#p.s. black flag is also brilliant because you start out in a heavily open world with no gods and masters and edward is utter trash

[rex-sidereus]

@treeofmana i dug through my notes, and this was like - mostly to articulate stuff for myself. but here ya go.

why assassin’s creed is brilliant as a franchise. 

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the fuck is ubisoft’s deal – why are they so uneven. why can I beat george washington into a bloody pulp as a native american character, and at the same time the mother of the said character is violently an unnecessarily killed for the purpose of his backstory. And then I realized that they are just dumb – like, very dumb. because capitalism is dumb.

like, we had family friends who would breed those samoyed dogs, which look like barking floof clouds. and those dogs are not really intelligent. apparently one would walk around and just randomly eat entire sticks of wood during its walks until it ruptured its stomach and died. and that’s how dumb ubisoft is – it is a gorgeous floof cloud of entertainment going from one potential source of profit to another and keep doing the thing that works until they eat the wrong stick and it backfires in spectacular fashion (ac unity).

but with ac they did tap into a thing so good it is nearly impossible to sink ( even gods fucking know they try, shooting themselves in the foot out of a machine gun) – because the urban environment & the way you interact with it become extremely important, and only in only a way that video games can provide - because the very mechanics that the game offers you, the way it is built goes directly into the layout of the space and your relationship with it.

my basic pitch is that ac is amazing in how it ties together the radically individual experience of a very developed world and complicated narratology/ideology (kinda same thing when we’re talking about texts).

ac relies on a functional urban environment ( the formula breaks in black flag – but in a very satisfying/unsettling way, I’d argue). It is essential because it in itself serves as an instrument to weight the protagonist against the society. each of the ac games is either an archetypical hero’s story or a careful play on it that my jaws hurt – rejection from the society, katabasis, initiation, return to the said society with a coherent mission, yet always separated with the veil of knowledge. run boy run the world wasn’t meant for you + a soldier on my own, etc. you can move really fast and really effective through an urban space, can scale nearly everything, can drop nearly every chase, blend into the crowds effortlessly - use the city itself as your weapon, yourself a weapon of the people, a tool of zeitgeist that gives a final push. because “nothing is true, everything is permitted” - as a philosophy of positive nihilism, taking your own agency & responsibility. it’s honestly boderline anarchic in it’s approach + method.

[my favourite intellectual stretch to go unto is that ac unwillingly follows the development of the atlantic republican thought – xii century renaissance + near east / Italian renaissance / republic of pirates / seven years war / amrev / frenchrev / industrial rev uk – and the games do better or worse depending on the extent that they are willing to engage with the topics of individual vs social agency + responsibility; and the gameplay, environment, and the narrative are really hard to separate in this case].

all of ac’s protagonists carry extreme individualism which comes with the mobility and power of a killer, and follow quite the archetypical narrative of a hero turned into a weapon by destiny, an armed prophet. and for them to be coherent as such, the environment needs to be distinct, thought through, dynamic, and responsive enough to highlight that ‘self’/‘outside of self’ distinction.

on the level of ideology, you are installed directly into the political discourse, because you are actually making history, and the big name figures are your friends/ allies / lovers / enemies / people you can’t save. the whole conspiracy theory thing is just so gorgeously unrepentant, and the double unreliable narrator & narrative within a narrative thing are all buffers towards the lack of historical accuracy - but beyond the obvious separation of sides, they mostly do a shockingly good job. and for me it feels like embracing the inherit absurdity of trying to conceptualize and bring sense into the past, and taking it to the outmost. it is also reclaiming the history from academic pedantry and to something one can be playful with, to something driven by emotions.

and ac also marries history & scifi in a terrific way, that honestly bends and expands both genres as they should be. I honestly don’t think anything could compare to getting into a fist fight with alexander vi in the middle of an alien vault. It is absolutely not believable, but believable should be left at the door when you’d think you grab unto the ledges as protagonists do.

there are two meta-narratives in place besides the main historical one. the greater one of the precursor race + their artifacts, and a more local one of a person entering the animus. [insert all the narratology I don’t have the training to articulate]. their limitations and virtues of the protagonists are so gorgeously framed by the narrative, because in a story of that scale they are rather actors, not heroes - there is no falling into the ‘hero’s shining and morally unchallenged presence solves all problems’ at all. it is complicated and problematic, and different narrative levels interact call each other out constantly.

the story of the historical protagonist is viewed by the modern day protagonist, and both impact each other and the greater precursor narrative – and all feed into the collective experience of a player.  and what saves it from a self-imploding mess is that those stories are deeply internalized through the protagonists with their radical individualism granted by them through the use of space. ac is able to survive a narrative mess because a sense of character self and an experience of the space in the games is so strong.

so, overall, ac binds the urban and the political through eyes of one person, writing a history and an experience of a individual, is fundamentally irreverent to canon and propriety, and expands the genre bounds - all while being ridiculously, ridiculously fun and beautiful.

#p.s. black flag is also brilliant because you start out in a heavily open world with no gods and masters and edward is utter trash #and the weak main plot really hammers that desolation from which you delightfully crawl out of #so it's definitely worth getting through #assassin's creed