ASSASSIN’S CREED: WOW!
NOTE: By habit, I’d provide all manner of links, pictures and such. I’ve few protracted periods at the moment for reasons evident below. So I haven’t.
I am staying in my mother’s house. I will be here for some time. I’m not sure how long exactly. She is 92 and she is not well. Each episode over the last year has established a fresh nadir of potential recovery and her formerly indomitable ability to get over things has withered. We are preparing for her to leave.
When my father died, some twenty odd years ago, one of the things that he left behind was an impressive stash of prescription opioids. I was tasked with taking these to the pharmacy in town for disposal. I did nothing of the sort. I packed them into my bag and returned to London.
Any change in my overall demeanour for the next month would be easily enough put down to mourning. So I reasoned, as I variously gobbled and snorted my way through the backlog of OxyContin, morphine and such. In the final weeks, a strange lyricism had taken over my father. He didn’t want to talk about his death, but he started telling anecdotes of his childhood. Tales that dissolved into imagination. He was off his face. Soon I was too.
Aside from holding down a steady office job, I’d return home at the end of the day and play two video games on the PlayStation: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and ICO. I’d borrowed the video projector from work and had them thrown onto the white wall opposite the bed. I didn’t play the game as such in GTA. I just drove around and listened to the radio. I obeyed the traffic lights. I wasn’t looking for trouble. Certainly not with all those prescription meds I was holding. But things would invariably escalate no matter how much I was playing the role of dutiful citizen.
I thought about buying the game again recently, but it’s twenty three years since its release and several of the included songs are no longer licensed and have been removed. No Rockit, no Billie Jean and, above all, no Kate Bush singing Wow. We’re all alone on the stage tonight, we’ve been told we’re not afraid of you…
That month of deranged mourning was probably my personal peak in gaming. Neither of these games required much in complex button combinations or even reflexes. You could play them in many ways. You didn’t have to follow the story, although ICO was profoundly linear.
I still play games from time to time, but the return seems less and less and the games are ever more bloated and time consuming. But, as a sort of Japanese historian, I’m always intrigued by the representation of Japan and the announcement of Assassin’s Creed Shadows from Ubisoft had me vaguely interested.
I have played several of the former iterations of the series. It started as cod Dan Brown Illuminati/Templar hokum. The mechanic was intriguing. Lots of climbing over architecture and generally stealthy play. You were a character in the future projected back into the past. It didn’t really make any sense. I just liked looking at the buildings and the views, whether that was the Holy Land during the Crusades or Renaissance Italy. There was a sense that the next historic period and location chosen would be somehow unexpected. Many were calling for Japan. That seemed far too obvious. Finally Ubisoft gave in.
As the release date for Shadows approaches, there has been a certain amount of clamour about aspects of the game. In particular the casting of a black character in one of the two main playable roles. Yasuke is a real historical figure. Whether he can be defined as “samurai” is a matter of debate. But, as it seems we need reminding, the strength of video games, like cinema, is not realism. A realistic samurai game could easily be worrying over how much rice you have in your coffers and whether or when the peasantry are going to try and do you in.
The clamour is of course a chimera. Is that clearer? Probably not. My main issue is HAVE YOU PLAYED THE GAME YET? To which the answer is no. You’ve seen snippets of gameplay over development and these have been further edited into five second bites of activity to furnish a decent harvest of harumph via outrage. Just as you were capable of inordinate amounts of violence and destruction in Vice City, you were also capable of doing the exact opposite. You have choices when you’re playing, rather than watching someone else do it.
The free will of many open world games like GTA is something often overlooked when enjoying the experience outside the storyline.
There has been particular recent focus on the inclusion of watermelons and cherry blossom at the same time. This is not possible! This denies the nature of seasonality! True. Furthermore, the precise period of its setting is before the introduction of watermelon to Japan. It is anachronistic. It is ahistorical. It is also Assassin’s Creed ffs, and the storyline is already entirely ridiculous. Video games are not reality.
