Nothing is true, history is playable: How the Assassin's Creed series shapes our view of history

Föreläsare

Péter Makai, Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), Linnéuniversitetet

Titel

Nothing is true, history is playable: How the Assassin's Creed series shapes our view of history

Presentation

A shadowy, historical secret society still exists today, and is actively seeking artifacts from the Bible, which remain in the hands of a powerful few, harbouring a secret about the origins of humankind. Only the descendants of another old society's bloodline can stop this society's domination of the hearts and minds of humankind. As the story unfolds, we learn that history was shaped by the millennia-spanning enmity between these two hidden factions, who have been actively influencing every major historical event known to civilization. If this sounds to you like something out of a hundred conspiracy theory websites or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, you are not wrong. But this plot, telling the story of the rivalry between the secret societies of the Templars, who seek peace through order and control, and the Assassins, who seek peace through freedom of will and self-determination, is from one of video gaming's most recognisable franchises, the historical action-adventure game series by Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed.

In the game-world, reliving the memory of our ancestors is made possible by extracting genetic memories using a fictional Virtual Reality device called the Animus. The games always feature a present-day plotline which features more details about the two organisations and their backstories, and also frames the events of a much larger historical narrative, set in a different time and age in every game. The bulk of each game takes place in that era, like the time of the Crusades, the American Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, or Victorian London, placing the player in the role of an Assassin ancestor and prompting them to do what assassins do best: sneak up behind people, send them to their deaths and thereby change the course of history. The games are also notable for the sheer volume of text it lays at the hands of its players, giving them sarcastic, funny and educational background information about the historical period they are stabbing their way through.

This talk sheds light on the way the games play with history, highlighting the computer game medium's unique way of blending information, entertainment and interactivity to convey an epic adventure story and a particular historical outlook that is distinctively (post-)postmodern in character. I will focus on three aspects of the series' participation in historical discourse:

1. appeals to authenticity in the world-building of the games,
2. the Discovery Mode, a non-fictional, non-ludic paratext that remediates the museum exhibit as an interactive display of historical knowledge
3. the conspiratorial, "paranoid style" of history-(re)writing in the narrative design of the series.

By scrutinising the Assassin's Creed series, I seek to provoke your thoughts on how these games reflect our current cultural fascination with and transformation of truth claims about historical knowledge.

Seminarieserien

Detta seminarium ingår i forskarnätverket Medeltidsforum Linnés seminarieserie. Alla kommande seminarier i serien finns samlade hos Medeltidsforum Linné.

Bild: Målning från Överselö kyrka, Södermanland (detalj) föreställande S:t Botvid och S:t Sigfrid. Foto: Lennart Karlsson, Statens historiska museer.