History, design and archaeology: The reception of Julius Caesar and the representation of gender and agency in Assassin's Creed Origins (original) (raw)
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Polychronia – negotiating the popular representation of a common past in Assassin's Creed
Several of the most successful large scale digital simulations in recent years are found in the immensely popular game series Assassin's Creed, developed by Ubisoft. A variety of monuments and places figure prominently throughout the series, but at different levels of detail and accuracy. While not presenting a thoroughly imagined representation of any time period or place, these recreations emphasize the epistemological impact of particular visual modes when communicating the past, representing the collective idea of a place or time, rather than archaeological or historical facts. The time and spaces presented in the game series give us an opportunity to study how representations of the past can be assembled to be recognizable to a wide audience. This, in turn, gives us insight into the mechanics of cultural memory. In order to analyze these mechanics we analyze the representation of the city of Rome created for Assassin´s Creed 2: Brotherhood, the third main installment of the series. Not only has Rome been the subject of several centuries of archaeological reconstructions, but due to the countless popular representations available, the city holds a strong position in the public consciousness. In Ubisoft’s version of Rome, the archaeological record and popular imagination meet, are combined, and sometimes collide. We argue that Rome as we encounter it here amounts to a concept which we call ”polychronia”, a place where several timelines exist simultaneously in an organized manner to appeal to a common understanding. As a polychonia, the representation of Rome is made more recognizable to the recipient than a representation solely reflecting expert knowledge.
In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson writes that: 'Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact.' Jameson's critique of genre aligns the cultural artefact with notions of value; ascribed with contractual attributes, artistic creation and audience expectations serve as manifestations of capitalist exchange. Assumptions of value and proper use become even more contentious when one considers artistic genres that recreate the past and invite conflict between representation and appropriation. This trend is long established in the Gothic tradition, for instance, with its use of the medieval and premodern ersatz for generic effect. In Hollywood cinema, the Classical Western provided a nostalgic response to the closure of the American frontier, relocating a codified national history to the cinematic imagination. More recently, video games have offered a new level of immersive and experiential history, reimagined in open-world narratives that give players the autonomy to both experience and shape narrative.
"History Is Our Playground": Action and Authenticity in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
Advances in Archaeological Practice, 2019
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series is one the entertainment industry's most popular titles set in the past. With a new game released on an annual basis-each full of distinct historical places, events, and people-the series has unfolded across post-classical history, from the Levant during the Third Crusade to Victorian-era London. The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed: Origins, which entailed a massive reconstruction of Hellenistic Egypt, pushed the series even further back in time. With it, Ubisoft also launched its Discovery Tour, allowing players to explore the game's setting at their leisure and without combat. These trends continued in 2018's Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, set in Greece during the Peloponnesian War. This review discusses the narrative, world, and gameplay of the latest Assassin's Creed within the series more broadly. We provide a critical appraisal of the experience that Odyssey offers and link it to this question: in the Assassin's Creed series, do we engage in meaningful play with the past, or are we simply assassinating our way through history?
New Horizons in English Studies, 2021
This article explores the gendered narrative in the video game Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. Using this game as its main case study, it addresses the question in which ways the game developers have conceptualized gender, race, and gender performance in the video game. It does so from an intersectional point of view. After establishing Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation as a prime example of the trend to include more female characters in games during recent years, I will argue that this game includes a complex rhetoric that not only perpetuates stereotypical notions regarding gender, but also fails to acknowledge issues regarding its main protagonist’s skin color in the historical reality the game wishes to emulate.
Reading Cleopatra VII: The Crafting of a Political Persona
The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research, 2014
The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of Cleopatra VII, as well as how and why she wanted to be depicted in a certain manner with respect to visual art. As the last noble of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, her images communicate her political abilities, her religious fervor, her maternal obligations and obstinacy in perpetuating royal lineage, and her direct connection to ancient Egyptian gods. Additionally, by consummating relationships with two of the most powerful men in ancient Roman history (Julius Caesar and Mark Antony), she was able to cultivate her skills as an influential pharaoh, equal to that of her male counterparts, and solidify her status as pharaoh. In exploring the multicultural facets of her images, I argue that not only did they not function solely as objects of aesthetic pleasure, they also appealed to a broad audience so as to communicate her level of influence as recognized not only in Egypt, but throughout the Mediterranean world.
