Mythology was a first attempt by UNCG to create an online course with game elements.
The approach I took was not to look at classical Greek art — which seemed to me to be overly used in pop culture and games. Instead I looked at the rough work of the Archaic era. One of the most memorable examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a kouros, a statue of a youth which I’d drawn many times over the years. I also read M. I. Finley's World of Odyesseus. And I was probably reading about the strangeness of early Greek life in John Keegan’s History of Warfare.
By evoking earlier art, showing maps of how the Greeks themselves imagined their environment and cosmos, and replicating reconstructions of the earliest temples, I sought to present a visual challenge to students playing this game, asking them to bridge the gap between West’s truly strange past and modernity.
The approach I took was not to look at classical Greek art — which seemed to me to be overly used in pop culture and games. Instead I looked at the rough work of the Archaic era. One of the most memorable examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a kouros, a statue of a youth which I’d drawn many times over the years. I also read M. I. Finley's World of Odyesseus. And I was probably reading about the strangeness of early Greek life in John Keegan’s History of Warfare.
By evoking earlier art, showing maps of how the Greeks themselves imagined their environment and cosmos, and replicating reconstructions of the earliest temples, I sought to present a visual challenge to students playing this game, asking them to bridge the gap between West’s truly strange past and modernity.
