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I’ve written about Assassin’s Creed for this newsletter before. Ass Creed if you are in the know. If you don’t want to read that article I am more than happy to provide a quick refresher. Assassin’s Creed is a video game series about inhabiting the body of your ancestors and stopping various deities/aliens/historical figures from destroying the world. Pretty cool. For this particular piece however, I’ll stay away from discussions of the sheer lunacy of these games and write about something else. Namely, the series’ use of history.
History, as hopefully you know, is near and dear to my heart. I’ve taken out lots of loans, spent lots of time studying it, and delayed getting a real job, and gave up a real job to go back to school for it. In fact, I am at this moment in the University of Pittsburgh’s archives doing research on the Homestead Strike. So, when I see history work being done in popular culture, I pay attention. It’s usually bad, but in some cases they do it well.
For a video game Ass Creed actually incorporates history pretty well. I have got to be clear here of course. I am not saying that I would use it in the classroom, or bring it up in a discussion, or write it into my dissertation. Those caveats aside, for a game where you spend most of your time sticking digital daggers into the digital necks of digital people they do a pretty good job with the history.
There are a lot of ways to use history in pop culture content. You can go the Ken Burns route and do slow motion pans over archival material while a guy with a nice voice intones gravely in the background. You can use it as window dressing, adding a few interesting tidbits of historical fact to spice up whatever it is you’re creating. You can take the “alt-history” path and think about what would happen if the Egyptians had pushed back the Roman conquest. You can do all kinds of things with it. None of those examples are innately good or bad. They’re just ways of dealing with history. People have done them quite well and quite poorly.
The history in Assassin’s Creed generally comes in two forms. One way is through little pieces of trivia, usually about buildings or places, that pop up as you discover those areas in the game world. They’re mostly written in character by one of the protagonists of their series, Shaun Hastings. I’m not clear on how many people stop playing the game to read these things, but they usually combine a few real facts about Notre Dame or some Ancient Roman obelisk with some clearly fictional in-game lore. The writers of the game love to dig up little facts a bits about architects or buildings and throw them into the game wherever they find the space.
The second way history is used is much more involved with the actual game play.In every game of the series a large part of it involves interacting and doing little missions and quests for and with historical characters. For instance, in one of the early games you are tasked with assassinating one of the Borgia popes, and getting Leonardo da Vinci to build you inventions. In another, you have to escort Karl Marx through 19th Century London, and in a third you debate a drunken Socrates. They often involve real historical events spiced with a large amount of fictional pepper.
Just as an aside, I feel like I once again need to make clear that I would not use this in a history class as a way to cover content with students, just in case any future employers are reading this. I promise I will not attempt to teach the French Revolution by having students play as Arno. And in any case that iteration of the game sucked.
I still haven’t fully explained what I mean by doing a good job with history. Mostly what I mean is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously - for examples of this please read that other newsletter I wrote about them - and uses the history to bring people to life. So often historical figures like George Washington, or Cleopatra or da Vinci, can become little more than myth to most people. We start to revere them more as idols than actual human beings. Which is not a good way to think about real very flawed historical figures. Ass Creed does a good job at taking historical figures down a peg, bringing them from the realm of the mythical to the realm of the real, all while being an enjoyable video game. I think that’s a good thing, and something historians should be more aware of. I don’t mean that I should write about ancient Gods coming to life during the Italian Renaissance, though that would be cool, but that I need to remember that the people I’m writing about were people. Real living breathing people with hopes and dreams and silliness all their own.
This may sound like I am promoting a sort of neo-“Big Man of History” type interpretive lens for historical work. I hope to do the opposite. I think that treating these people who have become those “Big Men” with an eye towards the unserious takes them down a peg. After all George Washington was a syphilitic slave owner with no teeth and bad hair. Let’s not treat him like a demi-god.
That’s something we can all do better at.