CHAPTER 8
Katherine Beydler
Introduction
SMITE: Battleground of the Gods is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) developed by Titan Forge Games and published by Hi-Rez Studios. Other games in the genre include League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) and DOTA 2. SMITE draws around 25,000 players a day on Steam and has about 30 million unique players worldwide.1 No continuous narrative underpins gameplay, which takes place in individual matches lasting thirty to sixty minutes. While playable characters in MOBA games sometimes draw on historical or mythological characters, they are generally invented for the game. SMITE’s playable characters are directly inspired by gods from sixteen groups of world religions and mythologies. About a third come from either the Greek or Roman pantheons,2 and fifteen of those are female. Unlike many games that rely on the history or mythology of the ancient Mediterranean to inspire story arcs, SMITE uses it only to inspire character design and aspects of the game environment.
In this chapter, I argue that this flexible but narrow form of reception offers an interpretation of women from classical antiquity nuanced in its presentation of femininity and emphatic about the diverse and powerful roles played by women in ancient mythology. Because SMITE decouples reception of ancient myth from adherence to particular narrative outcomes and norms (e.g. the rise and fall of Rome), it focuses instead on important thematic elements belonging to individual characters. This gives players an opportunity to get to know the ‘feeling’ of a goddess without all the details of her story and often expands character design away from romantic relationships. Additionally, because about half of the game’s playable characters are women, female characters assume more prominence than they do in many other video games. On the Battleground of the Gods, all enter as equals.
I will also demonstrate that this narrow, thematic reception in SMITE’s characters makes them an excellent avenue for starting discussions of reception in the classroom. Students do not have to consider an overwhelming number of story elements as they begin to analyse how the myths they know from ancient texts and images are used in a game setting. Translating a variety of primary sources into a game character is a challenging but limited exercise that students can explore as critics and designers; the deceptively straightforward process teaches them to ask questions about purpose, audience and author in both the ancient text and modern game. I will share teaching strategies for introducing characters from SMITE to the classroom using in addition to discussing the reception of women in the game.
Game and gameplay
In the most popular mode of gameplay, ‘Conquest’, two teams of five players choose characters and compete to destroy their opposition’s base encampment, with the goal of defeating the enemy ‘Titan’, a non-player boss character. There is no continuity between matches. Each playable character in SMITE has five unique abilities. These, along with the physical character design, voice acting and speech lines, create the entire apparatus through which players interact with the story of that character in-game.
Game design: Variations on a theme
Many games that draw on the ancient Mediterranean themes do so directly and take the majority of narrative and environmental elements from mythological or historical texts. Turn-based games like Civilization loosely follow historical state-foundation and war narratives and rely on ‘a mixture of sheer facts and dates, and violent conflict presented in excruciating detail’ to immerse players in the game’s story framework.3 Open-world roleplaying games like Assassin’s Creed or the 2018 God of War include invented elements or alternative historical storylines for the sake of gameplay while still including characters and settings from ancient myth and history.
As others in this volume mention, many of these games also subordinate or simplify the role of women in the past. Design often relies on straightforward martial narratives, which rarely feature women extensively, or on stories that cast women in roles stereotypical of modern or ancient prejudices. Orellana Figueroa discusses in his introduction in Chapter 2 how historical games often reflect popular knowledge about the past as well as shape it. For players, this sometimes means that historical accuracy is less important in design than creating a perception of contextual authenticity, which relies on audience impression.4 Perhaps for this reason, or because of an erroneous belief in a predominantly male player base, male protagonists are far more common in general than women.5
As I will discuss below, game designers must make choices that resonate with their audiences in a process not unlike the writing of history: ‘Development teams will operate in ways like historians in that they take “story elements” and play with those elements to create a narrative based on the history in question.’6 It would be possible to hire historical consultants (as many game developers do), extensively consult primary and secondary sources and still create a product that included few or no women.7 In any case, as Elliott and Kapell write, designing a game to be as objectively accurate as possible is difficult and not necessarily desirable and would not make games inherently more fun or even educational.8 One of the exciting things about playing games based on the ancient world is the opportunity to become an architect of history instead of a passive recipient. Assassin’s Creed lead designer Alex Hutchinson shared in an interview that for game design, ‘history is our playground’.9 When that includes few or no female characters, however, a significant dimension is lost.
