Greek mythology in video games

In Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Vandewalle Reference Vandewalle2026), I present a structured model of the various ways in which video games deal with Greco-Roman mythology. Frequently considered as a monolithic subset of fantasy gaming, mythological video games are inherently diverse in their reception of mythology, and their exact ways of doing so can be tied to different modalities of mythology in antiquity. In this theoretical section, I survey these mythological ‘languages’, as they will later inform the educational workshops.

The predominant mode of mythology in video games is epic, firmly inspired by the spectacular, violent battles in epic texts like the Iliad and Theogony, the heroic journeys of the Odyssey, Argonautica, or Aeneid, and the many powerful characterisations of gods, heroes, and monsters found in these texts. It is these texts, and their individual storytelling matrices, that inspire projects like Smite, where mythological characters fight other characters with their extraordinary abilities, on battlegrounds that recall theomachic spaces like the Trojan War in the later books of the Iliad. The many violent fights between heroes and mythical monsters (or divine adversaries) in games, from Hades to God of War (2005–present, Santa Monica Studio), Immortals Fenyx Rising, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Apotheon (2015, Alientrap), A Total War Saga: Troy (2020, Creative Assembly Sofia), Age of Mythology (2002, Ensemble Studios), and many, many others all function within what Clare (Reference Clare2021) likewise called an ‘epic game tradition’, ‘wherein central tenets of the epic film tradition are borrowed and altered to fit the interactive process’ (p. 57). While Clare focuses on the connection between these games and some of the epic films that inspired them (e.g., Troy, Clash of the Titans [1981, Desmond Davis]), these inspirations go back much further, to epic texts in antiquity. To be sure, I do not claim that each of these games is necessarily a conscious or deliberate reception of epic poetry, but what I do defend is that these games offer an at least somewhat similar version of mythology as those found in epic texts.

Yet, epic is certainly not the only language of mythology in video games, and is frequently either complemented or even deliberately subverted by alternative modalities. Set in ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey includes many interactions with in-world inhabitants where players can deviate from the epic mode. For example, after helping people in various quests, the player’s actions will be described in mythological ways by those they helped: ‘The gods must have sent you to save me’, Odyssey’s in-game people often state. In those instances, players can choose whether to affirm the game’s mythological dimension – by selecting an answer à la ‘Yes, I was indeed sent by the gods’ – or to completely dispel the illusion by claiming that there were no gods involved at all, and that you just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This effects a rationalist, historicised version of the mythology that recalls works by authors like Palaephatus (On Unbelievable Tales) or Euhemerus (Sacred Inscription) who claimed that there were perfectly rational explanations for the supernatural elements found in mythology. Likewise, Immortals Fenyx Rising’s incongruously idiotic and informal versions of the gods rely on comedic mythological storytelling, which parallels the humanised mythological characterisations found in classical Athenian comedy or Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods (see also Vandewalle and Paprocki Reference Vandewalle and Paprocki2024). God of War, conversely, relies on tragedy, as it pits its protagonist, Kratos, against the overwhelming power of the gods, fate, and prophecy. Kratos takes up arms against the Olympians after being betrayed by Ares, who led him to kill his own wife and child, similar to the events of Euripides’ Heracles (see also Clare Reference Clare2021). Still different, various indie games – that is, games produced independently from the mainstream industry – refute the dominant, hegemonic frames of most mythological storytelling, and offer radically different versions of the stories. The Next Penelope (2015, Aurelien Regard) takes place in a futuristic odyssey, featuring not Odysseus but Penelope as its protagonist, who actively goes out to find her husband on his journey home. The game ultimately culminates in a poignant comment on heroism where Penelope reflects on the violence of her journey, vows not to become a second Odysseus, and decides not to return to the toxic society of Ithaca. The walking simulator Theseus (2021, Sisi Jiang) similarly problematises its titular character, who is represented here not so much as a triumphant hero but as an unheroic protagonist who abandons his partner – Asterion himself here, not Ariadne – in his sleep. These games align with contemporary movements of revisionism, and serve as counterpoints to the epic mode. Finally, many of these games also function as ludic mythographies of Greek and Roman myths: they collect, reference, and present mythological stories in ways not too different from works of mythographers like Apollodorus and Hyginus. As such, mythological video games are more diverse than is perhaps often realised. Each of these modes is explored in more depth in Vandewalle (Reference Vandewalle2026).

