Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications

I've grown up in a period when pop culture didn't care much about cultural sensitivity. With proper education anyone can compensate and treat them as pure simplistic fiction, but I do think that those new debates, if nuanced and not reduced to representation, could bring quality to pop culture items.

Particularly in the video game industry, and this company, that have proven to have flawed IRL corporate cultures.

> This statement is making ... implicit [claims] (our diverse team means this game was produced in a careful, sensitive way)

Ah, I think that's a misunderstanding of why the statement is there. It's not to claim that the game is therefore produced in a careful way. Certainly not an accurate way! It's just saying you shouldn't take offense at any details in it (accurate or not). Like, "we probably had someone with the same ethnicity/religion/gender as you and they were fine with it". It's fall out from the original being set in Palestine, which they called "The Kingdom" in an attempt to bypass offense.

The bit about christian churches being decorated like abandoned shacks, with all the gold in a chest in the middle, I thought was funny. Making game worlds that feel 'used' by their inhabitants is a really interesting one.

idk, games are different things to different people; they're escapism and we don't all escape the same way. Some of us enjoy pillaging inaccurate churches, and some of us like chortling about how silly it is while we do it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssrNcwxALS4

“The history of the invasion itself in this time period is, of course, a critical part of the journey,” Ismail said. “What did it mean for the Vikings of the Norse to land in England and to cohabitate?” Ismail enunciated that last word carefully. He said the historians that his team worked with suggested that the “Viking approach to this invasion was cohabitation.” He continued: “Yes, there was war and it was bloody, and it was very brutal. But they adapted themselves to the people they came to. And this is an aspect of it that we do look at. Some historians will even say that this is maybe why the Vikings sort of lost their way of life and culture over time—that they adapted themselves rather than forcing others. And so that aspect is something we do explore to a certain degree in the game.”

Source: https://kotaku.com/the-many-things-we-ve-learned-about-assas...

No mention of slavery, and even brutal colonisation is dismissed with "but", instead talking about "cohabitation". I'm truly baffled by how ahistoric and whitewashing it is. What for?

Yet contrarians here seem to anchor on the inclusion of other races and women as the "bad pc" to be debated.

The conflict between making a videogame (or any bit of popculture really) enjoyable and inclusive vs. historically accurate often comes up and both sides have a fair point. My personal solution is to both enjoy the content and then try to educate myself through articles like this one.

> This statement is making ... implicit [claims] (our diverse team means this game was produced in a careful, sensitive way)

For everyone who isn't aware of the history of this statement, it was a way for the game to include a scene of beating up the pope without (pardon the pun) getting crucified.

I wonder if the people who made this game have some historical resentment towards the English.

(Massive moggy BTW)

[0] although vikings being predatory bastards I pretty much knew already, but there's plenty more I don't.

(edit to remove innuendo)

Anyway, perhaps it's a fair point to make if your blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry"...

I feel Factorio is the counter example, you are a settler on a planet wiping out the local inhabitants mostly just minding their own business, who are attracted by the pollution you are generating. I definitely always feel like the bad guy when playing.

I agree with the article's main points, but I think the author gives the game's creators too much credit here. You could tell from the first trailer that this game was going to engage in historical revisionism of the "the Vikings were really noble heroes" type. This isn't oversight or subtext, it's a conscious and deliberate choice.

The people who made this game weren't stupid or ignorant. If they chose to erase the reality of Viking slavery and violence against defenceless civilians, it wasn't an accident. They may (or may not) have intended to defend colonialism in general, but this game is an entirely intentional attempt to defend _Viking_ colonialism specifically. And they will have been perfectly aware that this played into neo-Nazi tropes.

Everybody seems to have their own personal viking. From the strong, pride of the white race, Christian-killing raider to the inclusive feminist bossgirl shield-maiden. The only thing tied everything together being the subjects' immunity to the corrupting influence of Western Modernity, whatever that influence means to you.

In the end, the best recent work of fiction I've seen in this setting happens to be... Japanese. Vinland Saga manages to be faithful in the things that affect historical awareness (the details of everyday life, the structure of society, the perception of the world) and still be very romantic in its character-building.

TLDR; Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla constructs a deceptive apology for colonialism. Colonialism = Good. And that is a irresponsible message.

There was a resurgence of neo-nazis a few years ago, all of this is trapped in a cultural time bubble, along with the concern?

