Computers are arcane cultural objects. We may use them for utilitarian purposes and become familiar with them over time, but the full implications of their design will always elude us. As computer software reflects both the traditions and the point of view of its creators, each application is an amalgamation of cultural values and contradictions, bound to time and space. Operating a computer then, is like navigating a collection of cultures, with all the messiness that entails.
The Orientalist tradition of homogenising Eastern cultures to establish a dichotomy between East and West
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations encapsulates this kind of mess. The Assassin’s Creed games famously take place in historical settings, such as 15th century Renaissance Italy or the Holy Land during the Third Crusades. But each setting is framed as a computer simulation: historical characters uniformly speak in English, no matter where they come from, and buildings are littered with visual cues to help players navigate. Language, architecture and people retain the cold functionality of commercial software. But even though this player-centric approach stifles the cultural significance of people and places, Revelations points towards a recognizable set of values.
Revelations follows the journey of veteran assassin, Ezio de Auditore, an Italian travelling East to unravel secrets of ancient artifacts. In an early cutscene, the camera slowly pans over the horizon, orchestral music amplifying the view’s grandiosity. Ezio arrives to foreign land by sea and marvels at the exotic beauty of Constantinople: “No city in Europa has a skyline quite like this”. A handsome young man, draped in fine clothes, politely corrects him by noting that Constantinople sits at the borders of Asia and Europe. The stranger then explains that this geographical fact has been a constant source of conflict. This scene frames Constantinople as an aesthetically pleasing place with a violent past. It’s a city with a double identity.
This duality runs through Constantinople. Ornate carpets decorate the city streets and markets are always packed with vegetables, fruits, meat and spices. People from all walks of life look clean and healthy. It’s as if poverty doesn’t exist in Constantinople. But violence and deception festers underneath the city’s facade. Gunpowder and dangerous substances are stashed away in hidden corners of the city and they can be found on city guards. They are in abundance, and in the right hands, they can be made into dangerous weapons. “Crafting explosives is a new hobby, one we borrowed from the Chinese and have taken to with great passion”, notes Yusuf, one of the local Assassin leaders.
The denizens of Constantinople are reduced to objects, like buildings that exist solely to be admired and traversed
Yet, it takes no time for Ezio to learn how to craft bombs and acquire dangerous substances. Similarly, navigating a foreign city comes with ease. Players are only asked to engage in laborious activities of traversal and acquisition. In a sense, the player is like a wealthy tourist browsing stereotypical miniatures in a shopping district. This lopsided relationship with Constantinople and its denizens is exemplified by Revelations’ trademark weapon, the hookblade. This modified wristblade grants further reach and faster traversal, allowing players to stay above the crowd longer than ever. In case the player falls down to street level, they can push aside and jump over bystanders, thanks to the hookblade. Players can engage in the labor of movement uninterrupted, while the denizens of Constantinople are reduced to objects, like buildings that exist solely to be admired and traversed.
Ezio’s depiction as superior is further cemented by the ongoing conflict between Templars and Assassins. Violent turf wars have been in an impasse for years in Constantinople between the series’ two secret societies. Shops are barred up and harassment is commonplace in the city streets until Ezio’s arrival. Yusuf asks for Ezio’s help to turn the tide by recruiting and training assassin leaders. Even though the city guard takes a major role in harassing citizens the locals can’t help but open up to an Italian stranger’s charisma. Revelations follows the Orientalist tradition of homogenising Eastern cultures to establish a dichotomy between East and West. This stereotypical depiction is highlighted by Ezio’s success: the game suggests that a Western man’s expertise and hard work is all it takes to train inexperienced men and women to the point of independence. Although the ultimate victory of conquering Templar territory and restoring the city to its former glory remains the Western hero’s privilege.
The game’s parallel plotlines supplement this colonist narrative. Each game of the series has two playable characters: one in the future and the other in the past. The character from the future, an American named Desmond Miles, can relive past events to uncover hidden truths. It’s all achieved through the Animus, a sophisticated computer simulation that makes it possible to embody past figures. But these characters separated by hundreds of years recognize each other throughout the series. Is it simulation if a character from the past can engage with a character from the future? Do we relive past events, or colonize the body and soul of past figures with lasting effects?