Again, as so few have played the game as yet, I don’t know how much Shadows involves itself with the overarching conspiratorial backstory of the series. It’s something of a millstone. Just as the early ones in the series regurgitated Priory of Sion bollocks that Dan Brown had himself half-inched from another bunch of chancers, it also coughed up a CliffsNotes summary of simulation via Jean Baudrillard similar to that which had fed into The Matrix et al. Yawn.
I played a few Jeff Minter games last week. I’d forgotten how hard some of them were. They need faster reflexes than mine these days. But this early era of gaming was modest in scale. Frequently the work of a very small team, if not just one obsessive individual. Far closer to an auteur or DIY style than what is required in the production of a AAA game now. So much bloat. You could imagine a game, programme it and put it out fairly quickly on cassette. Now development cycles are just that. Investors to satisfy with projections of future returns. It’s possible that AI might well enable far more modestly sized teams to produce AAA style content, but then I don’t like AI at all. Because I am an old git. But not old as my mother.
Video games, like cinema and tv, have perhaps abandoned imagination and, following considerable experiment in the so-called modern period, we’ve returned to a tiresome linear narrative. Almost sola scriptura, obsessed with lore and backstory, rather than the expansive mystical potential of imagination. Look, it’s five am and I’m just thinking out aloud to pass the time and I’m going to pass on going into the v-effect for now. Let’s summarise a few things before signing out and getting on with the day:
As I’ve read variously of late, woke/antiwoke discourse doesn’t seem so different. Get upset about the inclusion of diversity, get upset about its exclusion.
You spend a game like Assassin’s Creed looking at the back of someone’s head. Other than cut scenes, you don’t actually see so much of their face which is itself shrouded in massive helmet most of the time. Do I care about there being a black main character in Shadows? I am indifferent to the issue. I just want to know if it’s a good story and won’t have me abandon it after a few hours. If Yasuke speaks Portuguese so much the better!
How fantastical is it? Are you battling monsters or spirits at any point?
How does it compare to Ghosts of Tsushima? That was fairly good, but just like AC these games quickly become repetitive once you’ve got some of the mechanic down. Oh, another enemy encampment to clear…
… often with anachronistic weapons. AC similarly has all manner of explosive add ons to arrows and such, even if guns are a no-no. Weapons that didn’t exist or were barely available given expense, etc. GOT was no different here. Shadows will doubtless have arquebus matchlock weapons, but how faithfully will their reloading times etc be portrayed? Do I care? No.
Shame they didn’t go with early Japan, say Yamato, the crossover between Jomon and Yayoi.
There really aren’t any significant cities of grand architecture like Florence, Rome, Constantinople, etc. A few castles. Some temples. Japan is fundamentally low rise in architecture during this period, however bustling.
How far from the storyline can I depart? Can I abandon samurai pretensions and just become a rice merchant? It’s a bit too early for kabuki, but surely Nō theatre is on offer? How about kagaku, etc? Sadly Ubisoft are not Rockstar. I doubt there’ll be anything like Red Dead Redemption’s interpretation of the American West.
Have you actually played the game yet? If not, silence is an available option for now.
Japan has a robust culture and history. It does not need prissy protection. It will withhold. Informed and considered opinion, yes. It’s as if Japan has not played very fast and free already in games, film, manga, novels, etc.
Later in her life, my mother worked for a Japanese organisation that had based itself near our then home. She’d travel to Osaka once or twice a year. I’d started my studies around the same time. An entirely fortuitous match. Through her I got to work as poetry translator for a couple of years. It was all self-published works by tanka enthusiasts. We’d meet up there from time to time and in more recent years have travelled there together.
Maybe in months to come I’ll play Shadows with my mother in mind, although in many ways the Yakuza series would be the better fit and most certainly a similarly UNREALISTIC simulation of Japan, because ALL HISTORY IS IMAGINED AND GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUN. But I don’t want to be a samurai. Never have. Itinerant poet perhaps. Bunraku puppeteer. Taisho layabout. Devoted son, perhaps.