The identification of these games with ancient languages of storytelling allows for their integration in classroom contexts. Students who read Lucian – an author whose Atticist writing style can prove relatively accessible for secondary school students – could, for example, be asked to either play (a section of) Immortals Fenyx Rising, or watch and review several clips about it (e.g., reviews, cutscenes, walkthroughs; see Vincent Reference Vincent2021) to reflect on how the game and the text converge or diverge in their respective representations of the Olympians. How does the tone of the game’s dialogues match Lucian’s more colloquial prose? How does the game compare to more serious or grander versions of these characters, found, for example, in Hesiod’s Theogony or Athenian drama? Likewise, students engaging with Greek tragedy could be asked to perform the same exercise in relation to God of War: where does the characterisation of God of War’s Kratos overlap with tragic figures like Heracles, or others like Ajax or Oedipus? What does the presentation of the Greek pantheon as antagonistic to the main protagonist say about the position of the gods in Greek religious thought? In all these examples, it is important that the inclusion of a particular game does not solely serve the purpose of making the class more entertaining for students: this could be a welcome byproduct but should not be the only intended goal (McCall Reference McCall2011). Indeed, bringing in games just for the sake of fun can even have the reverse effect, where students are suddenly forced to think seriously about items they usually associate with leisure (e.g., Wainwright Reference Wainwright2014). Ideally, the game is brought into the classroom as a text to be studied in and of itself, to be juxtaposed with the ancient material as a way to highlight the legacy of the past, its transformations after its traditional endpoint, and its position as both an ideological text and a medium of entertainment in contemporary culture.

Workshop #1: epic characters in Smite 2

My first case study concerns a workshop which I have organised multiple times since 2025 in Flemish secondary schools, in collaboration with the Greek Outreach Team at Ghent University. Since the workshop requires at least some familiarity with mythological characters and basic research skills from the students, the module is primarily targeted at ages 13–18, which coincides roughly with years two to six in secondary schools. However, it can equally be adapted for younger audiences, as I have organised it once in the context of a primary school, too.

In this workshop, students (in groups of two or three) are asked to create their own (concept for a) mythological character in a video game. The workshop is based around the Smite series. In Smite and Smite 2 (2024–present, Titan Forge Games), teams of up to five players each select playable characters from a variety of mythological figures and pantheons to battle against other teams in inter-mythological fights on spectacular battlegrounds. The first Smite game houses 130 characters – both widely known (e.g., Anubis, Thor, Zeus) and more obscure (e.g., Bake Kujira, Ah Puch, Martichoras) – from 16 pantheons. In 2024, Smite 2 launched in an early access ‘beta’ mode, promoted as a sequel to the first game featuring many of the characters from the original Smite while bringing in new characters at the same time. Both games are free-to-play, although the free versions do not grant access to all characters on offer. Acquiring more characters requires either in-game resources gathered by playing the game (which is free, but time-intensive) or a one-time purchase with real-world currency which unlocks the entire roster. In terms of the mythology framework above, Smite stands firmly in the category of epic: its (pan)theomachic battles between different gods, presentation of characters with spectacular abilities, and general focus on divine power align well with Homeric or Hesiodic mythological precedents.

Inspired both by Beydler’s (Reference Beydler, Draycott and Cook2022) application of Smite at a university level, and by ‘Build-a-God’ events at Smite’s eSports tournaments, the workshop asks students to think about how mythological characters like gods, heroes, mortals, and monsters translate to the medium of video games, all by using Smite as inspiration for designing a blueprint for a new character. First, I allow the students to get a sense of how the game works. I bring in my gaming laptop, connect a gameplay controller to it via Bluetooth, and pass the controller around to allow students to play Smite 2 for themselves. I prefer Smite 2 over Smite because of its higher audiovisual fidelity and the fact that its character roster is currently smaller than the original Smite’s, meaning that it is easier to imagine characters that are not already in the game. Each of the characters can be played in ‘Practice Mode’, which leads to an offline digital environment where the game’s characters can be tested without the presence and pressure of other players. By setting the god’s level to 20 in the Practice menu, the character gains access to the final versions of all their abilities, so these can be showcased to the students. I then let students walk around the training area, where they can use their abilities to fight enemy Minions, a Tower, and, ultimately, an enemy Titan. Each time a player is defeated by the Titan (who is not easily killed solo, or at least not without prior experience and player-character customisation), I leave the Practice Mode and showcase a different character, which I repeat around three or four times. While they play, I ask the students questions about the characters they have selected: ‘How can you tell this is Zeus?’, ‘Why is Hera associated with peacocks?’, ‘Where do you think this ability comes from?’, and so on. The goal of this introductory demo is to allow students to gain an initial sense of Smite 2’s mythology reception, and to get them thinking about how their prior knowledge of mythology is represented (or not!) in the game.

