21 ms·

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications

• sergj 6y ago
  This is the problem with historic games. Either you acknowledge the bad and good things, or you white wash the past. As the author notes at the end: „As I have argued here many times, fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present.“
  • raxxorrax 6y ago
    I disagree with this conclusion because it disregards agency of players. I see more similarities to warnings about the dangers of books in contrast to how it might display historic events too critically or too uncritically. One mistake might be that we try to patronize people too much and that enlightenment might favor a relaxed approach. I am sure if historic depictions nurture interest in an era, people would search for additional information.
    • boudewijnrempt 6y ago
      As a player you cannot do _anything whatsoever_ to change the setting and rules of the game: you cannot be nicer or less nice to the indigenous people, you have to loot and destroy their religious centers, you have endure having their religion mocked by your compatriots, you cannot convert to the local religion... You have to play a Aryan colonial invader who disdains the local culture and religion because your own culture is so much superior, and you have to do that wearing the historically inaccurate trappings of of what people a century ago imagined vikings looked like -- trappings that have been appropriated by neo-nazis. There's no agency at all for players in this regard.
      • konjin 6y ago
        The Norse are not Aryans. The Aryans were nomadic horse tribes who lived some 3000 years before the game started and were closer to the Mongols than anyone of recent memory.
        • GavinMcG 6y ago
          But words sometimes mean more than one thing, and for better or worse, "Aryan" is far more frequently used in the sense developed in the scientific racism movement of the 19th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race
          • konjin 6y ago
            Interesting, so you're fine with calling blacks niggers because they were in the 19th century?
        • stale2002 6y ago
          In modern day society, the term "Aryan" has a different meaning than what you use. Most people full understand what people are trying to say, when they use that word.
      • gherkinnn 6y ago
        Spec Ops: The Line [0][1] puts a nice spin on just that. You have agency. Just stop playing [2]. It might just be the most harrowing game I've ever played. [0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/Spec_Ops_The_Line/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/50300/Spec_Ops_The_Line/ [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dzstxE_5Rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dzstxE_5Rc [2] - https://i.imgur.com/VSi8EOG.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VSi8EOG.jpg
        • cptnapalm 6y ago
          My experience of that game was quite different. I found it to be the heaviest handed, hypocritical virtue signaling of any game I have ever played. "Just stop playing"? Are the developers going to give me my money back?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • munchbunny 6y ago
          Spec Ops: The Line was trying to make that point with respect to you, the player, committing virtual war crimes. I thought it was clumsily executed, but it had a point. You knew what you were doing and the game told you it was wrong. The problem with Assassin's Creed Valhalla is that, rather than presenting you with the option to kill civilians and take slaves and letting you choose not to participate in this aspect of the time period/history, the game is hiding that historical fact in order to let you safely indulge in a sanitized historical fantasy. As a player who doesn't know better (AKA most people in the world), you don't even know the alternative you could be choosing.
        • teddyh 6y ago
          I would guess¹ that DayZ would also be just as, if not even more, harrowing. I mean, in DayZ you are playing against actual, real people. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7003821#7004805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7003821#7004805
      • imdsm 6y ago
        Surely people are aware of this before they buy a game? And I mean, at the end of the day, it's a video game. There are also video games about killing aliens, killing other players, killing monsters, capturing animals and making them fight other animals, and more. You could likely pick any game created and find someone that it upsets. Nobody plays a game and suddenly becomes the character in the game, no more than anyone reads a book and becomes the character in the book. If someone disagrees with it after purchasing it, then they don't play it.
        • throwaway894345 6y ago
          It sounds like this game is vilifying one religious/cultural group as a whole while glorifying another. I’m not familiar with many games that do this (at least not for real/nonfictional, extant groups at any rate). Some might argue that this is the same things as having Muslim terrorist villains, but the distinction is that these games don’t vilify Muslims in general but rather terrorists.
      • raxxorrax 6y ago
        I meant agency in regard to the conclusions you draw from playing, not that the degrees of freedom within a game are unlimited. You played it perhaps (I did not) and thought that the game forces you to identify with characters mocking something or someone. I haven't played many games that didn't depict such mockery in a negative light if the player has no influence on it anyway. Some games allow you to have a choice in it, but doing so is not synonymous with holding that view. > trappings that have been appropriated by neo-nazis. Don't make the mistake in handing such symbols to neo-nazis. They will turn it around on you. For them Vikings might depict an ideal but they probably aren't interested in a deeper cultural analysis anyway.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • watwut 6y ago
      Player or reader agency is not in contradiction with "fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present." People do conceptualize past based on entertainment they have seen voluntary, whether consciously or subconsciously. Majority of people engaging with fiction wont rush to read about real history. Which is not even complaint, it is just a fact. Which is why blog posts and writings that compare the two from people who actually know history do have value for minority of those who are curious or interested to fact check fiction. Cause even curious minority wont be necessary interested in reading massive historical book about vikings or England just because they played game.
  • watwut 6y ago
    His complain is waaay more nuanced then that. It is that that while the game acknowledges bad in England Christianity and even adds some more ahistorical bad, the Vikings are treated as basically saviors.