Connecting players and reception
SMITE, unlike the games described above, has no narrative constraints in its reception of women, allowing for considerable interpretation on the axes of development and gameplay. In SMITE, a character’s model and abilities are drawn from what game designers choose as the central point in her mythological background, constituting a conscious act of reception not based on accuracy so much as the desire for a particular impact – the feeling of authenticity mentioned above. To drive interest in the game and excitement for new characters, gamemakers connect players to their decisions and make the act of reception transparent. SMITE regularly releases ‘God Reveal’ videos beginning with a lore section introducing viewers to the mythological background behind the design. In order to create cohesive characters, their abilities are explained via the central elements taken from the story presented in the lore. All gods also have a title that draws from this theme (e.g., ‘Discordia, Goddess of Strife’ or ‘Nike, Goddess of Victory’). These videos rack up views; the release video for Terra, for example, has almost 700,000 on YouTube, showing considerable audience engagement. This alone sets SMITE apart in terms of representation; Cole discusses in Chapter 13 how women are sometimes omitted from even promotional materials.
Although designers do not often cite a particular author’s version of a myth, videos seem to draw often on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Other sources from Homer to Plutarch are evident as well, as detailed below. In many cases, multiple sources are combined to create a character that has a cohesive kit designed around one or two themes. This flattens the complexity of these goddesses and the relationships of the sources describing them to a certain extent. However, the simplification also makes their stories more accessible to users and, by focusing on famous or at least consistent thematic elements, helps players engage with a game environment containing at least some familiar characters.
HiRez Studios presents opportunities to connect with the reception process in addition to lore videos. Livestreamed development update shows on Twitch feature members of the R&D team, who explain the game design process behind upcoming gods, including how their lore inspired their kit. These include Q&A with Twitch viewers, giving players direct access to the creative process of reception. New playable characters are added regularly over time, and SMITE players frequently suggest new deities. A search on the Reddit community devoted to the game reveals several posts with detailed requests, including a post about adding the Dacian pantheon featuring extensive quotes from Herodotus. This feedback loop is effective; for example, the Norse god Heimdallr was requested often before his addition. This creates a relationship between audience, game design and source material that makes SMITE’s creative interaction with ancient Graeco-Roman source material more nuanced than gameplay might initially suggest. As mentioned above, the ability to show and discuss the process of design also makes SMITE useful in classrooms focusing on the reception of ancient myth. I will discuss some of the pedagogical benefits of games before discussing SMITE specifically.
Teaching ancient women through SMITE
In a definition modified with reference to Gee (2007), Plass, Homer and Kinzer (2015) and Shute and Ke (2012), game-based learning involves adapting or integrating games or game elements to instructional content with clear learning objectives for the purposes of active learning, increased student motivation, or pedagogical innovation. Video games represent a valuable avenue not only for active learning but also as a way to help students relate to course content, which is often delivered in a lecture/discussion/exam format that leaves relatively little room for creative engagement.10 Using games as teaching tools (even if there is insufficient time for students to engage in gameplay) can facilitate the creation of new learning activities and assessments, both summative and formative. Instructors may worry that teaching in this way will lead to a greater focus on fun than learning.11 Choicemaking in gameplay of games drawing on history and myth, however, or analysis of game design choices, can function as a critical tool for learning about the past.12
Instructors of classical studies have begun to embrace this in a variety of subfields, perhaps most commonly in archaeology and civilization courses.13 Immersing students in a gamified version of an ancient environment helps build a connection with material that can otherwise seem remote and invite students into formal study of a discipline which they may previously have encountered only casually via things like video games.14 Rassalle writes that debating the interpretive choices made in design and gameplay can foster conversations about aspects of the ancient world that are often difficult to teach via textual sources alone; educators can utilize the student’s ability to manipulate game elements to ‘stress the complexities of certain events of the past by giving an open-ended and unpredictable simulation’.15 Games can provide immersive access to environments in the ancient world that are not easy to access via texts or images alone.