After playing the game, it is time for the students themselves to start designing. The workshop asks students to design their own Greco-Roman character in Smite or Smite 2, one that does not already exist within it (hence the preference to focus on the sequel, which is currently still in development). During this process, the students are asked to research stories, feats, attributes, and other elements associated with their selected character – thereby exploring the mythology – and to take notes in a document via Word or Google Docs. This process covers several steps, through which they are guided by an example of my own:

• • First, they select the character they wish to design. This could be any god, hero, mortal, or monster from Greco-Roman mythology. The example that I use to guide the students is the wind deity Aeolus, known from the Odyssey. I briefly inform them about the god and show them some images that support his visual characterisation (e.g., François Boucher’s Juno Asking Aeolus to Release the Winds (1769)). While there are a couple of usual suspects in the characters that students select (e.g., Theseus, Ariadne, Odysseus), I have also been surprised by some perhaps nicher inclusions (e.g., Tithonus, Morpheus).

• • Second, the students categorise their character in a distinct ‘class’. Smite houses all of its characters in one of five distinct character classes, each of which structures the dominant ludic characterisation of the figure. Assassins (e.g., Thor, Mercury, Ratatoskr) can quickly move or fly across the battlefield to deal a short burst of damage before having to retreat, whereas Guardians (e.g., Athena, Terra, Ymir) are much slower, deal much less damage, yet have much higher defensive skills. Hunters (e.g., Cupid, Chiron, Hou Yi) primarily deal damage with their basic abilities (usually ranged ones, such as bows and arrows), while Mages (e.g., Ra, Hera, Zeus) utilise more supernatural powers (like thunderbolts, solar beams, magic spells, and so on). Warriors (e.g., Gilgamesh, Hercules, Achilles), finally, are usually associated with war or heroism and present a middle way between offensive and defensive capabilities. For Aeolus, I choose Mage, since his wind-based powers are primarily based on magic. The goal of this exercise is to get the students thinking about the particular identity of the character they have selected, and about the type of figure that this character is. Theseus, for example, makes for an easy Warrior since the Warrior class is largely populated by heroic characters; Morpheus, on the other hand, could work as a Mage.

• • Third, the students think of the appropriate abilities for their characters. Each Smite character has five attacks: one basic attack, used continuously; three (main) abilities, each of which requires specific activation; and one ultimate ability, which is the character’s strongest ability, but which cannot be activated as much as the others. Here, the students research particular myths associated with their character and think about how these would translate to particular gameplay abilities. Aeolus’s basic attack could be sending forth a gust of wind. His three abilities could consist of a larger wind blast, trapping his enemies in the bag of winds, or summoning his many children to fight for him. For his ultimate, he could summon a tornado, bringing Odysseus’s boat down on his enemies (thereby transporting it from Hom. Od. 10.54–55). Likewise, the Minotaur could rush with his horns at his enemies or hit his adversaries with his labrys, while Demeter could freeze the battleground and any who walk on it.

• • Fourth (and this is where the workshop starts to become a bit more technical), the students assign each of their abilities a particular quantitative statistic (see also Cameron Reference Cameron, Mckee and Wolin2022). Games are frequently numerical affairs: wins or losses are based on point systems, combative gameplay relies on hit points and health bars, and so on. For the workshop, the basic attack can exist between 0 and 50 damage points, the abilities between 50 and 100, while the ultimate can go up to 150. I ask the students to be fair in the points they assign – no one likes to play against an overpowered enemy – and to consider the character’s personality and character class while doing so.