  • narrator 6y ago
    "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it." - From George Orwell's 1984. What's weird is that this was meant to shock, but here we are in 2020 and this seems to be a good idea to a lot of people for some reason. 1984 was influenced a lot by Orwell's observance of Stalinism, where they would edit out people from old photos who had been executed and so forth. Stalin took a close interest in editing screenplays, editorials and even fiction produced in the Soviet Union to make it fit the narratives of Marxism. Why did he spend so much time on all of this? You have to make the whole ideology hang together if you want to transform society. The ruler must remove all contradictions everywhere so that all voices sing in unison one unifying vision and that includes popular art and media. There must be no contradictions!
    • uyhtgrfed 6y ago
      Orwell is accurately describing how history is recorded. Yes, all history, well-research history included. History is necessarily fuzzy and non-absolute. Historians work in conditions (social/political contexts) that shape not only what records are deemed appropriate to use, but also the means through which history ought to be recorded, presented and publicly disseminated. For example, Herodotus was a historian who relied in hearsay and myth to inform his largely oral depictions of world cultures. This was the accepted standard of his time. Fifty years ago, history was largely told as a series of 'big men' whose impact was absolute and only resisted by other big men. Today, history is largely social history, and uses lots of sources that account for everyday interactions, and the product is typically a monograph and a few blog posts or op-eds. To get back on track, Orwell (in this passage and throughout the entire book, really) is basically dramatizing fundamental means of understanding the past, and the effect this has on how the future is imagined. Yes, it is about dogma, but no, the enforcement of dogma does not necessarily have to be as institutional or intentional as you seem to be suggesting. A fundamental aspect of social existence is that understanding the past draws heavily on our assumptions in the present, which in turn are drawn from how we view the past. Our understanding of the past shapes how we reify the world around us, which in turn influences how we imagine future possibilities. See [double hermenutic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_hermeneutic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_hermeneutic), [reflexivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)) and [postmodernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism) (please actually read about what postmodernism is, rather than relying on popular understanding of the term, which is very often inaccurate)
  • macspoofing 6y ago
    >Either you acknowledge the bad and good things, or you white wash the past. And the way you white wash the past is also very interesting, because it shows the preset-day values of the storyteller.
  • tarsinge 6y ago
    The problem is more with the positioning of the game. They want the "Historic" label, but in reality it's Fantasy. Modern fantasy is a fertile ground for fun, diverse and "history inspired" stories. But trying to rewrite history with the excuse of "but it's fiction" is wrong, and I agree with the author, irresponsible and dangerous. But I guess the marketing is too tempting, AC:Valhalla should instead be positioned as Skyrim, not as a "moderately historical accurate game with more diversity".
  • AniseAbyss 6y ago
    An historically accurate game isn't much fun. For one you can't play as a female protagonist. Videogames can be an inspiration for someone to read up on the real history so its not all bad.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      TIL that South Park™: The Fractured But Whole is an historically accurate game : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1EbPpyq91U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1EbPpyq91U
• mecha_love 6y ago
  I actually quite like the part where you have to wait to get all types of armor etc. It makes you actually use more variety of tools than using one type for the whole game
• tdsamardzhiev 6y ago
  You're supposed to see the world through the memories of a 9th century Viking (who also happens to be a great figure of the Nordic mythology), of course the invasion of England will be portrayed in a positive light and Anglo-Saxons would be seen as inferior people. It's a Triple-A game featuring gods, diverse Vikings, and a dude with an axe in his head; if one takes it as a reputable historical source, I say the problem is them, not the game (although IMHO there's many things wrong with the game in general). Anyway, perhaps it's a fair point to make if your blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry"...
  • gelert 6y ago
    As the blog post points out within a decade of the 'great heathen army' and just four years after this game is supposedly set a majority of these vikings had converted to Christianity including prominent leaders among them. That's a very different picture than what the game portrays. There is also a difference between what the characters say and believe and what the environment depicts - e.g. there's not a problem with the norse thinking that they're doing good but rather with how the game constructs places which reinforce that narrative. e.g. the uninhabited river valley, the lack of slave trading
    • bluGill 6y ago
      Seems like the only way for this to work out at all is for the hero to go home after a year (ie before converting): grow old. The entire setting needs to be an old man telling young kids about the old glory and trying to convert them from Christianity. That is about the only way you can justify only showing those actions: his memory, and latter life surrounded by Christian means he wants to remember only those parts. But now you really need to get the player to realize that this his a romanticized past - the player must spend a lot of time seeing contradictions in the player (that is it becomes obvious some things didn't happen the way the player played them!). There are a lot more implications of this line that I can figure out in a few minutes.
    • kerng 6y ago
      So many things in the blog post I didn't know - but fascinating and makes you think.... it's like the Spaniards and Portugese would have adopted Native American religions at one point.
• Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  There’s lots of evidence of trade with African and MiddleEastern merchants in Viking-age Scandinavia; it’s totally plausible that some of these merchants ended up there
  • orwin 6y ago
    Not only that, but there is evidence of genetic exchange taking place around the 9th century between scandinavia/England and Malian kingdoms (i know it was not the Malian kingdom at that time). Probably slave trade tbh.
    • COGlory 6y ago
      Do you have a source for this? Id be curious to read it
  • serf 6y ago
    > it’s totally plausible that some of these merchants ended up there that's the same conclusion that the author came to; they just presume there would be a higher ratio of African origin individuals rather than Asia due to trade-route proximities.
    • Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      But the Vikings traded via Russia down to Persia, so Asian representation not less likely?
      • ReptileMan 6y ago
        Barbary coast, Spain England via sea vs Sweden, Finland, Silk Road ....