Games also make an accessible medium for students to begin considering reception studies. Simply opening a learning activity by asking why there are so many board and video games drawing on ancient Greece and Rome, and further examining what common genres and themes exist among them, facilitates a conversation about the role of the ancient world in popular culture and the continuing importance of its study. Students can then begin to describe their own ‘previously tacit cultural knowledge’ about the past and understand their own progress and new learning about the ancient world more effectively, whether casually in class discussions or formally in written assessments.16
This teaching method helps introduce discussion about gender roles in class artifacts (whether literature or games). Teaching about women in classics is often treated as a ‘tourist topic’ that can ‘reinforce unquestioned binaries of power whereby (citizen) men act in ancient history while women (and others) are objects acted upon.’17 SMITE, whose characters are not restrained by even a loose narrative, offers a flexible tool for teaching about the characterization of women in ancient sources and in modern receptions. In SMITE, female and male characters have equal representation and no variance in power level or agency. A conversation about the possible differences this might make in the perception of gender roles for players fosters reflection about the roles women play both in ancient sources and in modern representations.
The relative transparency of the design of the goddesses also makes the conversation about reception accessible to students and models for them one approach to a creative textual interpretation. At the same time, the narrow focus of design around a particular theme allows a thorough discussion of details and different possible approaches. A popular learning activity in my myth class includes showing a 5-minute ‘Lore’ video from SMITE, accompanied by an exercise in which students are asked to reimagine the character focused on a different story element or characteristic chosen from class readings, and always yields creative results. Discussion questions can include: Why did the designers choose that particular element of a character to focus on, and not another? What was their perception of that god before coming to class, and how did it change after both reading ancient texts and analysing modern receptions? Did they think the author of a text read in class would approve of the design, and why/why not?
This learning activity is not limited to gods and goddesses; encouraging students to imagine historical figures as video game characters in the MOBA model is also effective. I also ask students to design characters from the perspectives of their peers (for example, how would Hera design Zeus?). Although an exercise like this can certainly be filled with some amount of levity, it can also prompt meaningful conversations about how women are portrayed in both ancient and modern media. It also creates enduring learning and a sense of disciplinary belonging as students become engaged and are encouraged not only to recall facts but to analyse mythological stories and translate their analysis from one format to another.
This process offers students agency that ‘allows not only the interpretation of representation but also the manipulation of it. This access to doing … allows digital games to work not only as representations of the past but also as systems for historying, granting access to historical practices.’18 In general, instructors may find it useful to use model like backwards course design to pinpoint how and why the incorporation of games as teaching tools will further student learning. In the examples above, I wanted students both to demonstrate recall mastery over the texts we had read as well as creatively deploy their recalled knowledge in new contexts that showed an understanding of important themes and takeaways.
Some goddesses in SMITE make particularly interesting topics for classroom discussion, whether because of their physical model, their abilities or the complexity of the potential sources. Women are presented in a variety of ways in SMITE: assertive, aggressive, magical, monstrous and more. Some of them have characteristics more typical of male video game characters,19 and others not; overall the female characters in these groups leave no doubt in players’ and students’ minds of the diverse roles of women in ancient mythology.
The goddesses
The fifteen women that make up half of the Graeco-Roman pantheon group in SMITE include Aphrodite, Arachne, Artemis, Athena, Hera, Medusa, Nemesis, Nike, Persephone, Scylla, Charybdis, Bellona, Discordia, Nox and Terra. Female characters in SMITE are as likely to be hand-to-hand bruisers as they are to provide ranged magical support, providing a range of options for players who prefer to be represented by a woman in-game, unlike in some other MOBAs, which tend to pigeonhole female characters into supporting roles.20 A player whose primary introduction to Graeco-Roman mythology came from SMITE would find equal numbers of gods and goddesses with roles not immediately informed by modern gender stereotypes.
Several of the goddesses in SMITE are portrayed explicitly as frontline warriors who wear some form of battle armour and get into close quarters in team fights. Nike, Bellona, Athena, Terra and Nemesis all fall into this category, although each feels unique in her approach to the battlefield. I will focus on two goddesses of war with design choices other than what one might expect.
