In hindsight, the emergence of our modern, engagement bait-based world was inevitable. But of all the possible lenses through which to view the progression from a quainter, kinder internet to today’s sinkhole for eyeballs, I’d never considered the map game as pioneered by the Assassin’s Creed series. On the latest Aftermath Hours, our guest makes a convincing argument that these things moved in tandem.
This time around, we’re joined by Cameron Kunzelman of the Ranged Touch podcast network, who has a book about Assassin’s Creed, Everything Is Permitted, coming out next month. We discuss how the series has evolved over the years, with each sequel and spinoff essentially functioning as an argument in favor of the series’ continued existence. Highlights include: why Brotherhood was weird and kinda bad, how Ubisoft portrayed itself in its own book about Assassin’s Creed’s legacy, and the origin of the series’ entire Assassins vs Templars conflict (the first chunk of just one book).
Then we move on to modern Assassin’s Creed-related matters: This week, news broke that Ubisoft canceled a Reconstruction-era AC game that would’ve starred a freed slave, citing the current political climate and backlash to Yasuke, a Black samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. This after Ubisoft reportedly accepted funding from Saudi Arabia to develop a new DLC for Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Says a lot about where the company’s priorities lie! Finally, we adapt the Bible’s Old Testament into a WarioWare-like minigame collection.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can also adapt the New Testament into a series of minigames.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Cameron: [There’s this idea of] the more you’re spending minutes with our thing, the less you’re spending minutes with other things. The Assassin’s Creed games and Ubisoft games in general are a really interesting canary in the coalmine for that, alongside mobile gaming. Because that’s everything now. There’s a reason that Netflix currently talks about second-screen content, right? Their belief is that you’re not even looking at it. It’s a thing for you to be listening to and half paying attention to while you’re on your phone.
Ubisoft is thinking through this stuff. If you read those investor reports and you kinda pay attention to the way they talk about themselves, they want to capture that whole minute. They want to be demonstrating that people are putting all their effort and time and thought into that. And that goes all the way back to map design, to the map game. That’s the early indicator of “We’re gonna give you so much to do. There’s gonna be so many icons, and you’re gonna feel so good about completing those things.”
Luke, you were talking about this: That’s the Brotherhood innovation, right? “I’m gonna feel good by clearing this section of the map.” But it’s in order to eat your time. It’s in order to pull you into the orbit of the device. What’s great about Assassin’s Creed as a franchise – and why I wrote a book about the franchise – is that you can watch it happen, beat by beat. You can look at 15-ish games at this point and watch, nearly yearly, the progression toward the world we live in today.
The games industry of 2007 to now is a different universe. We have continuity of people and companies and whatever, but anyone who was around back then remembers: It’s just a radically different universe. The video game franchise is one of the really cool ways that we can trace that and watch that transformation happen.
And my hope is that on the academic side and anyone who wants to do this, my hope is that writing a book on the Assassin’s Creed franchise helps open the door to other people writing about things like this. I desperately want to read the Halo franchise book. Because it allows you to do the same thing, but in a different way. How has multiplayer changed? How has the relationship between studios and their ownership companies changed? How has the relationship between companies and IP changed?
If you follow the way the map game kind of operates and changes and moves, you get to watch the whole industry change around it from that initial kernel.
Luke: People often look at Origins as this very pivotal game in the series in terms of narrative and setting and overall structure. People say “Oh, it’s the first real open-world one.” But if Valhalla was the first game where they were actively tracking engagement metrics, Origins was the first one to bring in that “We want to keep you in this game” stuff. They’d make you log in through UPlay, and they’d keep offering skins, and they’d want you to keep buying stuff in the game, and they’d keep offering updates and little storylines. Six months, nine months later, they’d want you playing the same game.
So based on what you’re saying, that maybe makes Origins the most pivotal game in the franchise’s history. Fans will look at it in terms of its structure, but economically and design-wise, it’s clearly the most important. It’s almost like a clean BC/AD break between what came before and what’s happening now.
Cameron: I think you’re exactly right. When I mention Valhalla, it’s certainly not the first place that they’re highlighting those numbers and talking about engagement. I do think it starts with the beginning of the Leila/Hassan games. There’s something interesting that you make a new trilogy with a new economic model foregrounded underneath it. I think all of that starts with Origins and probably starts earlier.
But by the time you get to Valhalla, it’s such a major part of the self-narration of Ubisoft and of the franchise. I think the reason for that is that Valhalla broke $1 billion in revenue – or at least, that’s what Ubisoft claimed. So I think Valhalla gets highlighted by them so much because it demonstrates the thing they started with Origins has reached its apex with a three or four year-long support cycle on it that had daily content and weekly content associated with it that’s demonstrating not only a drip feed of stuff, but a firehose of stuff that is monetizable at all times.
That’s a fascinating game. The thing that’s tricky about writing a book like this is, every game in the franchise could support 250 pages of serious writing about it.
Nathan: When thousands of people worked on anything, it can support one book if not more.
Cameron: And thousands of people who have strong opinions and are willing to ping off each other. Each game is kind of an argument for why Assassin’s Creed should exist. There’s a real diligence to pulling those things apart.