      • gelert 6y ago
        While it is true that vikings traded and travelled down there - the famous Varangian Guard of Byzantium is a notable example. It does make Asian representation less likely. Trade with North and West Africa was purely maritime whereas to travel and trade across what is now Russia land travel was required, even if rivers made up most of the distance. This drastically slowed down travel time making it much more likely those Asian merchants would sell their goods on to an intermediary rather than travel all the way to Scandinavia and then on to Britain. On another tack I suppose it also doesn't really make sense for an Asian merchant like that to go on to Britain if they were in Scandinavia - I doubt they'd get better deals on goods or more demand for their goods. And they wouldn't return that way. Whereas African merchants would happen upon Britain first and would stop on their way back if they actually did travel all the way to Scandinavia.
• stupidcar 6y ago
  > Now, do I think that the developers set out to create a sanitized defense of colonialism (much less an apologia for Nazi race ideology)? Of course not. But they ended up doing it anyway. I agree with the article's main points, but I think the author gives the game's creators too much credit here. You could tell from the first trailer that this game was going to engage in historical revisionism of the "the Vikings were really noble heroes" type. This isn't oversight or subtext, it's a conscious and deliberate choice. The people who made this game weren't stupid or ignorant. If they chose to erase the reality of Viking slavery and violence against defenceless civilians, it wasn't an accident. They may (or may not) have intended to defend colonialism in general, but this game is an entirely intentional attempt to defend _Viking_ colonialism specifically. And they will have been perfectly aware that this played into neo-Nazi tropes.
  • eznzt 6y ago
    Or they just wanted to make a fun game. Maybe someone can create a mod where you control a black transsexual and win by killing every single viking? ;P
  • Ialdaboth 6y ago
    I don't think it's Ubisoft's fault, really - in 2020, you just can't produce a game where migrating people are presented as the bad guys who kill, rape and loot the locals indiscriminately. I'm more frustrated by the lack of diverse body types... there is no way malnutrition, lack of modern-day medicine and violence can produce as many healthy bodies as what we see in Ubisoft titles.
    • causality0 6y ago
      Considering Ubisoft's track record with depicting the disabled and downtrodden I'd rather them not engage with the subject at all. You may recall the homeless beggar woman and mentally ill man from Assassin's Creed 1, both of which existed just to try and annoy the player into killing them.
      • Ialdaboth 6y ago
• quietbritishjim 6y ago
  > > Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities. > This statement is making ... implicit [claims] (our diverse team means this game was produced in a careful, sensitive way) Ah, I think that's a misunderstanding of why the statement is there. It's not to claim that the game is therefore produced in a careful way. Certainly not an accurate way! It's just saying you shouldn't take offense at any details in it (accurate or not). Like, "we probably had someone with the same ethnicity/religion/gender as you and they were fine with it". It's fall out from the original being set in Palestine, which they called "The Kingdom" in an attempt to bypass offense.
  • enkid 6y ago
    Having someone with an ethnicity present while making something offensive isn't a great defense for the offensive thing.
    • Bishonen88 6y ago
      No, but it's still better than not having such a person around at all.
      • veddox 6y ago
        I find the two pretty orthogonal...
        • clankyclanker 6y ago
          Exactly. The statement is designed to be a meaningless deflection, a mental “nothing to see here, move along,” for cultural awareness.
        • ethbr0 6y ago
          How so? Presumably an individual from a specific background is more likely to be able to evaluate slights against that background, vs a random individual. Individual experiences vary, but it's a helluva better start than... you know... not.
• MatekCopatek 6y ago
  Lovely article. The conflict between making a videogame (or any bit of popculture really) enjoyable and inclusive vs. historically accurate often comes up and both sides have a fair point. My personal solution is to both enjoy the content and then try to educate myself through articles like this one.
  • bsanr2 6y ago
    The fact that foreign traders are present in a game that, produced a decade or so ago, would very much not have had them means that the tension is less between "inclusivity" and "historical accuracy", and more between "contemporary, preconceived notions" and "historical accuracy". It turns out that "inclusivity" is more historically-accurate when compared to what we would have gotten in the past. In the end, it really is about healthy skepticism, especially of long-held beliefs and "knowledge".
    • spoopyskelly 6y ago
      Slave traders, but woke, because they are diverse!
  • himinlomax 6y ago
    Why do they need to be inclusive? Do samurai games need to include red-haired Celts and curly-haired Bantus, you know, for diversity? What's the point of this? Lying about history to make some people feel better?
    • hackerbabz 6y ago
      Because games are supposed to be fun and it’s more fun if the player feels included.
      • flyinglizard 6y ago
        I never once played a violent game and felt the need to have my own character included.
• throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  He carefully distinguishes the game from his criticism of what it portrays and elucidates the discrepancies with careful reference to how things actually were so I can learn something[0]. IMO it's a first class perspective which I'll print out to read properly later. I can't complain about any of this. (Massive moggy BTW) [0] although vikings being predatory bastards I pretty much knew already, but there's plenty more I don't. (edit to remove innuendo)
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  I have no interest in these games, nor do I expect them to have any historical merit. My only observation is that the hard points of this article appear to be that the game aggressively asserts cultural superiority of the Norse over the evil, or, much worse, weak willed Christians who appreciate being shown non-Christian views; as well as as vaguely racist depictions of weak Saxony. Whatever your views on Christian (or Saxons?) this feels like a bad take. They want to make a story about how Vikings were unilaterally the good guys rather than a group of nomads who like all other humans wanted to take prosperity and geopolitical power, but only had a bunch of weapons, boats, and muscles (no need to prove me wrong on many technicalities here). Yet contrarians here seem to anchor on the inclusion of other races and women as the "bad pc" to be debated.