After these four steps, the students have a ludic blueprint for their character, based on self-performed mythology research and creative engagement. With each step, I go around the room and ask students to state and clarify their choices, from ‘Why did you use this ability?’ to ‘Which stories did you think of in particular?’. In the workshop’s final phase, I then have the student groups play against each other with their characters in an ‘analog’ version of Smite that I designed, thus staging their own epic theomachies. They battle each other in turns and try to defeat their opponents by bringing their health down to zero. Assassins carry 580 health points, Guardians 700, Hunters 600, Mages 520, and Warriors 660 – these are numbers I calculated to reflect Smite’s character classes. Every turn consists of one basic attack and one ability. Every three turns, they can use the ultimate ability instead of one of the main abilities. The basic attack always hits for the total of the points that the students assigned (that is, the value between 0 and 50), but for the other abilities the students roll a 20-sided die (so-called icosahedral or d20 dice) which determines the amount of damage it will inflict (to counteract students just always using the highest ability they assigned). Throwing a 1 implies that the attack misses (= 0%), throwing 2 to 5 means that the attack deals 25% of its possible value (i.e., an attack calculated at 80 will deal 20 damage), 6 to 10 means 50%, 11 to 15 equals 75%, and 16 to 19 does the full 100%. A natural 20 is considered a critical hit and inflicts 150%. The dice throws introduce an element of chance, but also engage their mathematical skills. Usually, I ask the students to open the calculator on their laptop so they can easily determine how much damage they did. I have them write down the total damage of their turn on a handout, which they then use to play the match. After a certain set of turns, one team will be victorious.

The workshop has several goals. First, by asking them to perform their own internet research, the workshop allows them to engage with Greek myth in a creative and perhaps even personal way, to learn more about either completely new characters or stories, or to expand their knowledge of those in which they are already interested. As Holmes-Henderson (Reference Holmes-Henderson and Maurice2021) argues, the teaching of (Greco-Roman) mythology can lead to the development of various important literacies: as mythological stories, names, and terms are part of the history, identity, and cultural vocabulary of various countries in the world, familiarising students with these stories enhances their global knowledge. By allowing students to choose the characters they build, they might be more invested in the workshop and thus be more eager to learn. Their use of the internet can also enhance heuristic skills or draw them to important websites. Second, the workshop lets students think creatively about the ludic translatability of mythological characters, stories, and attributes (see also Houghton Reference Houghton, Wright, Donald and Webber2026 for historical game mechanics), and, by adding game statistics, it highlights the numerical, algorithmic processes that lie at the basis of games and play. This, effectively, means teaching through reception: it can lead to discussions about how popular media portray and transform mythological stories, about the formal affordances and limitations of different media (like film, television, video games), and what these receptions in turn reveal about ourselves: as Bakogianni (Reference Bakogianni2018) writes, ‘classical reception is at its most productive when it urges us to interrogate our own relationship with the classical past, which is a valuable lesson to impart to all our students’ (p. 616). The consciously informal and collaborative nature of the workshop can facilitate such conversations rather well. While I have continued to refine and develop the workshop with each iteration – it is not necessarily ‘finished’ in its current form – I believe it already works to let students engage with mythology in a playful manner. The workshop usually lasts for around 1h–1h30, and even if we do not always get to the testing phase, or to complete it, it nevertheless has students play around creatively with mythology in the design phases.

