In this video, Corine Gerritsen presents some of her ideas around the theme of “alternatives”, focusing on “fantastical Romans”.
Grand Strategy games are particularly attractive to experiment with all kinds of historical alternates. This video pays special attention to Imperator: Rome (2019), the mods made for this game and mods for fantasy games that feature the popular Roman Empire. After all, who wouldn’t want to know about ‘Romans in Space!’?
Corine Gerritsen has a BA degree in history and continued her studies at Utrecht University completing the Research Master Ancient Studies. She did an internship at VALUE Foundation, studying the past in video games. She continued in this field, writing her master thesis about antiquity in video games, specifically the representation of Rome’s enemies and is persistently delving into this medium in her current PhD project at Leiden University within the project “Playful Time Machines”. Here she is preoccupied with the mechanics of video games set in the past and analyzing how they make these Time Machines tick.