Even if we look at the series’ two parallel plots separately, the answer is clear, and these narrative elements weave and intertwine with the games space and mechanics to convey meaning. In every Assassin’s Creed, players climb enormous towers, run hundreds of miles, kill people and accrue capital. Repeating these activities leads to self-improvement and betterment of society. In a sense, the series frames repetitious activity according to our contemporary understanding of work.
Wealth, gender and race affect people’s relationship to technology
But each Assassin’s Creed takes place across different times and cultures. Do people’s relationship with work and power was the same in twelfth-century Holy Land and during the Italian Renaissance? Certainly not. Yet, access to power is a given in the Animus, and the player character is free to traverse space, accumulate wealth, influence and more power. This meritocratic outlook is pervasive in Silicon Valley, the center of digital technology. Indeed, tech evangelists tend to view digital technology as the epitome of freedom, where hard work leads to good ideas, good ideas rise to the top, and consequently, hiring and rewards for labor operates according to merit. This fallacious stance ignores how wealth, gender and race affect people’s relationship to technology. Furthermore, it presupposes that digital technology itself is a value-neutral artifact. But technology carries ideological connotations of time and place, for good and ill, like every product of culture.
The East-West dichotomy, and stereotypical depiction of Constantinople and its denizens speak volumes about the game’s simulation. The way players can engage with this software, however, has further implications.
Technology-driven labor entraps people on all levels
Digital technology’s enhancing effect is present in the series’ user-interface. The weapon inventory, mini-map, and objective markers help players navigate, fight and perform tasks better—just as a computer program is expected to make faster calculations, carry out wishes and improve the lives of users. But technology has its detrimental effects. For instance, the side-activities displayed on the mini-map come in and out of the player’s view as she navigates. These prominent symbols promise adventure and riches. But by swarming the mini-map these promises tempt and distract players at every turn.
In Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, this disruptive dynamic is tied to training. Ezio rescues people from desperate situations by recruiting them. Then he sends these recruits on deadly assignments: novices bear the brunt of risk in exchange for experience, while Ezio reaps the rewards.
This training process is initiated from local outposts via a full-screen user-interface, and each assignment takes five to twenty minutes in real time. The Animus emits a sound effect and plasters the screen with text whenever a mission is finished. They can be as distracting as a smartphone’s buzzing notification. But unlike social media notifications, a finished assignment requires further action: equipment needs to be dispensed and idle assassins await their next assignment (provided they didn’t die on the last one). These outposts, however, are scattered throughout the city. Players either have to walk to an outpost after each assignment or they have to keep mental notes about them. Technology-driven labor entraps people on all levels.
Technology can also go haywire and become disobedient. Unlike in the previous games, Desmond finds himself stuck within the glitches of the Animus. Fractured shapes float as far as the eye can see and cold, brutalist architecture towers over the protagonist. Desmond is lost in the inhuman kernels of code.
Desmond’s memories can be accessed in the glitched-out Animus. His simulated past in rural America, however, feels just as alien. Lurid lights pierce the air, and gigantic slabs move around for perpetuity in enclosed spaces. Gone are the sunny vistas and the densely populated cityscapes. Rigid structures stand in pristine perfection, taking the place of battered city streets and buildings molded by human hands. Absent of human life and conflict, the player is tasked with navigating these architectural manifestations of computer code.
But the software holds danger at every corner: some of the lasers and slabs are deadly, while others are harmless. Players explore Desmond’s memories from a first-person perspective, without any weapons. Gone is the player’s sense of power and bodily presence. Desmond either escapes the shackles of the glitched-out Animus, or he gets deleted by the software. Desmond must embody Ezio to complete the colonist mission in Constantinople. Through Ezio, he has to work hard on recruitment and on eliminating the Templar threat. The memory chambers remain closed until he collects fragments scattered throughout the city.
