A Reflection on Assassin’ s Creed By Abhinav Tiku
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A Reflection on Assassin’ s Creed By Abhinav Tiku
I
owe video games a big debt for giving me a love of history. It all began over a decade ago, on a dewy day in southern England. My family and I lived in a house in the suburb of Ascot, separated from Waterloo Station by an x-teen train ride. It was a cosy, quiet place, made more lively by my uncle and his family who were visiting on vacation. It was a short but very memorable visit. He brought a present for me and my brother: a CD of Age of Empires II: Age of Kings and its expansion pack, The Conquerors. Back then I didn’ t know the substantial age of the game, which was first released in 1999, but even if I had, I wouldn’ t have cared. After they left, on that same dreary day as before, I decided to take it for a test drive on our old Dell. The monitor dwarfed my head in width and height, and I remember a horrible game I used to play with myself: I’ d put my eyes to the surface of the screen and see how long I could keep them there before I snapped away, blinking back tears and seeing drops of light splatter the inside of my eyelids.
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A lovable mania soon followed. I had enjoyed realtime strategy( RTS) games like Age of Empires before, but there was nothing as apparently sophisticated or immersive as the historical pageantry Age of Empires offered: building walls and castles; marshalling soldiers and cavalry in formations of jagged squares; colliding armies on muddy fields; reducing battlements to rubble. Here was history acted with urgency and packaged neatly. To be fair that urgency was due to the game’ s devotion to mostly military endeavors. Like in most media, violence is often the dramatic story trait and certainly the most tempting to grab our attention and thus make an easy buck upon. Violence plays to our fantasies, and so it can be considered somewhat ahistorical when overused in historical fiction, because it keeps us engrossed in a fake notion of history as entirely comprised of violent battles rather than a collection of more mundane facts. And there is a fair amount of ahistoriocity in games like Age of Empires- it buffs up the product and smoothens the complexity of lived reality in order to market and produce top-shelf entertainment.