Kevin Wong (Harvard)
Antiquity for Sale: Game Engines, Asset Stores, and the Platformization of the Classical Imagination in Videogame Development
Friday June 16 at 17:00 (UK time)
Digital Classicist London 2023
Institute of Classical Studies, Room 349, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU and broadcast online.
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Accordingly, this paper examines some of the most important software tools employed by videogame developers:
game engines and, more specifically, their asset stores. Game engines are software development platforms that facilitate the collaboration of designers, programmers, artists, and writers in the making of videogames, while asset stores are online marketplaces
for the sale of game assets which are already optimized for integration with their respective game engines. Taking the Unity Asset Store and the Unreal Engine Marketplace as case studies, I chart a narrative of classical reception across three related developments:
(1) the platformization of game engines, (2) the concept of searchability in the context of asset stores, and (3) the selective reception of antiquity in game development.
Commercial path dependencies have channeled creative production onto dominant and hegemonic platforms like
Unity and Unreal Engine. The sociotechnical workings of their asset stores lead them to ontologically generate a selective vision of ‘the classical’ in contemporary videogame development. Accordingly, they do much more than mechanically facilitate the sale
of classically-inspired game assets; they actively mediate the flow of historical material, trafficking in cultural signals of demand, availability, and imaginative possibility.
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Dr Gabriel BODARD (he/him)
Reader in Digital Classics
Institute of Classical Studies / Digital Humanities Research Hub
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