Athena, a well-known goddess, was one of the original characters in SMITE. She is portrayed in opposition to her brother Ares, another god of war among the original cast of playable gods. Both of their ‘Lore’ sections are characterized by their allegiances in the Trojan War, making her easy to include in a number of ancient civilization or myth courses. Her lore is drawn at least partially from the Iliad; SMITE casts Athena as the protagonist, a wise and just goddess who supports the Greeks simply to protect them from other divine interference:
At the Siege of Troy, Ares disobeyed Zeus and joined with the battle, fighting for the mortal Trojans. Athena rose to stop him, indirectly championing the Greeks, but directly keeping the order of divine law. Their fierce battle clashed in unspeakable proportions, ending only when Ares limped from the battlefield, cowed by his sister and rival. With Ares diminished, the tide of the war shifted, and the heroes of the Greek Army toppled Troy.21
Her official lore also draws on her role as patron goddess of the city of Athens and champion of scholarly pursuits, implying a blend of other sources besides the Iliad in her background (asking students to identify which sources might have been used in her character creation would make a fun learning activity or assignment). Athena’s abilities include summoning a ghostly group of hoplites to fight and a taunt that draws enemies’ aggression away from allies. Her ultimate ‘Defender of Olympus’ allows her to teleport instantly to any allied character on the map, providing substantial protections and allowing her to turn the tide of any battle. The design focuses on her characterization in myths as a protector of heroes and omits other aspects, particularly how her anger after the judgement of Paris led to some bloodthirsty actions in the Iliad (a lack of pity for Ajax during his madness, her deception of Hector, or her refusal to shelter Trojan women from Diomedes, for example). This choice by the game design team was deliberate and allowed for the creation of contrast between her and the in-game evil Ares, giving her a distinct identity.
In contrast to Athena, the less well-known goddess Bellona was brought in by popular player demand. In the development update show (with almost 40,000 views) discussing Bellona’s release as a character, game designers explain that she was chosen because of requests from players for another female warrior. Because they had added Athena early in the game, they decided it was time for a goddess of war from Rome.22 Her lore video shares a mix of history and mythology, possibly because most audience members would have relatively little familiarity with Bellona, and, indeed, Bellona is interesting to pair with Athena in the classroom because of her relative paucity of primary sources. Based around Plutarch’s Life of Sulla, Bellona’s powers are explained through her relationship to Lucius Cornelius Sulla and his rise to dictator in Rome:
When Rome was young, Bellona ran with her armies, conquered her enemies, made her strong. As Rome aged and began to crumble, she fought only with her strongest and most cunning of worshippers, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla rose through the ranks by accomplishing impossible deeds of heroism and ruthless prowess … everywhere he went, Bellona rode with him. Together they quelled the Germanic hordes, they broke the Social War, they sacked Athens. Sulla was utterly undefeatable, and it was the Goddess of War that made him so. But the Roman Senate moved to displace Sulla and end his rise to glory. ‘March on Rome,’ Bellona quietly urged, ‘and you shall rise as no other.’ Emboldened, Sulla commanded his legions and took the city streets, Bellona at the fore. The Senate buckled. They cast the vote. Sulla became the first life-long dictator of Rome.23
Comparing her release video and abilities with Athena’s also invites conversations about literary genres and how often women are cast in supporting roles in mythology. Bellona’s character, as described in Vergil (Aeneid 8.703), carries a sword, shield and whip, and wears a red cloak emblazoned with a golden eagle. The backstory drawn from Plutarch, with all its narrative details, has little impact on her in-game mechanics. Instead, her abilities and appearance simply emphasize that she is Roman and a goddess of war. Her ultimate ability is called Eagle’s Rally – on cast, the character yells either ‘Roma invicta!’ or ‘Rally here!’
