Assassin's Creed Rogue and Unity, Moral Tables Are Turned
Know your enemy by playing as your enemy. Video games have toyed with that idea for many years, and a new interactive historical epic called Assassin's Creed Rogue tries it once again.
In this game, you theoretically turn full-on bad guy. The man you control, an 18th-century Irishman named Shay Patrick Cormac, switches allegiance from the freedom-loving Assassins, the good guys of this popular series, to the Templars, their nemeses. We'll be the enemy this time. We'll hunt Assassins.
Most big-budget video games present more heroic fantasies. Be the righteous American soldier. Be the treasure hunter. Be the heavyweight champion. Be Batman. Succeed.
To play as a bona fide bad guy in a game is rare, not that this is quite what is happening in Rogue or its sister game, Assassin's Creed Unity, which was released on the same day last week by Ubisoft. Both games still allow players to feel like the good guy.
In Unity, you're Arno Dorian, an Assassin who at times crosses his flawed order. He does it for the woman he loves, a Templar. It's a fitting plot for a game set in Paris at the time of the French Revolution, itself a drama of faltering ideals. The vividly rendered city brings the strife home, with its thousands of computer-controlled protesters packing the squares, its to-scale landmarks and its walk-on appearances by Robespierre and Napoleon.
In Rogue, we're overt rebels. Cormac sneers at his order's double standards. The Assassins help free slaves from the French in Haiti while they help the French crown in the North Atlantic. Later, he deems his brotherhood guilty of an atrocity that kills hundreds of innocent people. Soon, under the player's control, he is attacking the very characters we've sided with in so many Assassin's Creed games before.
In both Unity and Rogue, we are at least shaken from the moral certitude gamers can usually assume justifies their efforts. Few games, especially the blockbusters, ask players to consider that they're wrong or to feel good about what they're doing while identifying with an unsavory group. But they could. Think of games as potential engines of empathy, transporting players into the shoes of those with whom they'd usually disagree.
Eight years ago, the game designer and critic Ian Bogost imagined an abortion video game that might do something like that. It would be made up of mini-games, each about an aspect of the abortion debate. One might be about being a teenage mother, another about testing how a city would run if all birth control were illegal. Each game would be weighted to favor one side of the issue. The overarching abortion game would detect how the player felt about the issues and serve up a mini-game that would most challenge the position and then another to challenge that one. 'This isn't a game that changes your opinion,' he had said at the time, 'but tells you why people have the opinion they do.'
Mr. Bogost never made his game, but in the years since, we've seen the occasional interactive experiment in experiencing a different perspective. The most notorious and disturbing might be the 'No Russian' level in the 2009 blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game let players control an undercover American agent who was embedded with a terrorist group as it massacred civilians in an airport. That mission was skippable, and some players reported playing it nauseously, their virtual rifles pointed to the ground. More nobly, the 2012 Assassin's Creed III let players experience the American Revolution through the eyes and behind the tomahawk of a half-Mohawk Assassin. Our playable hero buddied up with Sam Adams and mostly killed redcoats but also raged at the callous treatment of his people by that most unconventional of big-budget video game antagonists, George Washington.
A problem that designers face, however, is that even if you are going against your own values and beliefs, the games need to feel, to some extent, good. It's not an aspirational thing. It's tactile. The actions that players take - the percussion of fingers on controller buttons, the responsiveness of what then happens on the screen - need to be satisfying, like the plucking of a guitar string to sound a note or the smashing of a hammer against a nail to strengthen a frame. A well-programmed game makes the landing of a plane, the construction of a castle, the firing of a machine gun or even the slashing of a sword through an orc's neck in some way pleasing to the virtual touch.
Rogue's solution to this problem is novel. It takes what used to feel good for Assassin's Creed players and puts it in the computer-controlled hands of our newfound Assassin enemies. They can perform the signature moves we ourselves used in earlier Assassin's Creed games. Now it is you, as Cormac, who must worry about Assassins jumping down from the rooftops to stab you or leaping out of a cart of hay to suffocate you.
The creators of Assassin's Creed Rogue send a clear signal to players: You did that kind of thing before to someone like the character you're controlling now and felt good about it. You feel righteous now. Maybe you weren't the good guys before, after all.
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