  • munchbunny 6y ago
    I think you lost the forest for the trees in the blog post's arguments. The treatment of Christianity and depiction of the Saxons is only part of the bigger problem of a colonizer narrative. Big issues in actual history are just glossed over, like the Viking use of slaves and collateral damage to civilians. The argument is that pretending that the Vikings were unilaterally the good guys is an irresponsible thing to do when your game claims to be made by a multicultural team (AKA "we're trying to be sensitive about it") and when the game series has always tried to weave the stories into real-world settings. One of the interesting things the author points out is that they were open about slavery in a previous game set in the Caribbean, but it's almost never mentioned here despite its historical prominence in the setting.
• himinlomax 6y ago
  > But given the relative size of video-game markets, it isn’t hard to see why that decision might have been made [to include anachronistic ethnicities] Is anyone seriously believing that the lack of Africans limiting the market of, say, Samurai games? Why would it limit the market of Viking games?
  • Shmebulock 6y ago
    I think most people that waste their lives with video games and "make you feel good" fantasies of this kind don't care about historical accuracy; it's not about understanding reality but about feeling good and "engaged". That's what sells. And yeah, the makers of samurai games definitely consider the marketability of their games with regards to races portrayed. Consider the samurai game "Nioh" which takes place in feudal Japan, has a white protagonists and includes a black character.
    • himinlomax 6y ago
      The question is not whether someone did in fact include black samurais, but whether not doing so would negatively impact the market for the game. > "make you feel good" fantasies of this kind don't care about historical accuracy; Similarly irrelevant.
      • Shmebulock 6y ago
        The example I provided shows that people with actual skin in the game think that it impacts the market which to me is one of the best indicators that it actually does. The impression that I have of people that play such games makes it seem plausible to me. What would be a comment to your question that you wouldn't consider irrelevant? Should I conduct an experiment and let it be peer reviewed?
    • krapp 6y ago
      >Consider the samurai game "Nioh" which takes place in feudal Japan, has a white protagonists and includes a black character. You do know they were based on actual historical figures, right?
• torginus 6y ago
  Vikings invade England, pillage and massacre the English, yet they are still seen as the good guys. I wonder if the people who made this game have some historical resentment towards the English.
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    Vikings invade England, pillage and massacre the English, yet they are still seen as the good guys. It's curious that what is now Britain has been invaded and its people enslaved many times over the centuries but no modern day British person harbours any resentment for it towards present day Italians, Scandinavians, French, Moroccans...
    • pas 6y ago
      Are you sure? There are always a few ultra-nationalists in every country.
    • rgblambda 6y ago
      Moroccans? Think you mean Dutch. Unless you're talking about the Barbary pirates.
    • Shish2k 6y ago
      We were never taught that we were invaded by those nations - history lessons talk about “Romans”, “Saxons”, and “Normans”. None of those nations are around any more, so the obvious conclusion is that we must’ve “won”, probably by virtue of England being the strongest most pure-blooded nation, or something like that...
      • goatinaboat 6y ago
        None of those nations are around any more, so the obvious conclusion is that we must’ve “won”, probably by virtue of England being the strongest most pure-blooded nation, or something like that... You must have had a very different education than me then. We were taught that the Vikings we bought off, the Roman Empire collapsed for reasons unrelated to us, and the Normans stayed and intermingled with the population. Nevertheless for a present day Brit to harbour resentment against a present day dweller in Rome because of galley slaves would be considered utterly absurd.
• xalava 6y ago
  The most relevant point of this article is not about historical accuracy, but on the contradiction of claiming cultural sensitivity by including gender and origin diversity while totally missing the point on deeper issues. I've grown up in a period when pop culture didn't care much about cultural sensitivity. With proper education anyone can compensate and treat them as pure simplistic fiction, but I do think that those new debates, if nuanced and not reduced to representation, could bring quality to pop culture items. Particularly in the video game industry, and this company, that have proven to have flawed IRL corporate cultures.
  • mam2 6y ago
    > I've grown up in a period when pop culture didn't care much about cultural sensitivity. Same, and as unpopular it may be, i firmly believe it's kind of better to not care. Because the opposite is precisely what happens here, which is caring only about a specific set of 'aspects' that are currently fashionable in the society, while failing to cover for the large majority of inequalities that are not "visible". It's the exact same than positive discrimination, you end up only caring about women or color people in the name of "equal opportunity" and no one care anymore about economic inequalities that are largely the main factor of inequality at birth. In the end it's still the same rich people from the same parents but they just look more diverse, and no one care of young people from trailer parks & getthos. I don't blame prejudiced people fighting agaisnt their prejudices tho, imo it's more a consequence lazy politics and politician trying to get votes instead of taking on more complex and deeper problems.
    • TremendousJudge 6y ago
      Quoting the article: >Does all of that matter? Yes, I think it does. As I have argued here many times, fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present. Is one video game going to lead to a return to colonialist thinking? Of course not. But a culture in which such sanitized narratives are common is a culture far more willing to make those decisions; these stories matter in the aggregate. And so it is incumbent on designers and developers to construct their stories and their worlds with care, especially when they are set in the very real past.