Revelations also follows the capitalist dynamics of the rest of the series. But unlike the first Assassin’s Creed, Revelations also embraces colonist attitudes and Orientalist stereotypes. This imperialist dynamic is encapsulated during the missions in Derinkuyu, the underground city. The residents’ constant struggle with darkness fills the air with smoke and ash. The local assassin resistance similarly comes at a great cost: they were imprisoned, tortured and killed fighting the endless abyss of Templar influence. Their sacrifice yielded little success. But here comes an Italian stallion to set the city aflame, literally and figuratively: Ezio ignites the Templar gunpowder supplies, and blows the city and Templar plans to pieces. In the span of a few missions, Ezio almost single-handedly kills the Templar oppressors and foils their plans.
Computer software enables enslavement and simultaneously enslaves its users
Ezio’s display of superiority doesn’t end here, nor does the game’s depiction of the collective failure of the Orient. After unveiling the role of Prince Ahmet, the Sultan’s brother, in the Templar conspiracy, Ezio goes after the fleeing prince. During the chase, Ezio kills Ahmet’s most loyal servants, shatters his chariot and gives him a good beating, just before the Sultan’s arrival. But instead of confronting the Western invader, the Sultan grabs his brother by the neck, and throws him off a cliff without saying a single word. Ahmet may have deserved swift justice for his treachery, but the scene implies that Easterners can only solve problems through cold-blooded murder and barbaric violence. This act will eventually lead to more turmoil, as the game foreshadows, but the upcoming conflict doesn’t concern Ezio: his love interest has been recovered along with the keys for the ancient treasure he desires.
The game’s Eastern conflict is little more than a means to an end for Ezio. Desmond is no different, because he embodies Ezio out of pure self-preservation. Are players made to care about the conflict? I don’t think so, because Constantinople is framed as an exotic tourist attraction in the midst of game systems driven by accumulation and self-improvement. This voluntary labor may feel elevating—after all, work itself is considered moral a good in contemporary society, hence many videogames replicate this construct. But Assassin’s Creed: Revelations shows that this self-serving ideology entraps people even at the top: being a one-man-colonist takes a lot of work; computer software enables enslavement and simultaneously enslaves its users; and player attention is demanded, but also disrupted at every turn.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you for your support!
Computers are arcane cultural objects. We may use them for utilitarian purposes and become familiar with them over time, but the full implications of their design will always elude us. As computer software reflects both the traditions and the point of view of its creators, each application is an amalgamation of cultural values and contradictions, bound to time and space. Operating a computer then, is like navigating a collection of cultures, with all the messiness that entails.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations encapsulates this kind of mess. The Assassin’s Creed games famously take place in historical settings, such as 15th century Renaissance Italy or the Holy Land during the Third Crusades. But each setting is framed as a computer simulation: historical characters uniformly speak in English, no matter where they come from, and buildings are littered with visual cues to help players navigate. Language, architecture and people retain the cold functionality of commercial software. But even though this player-centric approach stifles the cultural significance of people and places, Revelations points towards a recognizable set of values.
Revelations follows the journey of veteran assassin, Ezio de Auditore, an Italian travelling East to unravel secrets of ancient artifacts. In an early cutscene, the camera slowly pans over the horizon, orchestral music amplifying the view’s grandiosity. Ezio arrives to foreign land by sea and marvels at the exotic beauty of Constantinople: “No city in Europa has a skyline quite like this”. A handsome young man, draped in fine clothes, politely corrects him by noting that Constantinople sits at the borders of Asia and Europe. The stranger then explains that this geographical fact has been a constant source of conflict. This scene frames Constantinople as an aesthetically pleasing place with a violent past. It’s a city with a double identity.
This duality runs through Constantinople. Ornate carpets decorate the city streets and markets are always packed with vegetables, fruits, meat and spices. People from all walks of life look clean and healthy. It’s as if poverty doesn’t exist in Constantinople. But violence and deception festers underneath the city’s facade. Gunpowder and dangerous substances are stashed away in hidden corners of the city and they can be found on city guards. They are in abundance, and in the right hands, they can be made into dangerous weapons. “Crafting explosives is a new hobby, one we borrowed from the Chinese and have taken to with great passion”, notes Yusuf, one of the local Assassin leaders.
