages war as site of male kleos, and noble death—an ideal embedded within alt-right and (predominately American) militarist rhetoric. Yet, for women in war there is no such resolution. Their fate is rarely an honourable death, but instead sexual violence, slavery, and collateral death, with victory often signified through their subjugation and capture[xxviii]. The contrast between male kleos and female suffering shaped my design philosophy; I didn’t want players to observe injustice, but rather be structurally implicated in it, forced to navigate systems that rewarded domination and erased resistance.
Initially, I worried my gameplay would inadvertently provoke, rather than interrogate, masculinist logic. The Visualising War and Peace project guided my research on how modern and ancient war stories influence our understandings of conflict, to ensure my gameplay critiqued war’s narrative traditions. Through this, I recognised that the Iliad is not a closed text, and that my game aimed to challenge dominant heroic frameworks by recentering the silenced female perspectives within the Iliad as agents of ethical disruption. Indeed, in times of war, women express themselves through language; language being ‘the sole compensation of their sex for being concerned with a mode of action [warfare] that is an exclusively male prerogative’—‘men fight; women speak’.[xxix] Yet, speech is not powerless; ‘texts [and by proxy, my RPG] give voice to women, [creating] the opportunity for critiques of war itself’.[xxx] This made me recognise that reception is mechanical. Indeed, game mechanics—agency, choice, narrative control—reframe how antiquity is read and repurposed. Such reframing offered me the confidence that my game could remain grounded in ancient material whilst pursuing radical (contemporary) recontextualisation. As noted by König, war stories ‘do not simply describe or reflect war, they… defer it and reframe it; [subsequently] re-narrating it into old and new ways of being’.[xxxi]Armed with such knowledge, I came to see my RPG as not a critique but a new branch in its long reception history, one that reframes consequence and choice of both ancient characters and contemporary players.
Studying ancient democratic models revealed how embedded hierarchy operates in both past and present political systems,[xxxii] compelling me to encode structural exclusion within my game mechanics. Flawed as it is, democracy became a fitting mechanic for intertwining epistemic constraints. This disrupted my instinct to idealise ancient democracy. Doing so, I subverted it into diagnostic tool illuminating exclusions in modern systems, subsequently directing us toward equity.
Indeed RPGs, I discovered, ‘cultivate democratic values’.[xxxiii] Thus, my game adopted an ‘autotelic approach’, promoting imaginative collaboration and problem solving to critically negotiating power systems.[xxxiv] I introduced gendered voting within gameplay, limiting women to advisory roles while men could vote, as to simulate the performative inclusivity of democratic structures that rely on silenced majorities. Likewise, RPGs encourage players to ‘foster habits of Dewey’s dramatic rehearsal… thereby [enhance] the individual’s understanding of the social repercussions of their choices’.[xxxv] I did not wish for the game to offer answers, but to trap players within ideological systems, and question whether they could, and would, break them. When players encountered these systems, many froze, aware that no option was ethically clean. Watching them hesitate, negotiate, and contradict themselves confirmed that the game had manifested my aim; an emotional rehearsal of real moral failure.
Player Experiences
I ensured all ethical procedures were followed prior to gameplay, creating anonymised consent forms, ensuring informed consent that the data from game-trials may be used in reflection. Participants withhold the ability to withdraw at any stage. I conducted research into how best to format the forms and, in surveys, prevent leading questions.
Prior to my own game-development, I created surveys for my teammates’ games. The first measured media exposure, bias, and political affiliation. Notably in a teammate’s game, the participant with the most right leaning political bias encouraged the most in-game violence. Whilst correlation is not causation, I found it interesting to observe patterns mirroring alt-right tendencies towards gamified violence. Such correlation, even if anecdotal, reaffirmed for me the urgent relevance of our project’s intervention into the gamified logic of radicalisation.
