Call for Papers:

Ten Years of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Legacy, Impact, Future
https://bristoldigitalgamelab.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2026/06/19/call-for-papers-ten-years-of-assassins-creed-odyssey-legacy-impact-future/

Editors: Dr Richard Cole & Dr Alexander Vandewalle

Deadline for submission of abstracts: August 24, 2026

In 2018, Ubisoft Quebec’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey introduced audiences around the world to the most elaborate rendering of Ancient Greece ever produced in a video game. Featuring a heroic protagonist in the first stages of the Peloponnesian War, Odyssey allowed players to roam an expansive, open world recreation of the Greek world, to experience historical events, converse with authors, philosophers, and politicians, and to play out their own historicized fantasies in an immersive sandbox. The game has been productive in popularizing the medium in environments where it was previously underappreciated, including the teaching and research of antiquity. In the years since its release, the game has received substantial academic attention, from analyses on its poetics of historical recreation (e.g., Cole, 2022a; Guilbert et al., 2019; McCall, 2024; Politopoulos et al., 2019), its pedagogical potential (e.g., Looije, 2023; Matuszkiewicz & Ruffing, 2024; Oulitskaia, 2024), its Story Creator mode (Cameron, 2023; Cole, forthcoming), its representation of ancient literature (e.g., Gainsford, 2019), historical characters (e.g., Clare, 2020; Dagios, 2020; Vandewalle, forthcoming), gender (Cole 2022b; Eklund & Zanescu, 2026; Eklund et al., 2024; Santos, 2022; Tuplin, 2022), sexuality (Schallegger, 2020), children (Reay, 2024), mythology (Ford, 2025; Vandewalle, 2026), and more. Others have explored how the game is experienced, including analyses of historical decision-making (Vandewalle & Cole, 2025), immersion (Cole, 2025), historical tourism (Schwarz, 2023), perceived realism (Vandewalle et al., 2023), sense of place (Bowman et al., 2024), authenticity (Zimmermann, 2021), or eudaimonia (Daneels et al., 2021).

Odyssey will celebrate its ten-year anniversary in 2028. This is the ideal moment to reflect on the game’s impact and legacy, and to look ahead to its potential future as a model and platform for virtual antiquity. This edited volume – to be proposed as a submission to the Screening Antiquity series at Edinburgh University Press – is envisaged as an opportunity for both contemplation on how the game has shaped classical reception, pedagogy, or discourse for a decade, and a chance to conceptualize what quests the game has unlocked, and where we are going next.

The collection asks the following questions: what is classical reception in games as a result of Odyssey? What can Odyssey tell us about the field, and its future? What has the game meant to players, students, teachers, designers, and scholars? How does the game function as a platform for immersion in the ancient past, from wandering endlessly through its detailed world to actively creating one’s own stories in Story Creator? How has it shaped the way in which audiences conceptualize their engagement with antiquity? How has it informed game design more generally? Specifically, we invite submissions on the following topics:

• Odyssey’s position within wider cultural trends of classical reception
• Odyssey’s influence on subsequent multimedia receptions of antiquity
• Meta-analyses of Odyssey scholarship
• Retrospectives on Odyssey’s design, production, and promotion
• Odyssey’s audience evaluation, discourse, and community
• Odyssey as an immersive platform for creation, experience, tourism, immersion, and reuse
• New directions for Odyssey and the politics of representation (e.g., gender, race, sexuality)
• Contemporary innovations in, and best practices for, Classics teaching with and through Odyssey
• Autoethnographical essays reflecting on less discussed aspects of the game and its various modes
• The use of Odyssey in the cultural sector and heritage contexts (e.g., museum installations)

We strongly encourage authors to take stock of the available scholarship on the game, to identify urgent and persistent gaps, and to reflect on the game’s position in both the reception of antiquity and the scholarship around it.

Interested contributors are invited to submit an abstract between 300–500 words (excl. bibliography) to both Richard Cole (richard.cole@bristol.ac.uk) and Alexander Vandewalle (alexander.vandewalle@ugent.be) before August 24, 2026. The full timeline of the project is as follows:

August 24, 2026: abstracts deadline
September 30, 2026: notification of acceptance/rejection
February 1, 2027: chapters due
May 1, 2027: editor feedback
July 1, 2027: full manuscript sent to publisher

As this is an anniversary-themed collection, the timeline for this project is fixed. By submitting an abstract, you agree to meet these strict deadlines.

REFERENCES

Bowman, N. D., Vandewalle, A., Daneels, R., Lee, Y., & Chen, S. (2024). Animating a Plausible Past: Perceived Realism and Sense of Place Influence Entertainment of and Tourism Intentions from Historical Video Games’, Games and Culture, 19(3), 286–308. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231162428.

Cameron, H. (2023). Classical Creations in a Modern Medium: Using Story Creator Mode in a University Assignment. In E. Champion & J. Hiriart (eds), Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? (pp. 189–202). De Gruyter.

Clare, R. (2020). Herodotus – A Player’s Guide to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Presented at the Herodotus Helpline Lecture series (online). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9VngteD–Y

Cole, R. (2022a). Mashing Up History and Heritage in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Games and Culture, 17(6), 915–928. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221115403.