Yet, it takes no time for Ezio to learn how to craft bombs and acquire dangerous substances. Similarly, navigating a foreign city comes with ease. Players are only asked to engage in laborious activities of traversal and acquisition. In a sense, the player is like a wealthy tourist browsing stereotypical miniatures in a shopping district. This lopsided relationship with Constantinople and its denizens is exemplified by Revelations’ trademark weapon, the hookblade. This modified wristblade grants further reach and faster traversal, allowing players to stay above the crowd longer than ever. In case the player falls down to street level, they can push aside and jump over bystanders, thanks to the hookblade. Players can engage in the labor of movement uninterrupted, while the denizens of Constantinople are reduced to objects, like buildings that exist solely to be admired and traversed.
Ezio’s depiction as superior is further cemented by the ongoing conflict between Templars and Assassins. Violent turf wars have been in an impasse for years in Constantinople between the series’ two secret societies. Shops are barred up and harassment is commonplace in the city streets until Ezio’s arrival. Yusuf asks for Ezio’s help to turn the tide by recruiting and training assassin leaders. Even though the city guard takes a major role in harassing citizens the locals can’t help but open up to an Italian stranger’s charisma. Revelations follows the Orientalist tradition of homogenising Eastern cultures to establish a dichotomy between East and West. This stereotypical depiction is highlighted by Ezio’s success: the game suggests that a Western man’s expertise and hard work is all it takes to train inexperienced men and women to the point of independence. Although the ultimate victory of conquering Templar territory and restoring the city to its former glory remains the Western hero’s privilege.
The game’s parallel plotlines supplement this colonist narrative. Each game of the series has two playable characters: one in the future and the other in the past. The character from the future, an American named Desmond Miles, can relive past events to uncover hidden truths. It’s all achieved through the Animus, a sophisticated computer simulation that makes it possible to embody past figures. But these characters separated by hundreds of years recognize each other throughout the series. Is it simulation if a character from the past can engage with a character from the future? Do we relive past events, or colonize the body and soul of past figures with lasting effects?
Even if we look at the series’ two parallel plots separately, the answer is clear, and these narrative elements weave and intertwine with the games space and mechanics to convey meaning. In every Assassin’s Creed, players climb enormous towers, run hundreds of miles, kill people and accrue capital. Repeating these activities leads to self-improvement and betterment of society. In a sense, the series frames repetitious activity according to our contemporary understanding of work.
But each Assassin’s Creed takes place across different times and cultures. Do people’s relationship with work and power was the same in twelfth-century Holy Land and during the Italian Renaissance? Certainly not. Yet, access to power is a given in the Animus, and the player character is free to traverse space, accumulate wealth, influence and more power. This meritocratic outlook is pervasive in Silicon Valley, the center of digital technology. Indeed, tech evangelists tend to view digital technology as the epitome of freedom, where hard work leads to good ideas, good ideas rise to the top, and consequently, hiring and rewards for labor operates according to merit. This fallacious stance ignores how wealth, gender and race affect people’s relationship to technology. Furthermore, it presupposes that digital technology itself is a value-neutral artifact. But technology carries ideological connotations of time and place, for good and ill, like every product of culture.
The East-West dichotomy, and stereotypical depiction of Constantinople and its denizens speak volumes about the game’s simulation. The way players can engage with this software, however, has further implications.
Digital technology’s enhancing effect is present in the series’ user-interface. The weapon inventory, mini-map, and objective markers help players navigate, fight and perform tasks better—just as a computer program is expected to make faster calculations, carry out wishes and improve the lives of users. But technology has its detrimental effects. For instance, the side-activities displayed on the mini-map come in and out of the player’s view as she navigates. These prominent symbols promise adventure and riches. But by swarming the mini-map these promises tempt and distract players at every turn.
In Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, this disruptive dynamic is tied to training. Ezio rescues people from desperate situations by recruiting them. Then he sends these recruits on deadly assignments: novices bear the brunt of risk in exchange for experience, while Ezio reaps the rewards.