SMITE has created character models for some goddesses that showcase transgression of traditional female forms. Arachne, Medusa, and Scylla are all human/animal hybrids, with their powerful abilities coming largely as a result of this hybridity. This is made explicit in lore videos, in which the tales of Arachne and Medusa’s transformations and Scylla’s animal nature are explicitly described as the source of their power. Moreover, instead of being cast simply as victims, each character takes charge of her post-transformation experience with her choice to enter the battleground of the gods.
The transformations of Medusa and Arachne require the female character to suffer before gaining the ability to fight, a contrast to male characters, a common theme in other games: ‘Where the revenge in the narratives of male characters are used as justification for the use of their inherent martial abilities, in contrast, women must undergo trauma merely to become strong in the first place.’24 This was not a necessary choice for Medusa, given that her Homeric story shows only a dangerous monster, providing none of Ovid’s tragic backstory.25 These characters, their designs and their Lore releases facilitate discussions of new, feminist retellings of classical myths and their potential pitfalls, especially in efforts to remediate stories of sexual violence: ‘Restoring agency to these women doesn’t happen by denying them their trauma, or by removing the label of victim. They enjoy true agency when their authors allow them to rise above their victimhood and become survivors, or at the very least become women who deal with the world on their own terms.’26
Medusa
Medusa’s Lore emphasizes the power granted to her by her transformed form as a gorgon: ‘There is only one whose hair is made of slithering serpents, only one with skin of scales, only one whose very gaze can turn man, beast, or god to stone: Medusa.’ The narrator then turns to Ovid’s tale, in which Medusa is raped by Poseidon and punished by Athena (see Ovid Met. 4.753–803). It also makes no mention of Medusa’s eventual death at the hands of Perseus, focusing instead on how her anger and desire for revenge make her a formidable opponent. Some of this is obviously for the purpose of game functionality; it would be difficult to include a dead goddess in the game. Still, the traditional ending of Medusa’s story changed in favour of a promise of vengeance against those who wronged her makes her more agential than in Ovid’s Perseus-centric version. The choice to include her rape – and make it part of the experience of a playable character – is a more inclusive approach than that described in Chapter 10 by Chidwick. In Ryse: Son of Rome, the rape of Boudica’s daughters is replaced by the murder of her father; further, she, like many women in games, is only presented as a non-playable character with whom players ‘do not have to identify.’27
Her model is an anthropomorphic green snake with more green snakes for hair. In an update show, designers discussed the difficulty of developing such a popular mythological figure into a SMITE. They decided to focus on her most well-known feature (unlike a character like Bellona): ‘She’s one of the few characters that everyone knows; she’s very popular in mythology and shows up a lot of movies and media. We were excited to create this character and bring her into SMITE. Making her a hunter was a little bit different … Really the strongest thing about her lore is that she turns people to stone.’28
Arachne
Arachne is one of SMITE’s original characters and has undergone many changes to physical model and abilities. However, a focus on her power to weave in her transformed arachnid body has remained consistent. Like Medusa, Arachne’s mythological background is taken fairly closely from Ovid (Met. 6.1–145). SMITE tells the beginning of her story in this way:
Once, a beautiful and talented weaver of cloth and fabric, a single prideful mistake made a monster of Arachne for all time. With loom and thread, there were none more skilled than the mortal Arachne. Viewers traveled leagues just to see her art. So wondrous and majestic were her tapestries, it was said the spinner must have been instructed by the patron Goddess of Weavers herself, Athena. To this comparison, Arachne proudly scoffed, claiming not even the Gods rivaled her talent at weaving. When Athena heard this, disguised as a crone, she visited Arachne and encouraged her to show proper respect to the Gods. Arachne dismissed the old woman and issued a challenge that no God, not even Athena, could weave better than she. Furious, Athena revealed herself and accepted the challenge.29
As with Medusa, the ending of the story is altered. In Ovid’s version, Arachne attempts to commit suicide at the end of the contest, only living on as a spider thanks to Athena’s pity. In this version, however, Athena simply turns her into a spider without the intervening violence as a punishment for her pride, leading Arachne to join the battleground in a continuing attempt to best Athena.
