What is Assassin’s Creed?

It’s one of the most popular video games series around.  People with no concept of Assassin’s Creed at least know of its existence by name or they have seen the iconic image of the hooded figure in white advertised every autumn.  Since the release of the first game in November 2007 over 55 million copies of all the games in the series have been sold making it one of the most successful for the current generation of consoles.  In addition to the games, there are novelizations of the games, stand-alone novels, comic books, animated short films, an array of merchandise, and even a line of apparel.

 

To say that Assassin’s Creed is a video game series is an accurate description, but not a very good definition.  It is only part of a definition.  According to Aristotle, who invented the definition, a definition has two parts.  The first is called the genus.  This tells us what is similar to the thing we are defining.  The second part is the differentia.  This tells us how this thing is different from those things that it is like.  To truly understand what Assassin’s Creed is requires a definition.

Assassin’s Creed Is A Franchise

Establishing the genus begins by recognising Assassin’s Creed as a video game series, but this can be further clarified.  There are all sorts of video games out there from car racing, to sports, to first person shooters, to straight-up puzzle games.  Assassin’s Creed is classed as a third person, action/adventure open world game.  This tells a bit more about the kind of game it is.  In these types of games there is a narrative plot told through a series of cutscenes or cinematics.  To connect the cutscenes, the player has the choice to either move to the starting point for the next cutscene and thus advance the story, or the player may choose to run about the world gathering collectibles or engage in side-missions that have only a tentative connection to the main plot.

The second part of this genus is that Assassin’s Creed is a series.  There are currently nine games in the series, but more importantly it has crossed-over into other media.  Therefore, it is more than a series.  It is a franchise.  This multimedia aspect distinguishes a mere series from a franchise and being a franchise also tells us other facts about Assassin’s Creed.

As both a video game series and a franchise, Assassin’s Creed is a cultural commodity.  In the global marketplace there is a part that could be labelled “entertainment” filled with movies, television programs, books and comics, various types of music, and of course video games.  Collectively these are known as cultural commodities to be created and distributed by people in the culture industry to be purchased and consumed by the masses in order to generate a profit for everyone along the supply chain.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise is produced by a company called Ubisoft that employs writers, actors, artists, musicians, game designers, marketers and hundreds of others to produce a product intended to distribute and sell to consumers for a profit.  When people get caught-up in the emotional and intellectual stimulation of the world created by Ubisoft, it is easy to forget that Assassin’s Creed is just another cultural commodity to be consumed.

And like any mass produced consumed commodity, cultural commodities are indeed consumed in mass.  There’s the video game industry, the music industry, the film and television industries, the publishing industry, the sports industry, and even the news-infotainment industry, all creating a huge array of entertainment products and associated merchandise that the general public consumes and throws away.  It is because of this disposable nature that franchises must continually try to reinvigorate their product.  If they cannot, then the customers will get bored and find something else to eat.  A dead franchise might be fondly remembered, but very few attain the multi-generational cultural impact of Star Trek, Star Wars, and DC or Marvel comics.  It is this need to sustain the franchise and the profits it generates that drives its production.  When Assassin’s Creed is no longer profitable, it will cease to be culturally viable.

Another assumption exists when describing Assassin’s Creed as a franchise.  There are customers for the product.  In other words, there is a fan base.  So what is a fan?  The word is short for fanatic and describes someone passionate about a particular cultural product.

Some people consume media and then move onto the next thing without a backwards glance.  Some people are moved to a level where they will buy the t-shirt and stick a poster on the wall.  Some people are engaged at a level where they just can’t get enough of the product.  These are the people who have seen the movie scores of times, memorise dialogue and trivia, and some create costumes for cosplay.  This last group are the people commonly seen as being fans.  However, there is another level – a fourth level breaking the fourth wall – those who seek to bring art into life.  They are the people inspired by Star Trek to become astrophysicists, by Star Wars to become film makers, or by Indiana Jones to become history professors.

