'Virtual Antiquity: “The closest thing to a time machine that lets you experience ancient Greece”'

In 2022, Meta ran a sponsored advert as follows: ‘In the metaverse, history students will be able to go back in time.’ The claim was less about how technology might approximate the past and more about how the metaverse would turn back the clock, allowing students to witness events as they happened, in a way equivalent to visualising things not immediately apparent in the real world. Meta’s bold assertion that ‘the metaverse may be virtual, but the impact will be real,’ implies its virtual realities will facilitate a deeper engagement with time and the past than hitherto possible.

Since actual time travel remains the realm of science fiction, this leaves the meaning of the phrase as used by producers and audiences alike open to interpretation. In both Meta’s campaign and the responses it provoked, the phrase ‘time travel’ thus takes on a largely metaphorical meaning, helping to collate (and indeed conflate) different historiographical ideas and modes. In this article, I explore the wide ranging use of the time travel metaphor to describe the experience of historical simulations.

First, I look at how developers use time travel to describe the type of experience on offer in historical video games and VR simulations, looking in particular at those set in the ancient world, which I define as ‘virtual antiquity’. My case studies include historical strategy and roleplaying games, as well as VR experiences and digital models. In this section, I analyse how different metaphors are deployed by game companies, from the temporal ‘leap’ as a way of experiencing historical simulations, to games and VR experiences as time capsules able to transport players to different times and evoke empathy. Second, I focus on critical responses that examine and make use of the metaphor, looking at both scholarship and game reviews. Third, I consider how players describe their experience of time in historical games and VR experiences, focusing on feedback for the Virtual Reality Oracle (2023) experience and player reviews for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft, 2018).

I conclude by exploring how the metaphor of time travel sustains an important connection between the users and producers of virtual histories, helping to shape their relationship to history and indeed their sense of the past. I argue that it does so, not by transporting players to the past, but rather by engaging in creative ways with historiography.