Her in-game model is a spider with a woman’s face and eight legs; her abilities focus on weaving. Each SMITE character has a series of unique voice lines that occur whenever they cast abilities or use universal in-game emotes like greetings or apologies. One of the emotes is a taunt line that deploys sarcastic lines meant for enemy players. In Arachne’s usual taunt line, she says, ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we want to suck the juicy bits out of our enemies.’ When she is taunting Athena, however, the line is filled with more direct and threatening intent: ‘I’ll weave a nice little grave for you!’ she says. In this aspect, her feud with Athena is preserved in-game. Other characters with interlocking mythologies often have similar easter eggs; asking students to imagine other routes for these relationships in-game usually starts productive discussions.
Scylla
Of the three characters into this category, Scylla is the most difficult to teach, as not all stories even necessarily assign a gender to them.30 Furthermore, whether the beast (therion) described in Homer is actually synonymous with the character depicted in later art showing a half-woman, half-dog monster is unclear. In SMITE, Scylla is as a blend of many story elements, although she appears at first glance as a female child. Scylla’s lore video reflects the ambiguous nature of her origins and unambiguously portrays her as a dangerous monster:
Ancient poems warn of a narrow channel of water so treacherous that death touches all who approach. Sailors must choose to risk their ship, traveling close to the monstrous whirlpool Charybdis, or instead hug the rocky shoals where dwells a creature some say is made from the nightmares of all men. Scylla, they call her, Horror of the Sea. No ship that dares sail in her waters goes unscathed. Those that cling to survival whisper panicked tales of enormous black tentacles tipped with slavering hound heads ravaging whole ships to splinters with pitiless precision. Though it’s her laughter, they say, that’s most horrible; child-like, delighting in blood-soaked murder as men are dragged into the dark abyss. Poets have tried to romanticize this beast, to provide some humanity to her monstrosity. They write she was once a beautiful Naiad, wronged by a jealous priestess and transformed. Yet the old poems say she was born this way, beget by gods full of jealousy and loathing; dropped into the sea to terrorize mankind.31
Ovid’s story (presumably the poet referred to above) is of the Naiad who is transformed by a jealous Circe into a monster (Met. 14.1–74). The ‘old poems’ referred to in the reveal probably refer to the mention of Scylla in Homeric poetry. Scylla’s brief appearance in the Odyssey as a six-headed monster is echoed in the character model. Finally, her appearance as a young girl is hinted at by Circe’s description in the Odyssey.32 Through her abilities, she reveals that her lower half is composed of four monstrous dogs that perform a variety of attacks. When she casts her ultimate ability, called ‘I’m a Monster!’ her appearance transforms further; she becomes enormous, the dogs emerge and she makes one powerful attack. If the attack succeeds in killing an enemy player, she is able to make another attack, chaining up to five times, a possible mechanical reference to the slaughter of sailors on Odysseus’ ship. Her ‘taunt’ voice lines in game also reference this event as well: ‘I don’t sink ships on purpose! I’m just trying to eat the crew …’ and ‘Do you know the phrase “Between a rock and a hard place”? That was me!’
The creative liberties taken as a result of negotiation between different sources allowed game designers to magnify the impact of the story as an in-game experience. Interestingly, the SMITE Scylla also has hints of the sirens, another obstacle faced by Odysseus on his journey. In not being anchored to the story of the Odyssey or a particular history for Scylla, elements of multiple episodes that might be broadly recognizable to players (in this case, the temptation of the unwary to disaster during Odysseus’ journey home) can be rolled into a single design. All these factors make her one of the most interesting choices for an assessment asking students to redesign a character based on their own interpretation of stories, or to write an analysis of the existing one.
What about women in the game who are not war goddesses or otherwise different from a ‘typical’ female character? Other goddesses, including Hera, Nox, Discordia and Persephone, appear as commanding and powerful figures through their designs in different ways. The focus of Hera’s design is in her role as ‘Queen of the Gods’. For example, she summons and controls the male Argus to provide most of her in-game damage. Some of her other myths are hinted at indirectly, as well. She can cast a polymorph that turns enemies into a random animal, presumably a reference to the Io myth, also referenced in her lore video: ‘She can reshape nature, including her foes, and she will hold nothing back as she steps forth upon the Battleground of the Gods. For the Queen of the Gods has come at last, and she has come to rule.’ Zeus’ many marital indecencies are not mentioned in either character’s lore or in-game kit other than one of Hera’s voice lines. If she taunts a player piloting Zeus in game, Hera will say, ‘Zeus and I lived happily for a millennia. Then we met.’