There are some practical risks and potential pitfalls of this workshop. The first are practical or technological in nature: even if the demo characters are only introduced via Practice Mode, logging into Smite or Smite 2 requires a Wi-Fi connection, which is important to take into account. The games are not the most technologically demanding titles, but a relatively standard or modern set-up is recommended. Both games start with a non-optional tutorial, so it is best to test the game before organising the workshop. Second, I have observed a potential risk for sexism during play. In one of the sessions, when asked to select a character for the introductory demos, male students loudly proclaimed their wish to play as Aphrodite, a goddess who is frequently represented as either scantily clad (e.g., Smite, God of War III [2011, Santa Monica Studio]) or fully nude (e.g., Hades) in games (see Ciaccia Reference Ciaccia, Draycott and Cook2022 among other discussions). While playing as her – and empowered by their possession of the remotely connected controller – the students then repeatedly asked their classmate player to ‘turn around real quick’, so they could get a glimpse of the goddess’s body underneath her clothes. In that same session, the next goddess that we played was Artemis, who – as a virgin goddess from antiquity – is fully clothed in the game. Since the student who played Artemis was the only one to be able to defeat the Titan, the character was described by one of the aforementioned students as ‘an overpowered little puppet’. Whether the term ‘puppet’ was used in line with its use in game studies or game journalism as a synonym for the character’s avatar (e.g., Aarseth Reference Aarseth1997; Klevjer Reference Klevjer2006) or as a sexist term to demean a female agent to the status of a doll to be played with cannot be completely determined, but there is a strong possibility for the latter option. Third, I have found that the workshop sometimes becomes more complex for students when the statistics are introduced and the playtests begin. A rowdy classroom that does not take in everything the instructor says – which, at least in my experience, is frequently the case the moment video games enter the room – might not fully know what to do once the workshop gets more technical. In that case, I have found it best to repeat the instructions not for the full class, but for the particular groups instead.

Workshop #2: mythological quests in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Story Creator

The second workshop, which I organised for three cohorts totalling around 60 students at the 2023 Dag van het Grieks (“Day of the Greek Language”) at Sint-Lievenscollege in Ghent, utilises the Story Creator mode that was released in 2019 for the well-known 2018 video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The 11th main game in the long-standing Assassin’s Creed series, Odyssey travels back to ancient Greece at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431–422 BCE) and offers players a long journey in search of the protagonist’s family. Odyssey received critical and popular acclaim for its detailed and meticulous recreation of ancient Greece, covering well-known sites like the Acropolis or the Sanctuary of Delphi, alongside comparably niche environments like the Melissani Cave in Kefalonia or the Oracle of Trophonios in Boeotia. The game has been very well researched (see Vandewalle Reference Vandewalle2026 for an overview), and the Story Creator has also received scholarly attention (Cameron Reference Cameron, Champion and Hiriart2023). The Story Creator is a browser-based complement to the game which lets users employ Odyssey’s digital assets, character models, and virtual world to write their own choice-based, multi-path narratives. Users can select interactable characters, script dialogue lines (potentially equipped with behavioural animations, but devoid of voice acting), create combat scenarios, and design elaborately branching storylines with different endings. Cameron (Reference Cameron, Champion and Hiriart2023) has previously offered the Story Creator as an optional creative assignment for students, where students convey a specific argument about antiquity (e.g., urban spaces) through a self-created story in Odyssey’s elaborate world. For more practical information on the Story Creator, I therefore recommend Cameron (Reference Cameron, Champion and Hiriart2023).

For this workshop, I wrote three (Dutch) short stories (ca. 20 minutes) in Odyssey’s Story Creator, each with a different mythological emphasis. The first one was called An *Epic* Battle and reimagined the famed contest between Homer and Hesiod as a modern-day rap battle. The player meets both poets in Orchomenos in Boeotia, not far from Mount Helicon. Upon learning that thieves have stolen the poets’ texts, they are sent on a quest to retrieve these works. On this journey, the players hear various Greek myths (including the Odyssey, the Titanomachy, and more) through interactions with side characters. Having collected all the necessary information, the player then returns to the poets, but finds them drunk as a result of having over-indulged in ouzo. During the contest, the player then helps the poets fill in the gaps in their stories, based on what they have learned. Inspired by Paul Veyne’s (Reference Veyne1983) Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leur mythes?, the second story was called The Greeks and their Myths, and had the player meet a time-travelling archaeologist named Dakota Smith – an admittedly cheeky parallel to Indiana Jones, or the Indy-inspired character Nevada Smith from Pharaoh’s Tomb (1990, Micro F/X Software). Dakota wishes to know more about how the Greeks conceptualised their mythology and sends the player to meet various authors and thinkers in Athens. Players find the rationalist Palaephatus in conversation with the mythographer Apollodorus, listen to Xenophanes and his critiques about the Homeric gods, and hear an audience member express their concerns about an ‘inaccurate’ portrayal of Greek myth in a drama play they attended, only to have Euripides show up and tell them that ancient playwrights also engaged in reception and creative invention. An optional encounter in this questline featured Plato, who informs the player that Atlantis – the supposed setting of the play – was not an actual ancient myth but a thought experiment he invented. The final story, Were the Greek Heroes Really So Heroic? took place on Naxos and was inspired by Ovid’s Heroides and contemporary feminist revisionism. It had players listen to Ariadne, Medea, and Penelope, who recounted their version of the myths in which they feature. The goal of this story was to question some of the ‘heroic’ behaviours of Theseus, Jason, and Odysseus, ultimately leading to an encounter where the students voiced their own evaluation of these characters via dialogue options.

