Can we persuade you to kill some people?

One of the best things about this paper, is that as a gamer is that I can talk about games that I've played through out the years in an academic or investigative fashion. One of those games is Assassins Creed, I had always seen this game as more than just a beautiful stealth and action game.

A quick background on the Assassin’s Creed series for those who are unfamiliar. The game is a simulation inside a simulation, you play Desmond, living in the present day, you are the descendant of a line of Assassins, you are recruited by a corporation who wishes to unlock the memories of your ancestors which are locked in your DNA, the only way to do so, is to relive the memories through a simulator called the Animus. So, thus a simulator within a simulator! The memories must be relived in a semi-linear fashion, and completed in the same manner that they happened historically to achieve “synchronization” with your ancestors memories.


Assassins Creed gives you many opportunities to learn about the historical characters and environments that make up the game space without this being a specific requirement for progression in the game, as you explore the different environments through out the series (Rome, Istanbul and Jerusalem to name a few) on screen hints will pop up inviting you to read a short piece about something you have encountered in the game, be they new weapons, locations, characters or enemies. The prompts are merely invitational, and avoid pushing their existence at the character, and are written from the point of view of a historian working on the project that is employing you, and matches his sarcastic English character-type.

An example of the in-game database.

The game has some limitations to your agency which may show up as glaring flaws in the game play, but work due to the ‘simulation in a simulation’ environment. An example of this is that killing civilians in the game will cause the game play to cease and reload from a previous point. So the game does follow the idea that Ian Bogost presents about the inflexibility of rules in procedural systems, but these rules seem less obvious as a limitation of the game Assassin’s Creed, and more as limitations of the Animus simulator located within Assassin’s Creed. As well, this system of limitations and ‘procedural rhetoric’, is part of the educational element of the game. The game goes to a point to tell you that the assassins didn’t kill people without cause or reason, as such killing random civilians causes the interface to be disrupted and alert come up saying “Altaïr/Ezio did not kill civilians”, further killings will warn you that desynchronization with the memories will occur.

As Keith Stuart discovers in this article from the Guardian, when you play a WW2 shooter, you’re not learning about the reasons behind Nazism and politics of Europe, it’s merely a location for the action, reality be damned. Assassin’s Creed relies heavily on historical research to build its backstory, but avoids making learning it the goal of the game. Bear in mind of course that the situation of the game is fictional, end of the world, Templars vs Assassins, genetic memories etc, however the game provides a great framework that game builders should follow for creating a persuasive game that can educate whilst not ramming the historical information down peoples throats. I know that the AC series got me interested in historical fiction and then eventually reading actual historical recounts of the periods the game covers.

Further reading on the educational nature of Assassin's Creed.