This training process is initiated from local outposts via a full-screen user-interface, and each assignment takes five to twenty minutes in real time. The Animus emits a sound effect and plasters the screen with text whenever a mission is finished. They can be as distracting as a smartphone’s buzzing notification. But unlike social media notifications, a finished assignment requires further action: equipment needs to be dispensed and idle assassins await their next assignment (provided they didn’t die on the last one). These outposts, however, are scattered throughout the city. Players either have to walk to an outpost after each assignment or they have to keep mental notes about them. Technology-driven labor entraps people on all levels.
Technology can also go haywire and become disobedient. Unlike in the previous games, Desmond finds himself stuck within the glitches of the Animus. Fractured shapes float as far as the eye can see and cold, brutalist architecture towers over the protagonist. Desmond is lost in the inhuman kernels of code.
Desmond’s memories can be accessed in the glitched-out Animus. His simulated past in rural America, however, feels just as alien. Lurid lights pierce the air, and gigantic slabs move around for perpetuity in enclosed spaces. Gone are the sunny vistas and the densely populated cityscapes. Rigid structures stand in pristine perfection, taking the place of battered city streets and buildings molded by human hands. Absent of human life and conflict, the player is tasked with navigating these architectural manifestations of computer code.
But the software holds danger at every corner: some of the lasers and slabs are deadly, while others are harmless. Players explore Desmond’s memories from a first-person perspective, without any weapons. Gone is the player’s sense of power and bodily presence. Desmond either escapes the shackles of the glitched-out Animus, or he gets deleted by the software. Desmond must embody Ezio to complete the colonist mission in Constantinople. Through Ezio, he has to work hard on recruitment and on eliminating the Templar threat. The memory chambers remain closed until he collects fragments scattered throughout the city.
Revelations also follows the capitalist dynamics of the rest of the series. But unlike the first Assassin’s Creed, Revelations also embraces colonist attitudes and Orientalist stereotypes. This imperialist dynamic is encapsulated during the missions in Derinkuyu, the underground city. The residents’ constant struggle with darkness fills the air with smoke and ash. The local assassin resistance similarly comes at a great cost: they were imprisoned, tortured and killed fighting the endless abyss of Templar influence. Their sacrifice yielded little success. But here comes an Italian stallion to set the city aflame, literally and figuratively: Ezio ignites the Templar gunpowder supplies, and blows the city and Templar plans to pieces. In the span of a few missions, Ezio almost single-handedly kills the Templar oppressors and foils their plans.
Ezio’s display of superiority doesn’t end here, nor does the game’s depiction of the collective failure of the Orient. After unveiling the role of Prince Ahmet, the Sultan’s brother, in the Templar conspiracy, Ezio goes after the fleeing prince. During the chase, Ezio kills Ahmet’s most loyal servants, shatters his chariot and gives him a good beating, just before the Sultan’s arrival. But instead of confronting the Western invader, the Sultan grabs his brother by the neck, and throws him off a cliff without saying a single word. Ahmet may have deserved swift justice for his treachery, but the scene implies that Easterners can only solve problems through cold-blooded murder and barbaric violence. This act will eventually lead to more turmoil, as the game foreshadows, but the upcoming conflict doesn’t concern Ezio: his love interest has been recovered along with the keys for the ancient treasure he desires.
The game’s Eastern conflict is little more than a means to an end for Ezio. Desmond is no different, because he embodies Ezio out of pure self-preservation. Are players made to care about the conflict? I don’t think so, because Constantinople is framed as an exotic tourist attraction in the midst of game systems driven by accumulation and self-improvement. This voluntary labor may feel elevating—after all, work itself is considered moral a good in contemporary society, hence many videogames replicate this construct. But Assassin’s Creed: Revelations shows that this self-serving ideology entraps people even at the top: being a one-man-colonist takes a lot of work; computer software enables enslavement and simultaneously enslaves its users; and player attention is demanded, but also disrupted at every turn.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you for your support!
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