Each story opened with an introduction to the narrative, then moved to branching quest encounters where players chose which part of the quest they engaged with first (e.g., starting with Palaephatus and Apollodorus, with Xenophanes, and so on), and culminated in a conclusion where the covered mythological topics were repeated by the player and discussed with the initial quest giver as a way to test the students’ retention of the discussed subjects. The branching narratives allowed students to play the quests in their order of preference, meaning they could prioritise stories that they already liked or wanted to know more about. By including dialogue scenes where the students could express their own opinions about, for example, Theseus’s treatment of Ariadne, the learning experience became more personal, which I believed would help with their investment in the stories. In the time span of the workshop, students were able to play at least one, and usually two of the offered stories. Taking after the variety of mythological languages noted above, the workshop intended to introduce students to different, sometimes conflicting interpretations of Greek myths: The Greeks and their Myths explicitly featured several Greek thinkers, and Were the Greek Heroes Really So Heroic? nuanced the epic portrayals encountered in An *Epic* Battle. Indeed, central to the workshop was not to take the myths at face value, but to foster awareness of their constructed nature through particular generic lenses, philosophical frameworks, and artistic projects. Rather than familiarising students with ‘the’ story of Theseus and the Minotaur, I wanted to showcase how Greek thinkers conceptualised the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, from Palaephatus’s rationalist interpretation of it (Palaeph. 2) to Ovid’s emphasis on the feelings of Ariadne in Heroides 10.

For this workshop, too, there are some risks to take into account. The first relates to the intersection of Odyssey’s open world design and the participatory nature of video games: once they are given the possibility to roam Odyssey’s lush game world – seeing as the Story Creator cannot demarcate certain areas as out of bounds – various players neglected the story I had written, and wandered off to pursue their own, usually non-academic interests. Likewise, while the Story Creator naturally equips the player’s character with a diverse set of abilities, some novice players had difficulty traversing the game world and dealing with incoming attacks from either scripted (e.g., the thieves in An *Epic* Battle) or spontaneous adversaries (e.g., wolves who happened to roam Mount Helicon too). In those cases, I lent a helping hand and removed the obstacle for the student so they could continue with the story. Second, some players – most of whom were around 15 years old – felt that some of the included myths were too close to the stories that they had already learned about in their classes. This diminished their engagement, as they felt like they were already familiar with some of the narratives – meaning that, for some students, my goal of introducing them to ideas about the myths rather than the myths themselves was not, or perhaps only partially, successful. Finally, there were practical difficulties related to uploading the designed storylines to the game itself. After designing a story in the Story Creator, the natural course of action is to ‘upload’ it to the application’s story database where, theoretically, all players should be able to access it. However, when trying to do so, I repeatedly ran into an endless loading screen that would not let me complete the upload. (In the meantime, the uploads have been successful.) As a solution, it is recommended to log into the available console with the educator’s own Ubisoft account and to play the stories in ‘Draft’ mode. Alternatively, it is possible to create a shareable link to the story which can help make them available on other devices. It is also worth pointing out that, differently from the Smite workshop, the Odyssey experience requires more elaborate technological support. I was fortunate to be able to host this workshop at a school with a dedicated investment in game-based learning and nine available Xbox consoles. Most secondary school laptops might not be strong enough, so it is important to check their technological capacities beforehand. Since the Story Creator is only accessible to players once the first episode of Odyssey’s main story quest is completed (that is, leaving Kefalonia and arriving in Megaris), this could serve as a good technical test.