I found the post-game survey most insightful. It was designed to evaluate participants’ ability to distinguish between classical and extremist rhetoric, thereby revealing how weaponised familiarity masks ideological harm. In research, I was shocked by how pseudo-Classical rhetoric lent legitimacy to extremist context, frequently indistinguishable from legitimate sources:
- ‘If all your children come from one woman, you are not a conqueror’[xxxvi]
- ‘…a woman will fight back when assailed by a young man’s flattery;/ even the one you might think doesn’t want it will want it’[xxxvii]
Out of over 30 surveys conducted, only one participant was able to correctly identify the source of the quotes, emphasising the scary ambiguity of such rhetoric. Participants then evaluated a white-supremacist passage on the Ara Pacis,[xxxviii] testing their ability to discern academic legitimacy. Shockingly, answers varied across being a 20th century academic journal to guessing the provenance correctly. It is scary that such pseudo-academic language can launder extremist ideology by cloaking it in the aura of classical legitimacy.
I offered Thucydides 1.23.6 across various translations, with varying levels of subjectivity, in an exercise on media bias and rhetoric. After revealing the sources, I asked if participants would be more likely to check multiple sources, as to confirm validity and bias. While the unanimous agreement was encouraging, the lack of long-term tracking left me uncertain whether critical awareness translated into behavioural change, a limitation I would address with follow-up surveys in future iterations.
I believe my surveys supported our project, revealing how gameplay evolved broader ideologies alongside encouraging fact checking and scepticism regarding the misuse of classics. However, they were incredibly overarching, encompassing broad tenets of the alt-right. In hindsight, a more modular survey design, tailored to each game’s goals, would offer greater insight into how specific themes were processed. I now recognise the value of follow-up surveys as to track retention and ideological shifts.
Following a prologue that determined players’ allegiance via the Judgement of Paris and their god’s gender, the first episode focused on Iphigenia’s sacrifice. I designed the episode to immerse players within the uncomfortable reality that female bodies often function as expendable collateral in both ancient and modern political systems. The gameplay was drawn primarily from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Agamemnon, having players vote on her sacrifice to ensure safe passage—echoing Agamemnon’s impossible choice (Eur. IA 1257-8). I deliberately avoided ‘correct’ choices to foreground moral ambiguity and implicate players in the structural logic of sacrificial politics.
Emma Bridges enlightened me to parallels between the sacrificial logic of contemporary militaries, glorifying duty while ignoring those most affected—‘the family’.[xxxix] Such moral fiction was key, emphasising that innocent loss is often mitigated as part of a supposed ‘greater good’. Indeed, as noted, ‘the literature of war shaped itself around the male experience, suppressing women’s narratives and reinforcing their status… participants only insofar as they aided or observed male agency’[xl]. Some players expressed discomfort with being made to decide her fate, while others debated whether sacrificing one life could be justified for the many—discourse I had deliberately constructed to echo contemporary military ethics. I included Iphigenia’s age—14—as to provoke reflection on the persistent logic of child sacrifice in war, drawing parallels with contemporary child death in places such as Gaza.[xli] In gameplay, one participant admitted: ‘I’m struggling to separate [my character] and myself,’ revealing precisely the internalised ethical complicity I had hoped to provoke. This moment clarified to me how role-play can collapse distance between player and structure in making complicity personal rather than theoretical.
Following Iphigenia’s episode, the Briseis and Chryseis episode was designed to implicate players within a broader system of possession and symbolic (sexual) violence. This scene was meant to expose how even well-intentioned players reproduce violent logics when no ‘saviour’ options are available. While Barker’s Silence of the Girls[xlii] guided my approach to reframing trauma, I rooted the script in Iliad 1.10-305, wherein Briseis is reduced to a movable asset within a masculine economy. Briseis’ monologue was derived from Iliad 19.290-97, the moment of textual fidelity was essential, as to give the character her voice, confronting players with the brutal literality of being a war prize. Players voted on whether Agamemnon or Achilles would keep Briseis, with no outcome ethically clean, deliberately echoing the absence of meaningful female autonomy..