Creed, Code and Culture: Assassin's Creed as Videogame Legend
Another in the series of long critical reviews for the JGVW, I examine Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Firstly, I perform a mechanical assessment, comparing the mechanical affordances created by the game, and analyze their effectiveness for creating experiencing Altair's adventures. Does the game make me "feel" like an assassin? Secondly, I examine characteristics of the Assassin legend, as an intersection between history, legend and contemporary fiction. Understanding the game not as a historically real 'simulation' is important in enjoying the historical fiction it supports.
The many faces of Cleopatra : from propaganda to myth
2003
Few women of antiquity have gripped the public imagination as Cleopatra has. For centuries, she has inspired playwrights, poets, artists and film-makers, with the result that she and Antony are arguably history's most famous lovers. However, I have not yet encountered a study which discusses, in one work, the multiple constructions of Cleopatra across the range of genres in which she has been represented. Certainly, many books and articles are devoted to revealing how Cleopatra has been constructed in one or other specific genre, but it seems as though no attempts have been made to portray, in juxtaposition to one another, the many faces of Cleopatra. This dissertation seeks to do just that. Although I could not possibly include a discussion ofevery genre in which Cleopatra has been constructed, I have chosen six areas for study: ancient Greek biography (using Plutarch's Life ofAntony); the poetry of the Augustan poets: Vergil (the Aeneid), Horace (Ode 1.37) and Propertius (Elegies 3.11); Shakespearean tragedy (Antony and Cleopatra); art (numismatics and ancient sculpture); film (Joseph Mankiewicz's Cleopatra), and, briefly, Africanist historiography. I have chosen these areas because each offers such diverse constructions of Cleopatra that one begins to appreciate how historiography, propaganda and representation have contributed to the shaping ofthe Cleopatra myth, coloured by the ideology of the age in which she has been interpreted afresh. Current Africanist appropriations ofCleopatra suggest that historiography is never neutral: race and gender often intersect to create 'historical' identities.
The Renaissance Ass: Ezio Auditore and Digital Menippea
Transgression in Games and Play, 2019
In this chapter, I conduct a textual analysis of Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed II (Ubisoft Montreal 2009) through menippea , a transgressive mode of narrative relying on scandal and paradox to test a philosophical concept, and parody to uncover the game's transgressive potential. This focus may seem strange; the Assassin's Creed series is not usually perceived as offensive or rebellious, despite its many attacks on organized religion, especially Catholicism. Any controversy surrounding this game is more often related to its rather frivolous use of history. On one hand, the game takes liberties in both its visual presentation of the historical setting and its fictionalized recounting of historical events. On the other hand, it creates a sense of historicity and an authentic presentation of past places and events. Several authors have already analyzed this aspect of the game, focusing mostly on anachronism in the game's presentation of Renaissance-era Florence and Rome (Dow 2013; Szewerniak 2016; Westin and Hedlund 2016). Any further debate is silenced by two factors: the game's precautionary disclaimer about the design team's varied ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds and the uses of traditional videogame aesthetics. At first glance, then, Assassin's Creed II is just another mass-market sandbox game, faithful to genre rules and player expectations. Here, however, I expose the way Assassin's Creed II transgresses genre conventions by critiquing three important assumptions of sandbox games. First, I deal with the game's stance on killing enemies and on death in general; then I problematize character development beyond the raising of attribute scores. Finally, I move to the more general issue of freedom that sandbox games are built upon. Focusing on these three problems, I aim to describe how a mainstream videogame can "go beyond the bounds or limits set by commandments or law or convention" (Jenks 2003, 2), not by provoking controversy and outrage among players or the media or by inspiring the player to violate the rules of the game, but in more reflexive ways. My argument is that transgression can be perceived intellectually as well as emotionally.
Playing with Herstory. Representing Femininity in Historical Video Games
2016
We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine characters, and we illustrate them through an analysis of This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days. Historical games may include documented historical characters and fictive characters as well; the latter may aim to represent a type of real persons, or may be individualized as a purely fictional character. We argue that This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days have both strong and weak points in their construction of feminine characters, when taking into account the proposed set of indicators.