Another feature of a franchise is lore. Since there are so many stories being told throughout all the media utilized by the franchise, a vast amount of information accumulates over time.  Collectively, all these stories comprise the lore of the franchise.  Sometimes lore is referred to as “the universe”, like saying the Star Trek universe or the Assassin’s Creed universe.  Where the term lore focuses on the various stories in the setting, the use of the word universe emphasises the setting in which the stories occur, but they both mean the same thing.

Unlike a single story by a single author, like Moby Dick for example, the lore of a particular franchise is the product of a company employing or endorsing many writers, directors, and artists operating in a variety of different media telling a variety of different stories all set in the same fictional universe.  This makes it difficult to credit any one person with a particular phrase of dialogue or to interpret a single author’s meaning.  Literary critics can ponder Herman Melville’s intent and meaning when analysing Moby Dick, but when analysing the lore of a franchise it is not always possible to know exactly who is responsible for a piece of dialogue or plot point.

Generally, there will be some form of caretaker who oversees the franchise during a particular period ensuring that the media output fits certain constraints according to a certain vision.  This will often keep continuity in check, but not always, therefore some outputs are considered canon while others are not. 

The term canon is taken from religion and refers to religious texts deemed to be of divine inspiration and therefore included in what we know today as the Bible.   In media, canon determines what works are part of the overall story and what is not.   In the Star Trek franchise, the films are deemed canon, but not necessarily all the spin-off books.  If a spin-off book says that Captain Kirk’s favourite ice-cream is vanilla, but a film says that it is chocolate, then we go with the film because it is canon.  In Assassin’s Creed, the games are deemed canon, then the novels, but the comics less so. 

The caretakers decide what is and is not canon as the controllers of the primary source material.  Among fans, certain fans become experts in the lore and are sometimes called upon by other fans to settle debates concerning the lore.  These experts have been called bards, a term referring to the caste of storytellers in ancient Celtic society who were the keepers of the cultural lore.

Identifying Assassin’s Creed as a franchise infers a great deal of information about it.  It is a series that operates in several media; it is produced by a corporation driven by corporate interests and employing many storytellers over many years; it has a devoted fan base; it has created a large body of work, or lore, overseen by a central caretaker which is then learned by expert fans emotionally invested in the fictional world. 

Assassin’s Creed Is An Historical Romance

Assassin’s Creed is primarily described as a video game, and this too has key characteristics.  Open world games, like Assassin’s Creed, have two major elements:  gameplay and story.  Storytelling is becoming more and more important in video games.  In 2006 the Writer’s Guild of America introduced a category in their annual awards for video game writing.  With the exception of Assassin’s Creed 1, every game in the series has been nominated for the award.  Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood won in 2010 and Assassin’s Creed III lost in 2013 to Assassin’s Creed Liberation. 

However, games are still judged by the games industry and gamers largely by this thing called gameplay.  How does the character interact with the environment, what are the combat mechanics like, how enjoyable or irritating are the side quests, collectibles, achievements, or puzzles, how are the graphics and the overall look and feel of the game?  Is it immersive and fun to play?  A video game can be successful without a complex story.  For example, Donkey Kong is the story of Mario rescuing the Princess, but really it’s about avoiding barrels.

When it comes to fans of Assassin’s Creed, some like the gameplay and others like the story elements, such as the historical settings and costumes, characters, plot, and themes.  Of course it is possible to like both of these aspects, and that is the ideal for game designers, but a person predominately passionate about gameplay may not see the same Assassin’s Creed as someone more invested in the story.  In this sense the series has achieved the multileveled approach to please those moved by the story as well as those who like running around and stabbing someone in the face.

There are some gameplay elements unique to an Assassin’s Creed game.  Each game in the series shares a certain “feel” even though various aspects are tweaked and new game features are added from game to game.  However, none of these are fundamental in defining Assassin’s Creed.  There are many other games that include free running, climbing, and finding collectables and even if Assassin’s Creed was the only game with these gameplay features it would still not define what Assassin’s Creed is really all about.  For this we have to look at the story.

