Through accessible and engaging history, SASA aims to reignite passions for ancient research. It would not be possible to achieve this goal without the work of our team members. We would like to take this moment to celebrate the work of Alexander Vandewalle who recently received his PhD.
Alex lives in Belgium and has been co-leading the Achaeogaming Live team since 2021. .For the past three years, he’s been organizing, and executing the quasi-weekly livestreams on SASA's Twitch channel. He obtained a MA in Linguistics and Literature: Latin & Greek from Ghent University, and a MSc in Film Studies and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp, where he wrote a thesis on the narrative coherence of the so-called 'cinematic universe' technique in contemporary superhero fiction. He started his PhD research at both of those universities in November 2020 and completed it in September 2024.
His dissertation focused on the reception of Greco-Roman mythological characters in video games. Approaching the topic via the lens of characterization, which is the ascription of character traits to the textual entities that we call characters. The first stage of research conceptualized how something like characterization could operate in games, which resulted in a published framework of characterization cues in video games. This framework was applied to a corpus of Greco-Roman mythological video games, to show how different games use different methods or modes of mythology reception to characterize Greek gods and heroes. Alex examined how players participate in the characterization process, such as the choices players make and why. as well as different types of developer motivations that go into the design process of mythological characters.
Starting his dissertation during the pandemic meant that online community was even more important for gaining a sense of community. The inherently digital nature of his research had already translated itself into a number of virtual environments with like-minded people. There was a struggle in finding the right balance between the ancient and modern aspects of the thesis: studying classical reception in video games means that you need to persuade those with backgrounds in game studies as well as those in the Classics. Convincing people that games are worthy of academic investigation was another challenge, since games have acquired a reputation for being a waste of time.
Alex will be working with media that he finds compelling and has a broader relevance to our world. He enjoys combining the media he loves with sustained academic inquiry, and to explore what these media do, are, and mean in our society. He will be starting a three-year postdoc project that will allow him to work on these questions in depth. Alex started a database in 2020 (www.paizomen.com) that introduces its users to games set in ancient Greece and Rome, and he has a chapter coming out that details the study of the ancient world in video games to help readers get a grasp of the field. He is currently creating larger structures to support the study of games at his school.
All of us at SASA wish Alexander the best of luck in his next endeavor's. And we'll be looking forward to seeing what he accomplishes next.
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