Earlier this week Ubisoft, the company behind the Assassin's Creed series, felt the need to issue a lengthy statement in response to complaints about its upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows.
The game, set in 16th-century Japan, has been embroiled in a number of controversies since its reveal a few months back, from a minor scuffle over a flag in an art book to some more valid concerns over the game's architecture (which is normally a series strongpoint) to a minor conservative party trying and very much failing to make the game a political scapegoat.
Then, you know, there's a lot of people's main issue: that one of the game's two protagonists (Yasuke) is a black man, despite him being an actual historical figure, which instantly makes him more historically-accurate than...any other Assassin's Creed protagonist, ever.
Normally the guys complaining about a black man in a video game are the same ones crying foul over historical accuracy, so this is a wonderful example of just how uninterested these guys are in...actual historical accuracy, as I've written about previously:
To truly present something “accurate” to the time period would probably result in a game you wouldn’t really enjoy playing. What we often see in a “historical” FPS action game is just the visual trappings. And that’s okay—it’s a mass-market action game, not a history lesson.
What angry dorks mean when they say “historical accuracy” is not a game that’s accurate to the time being presented, then, but accurate to the aspects of that time (or the popular historical re-telling of it) that are sympathetic to their current political and cultural beliefs.
It doesn’t bother them that a randomly-created soldier with no training can jump behind the controls of a complex fighter aircraft, or expertly handle a cross-section of enemy weapons. They don’t care that the streets of European cities aren’t recreated 1:1, or that uniform details aren’t strictly adhered to, or that Battlefield’s war is fought to time limits and kill counts.
Those things are acceptable compromises. It’s a video game, and those are video game things that the Second World War just needs to accommodate with its representation in order to work. Yet introduce something as relatively harmless (it has zero impact on gameplay!) as women or black soldiers where historically there were none, and suddenly the sky is falling.
The perfect response to dealing with shitheads like this is to simply live your life pretending they don't exist. Their opinions are ill-formed, bigoted and unsuitable for mainstream consumption, and so should be ignored at all costs. Let them howl at the moon all they want, let their furious emails wash against the walls of your inbox, these people simply are not worth your time.
Those of us in the media learned that lesson a long time ago. A decade ago, in fact, when Gawker's Max Read wrote "How We Got Rolled by the Dishonest Fascists of Gamergate", an evergreen piece on the dangers of confusing a bunch of angry tweets with a movement of any significant size or importance. You do not, and should not, have to listen to these pricks!
Yet here we are, in 2024, and Ubisoft hasn't learned a damn thing. While the apology appears at first to be mostly addressed to the series' Japanese fans (most of whom, being actual fans of a series that has long played loose with history, won't care!), it also touches on the matter of Yasuke's place in history, which is a wild thing to commit to public record.
As Trone Dowd put so well on Inverse:
...by issuing this weird, non-explanation for the very normal creative decision to tell its version of a popular historical figure’s story, Ubisoft only lent legitimacy to bad faith complaints seeped in racism. The vocal minority didn’t take issue with the many historical inaccuracies of the series past. For nearly two decades, they seemed perfectly satiated by a prompt telling them Assassin’s Creed is “inspired by historical events and characters,” not painstakingly recreating them. But these gamers launched a cultural battle once they knew they’d occasionally have to step into the shoes of a Black figure in Japan.
Ubisoft didn’t have to explain its creative decisions. It shouldn’t spoon-feed obvious answers to a delusional movement based on bigotry. But it did. And by doing so, it’s validated a straw man argument bolstered by people who have no zero interest in the quality of the game and the simpletons who’ve decided to fall for their grift. Instead of smothering it with logic and standing firmly by its artistic vision, Ubisoft has needlessly poured gasoline onto a smoldering fire. And now, the most annoying trolls on the internet will likely never shut up about it.
This fucking sucks. Ubisoft, you should know better, and for everyone creatively involved in the game who had no part in issuing this spineless statement, I'm sorry you're having to continue putting up with this.