Zuckerberg,[xliii] alongside personal research within incel forums, demonstrated how female submission[xliv] and sexual slavery[xlv] are imagined as historical ‘rights’. The fantasised return of ancient sexual economies is real, suggesting the Iliad (among other sources, such as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria) to be a playbook. The scene was a disturbing mirror that ancient misogyny remains not only legible, but aspirational to extremist ideologies today. Likewise, I was appalled to discover horrific statistics that demonstrate sexual violence endures as a strategic tool of war, paralleling historical accounts,[xlvi] guided by Dr König’s Visualising War and Peace project. The project exposed how ancient captivity narratives continue to shape modern representations of refugee-hood, often reinforcing the same dehumanising frames. Indeed, recent UN reports from the DRC, Gaza, and Ukraine[xlvii]confirm that sexual violence serves the maintenance of masculine hierarchies, and that women are war’s collateral. Militias, like Achilles and Agamemnon, continue to award women as trophies, observed in the testimonies of war ‘wives’.[xlviii] Players were visibly uncomfortable when forced to choose between two captors, many noting the unease of being reduced to a binary that mirrored systems they found abhorrent. Thus, I intended to echo—without sensationalising or exploiting—, such narratives, providing players with information regarding the experience of Congolese women in post-game discussion. In this discussion, several participants expressed shock at how easily they had accepted in-game logic that mirrored real-world war crimes. One noted that the game made abstract accounts feel disturbingly visceral.
Voice and Agency
Both Andromache and Cassandra’s episodes examine systematic ignorance of female voices resulting in agency loss. Contemporary research confirms women are frequently ignored in comparison to their male counterparts—across public[xlix] and private domains.[l] Thus, Andromache’s felt eerily resonant, her helplessness echoing the institutional deferrals contemporary women face. I drew upon Iliad 6.630-495, wherein Andromache begs Hector to stay with her, emphasising her dependance and her fate upon his death.
In voting whether Hector should return to battle or wait a night, I deliberately evoked the gendered discrimination[li] within the Athenian Boule, having only male characters vote—articulating the rhetorical exclusion of women as ‘war is a man’s game’. In each instance and despite opposition from the female characters, the male characters voted against Andromache’s wishes. I hadn’t anticipated such an overt reproduction of gendered disempowerment, although one player expressed ‘[confusion] as to what the better answer [was]’ exercising ethical tension. The outcome forced me to consider how easily players, even with modern sensibilities, reproduce ancient hierarchies when embedded in ‘authentic’ systems.
Cassandra’s prophecy was the most emotionally haunting and instructive episode to design. Only female characters heard Cassandra’s prophecy, shaping gameplay through awareness of future mechanics. All players were then required to vote on whether to acknowledge or ignore her warnings, understanding they could not alter fate, only how Cassandra was received. What I found most disturbing—and what players picked up upon—is how Cassandra’s experience mirrored contemporary receptions of female survivor testimony.[lii] Such discourse echoes contemporary scholarship, notably that the myth of Cassandra reinforces ‘that women will be punished if we refuse to have sex and that no one will believe us when we tell the truth about having been assaulted’.[liii] The following is discourse from game players:
Player A – ‘what’s the point of hearing a prophecy if its going to happen anyway?’
Player B – ‘[If] someones already been sexually assaulted, [and they] tell someone afterwards, it won’t change anything… But are you going to heal from the fact you were validated? Maybe a bit more. If you’re ignored…, you’re going to spiral and your life is going to be [harder]… words do matter,… it’s more about validation… Why not believe [Cassandra] and give her peace of mind. Because [doing so] does not delimit the fact that this is happening no matter what… We can’t help [the Trojans] because it’s destiny, [but] we can help her.’
Player A – ‘You make a very good point. She’s got a lifetime of suffering that could be eased.’
I was incredibly pleased that the game had evoked such progressive discussion, demonstrating both evolving perspectives and that the situation is applicable to contemporary parallels, and view this as scene as a highly affective.
Helen’s arc was hardest to write, as her ambitious agency[liv] required players to confront the ambiguity of her myth. The scene’s outcome depended on the player’s prologue alignment, since I aimed to have them complicit in her situation. Thus, I wished to evoke debate upon desire, coercion and lack of autonomy. If players aligned with Aphrodite, Helen was divinely coerced—or as a player coined it, ‘divine Stockholm Syndrome’.