• rosmax_1337 6y ago
  I think it's pretty rich for anyone to be complaining about the video game industry not pandering enough to left-wing social justice theories enough these days. It practically all you see. This game in itself is an example of it! (As noted sort-of by the writer) Most developers don't care about this stuff anyway, the industry needs to go back to the time when developers just made the games they liked, the games were better then, and it shows.
  • spoopyskelly 6y ago
    > Most developers don't care about this stuff anyway, the industry needs to go back to the time when developers just made the games they liked This won't happen anytime soon because outsiders are chasing clout by injecting identity politics into everything.
  • galangalalgol 6y ago
    Yeah, it has both left and right wing neurosis represented. Probably because rather than generate something coherent and new, it mashed together whatever trended highest on the big data culture combiner thing AAA game houses use to theme their re releases of the same game over and over. The games are garbage but maybe the meme concentrator engine used to create them could be useful as a warning for us to stop being nazi sympathizing social justice warrior misogynists.
• friendlybus 6y ago
  A slave raiding realistically violent viking game would be R18+ easily and lose most of its paying audience. There was a resurgence of neo-nazis a few years ago, all of this is trapped in a cultural time bubble, along with the concern?
  • bhaak 6y ago
    Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is already rated PEGI 18. The ESRB rating is "Mature". There are hardly any games besides pornographic games that get "Adults Only". Even the Witcher 3 is only "Mature".
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• shusson 6y ago
  > I think the problem can be neatly summed up in just one thing about the game: the game will ‘desyncronize’ you (meaning produce a game over) if your character kills civilians While I agree this broke immersion completely for me, I don't think you want 10 year olds killing civilians.
  • Strom 6y ago
    The game is rated M for mature / PEGI-18. It's not meant to be played by 10 year olds.
  • gelert 6y ago
    But it's okay for 10 year olds to kill combatants? Edit: That statement alone is underdeveloped but I wanted to provoke a reaction. Given that the above comment says that killing civilians is what would make this game inappropriate for a ten year old it implies that the rest of the game is appropriate.
    • shusson 6y ago
      > But it's okay for 10 year olds to kill combatants? An adult should understand that killing civilians is morally/ethically wrong. Where as a child might not. So while you probably don't want any child to simulate killing combatants, you can morally justify it from the perspective of the character in video game. > Given that the above comment says that killing civilians is what would make this game inappropriate for a ten year old it implies that the rest of the game is appropriate. I did not mean to imply that the rest of the game is appropriate, rather that there are certain moral principles that game developers will not cross because they would lose a large audience or break regulations.
  • bhaak 6y ago
    Do you think many 10 year olds play AC? I would have thought their target group is much older. I'm also not quite sure what you're insinuating by bringing up kids and computer game violence?
    • 6y ago
• tobr 6y ago
  Since the article is explicitly about pedantry and nitpicking, I can’t not point out the unbalanced parentheses. It begins right before a typographic complaint, nonetheless.
• seer 6y ago
  I think what people are missing is that this is a work of fiction. Any work of fiction is entitled to do whatever it wants really. So what if it white washes stuff for the masses, maybe thats a good thing. If people experience the past only as a fictional place where people are gentle and sensitive, if there is wide acknowledgment of race and gender, in the way that we actually want from our society today, isn’t that for the better? Whenever I played Civilization as a kid and had “Mongolians build the pyramids” I never thought thats a historical fact, It just inspired me to read up some real info about it. Assassins creed series that I’ve played had a similar effect (just the ones up until Italy, haven’t played the newer ones). I read up a ton about the warring families of the renaissance and when I actually visited the historical places it was all the more interesting for it. I’m glad AC exists even in its current corporate PC form, the world is better for it than without I’d wager. Even the fact that people are discussing that there are inaccuracies means there is a conversation.
  • enkid 6y ago
    This is dangerous stuff. What if there was an Assassin's Creed that showed slavery in a positive light? Or the glory of killing Rightists in China in the 50s? Or Turks killing Armenians in 1918? People might look into it, but a lot of people are going to take it at face value and even if they do look it up, there initial exposure is going to color their expectations.
    • ceilingcorner 6y ago
      Then don’t take your ethical values from video games? This Puritanization of all art and entertainment is disturbing.
      • galangalalgol 6y ago
        I think the precise criticism is that it was already puritanized. I don't think the argument was thay they set out to make mysogynist nazi propaganda, but that the cliche reorganizing machine that is a AAA gamehouse looked around at society, gears whirled, and the resulting thing that would sell the best that came flying out was a combination of white supremacist mythology, mockery of christianity, and the devaluation of femininity. Its not a critique of the game so much as it is of the society that produced it.
• Hokusai 6y ago
  So many people missing the point, and not reading the article. TLDR; Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla constructs a deceptive apology for colonialism. Colonialism = Good. And that is a irresponsible message.
• ignisrising 6y ago
  I know it has its flaws, but I still love this game
• macspoofing 6y ago
  Great write-up. I'm sure this will be a good game, but the issue with romanticizing of the Vikings was evident in the trailer[1]. The eye-rolling moment for me was at 0:35 which contrasted how the Vikings were described by the Saxon King versus how peaceful and chivalrous they "really" were! It was total cringe because you don't need advanced History degrees to know that Viking raids, which spanned hundreds of years, were devesting to the local populations. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssrNcwxALS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssrNcwxALS4
• WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > > Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities. > This statement is making ... implicit [claims] (our diverse team means this game was produced in a careful, sensitive way) For everyone who isn't aware of the history of this statement, it was a way for the game to include a scene of beating up the pope without (pardon the pun) getting crucified.