When you take a story and boil away all the fluff you find that there are really just a few basic plots.  Watch any Romantic Comedy and you find the boy meets girl, boy looses girl, and boy wins girl back plot over and over again.  You’ll even find it in films not obviously of that genre, like Shrek for example.  So in defining Assassin’s Creed, part of the genus is identifying the type of story found in the game.

Assassin’s Creed is what is commonly known in literary circles as a Historical Romance.  Unfortunately, the word romance has become tainted in popular culture.  In the 1930’s the so-called Romance novels emerged and today account for over half of all paperback books sold.  Before this the word Romance had a very different meaning.  It meant action/adventure.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, there emerged among the tribes of Western Europe various dialects of pigeon Latin collectively referred to as being Roman-like, or “romantic”.  These dialects eventually became the modern Romance languages of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

During the Middle-Ages travelling storytellers told stories in these languages and they came to be known as collectively as Romances. These stories in turn provided inspiration for the poets and early novelists of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The English word novel means new, because it was an entirely new form of storytelling, but the word for novel in French and Italian is roman, in reference to the Romances that inspired the early novels.

The Medieval Romances had four key features: the hero's quest, the love interest, interesting settings, and supernatural events.  These four elements have brought us literally scores of different uses for the word Romantic.  For example, the most common modern usage pertains to love; this comes from the love interest aspect.  Romantic is also used to mean unrealistic; this stems from the supernatural element.  Another key usage refers to a love of nature; this refers back to the emphasis on the beautiful settings depicted in the Romances.

The best way to understand the Romantic in this context is to see these stories as portraying believable but larger than life people, in larger than life relationships, doing larger than life things, in larger than life places under larger than life circumstances.  In other words, Romanticism is about making life interesting.

It does not matter if the hero is a knight in shining armour, a cowboy with a six gun, the captain of a space ship, wearing tights and cape, or just some guy in jeans and a t-shirt.  The love interest can be the traditional boy/girl or it can be the emotions between partners or comrades.  The settings can be anything just so long as it is interesting.  As for the supernatural element, this can be magic or science based, an unknown mystery to be explored, or something as simple as a hero in a realistic setting who accomplishes extraordinary feats, like leaping onto a moving train.  This is something taken for granted in films, but it real life it’s a feat.

The man responsible for creating the template for Romantic storytelling was Sir Walter Scott as the inventor of the Historical Romance.  Another important invention from Scott was the character of Robin Hood as portrayed in his novel Ivanhoe.  Robin Hood existed in ballads from the Middle-Ages, but it was Scott who created our modern image of the character.  The story of splitting the arrow was made-up by Scott.  He also politicised the character as someone who “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor” in opposition to tyranny.  This element was mentioned briefly in one ballad but does not exist in the bulk of the original ballads.  Scott also invented the Merry Men.

In his creation of Robin Hood, Scott gave us a new kind of hero.  He is outside the law, fights alongside his team for the good of others against oppression in the name of freedom, and uses his physical agility, skills, and cunning to thwart his adversaries.  He is a villain to many, but to those in the know he is a hero.  This character inspired the heroes of the penny-dreadfuls, the Victorian equivalent to comic books, such as the highwayman Dick Turpin.  These in-turn inspired characters like The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Zorro (1919), The Shadow (1930,) and culminated in Batman (1939).  In Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Sofia Sartor jokingly asks Ezio Auditore if Altair established the tradition among the Assassins for wearing menacing hoods.  More likely, the source is Rob in the Hood as the spiritual ancestor of the Assassins.

This look back at the Western storytelling tradition demonstrates that Assassin’s Creed is firmly part of this tradition.  There is the archetypal Robin Hood hero fighting oppression with his team, there are interesting settings, supernatural events, and although the relationship aspects is not as pronounced (there is no Maid Marion type), there are important human relationships and emotions present.  This makes Assassin’s Creed a Romance and the use of historical settings and characters make it a Historical Romance.

