Forget Time Travel, Play Assassins Creed

I leap from rooftop to rooftop. A banker goes about his business beneath me. I can see people's clothes, their faces, and watch as they look at me in angered astonishment because I've clumsily knocked a crate from someone's arms. I can practically smell the horses walking around the city - I hear their hooves slap the Roman cobblestone as I watch riders float past me. I'm living out history. As a result, I am given a new, novel understanding of what Italy is during the 16th century.

I love Assassin's Creed. Not because I take pleasure in stabbing guards through the windpipe (although, that's more fun than it has any right to be). It's also not because the multiplayer has taken the hiding and assassinating mechanics of the singleplayer and successfully translated it into something that must be played. All of that is great, but there's another facet to Assassin's Creed that I think is largely glossed over when people talk about the game, and it's a tremendous draw for me (and others stuck in the 21st century).

Assassin's Creed does something uniquely suited to games. It grants the ability to practically be in another time period - to interact with it, explore it, and absorb it as I see fit. It gives me the chance to do something no book, movie, or painting can do. Assassin's Creed grants player agency, allowing me to become an actor in another world. Just like I can become a Dark Elf in Skyrim, enabling me to learn more about his world, I can live the life of a man from the Renaissance, allowing me to understand humanity's history in ways I never thought possible. 



To be clear, I'm not talking about spinning the Pantheon around to look at it from any angle I choose. I'm talking about seeing that beautiful work of architecture as a backdrop for the living, breathing civilization of Renaissance Italy – understanding what it's like to live in the shadow of unparalleled, ancient art from a time before the Renaissance, even. I'm walking a mile in another man's shoes.

Assassin's Creed takes the fringes of history, and uses it to weave an impossibly eye-opening tapestry by allowing me to explore the living, beating heart of an age no one can ever return to. I get to soak up an experience that is so much more than the sum of its parts. Videogames like the Assassin's Creed are incredible tools for giving its audience a greater understanding of their own history.

I see the Renaissance through the eyes of those who lived it. I bend to its rules, follow its customs, and through all of that, begin to understand its basic nature. Learning in this way is an invaluable tool for understanding, as it teaches us the intangible things that you can't really take in from reading a history book. When I'm directly responsible for guiding someone in that time period, everything hits much closer to home, imbuing me with the feeling that I've lived out another life - and when it's true to the period, as it is in Assassin's Creed, it feels like I can almost touch the psychology of a Roman during the 16th century.



Yes, Assassin's Creed is not an entirely historically accurate game. Especially where it concerns the Borgias (who were an actual aristocratic Italian family, complete with three separate reigns as Pope, though I imagine none of them were punched in the face). But, Ubisoft did take great pains to be faithful to the time period, bringing in experts on the Italian renaissance just to be sure they're capturing the culture correctly. I have studied Italian Renaissance art and culture, myself, and from my amateur's eye, Assassin's Creed is as close as you can possibly get without being a completely biographical game. And would you want AC to be biographical? Where would it be without a license to create an entirely batshit storyline?

Ultimately, my point is it's a blessing for Ubisoft to aggressively seek out and accurately recreate settings that aren't typically explored in videogames. As a player, I get to live out points in human history that I'm not born into. Being exposed to different times and cultures without having to leave my living room is in an experience uniquely suited to videogames. It gives me a better understanding of what life was like for people of another age. Whether Ubisoft decides on a future installment of the series in revolutionary France, or the age of Conquistadors, I can't wait to lose myself.