  • julianmarq 6y ago
    I fail to see how that in any way justifies the decision. Seems like the implication is that christians (specifically catholics) should just be okay with having their religion insulted if the decision was made by someone of a different cultural background. If anything, that just makes it more offensive instead of less, IMO.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      I think the idea was that the team had Christians and they were okay with the depiction (or perhaps didn’t feel safe objecting), not that the decision was expressly made by non-Christians.
      • julianmarq 6y ago
        Again, that doesn't justify it, in fact, if your interpretation is correct, it no longer even explains it. The implication still remains that "hey, we're insulting your religion, but there are people of multiple backgrounds here so it should be okay"... which really doesn't follow at all. And I didn't say that the decision was expressly made by non-christians.
        • throwaway894345 6y ago
          I agree that it doesn’t justify it, but to be quite clear, the argument isn’t that there are many backgrounds represented but specifically that some of those backgrounds are Christian and they were presumably okay with it. Again, this is terrible logic because one or two Christians don’t speak for the lot. > And I didn't say that the decision was expressly made by non-christians. I don’t know what else you could’ve meant by “the decision was made by someone of a different background” (paraphrased because copy/paste on HN mobile is tedious).
• calrissian 6y ago
  I loved this article for the many cognitive dissonances it brings into light. Some of them are internalized by the author, and for some other he has to carefully maneuver around them. First, I would like to point out that it is evident, obvious, absolutely certain that the person writing this blog is a white american liberal. Why? Because while they can make pedantic remarks about weapons, armors, clothes -- which are badly depicted within the game as a result of errors or ignorance --, they will openly switch their stance, and make pedantic remarks but this time justifying the choices of the developers, as long as they are errors that are done to enforce a false narrative. Of course, this "false narrative" I am referring to is a progressive narrative: here, that 9th century England was racially diverse, as it _should_, and that some "primitive" sympathetic people like Danes or Norses were gender equal, as they _should_. Even in the world of things the author is allegedly unbothered about, there is a hierarchy of things to be unbothered about in a positive or in a negative way. Continuing from this perspective, the efforts of the author to pursue his pedantic analysis can only be very arduous. Because he has to analyze blatant lies in a pedantic way, but still maintain a conclusion that will be seen as progressive (something along the lines of: there is a more abstract interpretation of all of this that shows that white people are the real culprits in all of this, even though they are openly depicted as evil and ridiculed in every way). So... the author remarks that Vikings are represented as racially diverse, gender-equal, generally the "good guys" (a "good guy" in pop culture is usually someone who possess anachronic progressive liberal values). These good guys are opposed to the Saxons -- indigenous whites, who are Christian, who wear boring mail, who are religious fanatics, and patriarchal. One could think that this was the intent, that Ubisoft is simply pandering to American racial justice narratives by painting world progress as a fight against traditional white societies. The simple manicheism used throughout the story makes it simply too obvious... But, NO. That answer would fall in the category of "bad conclusions", and even though the author is pedantic, he can't go there due to his liberal _essence_. Hence the need for him to abstract every piece of evidence, and every obvious conclusion that the creators of this game are stupidly pushing their social agenda, in order to reframe those ideas in a light that blames whites. The way to do this? It is quite astute. It consists in abstracting the very ideas of the developers to ridicule whites and acclaim diverse societies, and to claim that those offensive representations are ACTUALLY toxic white representations of colonialism. > And that, of course is the problem: the broader implications of this kind of game design for thinking about colonialism. I do not think we are all collectively bothered by how Viking-themed products make us think about 9th century settler colonialism in Northern Europe. But colonialism more broadly, and the still popular fantasy of colonists finding empty ‘virgin’ lands to settle, is still a major issue in the consciousness and politics of many countries. Namely, that even though no one cares that peasants in 9th century England were massacred, we should be WARY of it because of OTHER INSTANCES of white colonialism. Indeed, every bad in history is bad not for objective reasons, but because at some point whites did it and it was bad. This is a caricature, but very close to reality. And in all, it is a clever argumentation. Picture a far-right person, who after analyzing demography and the general trends in American or European culture would see in this game the exact evil he is fighting against. Precisely: that there is a dominant trend in all pop culture and the entertainment industry to present dominantly white european countries (or the U.S., which still is demographically a dominantly white european country) and their cultures as 'virgin' islands, that should be forced open to massive foreign immigration by international treaties. And that the laws, customs and religion of these countries (Christianism, hello) should be considered equal or inferior to foreign incoming values (hello """paganism"""). Well, the only way to fight this point is to reverse all the obvious, and go from a concrete to an abstract point of view. See: > Let’s consider this through our heuristic of “what would we think about this if it were a religion other than Christianity?” Imagine a game where your character comes upon a Buddhist monk in a small shrine and easily talks them into violating their vows by acquiring some property or engaging in sexual intercourse (using reasoning from your religious tradition, no less), after which they thank you and then the game rewards you experience for having desecrated their sacred vows. This is roughly what you do with the anchoress (whose vow is to stay isolated and in