Assassin’s Creed Is A Secret

When creating a definition, the genus tells us what is similar to the thing we are defining.  What type of thing is it?  Assassin’s Creed is a historical romance franchise based on an open-world video game series.  This tells us the type of story, the type of video game series, and that it is a franchise.  The next question is what makes it unique.  What differentiates Assassin’s Creed from other historical romances, video games, and franchises?  The answer lies in the elements of the story itself, particularly in the setting and the themes.

Assassin’s Creed is set in an alternate reality where the lore of the modern day conspiracy theories are mostly true.  The fundamental premise of conspiracy lore is that there exists a group of central planners, these may be the Knights Templar, Freemasons, Illuminati, Bilderburg Group, lizard people, or any other alleged organisation depending on who is promoting their pet theory, that has been behind the scenes of human history guiding events to a determined conclusion, typically the enslavement of the human race.

Of the various groups in the lore, the creators of Assassin’s Creed have chosen the Knights Templar as the primary planners.  At the same time as the Templars were historically active, there was another secret society running about the Middle East called The Assassins, from whom we get the word assassin.  From a storytelling perspective is seems only logical to make them the primary foil to the Templars.  Where the Templars seek the enslave humanity, the Assassins promote freedom.  Where the Templars look to consolidate power, the Assassins want to distribute it to each individual.

Secret societies are secret in the sense that their existence is not known to the general public, but another aspect is that secret societies have a secret.  In Assassin’s Creed, both the Assassins and the Templars share the same secret knowledge; that the human race was not created by God, but in a laboratory to serve as a slave race.

In 1968, Erich von Daniken released his book Chariots of the Gods?in which he speculated that extraterrestrial aliens had visited ancient human civilizations, taught them new technologies, and were revered as gods.  A decade later, Zecharia Sitchen went a step further in his book The 12th Planet suggesting that visiting aliens genetically engineered humans from proto-human primates to serve as a slave race.  These theories formed the premise of the film and television series Stargate and is alluded to in the film The Avengers when the god Loki declares, “You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel”.

In an unrelated theory, Graham Hancock in his 1995 book, Fingerprints of the Gods: Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization furthers a theory first proposed by Ignatius Donnelly in 1882 suggesting that an ancient but highly advanced civilization existed prior to recorded history.  At the end of the last Ice Age, the great sheets of ice covering the poles melted, sea levels rose, and they perished leaving behind the legacy of advanced astronomy, architecture, and mathematic to those who picked-up the pieces.

The creators of Assassin’s Creed incorporated both of these theories into their story.  In their version of events, a sentient race evolved on Earth over 80,000 years ago and created humans as a slave race.  These beings, referred to in the game as both Those Who Came Before or simply as “the precursor race” formed the basis of human mythology and religion.  They were eventually decimated in an apocalypse from which enough humans survived to continue the species. Among the remains of their civilization were artefacts so technologically advanced as to be seen as magical by the humans who discovered and wielded them.  Much of the conflict in the game series revolves around Templar attempts to acquire these artefacts and the Assassins working to prevent them from falling into Templar hands.

This conflict between these two secret societies provides the central conflict in the game series with each group representing an opposing ideology.  From this tension the central themes of the series emerge.

Assassin’s Creed Is All About The Themes

As human beings, we learn from experience.  This can include vicarious experiences, and since the unconscious responds equally to real and imagined stimuli, stories have the power to transform, or at least influence, who we are.  Someone may say, “War is bad”.  This may have little or no effect on how a person views war.  However, if he tells a heart-felt story about a family in which the father is called to war and suffers depravation while his family at home first suffers because he is absent and later suffers because of an invading army, then through storytelling the writer has illustrated that war is bad without saying it outright.

In literary criticism this is called the theme.  A theme is often expressed as a single word.  So the theme of this story is war, but beyond that is what the storyteller is saying about war.  He is saying that it is bad.  This is the writer’s philosophical statement of belief, more commonly called the message of the story.