If you interpret the current zeitgeist as "colonialism is wrong", therefore, you'll be constantly surprised when less-Western colonialism is given a pass. If you interpret it as "the West is evil", and notice that the British are the ones being colonized in this game and that Western religions are being robbed, you will be surprised much less.

It's true that Norse are also associated with the Nazis, but I think that's a coincidence. The Norse are being whitewashed because they're sticking it to the Man.

While I agree this broke immersion completely for me, I don't think you want 10 year olds killing civilians.

First, I would like to point out that it is evident, obvious, absolutely certain that the person writing this blog is a white american liberal. Why? Because while they can make pedantic remarks about weapons, armors, clothes -- which are badly depicted within the game as a result of errors or ignorance --, they will openly switch their stance, and make pedantic remarks but this time justifying the choices of the developers, as long as they are errors that are done to enforce a false narrative. Of course, this "false narrative" I am referring to is a progressive narrative: here, that 9th century England was racially diverse, as it _should_, and that some "primitive" sympathetic people like Danes or Norses were gender equal, as they _should_.

Even in the world of things the author is allegedly unbothered about, there is a hierarchy of things to be unbothered about in a positive or in a negative way.

Continuing from this perspective, the efforts of the author to pursue his pedantic analysis can only be very arduous. Because he has to analyze blatant lies in a pedantic way, but still maintain a conclusion that will be seen as progressive (something along the lines of: there is a more abstract interpretation of all of this that shows that white people are the real culprits in all of this, even though they are openly depicted as evil and ridiculed in every way).

So... the author remarks that Vikings are represented as racially diverse, gender-equal, generally the "good guys" (a "good guy" in pop culture is usually someone who possess anachronic progressive liberal values). These good guys are opposed to the Saxons -- indigenous whites, who are Christian, who wear boring mail, who are religious fanatics, and patriarchal.

One could think that this was the intent, that Ubisoft is simply pandering to American racial justice narratives by painting world progress as a fight against traditional white societies. The simple manicheism used throughout the story makes it simply too obvious...

But, NO. That answer would fall in the category of "bad conclusions", and even though the author is pedantic, he can't go there due to his liberal _essence_.

Hence the need for him to abstract every piece of evidence, and every obvious conclusion that the creators of this game are stupidly pushing their social agenda, in order to reframe those ideas in a light that blames whites.

The way to do this? It is quite astute. It consists in abstracting the very ideas of the developers to ridicule whites and acclaim diverse societies, and to claim that those offensive representations are ACTUALLY toxic white representations of colonialism.

> And that, of course is the problem: the broader implications of this kind of game design for thinking about colonialism. I do not think we are all collectively bothered by how Viking-themed products make us think about 9th century settler colonialism in Northern Europe. But colonialism more broadly, and the still popular fantasy of colonists finding empty ‘virgin’ lands to settle, is still a major issue in the consciousness and politics of many countries.

Namely, that even though no one cares that peasants in 9th century England were massacred, we should be WARY of it because of OTHER INSTANCES of white colonialism. Indeed, every bad in history is bad not for objective reasons, but because at some point whites did it and it was bad. This is a caricature, but very close to reality.

And in all, it is a clever argumentation. Picture a far-right person, who after analyzing demography and the general trends in American or European culture would see in this game the exact evil he is fighting against. Precisely: that there is a dominant trend in all pop culture and the entertainment industry to present dominantly white european countries (or the U.S., which still is demographically a dominantly white european country) and their cultures as 'virgin' islands, that should be forced open to massive foreign immigration by international treaties. And that the laws, customs and religion of these countries (Christianism, hello) should be considered equal or inferior to foreign incoming values (hello """paganism""").

Well, the only way to fight this point is to reverse all the obvious, and go from a concrete to an abstract point of view. See:

> Let’s consider this through our heuristic of “what would we think about this if it were a religion other than Christianity?” Imagine a game where your character comes upon a Buddhist monk in a small shrine and easily talks them into violating their vows by acquiring some property or engaging in sexual intercourse (using reasoning from your religious tradition, no less), after which they thank you and then the game rewards you experience for having desecrated their sacred vows. This is roughly what you do with the anchoress (whose vow is to stay isolated and in place).

Anyone would see this as an attack on christianity by liberal values, namely individualism and hedonism that lead to a disrespect and subversion of people wanting to adopt a religious way of life (these liberal values are represented in the game by the token paganism of the Norse). But NOPE. You CANNOT go this way! First, blame whites. Then, go to an abstract level where you can still blame them.