place). Anyone would see this as an attack on christianity by liberal values, namely individualism and hedonism that lead to a disrespect and subversion of people wanting to adopt a religious way of life (these liberal values are represented in the game by the token paganism of the Norse). But NOPE. You CANNOT go this way! First, blame whites. Then, go to an abstract level where you can still blame them. > Now look, I get it, Christianity in 9th century England was an intolerant, hegemonic religion. But you are a foreign colonizing invader rolling in wrecking their holy sites, (not) killing their religious practitioners and toppling their governments: you are intolerant and hegemonic too! This is a typical "fake middle ground" centrist point of view. "I agree they are nazis and should be beat up, BUT DON'T BE TOO ROUGH WITH THEM OR YOU MIGHT START TO RESEMBLE THEM." It only ever serves to further bring the knife under the neck of whoever is being beat up. > And of course that plays straight back into the problem with sanitizing Scandinavian raiding, slavery, and gender roles: the Christian Saxons do not get the same treatment, setting up this stark contrast between an a-historically pure and moral set of Norse characters and a more historically grounded, flawed Christian Saxon society (all the more awkward because one of the things the Christian church militated against in Scandinavian society was slavery, since many of the enslaved people there were Christian). > And this is my Eivor’s boat-cat. He is adorable and fortunately, unlike the rest of this game, not a white-wash of colonialism. The author, a proud white liberal, has failed to recognize his own worldview behind the token paganism of these racially diverse / gender equal imaginary Norse people. He still thinks that the problem in this is that _people could see Norse characters as good_, and not that they have been made token protagonists to enforce his own cultural values. The conclusion of this article is a delusion: > To be clear, my preference here is not for Ubisoft to have not made this game, my preference here would be for Scandinavian settlement in England to have been presented, warts and all. Having argued that this game is Bad (it COULD give white people a positive view of colonialism, because they're inherently prone to Nazism), and that even though it became bad for Good reasons (he neutrally points out that the creators censored and distorted reality, because they were just happy to depict the colonization of white people and to demonize christianism), he now expresses the wish that the developers had made a better job of showing the horrors of the pillage and erasure of a culture. It, of course, runs contrary to his beliefs expressed in the introduction that there's no fuss in falsely portraying a white society as racially diverse or any other distortions as long as it's to enforce a progressive agenda. This is the epiphany of cognitive dissonance, "SHOW THE TRUTH to fight white nazis" vs. "HIDE THE TRUTH to fight white nazis". And I am happy to point this out, in the most pedantic way that anyone could think of. For a final point of fun, read this: Ubisoft, please: do better. Earn that title card about your diverse team. And realize that the author missed that the whole point of this game was to show (CHAD "pagan" diversity) vs. (VIRGIN white christianism) and that he distorted it into a bizarre plot that would somehow reinforce the worldviews of Nazis. ----------------------- I am well aware that someone will pedanticly argue that the author put up a minor disclaimer in parenthesis to make it seem as he is taking the "middle ground" between all these issues, and that he's the voice of reason / objectivity. My claim is that it is mostly bullshit noise, and that pedanticism is a nice game for nerds until it has to be tamed and distorted to defend some ideology. The fact that the author cannot argue even one second that this game is symbolically anti-white colonial propaganda, and have to resort to a universalist position ("I would do the same for any religion / people / etc. !") but without naming once the target of the propaganda... It is funny. That's a funny piece, from an astute contorted liberal white pedant.
• afrcnc 6y ago
  What a bunch of garbage.... So this author is angry because the game portrayed historical events with accuracy? So what if it shows burning churches. That's what vikings did, ffs.
  • anand-bala 6y ago
    I am not sure if you read the article in it's entirety. The author's point is the exact opposite: while Ubisoft developers are ok with burning churches (which magically restore themselves), they do not show any of the other Viking raiding acts that have more broad implications. The author's problem is with the erasure of the actual viking culture, like slavery, and also with the (possibly unintentional) misogynistic views that the game portrays about weak, effeminate men, etc.
  • peer2pay 6y ago
    Did you even bother reading the whole article before attacking the author? They make it quite clear that they are angry about the selective omission of historical events such as the Scandinavian slave trade.
• lambdadmitry 6y ago
  Here is what the game's creative director has to say: “The history of the invasion itself in this time period is, of course, a critical part of the journey,” Ismail said. “What did it mean for the Vikings of the Norse to land in England and to cohabitate?” Ismail enunciated that last word carefully. He said the historians that his team worked with suggested that the “Viking approach to this invasion was cohabitation.” He continued: “Yes, there was war and it was bloody, and it was very brutal. But they adapted themselves to the people they came to. And this is an aspect of it that we do look at. Some historians will even say that this is maybe why the Vikings sort of lost their way of life and culture over time—that they adapted themselves rather than forcing others. And so that aspect is something we do explore to a certain degree in the game.” Source: https://kotaku.com/the-many-things-we-ve-learned-about-assassin-s-creed-va-1843522310 https://kotaku.com/the-many-things-we-ve-learned-about-assas... No mention of slavery, and even brutal colonisation is dismissed with "but", instead talking about "cohabitation". I'm truly baffled by how ahistoric and whitewashing it is. What for?
  • mcphage 6y ago
    > I'm truly baffled by how ahistoric and whitewashing it is. What for? Because most players don't want to play as someone who captures people for slavery, or invades a monastery by slaughtering all of the monks inside.
