December, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now January.  Happy New Year!

Alas, I open with news that is somewhat of a bummer.  As I noted last month, I had a campus visit for a very exciting academic job.  Alas of the four candidates, my understanding is that I was the second choice...and the first choice accepted the offer.  The campus visit went very well, there was a lot of enthusiasm for me, but in this game there is no prize for second place.

At this point that means while there are still a few hanging loose ends on the job market, chances are this year is going to be a bust.  On the one hand obviously that is disappointing. It is very frustrating to feel like I am always scrambling to 'catch up' in a race where I was always behind: the UNC 'pedigree' wasn't good enough to get me in the door early on, so I had to 'prove' myself, but now that I've done that the degree is 'stale' and many programs are simply uninterested in someone who has been out for more than 2 or 3 years.

On the other hand, we got very close, which suggests that given the right department we might be able to land something.  The alchemy there is tough, of course: we need a department that is research oriented, but not stuck up on pedigree or time-from-degree, which values public scholarship and needs an ancient and/or military historian.  And it has to be a position with a moderate enough teaching load to make research and blogging still possible (so 3-3 at most, more likely 2-2).  That's obviously a very small number of places, but perhaps not zero places, so we can keep trying.

In the meantime, I'll have to approach my current department to see what teaching they need done next year.  I expect they'll still need me to teach at least the military history courses (they are currently hiring an ancient historian, so perhaps not the ancient history courses; my application for that opening did not merit an interview) as the ROTC cadets require those courses to commission and so they must be offered every year.  That will keep me with an academic affiliation, access to a library and so on.

In the meantime, I am working on a chapter on the reception of the ancient world in video games for an upcoming companion volume and that's going to be my focus for basically all of January as I am now running hard against the deadline (an ill-timed and quite nasty cold in late December set me back on my writing schedule).

My argument in the chapter is going to be that, whereas the range of topics and experiences that historical games addresses has expanded massively over the last decade or so, the historical vision of the ancient Mediterranean remains much more limited, focused almost entirely on elite military leadership and what I am terming 'monumental urbanism.'  I'm focusing on two genres in particular: state-level strategy games (particularly TW: Rome II and Imperator) and city-builders (Caesar IV, Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh: A New Era), potentially with some very cursory references to the two 'ancient' Assassin's Creed titles (Origins and Odyssey).

My analytical frame is to note that both of these kinds of games are in a sense 'simulations' (in fancy academic games speak, 'conceptual simulations' - Adam Chapman's term) and that part of the meaning conveyed by the mechanics of such games (their 'procedural rhetoric' - Jeremiah McCall's term - mastering the academic lingo of this field has been a chore) is in what they choose to simulate and what they choose to leave out.  The focus is the message as it were, saying "this was important history, this was not."

And mechanically, the state-level strategy games are very strongly focused on military affairs over other concerns.  You cannot, for instance, in TW: Rome II, end up with a civil war because of your legal policy over citizenship - the thing that was famously at issue in the Social War (91-87BC) and Sulla's first march on Rome (88BC), because citizenship and popular politics at Rome aren't simulated.  TW: Rome II and Imperator don't even have elections (though Imperator at least has a process for law changes, thinly simulated).  But they do have elaborately simulated military components, of course.  Both games, in both their narrative framing as well as game mechanics push the player to view military affairs as the primary concern, the lens through which all other mechanics are assessed.

Likewise, whereas the broader genre of city-builders has gotten interested in all kinds of cities (villages and towns, like in Banished and Farthest Frontier, the interlocking systems of Cities: Skylines, transit in Cities in Motion, industry and development in games like Tropico, etc), ancient city-builders remain focused on monumental urbanism, that is the urban space either as a tool for raising armies or a canvas for the display of royal power (many of these games actually split the campaign path between scenarios where the goal is raising armies and scenarios where the goal is monumental construction).  One need merely note the names of the current ancient citybuilders - Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh - to note the difference in focus from something like Banished, Going Medieval, or Rimworld: the latter are much more concerned in their framing and mechanics on the lives of regular people in these cities.

I plan to close by arguing that it is striking that even as the games featuring other periods of history have moved on to consider economics (Patrician, The Guild, Port Royale), small units of common soldiers (Battle Brothers, Wartales), farming economies (Banished, Farthest Frontier) or daily life (Pentiment, Kingdom Come: Deliverance), the ancient world remains 'stuck' in a very 1990s Civ1 and Caesar1 mold.  I argue (very briefly) that this is because that it's because the public imagination of the ancient world remains similarly stuck, viewing ancient cultures primarily through the prism of state power.

In any case, that's the plan.  I've also got a few podcasts recently recorded coming out soon (one with Drachinifel and one with HistoryHack) and another I'm recording shortly (with the Partial Historians) which should start coming out in January and subsequently.  I'll be sure to holler about those when they appear.

Finally, as I write this quite a few people on Twitter (no, I will not call it 'X') seem to be enjoying a tweet thread I wrote responding to someone claiming that VIRILITAS (lit: 'manliness') was a "maximally desirable quality in a man" in ancient Rome.  Since I know a lot of you aren't on Twitter (I don't blame you) here is a link to the thread on the thread-reader site so you can read it without needing to have Twitter.

And that's the month!  Classes are starting up next week (U.S. Naval History again as last Spring, plus another section of Ancient Mediterranean World) so I'm getting ready to start teaching again shortly.  I hope to try to make time for a new ACOUP Senate poll and open thread here in the next couple of weeks too.  I have been meaning to for some time now, but keep getting distracted.

Here's to a happy and productive new year for all of us!