I drew upon Cypria Frag. 4 and Iliad 3.380-420, in which Aphrodite forces Helen to go to Paris against her will and Helen expresses guilt and self-blame towards the loss of life. For Helen’s own speech, I adopted her self-deprecating language of Iliad 6.345-54. Indeed, I discovered, coercion—over enthusiasm—is encouraged within Red-Pill communities[lv] and that sexual boundaries are intentionally blurred.[lvi] As such, I deliberately included rhetoric from Red-Pill pick-up artists, and watched as players squirmed, recognising their inadvertent complicity. This confirmed my hypothesis that discomfort is a necessary pedagogical tool in confronting internalised tropes of consent and power. I was surprised when the debate turned to whether Helen’s (potential) death might serve a greater purpose, although immediately shut it down. Players developed the perspective she was ‘scapegoated by Agamemnon to conquer the Greeks’ and created contemporary parallels to male political scapegoating—in this instance, Monica Lewinsky. This interpretive leap affirmed the game’s ability to facilitate layered historical and contemporary critique.
Conclusion
This project entirely reframed the paradox I had initially romanticised, that indeed ancient cultures are both alien and familiar, yet this is not simply due to the enduring nature of the human condition, but that familiarity is often manufactured to support ideological supremacy. Designing the game deepened my understanding of reception as a mechanism, teaching me that ethics must be embedded in form and context. While I was proud of the moral complexity evoked, in future iterations I would have a more diverse (non-university student) demographic. Ultimately, this project affirmed that engaging critically with the ancient world is not only an academic pursuit but a foundational practice for the kind of ethical, historically literate work I hope to carry into my future career.
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[i] Haynes, 2020, 10
[ii] Sweeney, 2019, 1, 3
[iii] Morales, 2021, 13
[iv] Sweeney, 2019, 2-4
[v] Joseph, 2022
[vi] Zuckerberg, 2018
[vii] Winterer, 2002, 4
[viii] Poser, 2021
[ix] Zuckerberg, 2018, 10
[x] Barcellona, 2022, 171
[xi] Kennedy, 2019
[xii] Clebanov, 2018, 285
[xiii] “Capitol Terrorists Take Inspiration from Ancient World” 2021
[xiv] Tarik Abou-Chadi, 2024, 4-5
[xv] Dionis, 2025
[xvi] Craft, 2016, 349
[xvii] Shewale, 2023
[xviii] Freire, 1970, 30
[xix] Morales, 14
[xx] Useful Fiction, 2023
[xxi] Friere, 1970, 36
[xxii] Cameron, 2022, 91
[xxiii] Ibid. 93-94
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] Zuckerberg, 2018, 10
[xxvi] Barker, 2018, 39
[xxvii] Fabre-Serris, 2015, 34
[xxviii] Ibid.
[xxix] Ibid. 3
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi] König, 2025, 21
[xxxii] Ober, 2006, 3
[xxxiii] Haarman, 2023, 72
[xxxiv] Ibid. 12
[xxxv] Ibid. 24
[xxxvi] Tate (@Cobratate) 16/02/2025
[xxxvii] Ovid, Ars 1.269-274
[xxxviii] Rossetti, 2019
[xxxix] Bridges, 2023b, 43, 45-47, 56
[xl] Rekdel, 2021
[xli] Bennett, 2025
[xlii] Barker, 2018
[xliii] Zuckerberg, 2018, 156, 160
[xliv] NEETcel2023, 2023
[xlv] Moroccancel, 2025,
[xlvi] Bridges, 2023a, 170, 180, 202
[xlvii] “World News in Brief: Fresh Ukraine Attacks Condemned, Gaza Healthcare, DR Congo Needs Escalating | UN News” 2024
[xlviii] Bridges, 2023a, 180
[xlix] eClinicalMedicine, 2024
[l] Jaspan, 2022
[li] Unfortunately, due to game mechanics, I was unable to incorporate the impact of social hierarchy
[lii] Eswaran, 2018, 2-3
[liii] Morales, 2020, 62
[liv] Farron, 1979, 17,
Roisman, 2006, 14,
Lesser, 2019, 196-21
[lv] Zuckerberg, 2018, 100-101
[lvi] Ibid. 179