    • lambdadmitry 6y ago
      I hoped it doesn't mean the creative director has to actively whitewash the period in an interview quite ahead of the release.
    • krapp 6y ago
      >Because most players don't want to play as someone who captures people for slavery, or invades a monastery by slaughtering all of the monks inside. The slavery I can understand, but the violence is kind of what makes Vikings a popular character archetype. I can't imagine wanting to play a Viking protagonist in a "realistic" setting without the pillaging and bloodshed. That's kind of the draw.
• flippinburgers 6y ago
  The author exposes his biases by indicating that historically questionable accuracy in terms of racial diversity is perfectly OK but that glossing over the atrocities is NOT OK because of some phantom fear that modern day nazis will interpret it as a celebration of ... whiteness I guess. The entire thing comes across as white is bad. Further evidence of how academically overboard he is is illustrated by the fact that he links to a video about colonialism in minecraft. I am reminded of the insufferable people I have had the displeasure of knowing in life who act like they are on the cusp of something profound when in fact they seem to be just trying to get laid. Equating actions in a video game with actual colonization is borderline perverse if you ask me.
  • yoyohello13 6y ago
    In his defence, he titled his blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry".
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• frazbin 6y ago
  This is a pretty high effort article, let's take a deep breath. I enjoyed it because it uses Assassin's Creed as a lense to teach us a bit about history. No culture war related baggage is required for admission into this article IMO; the narrative compromises necessary to make a playable game out of a 9th century setting are kind of hilarious, and this article helped me process the cognitive dissonance that comes from playing such games. The bit about christian churches being decorated like abandoned shacks, with all the gold in a chest in the middle, I thought was funny. Making game worlds that feel 'used' by their inhabitants is a really interesting one. idk, games are different things to different people; they're escapism and we don't all escape the same way. Some of us enjoy pillaging inaccurate churches, and some of us like chortling about how silly it is while we do it.
  • trey-jones 6y ago
    My biggest takeaway: this question of how to be truthful about history and simultaneously sensitive to people who are traumatized by the memory, or have a unique or minority perspective - it is neither and easy question to answer, nor an easy problem to solve. Parties who would debate the question would do well to respect the problem and others who would offer solutions. I lean more towards honesty and accuracy, and if you can't handle the truth then go read something else, but my perspective is probably closer to one of decadence, rather than persecution. Also, I haven't played the game but I thought the article was a good read regardless.
  • megameter 6y ago
    This kind of sensitivity/accuracy issue and how it relates to culture broadly is one of those things inherent to fiction that isn't necessarily obvious when you experience it, but looms ever-larger as you get deeper into crafting it. At first you're OK with putting throwaway stereotypes in your work, and then you start thinking, "well, why?" Because if you don't take the question head-on, you aren't going to craft something coherent and directed towards a point or a purpose. And asking that that can lead you towards an elaborate justification, to some kind of critique, or to a nihilistic dismissal. And while that can feed into culture wars issues, and popular works often arrive at the right time to be a lightning rod for them, it's equally often a case of "the real point being made is going to be esoteric anyway and only a fraction of the audience will work at understanding it properly." Especially with big productions like AAA video games, the prioritization is on rushing to produce big spectacles, and a majority of the production effort goes to the technical part of that, while the concept is kept to something easily described in blunt shorthand: "you get to play as a Viking and pillage the British." And it's like, oh, okay, gotta live up to the audience expectations here, make it a fun thrill ride with a happy ending, let's ignore the implications. The novel stuff and minority views usually can't get represented in such productions for structural reasons.
• Jiro 6y ago
  My take, which is less charitable in some ways and more in others, is this: Anti-colonialism is aimed at the West and especially at countries associated with the current West. The most anger is felt towards US colonialism. Failing that, British colonialism, and anything involving Western cultural institutions such as Christianity. Colonialism that opposes those is not so hated. If you interpret the current zeitgeist as "colonialism is wrong", therefore, you'll be constantly surprised when less-Western colonialism is given a pass. If you interpret it as "the West is evil", and notice that the British are the ones being colonized in this game and that Western religions are being robbed, you will be surprised much less. It's true that Norse are also associated with the Nazis, but I think that's a coincidence. The Norse are being whitewashed because they're sticking it to the Man.
• sneak 6y ago
  That’s the best blog title I’ve ever seen.
• Bayart 6y ago
  The whole viking craze that's been undergoing for the last ten years or so has been a vehicle for the most fantastical right-wing and left-wing rubbish. Everybody seems to have their own personal viking. From the strong, pride of the white race, Christian-killing raider to the inclusive feminist bossgirl shield-maiden. The only thing tied everything together being the subjects' immunity to the corrupting influence of Western Modernity, whatever that influence means to you. In the end, the best recent work of fiction I've seen in this setting happens to be... Japanese. Vinland Saga manages to be faithful in the things that affect historical awareness (the details of everyday life, the structure of society, the perception of the world) and still be very romantic in its character-building.
• freewilly1040 6y ago
  > Absolutely, there are other games that indulge in the ‘virgin lands’ fantasy – Minecraft, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress I feel Factorio is the counter example, you are a settler on a planet wiping out the local inhabitants mostly just minding their own business, who are attracted by the pollution you are generating. I definitely always feel like the bad guy when playing.
• EugeneOZ 6y ago
  Thanks for posting this - my vocabulary and knowledge of history have been improved by reading this.