> Now look, I get it, Christianity in 9th century England was an intolerant, hegemonic religion. But you are a foreign colonizing invader rolling in wrecking their holy sites, (not) killing their religious practitioners and toppling their governments: you are intolerant and hegemonic too!

This is a typical "fake middle ground" centrist point of view. "I agree they are nazis and should be beat up, BUT DON'T BE TOO ROUGH WITH THEM OR YOU MIGHT START TO RESEMBLE THEM." It only ever serves to further bring the knife under the neck of whoever is being beat up.

> And of course that plays straight back into the problem with sanitizing Scandinavian raiding, slavery, and gender roles: the Christian Saxons do not get the same treatment, setting up this stark contrast between an a-historically pure and moral set of Norse characters and a more historically grounded, flawed Christian Saxon society (all the more awkward because one of the things the Christian church militated against in Scandinavian society was slavery, since many of the enslaved people there were Christian).

> And this is my Eivor’s boat-cat. He is adorable and fortunately, unlike the rest of this game, not a white-wash of colonialism.

The author, a proud white liberal, has failed to recognize his own worldview behind the token paganism of these racially diverse / gender equal imaginary Norse people. He still thinks that the problem in this is that _people could see Norse characters as good_, and not that they have been made token protagonists to enforce his own cultural values.

The conclusion of this article is a delusion:

> To be clear, my preference here is not for Ubisoft to have not made this game, my preference here would be for Scandinavian settlement in England to have been presented, warts and all.

Having argued that this game is Bad (it COULD give white people a positive view of colonialism, because they're inherently prone to Nazism), and that even though it became bad for Good reasons (he neutrally points out that the creators censored and distorted reality, because they were just happy to depict the colonization of white people and to demonize christianism), he now expresses the wish that the developers had made a better job of showing the horrors of the pillage and erasure of a culture. It, of course, runs contrary to his beliefs expressed in the introduction that there's no fuss in falsely portraying a white society as racially diverse or any other distortions as long as it's to enforce a progressive agenda.

This is the epiphany of cognitive dissonance, "SHOW THE TRUTH to fight white nazis" vs. "HIDE THE TRUTH to fight white nazis". And I am happy to point this out, in the most pedantic way that anyone could think of.

For a final point of fun, read this:

Ubisoft, please: do better. Earn that title card about your diverse team.

And realize that the author missed that the whole point of this game was to show (CHAD "pagan" diversity) vs. (VIRGIN white christianism) and that he distorted it into a bizarre plot that would somehow reinforce the worldviews of Nazis.

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I am well aware that someone will pedanticly argue that the author put up a minor disclaimer in parenthesis to make it seem as he is taking the "middle ground" between all these issues, and that he's the voice of reason / objectivity. My claim is that it is mostly bullshit noise, and that pedanticism is a nice game for nerds until it has to be tamed and distorted to defend some ideology.

The fact that the author cannot argue even one second that this game is symbolically anti-white colonial propaganda, and have to resort to a universalist position ("I would do the same for any religion / people / etc. !") but without naming once the target of the propaganda... It is funny. That's a funny piece, from an astute contorted liberal white pedant.

Is anyone seriously believing that the lack of Africans limiting the market of, say, Samurai games? Why would it limit the market of Viking games?

So what if it white washes stuff for the masses, maybe thats a good thing. If people experience the past only as a fictional place where people are gentle and sensitive, if there is wide acknowledgment of race and gender, in the way that we actually want from our society today, isn’t that for the better?

Whenever I played Civilization as a kid and had “Mongolians build the pyramids” I never thought thats a historical fact, It just inspired me to read up some real info about it.

Assassins creed series that I’ve played had a similar effect (just the ones up until Italy, haven’t played the newer ones). I read up a ton about the warring families of the renaissance and when I actually visited the historical places it was all the more interesting for it.

I’m glad AC exists even in its current corporate PC form, the world is better for it than without I’d wager. Even the fact that people are discussing that there are inaccuracies means there is a conversation.

Further evidence of how academically overboard he is is illustrated by the fact that he links to a video about colonialism in minecraft. I am reminded of the insufferable people I have had the displeasure of knowing in life who act like they are on the cusp of something profound when in fact they seem to be just trying to get laid. Equating actions in a video game with actual colonization is borderline perverse if you ask me.