Determination: Essays About Video Games and Us | Page 42

A Reflection on Assassin ’ s Creed By Abhinav Tiku
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A Reflection on Assassin ’ s Creed By Abhinav Tiku

I

owe video games a big debt for giving me a love of history . It all began over a decade ago , on a dewy day in southern England . My family and I lived in a house in the suburb of Ascot , separated from Waterloo Station by an x-teen train ride . It was a cosy , quiet place , made more lively by my uncle and his family who were visiting on vacation . It was a short but very memorable visit . He brought a present for me and my brother : a CD of Age of Empires II : Age of Kings and its expansion pack , The Conquerors . Back then I didn ’ t know the substantial age of the game , which was first released in 1999 , but even if I had , I wouldn ’ t have cared . After they left , on that same dreary day as before , I decided to take it for a test drive on our old Dell . The monitor dwarfed my head in width and height , and I remember a horrible game I used to play with myself : I ’ d put my eyes to the surface of the screen and see how long I could keep them there before I snapped away , blinking back tears and seeing drops of light splatter the inside of my eyelids .

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A lovable mania soon followed . I had enjoyed realtime strategy ( RTS ) games like Age of Empires before , but there was nothing as apparently sophisticated or immersive as the historical pageantry Age of Empires offered : building walls and castles ; marshalling soldiers and cavalry in formations of jagged squares ; colliding armies on muddy fields ; reducing battlements to rubble . Here was history acted with urgency and packaged neatly . To be fair that urgency was due to the game ’ s devotion to mostly military endeavors . Like in most media , violence is often the dramatic story trait and certainly the most tempting to grab our attention and thus make an easy buck upon . Violence plays to our fantasies , and so it can be considered somewhat ahistorical when overused in historical fiction , because it keeps us engrossed in a fake notion of history as entirely comprised of violent battles rather than a collection of more mundane facts . And there is a fair amount of ahistoriocity in games like Age of Empires - it buffs up the product and smoothens the complexity of lived reality in order to market and produce top-shelf entertainment .