Other goddesses have similar mixes between functional in-game mechanics, lore, and mythological details. Discordia’s chaotic reputation serves as the centre point of her design. She causes gods to fight each other and in her ultimate ability shoots a golden apple that causes turmoil. Another ability grants extra damage to the allied god with the most damage, representing her as a cause of competition among friends. Persephone’s kit focuses on her relationship with flora; she grows a deadly garden to entrap enemy characters. As in some other popular, recent receptions like the webcomic Lore Olympus, the violence of her relationship with death and Hades is elided; instead of being tricked by the god of the underworld, her lore video describes her choice as purposeful.33 As mentioned above, it is possible to read this as an erasure of rape and sexual violence and an avoidance of an uncomfortable topic. Whether this provides Persephone with more agency in her own mythology or oversimplifies her character makes another interesting point for discussing different popular receptions of a disturbing myth, especially in conjunction with other games featuring Persephone, like Hades.
Conclusion
Women (both mortal and goddess) in Greek and Roman mythology fill a diverse set of roles that defy categories and stereotypes and often showcase women as dangerous, powerful, or transgressive of traditional female roles in some way. Although the rich array of stories from ancient sources associated with the goddesses in SMITE are truncated by their use in linear character design rather than narrative gameplay, the range of abilities and models used in game still provide a compelling variety to players concerning the role of women in the past. The goddesses in the game are mages, warriors, old, young, beautiful, monstrous, inhuman and invariably powerful. They also make up half of playable characters, meaning that even players who choose their characters randomly are likely to encounter a female character. Moreover, players who want to engage with the process of character design (and thus reception) can either watch the polished ‘Lore’ content the game presents or engage in casual Q&As with developers, learning both about sources for the game as well as how its makers have chosen to use those sources. All these characteristics make the game an effective tool for teaching about the reception of classical women in a range of classes on the ancient world.
Notes
1.See: https://steamcharts.com/app/386360 for SMITE play (accessed 9 May 2021) data and https://www.titanforgegames.com/ (accessed 9 May 2021) for total unique players.
2.See: https://www.smitegame.com/gods/ (accessed 9 May 2021).
3.Rollinger (2020a: 23).
4.Rollinger (2020b: 21).
5.Ivory (2006) and Summers and Miller (2014).
6.Clare (2021: 18).
7.Beavers (2020b).
8.Elliott and Kapell (2013: 6–7).
9.Hansen (2012).
10.MacLeod (2021).
11.Mol, Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Boom, Politopoulos and Vandemeulebroucke (2016).
12.Metzger and Paxton (2016).
13.Rassalle (2021) and Reinhard (2018).
14.Boom, Ariese, van den Hout, Mol and Politopoulos (2020).
15.Rassalle (2021).
16.Sellers (2006: 21).
17.Romney (2021).
18.Chapman (2016: 51).
19.See Dill and Thill (2007) for characteristics typical of male protagonists in video games.
20.Bell (2017).
21.See: https://smite.gamepedia.com/Athena.
22.SMITE Dev Talk: Bellona.
23.See https://smite.gamepedia.com/Bellona.
24.Beavers (2020b: 99).
25.Lowe (2011).
26.Hinds (2019).
27.Chidwick in this volume (2022: 147–61).
28.SMITE Dev Talk: Medusa.
29.See: https://smite.gamepedia.com/Arachne (accessed 9 May 2021).
30.See Hopman (2016: 109–11) for an argument for Scylla’s female nature even in Homer.
31.See: https://smite.gamepedia.com/Scylla (accessed 9 May 2021).
32.Hopman (2016: 86); see also Odyssey 12.54 ff.
33.See: https://smite.gamepedia.com/Persephone (accessed 9 May 2021).