Cole, R. (2022b). Kassandra’s Odyssey. In J. Draycott & K. Cook (eds), Women in Classical Video Games (pp. 191–207). Bloomsbury Academic.

Cole, R. (2025). Immersivity in “Virtual Antiquity”. In E. Cole (ed), Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: From Narrativity to Virtual Reality (pp. 145–158). Bloomsbury Academic.

Cole, R. (forthcoming). ‘Interact with history like never before’: Modding the Past in Historical Video Games. In K. Cook, R. Houghton & C. Kempshall (eds), The Routledge Companion to Video Games and History. Routledge.

Dagios, M. (2020). Kassandra: uma amazona espartana? Gênero e representação in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. ANTARES: Letras e Humanidades, 12(28), 125–143. https://doi.org/10.18226/19844921.v12.n28.07.

Daneels, R., Malliet, S., Geerts, L., Denayer, N., Walrave, M. & Vandebosch, H. (2021). Assassins, Gods, and Androids: How Narratives and Game Mechanics Shape Eudaimonic Game Experiences. Media and Communication, 9(1), 49–61. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i1.3205.

Eklund, L., & Zanescu, A. (2026). Times They Are A-Changin’? Evolving Representations of Women in the Assassin’s Creed Franchise. Games and Culture, 21(2), 192–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241246575

Eklund, L., Foka, A., & Vekselius, J. (2024). Playing with Gender: Women in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Game Studies, 24(2). https://gamestudies.org/2402/articles/eklund_foka_vekselius

Ford, D. (2025). Mytholudics: Games and Myth. De Gruyter Brill.

Gainsford, P. (2019). Shanties in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Kiwi Hellenist. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2019/01/sea-shanties-assassins-creed-odyssey.html.

Guilbert, X., Guindeuil, T., Le Breton, E., & Noël, T. (2019). Revivre l’histoire en écrivant la sienne. La construction des mondes d’Assassin’s Creed. Revue de la BNF, 2019(2), 104–114. https://doi.org/10.3917/rbnf.059.0104.

Looije, N. (2023). Exploring History through Depictions of Historical Characters in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In E. Champion & J. Hiriart (eds), Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? (pp. 107–131). De Gruyter.

Matuszkiewicz, K., & Ruffing, K. (2024). Let’s Analyse Ancient Greece: Digital Game-based Learning and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In J. Harrisson, M. Lindner & L. Unceta Gómez (eds), Playful Classics: Classical Reception as a Creative Process (89–101), Bloomsbury Academic.

McCall, J. (2024). Agents, Goals, and Action-Choices: Analyzing the Game Histories of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece with the Historical Problem Space Framework. thersites, 18, 69–115. https://doi.org/10.34679/thersites.vol18.238.

Oulitskaia, V. (2024). Using Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey to teach Olympia as part of the Classical Civilisation A Level. Journal of Classics Teaching, 25(50), 166–172.

Politopoulos, A., A. A. A. Mol, K. H. J. Boom and C. E. Ariese (2019), “History Is Our Playground”: Action and Authenticity in Asssassin’s Creed Odyssey Advances in Archaeological Practice, 7(3), 317–323. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2019.30.

Reay, E. (2024). The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous. Palgrave Macmillan.

Santos, N. (2022). Assassins and the Creed: A look at the Assassin’s Creed series, Ubisoft, and women in the video game industry. In J. Draycott (ed.), Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games (25–55). De Gruyter.

Schallegger, R. R. (2020). “As You Command”: Male-Male Desire, Love, and Relationships in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’, in E. Bektic, D. Bruns, S. Gabriel, F. Kelle, G. Pölsterl and F. Schniz (eds), Mixed Reality and Games: Theoretical and Practical Approaches in Game Studies and Education (133–43). transcript.

Schwarz, A. (2023). Discovering the Past as a Virtual Foreign Country: Assassin’s Creed as Historical Tourism. In E. Champion and J. Hiriart (eds), Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? (169–187). De Gruyter.

Tuplin, R. (2022). “We do what we must to survive”: Female Sex Workers in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In J. Draycott and K. Cook (eds), Women in Classical Video Games (208–222). Bloomsbury Academic.

Vandewalle, A. (2026). Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games. Bloomsbury Academic.

Vandewalle, A. (forthcoming). Historical Characters in Antiquity Games. In K. Cook, R. Houghton & C. Kempshall (eds), The Routledge Companion to Video Games and History. Routledge.

Vandewalle, A. Daneels, R., Simons, E., & Malliet, S. (2023). Enjoying My Time in the Animus: A Quantitative Survey on Perceived Realism and Enjoyment of Historical Video Games. Games and Culture, 18(5), 643–663. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221115404.

Vandewalle, A., & Cole, R. (2025). “As You Write Your Odyssey…”: An Empirical Study of Classics Students’ Play Interests and Ergodic Characterization in Historical Video Games. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 31(5), 1745–1763. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251360506.

Zimmermann, F. (2021). Historical Digital Games as Experiences: How Atmospheres of the Past Satisfy Needs of Authenticity. In M. Bonner (ed), Game | World | Architectonics: Transdisciplinary Approaches on Structures and Mechanics, Levels and Spaces, Aesthetics and Perception (19–34). Heidelberg University Publishing.