Ideas of the “Barbarian” in Pandemic: Fall of Rome

Kevin Nobel (The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

The top-selling board game Pandemic asks players to cooperate to find a cure and limit the spread of deadly diseases across the planet. The Pandemic line, published by Z-Man Games, has led to several other similar titles, and this adversarial format of humanity-versus-existential-threat branches out into, oddly enough, a title that involves players fending off groups of “barbarians” that threaten to overrun the city of Rome. This board game, Pandemic: Fall of Rome is the subject of this paper. I argue that this game presents a distortion of history that perpetuates views on the ancient world that migration is equal to invasion, that cultural mixing and diversity were not normal, and that outsiders and those who are different have been, and always will be, a threat. I will further show that Fall of Rome and the genre as a whole frequently perpetuates othering of outsiders—often by baking a West-versus-the-rest theme into the rules themselves, where the Other is unplayable (Mukherjee 2018) and threatening. Fall of Rome has a narrative format, and players are immersed within it, participating in any of a variety of alternate histories (Lowe 2009). Participants play Roman military commanders who cooperate by levying armies, attacking five different foreign ethnic groups, and making diplomatic arrangements with these groups to turn their numbers into allied legions. The players simulate a version of history and they are given a particular viewpoint (Clare 2023); such games can be classified as a kind of historiography (Kapell and Elliott, 2013). Of course, Fall of Rome is lacking any real sources, and any evidence of cultural exchange throughout the empire (Gruen 2011). Games like Hadrian’s Wall or any of a variety of ancient war games lean into harmful othering tropes. Fall of Rome is merely one of many.

Select Bibliography:

Clare, Ross. Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames : Representation, Play, Transmedia.  Bloomsbury, 2023.

Elliott, Andrew B. R, and Matthew Kapell, eds. Playing with the Past : Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Gruen, E. Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Lowe, Dunstan. “Playing with Antiquity: Videogame Receptions of the Classical World.” Classics for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture. Edited by Dunstan Lowe and Kim Shahabudin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009. p. 64-90.

Mukherjee, S. “Playing subaltern: Video games and postcolonialism.” Games and Culture 13, 5 (2018): 504-20.