Since two weeks I can call myself an intern at Foundation VALUE. I will be making posts and video’s and I’d like to introduce myself!

Hello! My name is Corine Gerritsen and as part of my Research Master Ancient Studies at Utrecht University, I’m doing an internship at Foundation VALUE. As the name of my study suggests, I mainly focus on ancient history and Roman history in particular. However, history is not my only passion, I love videogames as well and I think they play a major role in making people enthusiastic about, for example, history. 

Looking back, my interest in antiquity started young and the first game in which I could emerge myself into the ancient world was a videogame my dad had bought for me; CivCity: Rome. The game was only in English, which, at the time, was quite the struggle for me. I couldn’t figure out what these ‘granaries’ people kept complaining about being ‘empty’ were, but somehow I still managed to build an ancient city.

Temples, insulae and a warehouse in CivCity: Rome.

I love how Foundation VALUE offers the combination of both history and videogames. At VALUE I’ll be creating videos, make stratigraphs, participate in a stream every now and then and help with all kind of other stuff.

Whenever I can find the time between my studies, internship and other activities, I love to play games. Most of them have some link to history, although not all. I love the Assassins Creed series, the first in the series was actually my first ‘open-world’ game I owned and I was over the moon when ‘Origins’ and ‘Odyssey’ were released, since these take place in my favourite time periods. Lately, I’ve spent much of my time playing researching Imperator Rome, one of my favourite games and I will share videos of my insights with you! When I’m not busy being a cityplanner/quaestor/ruler of Rome in Civcity: Rome or Imperator Rome, I enjoy building in Eco or Banished, I enjoy slaying dragons in Skyrim, killing monsters and playing a hand of Gwent in the Whitcher III, making alternate history in Europa Universalis IV, designing spaceships in Space Engineers, and a lot of other things!

Imperator Rome story trailer.

In the coming weeks, you can expect some videos about the representation of ‘states’ in Imperator Rome (first video probably in two weeks). For the first video, I will be looking at the ‘city-building’ Etruscans and the secret behind their ‘downfall’ in Imperator Rome.