The audience may be drawn in emotionally to the plight of the soldier and his family and feel that they have experienced that war is bad.  However, they forget that every action and consequence illustrating the theme was created by the storyteller from a blank sheet of paper to convince them that war is bad.  It is all a lie.  The storyteller might just as easily tell a tale of heroism and noble sacrifice for God and Country to give the impression that war is good.  The story is essentially rigged by the storyteller to convey whatever message he wishes to convey or whatever he believes.  One of the purposes of literary criticism is to identify the themes and messages in the story and convert them from emotion-based storytelling into rational prose for analysis.

The way a theme is presented is called style.  All of the things that people associate with Assassin’s Creed from the gameplay, to the iconic hooded costumes, to the characters and settings themselves are all packaging for the theme.  The style of a story is what draws people, inspires them, and emotionally moves them, but ultimately style is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.  It may seem unfair to call a theme medicine, but most people would rather watch an engaging drama with an anti-war theme than read a philosophical anti-war treatise.  Yet, the themes of Assassin’s Creed are the real core elements of the game and have real world application beyond the entertaining fantasy world that has been created.

There are many themes in the Assassin’s Creed lore worthy of examination.  For the purpose of identifying a differentia for a definition of Assassin’s Creed there are three key themes that stand-out above the rest.  Interestingly, two are found in the creed itself.

Nothing is true.  Throughout the Assassin’s Creed series truth is concealed and characters must face uncomfortable revelations.  In the first game, Al Mualim, the leader of the Assassin’s, is revealed to have secretly been a Templar all along.  In the second game, Ezio’s father has hidden his secret life as an Assassin from Ezio as do the characters who guide Ezio throughout the game.  In Brotherhood, the Borgia family is a nest of lies.  In Revelation, Ahmet, the leader of the Byzantine Templars, is concealed for most of the story.  In Assassin’s Creed III, Connor’s entire quest is based on manipulation and lies, in Liberation the villain proves to be someone close to Aveline, and in Black Flag, Edward only pretends to be an Assassin throughout the game until his acceptance into the order near the end.

Everything is permitted.  The second major theme is Freedom.  This is a topic of discussion among the many characters, but also an overt motivation for the Assassins in their conflict against Templar control.  The most outspoken expressions of this theme are found in Liberation and Cry Freedom which both deal directly with the topic of slavery.

The third major theme is Defiance.    This theme is largely implied in AC1 and the Ezio trilogy,  however it takes centre stage in AC3 and AC4. The most blatant examples come from the Ubisoft marketing department with the Rise trailer for AC3 and the Defy trailer for AC4.  Presumably,  the intent was to encourage to audience to want to assume the role of the playable character and have the vicarious experience of resistance by purchasing the game. However, looking past the fourth wall, these trailers, in capturing the spirit of defiance in the games, also tap into the real world spirit of defiance against increasingly authoritarian state governments. They ask the audience,  what are you prepared to do? How far are you willing to go? What are you willing to sacrifice in the name of freedom?

So What Does It All Mean? 

Assassin’s Creed is a historical romance franchise based on an open-world video game series set in the world of conspiracy theory that explores the central themes of truth, freedom, and defiance.

Aristotle teaches us that since all things act according to their nature, we cannot understand a thing unless we understand its nature. This understanding begins with defining the subject.  This is why it is important to define Assassin’s Creed. 

Definitions, by their nature, are cold things – heartless.  But definitions are only half of the process of understanding a subject.  The other half of objective definition is subjective meaning.  Definitions are rational and logical while meanings are emotional, personal, and often indefinable.

To illustrate the difference between definition and meaning, here is an observation from Captain Jack Sparrow, “That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs but what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.”  The keel, hull, deck and sails are the definition, but what does it mean?  It means freedom.

There is one definition for a cat but seven billion different meanings.  Understanding this concept is vital to understanding the underlying philosophy in Assassin’s Creed.  Objective definitions can be argued at length with facts and reason, but subjective meanings are personal.  No one can tell you what something means.  You have to decide that for yourself.

What does Assassin’s Creed mean?  For some it’s just a cool video game.  For others it’s just another video game that their kid asks for every Christmas.  For me personally, it’s Existentialist mythology with a healthy portion of Stoicism and the Romantic mixed in.  For you it’s something else.  It could mean everything or it could mean nothing.