\u201cThere is nothing more harmful to one\u2019s character than attendance at some spectacle, because vices easily creep into your soul while you are being entertained. When I return from some spectacle, I am greedier, more aggressive, and more addicted to pleasurable sensations; I am more cruel and inhumane.\u201d (Letters, 7.2-5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Both Roman and American culture share the common feature of broad diversity. The Roman Empire encompassed most of modern Europe, much of the Middle East, and North Africa and attempted to unify Roman identity across a variety of cultures by consciously spreading Roman pursuits, architecture, and systems throughout the provinces. America today manages her identity somewhat differently. She revels in her status as the melting pot and diversity is a keyword in nearly every discourse of American society. Our cultural identity is unified through that very diversity rather than despite it. And yet, America still has problems in understanding just who belongs and who doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n After 9\/11, acts of violence against American Arabs and Muslims at the hands of their fellow countrymen became such a concern that the Ad Council of America<\/a> called for volunteer advertisement agencies to submit an advertisement promoting the unification of Americans. They decided that the best way to promote cultural unity was to remind the people of America that their common identifying feature is the very diversity that was being used as justification for the treatment of American Muslims as an Other. In the chosen ad, the viewer sees a series of faces, people of different races and heritage, all saying, \u201cI am an American\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/colosseum.jpg\" "\\"colosseum\\"")
<\/a>His interpretation of the Roman games, although an understandable response to the extreme violence of the amphitheatre, fails to account for the full array of complex and nuanced psychological effects of the arena. Within it, an image of Rome was established and cultivated, providing a common cultural identity for those who attended. In modern day America, criticisms similar to those of Seneca are widely voiced about the danger of violence in games, albeit those within the living room instead of a public arena. Regardless of our own stance on the issue of violence in video games, this criticism is overly simplistic and avoids acknowledging interesting features and effects of video game worlds. In contrast to how the games in Roman society expressed an official ideology of what it meant to be Roman, video games subvert the official rhetoric of diversity as identity and provide a fantasy version of Rome as an alternative identity built on uniformity and similitude. Aside from being simply another segment of popular culture that chances to use a classical setting, the games I will discuss in this series of posts are a social commentary on the culture of which they are a part and are an implicit act of comparative culture by their players.<\/p>\n