An article that describes how today's pigs are different from yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs; neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more entertaining game for them...
Sometimes, factual errors are actually deliberate in order to improve gameplay. For example, accurate architecture may take a back seat to level design. Weapons may react in completely unrealistic ways, but it is understandable because in real life, people didn't fight with controllers. People go much faster than they should, distances are shortened, there is either too much or too little variety because having too much of the same thing is boring and having variation is every small detail is too expensive. All that is not just excusable, it is actually good design, it is a game, not a history lesson. Sometimes, though it is more relevant in movies, there is a deliberate inaccuracy just because that's what people expect and doing it differently would make the audience focus on an unimportant detail or mess with the pacing. And sometimes, it is just to save money that is better spend elsewhere.
I don't think having period accurate pigs is any of these, so for me, it is a mistake, no more, no less. Not the worst, but it deserves a "bug report".
And your character is also likely carrying more of them than their period counterparts, or in some cases, is humanly possible
In the case of recent Assassins Creed games, it's both.
"...freely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/04/15/collections-expeditions-rome-a...
The first two mission chains in England involve replacing the ‘bad guy’ anti-pagan king of Mercia with a good guy reasonable king Ceolwulf (and his good guy reasonable son) and rescuing the Dane-ruled settlement of Grantebridge where, I kid you not, we are told that this settlement was just a tiny village when the Danes moved in and built it up into a big, multi-cultural trading town and all of the local English folks are just totally OK with this and it is just the mean nasty Saxon army (led by a bad guy member of an evil conspiracy) who are ruining everything. Apparently all of the Danish vikings only really came by for infrastructure week.
This problem is infinitely compounded by the way the game treats, or more correctly does not treat, the Norse practice of slavery.
This, for me, is a much bigger - history-wise - problem than a color of pigs.
One such historical custom which has gone by the wayside: an entire family used to share a single bed. If you had a stranger over, they were likely to hop in as well for the night.
The financing of AAA titles is actually rather tight; the fact that AAA titles hardly ever do experiments in gameplay and the fact that in many studios crunch time happens show how tight the financial planning of AAA titles has to be to work out.
There's an argument to be made that getting some of these details right would improve their profitability. For sure people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering around outside the villages.
Details like this are a big part of what makes historical fiction compelling! The more things one encounters that diverge unexpectedly, yet believably from the present day, the greater the sense of immersion.
My friends ask why I care about accuracy. It's really simple! The world 1,000 or 2,000 years ago was VERY different than today, and trying to replicate it is usually enough to create an interesting and foreign world.
If you want to morph things for gameplay's sake, you still can. But there's a difference between purposefully introducing inaccuracies and ignorantly doing so.
I agree.
Even ignoring that, there’s a relatively broad interest in movie bloopers, where people complain about such things as “2011 Chargers were replaced by the earlier models. You can easily tell it by the taillights” (https://www.carthrottle.com/post/alqlmmp/) or “Both Apatosaurs and Stegosaurs went extinct before the point of divergence of this alternate history” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1979388/goofs/). I think that naturally extends to game bloopers, and this is one.
In the case of Assassin's Creed, there is a special draw regarding historical accuracy since the game purports to tell the "real" story, so everything that's immediately outside the fiction should be accurate -- and in fact the games have been noted as arousing interest in history among players.
This is why this kind of approximation can be problematic: if you play the original game from 2007, sure you'll disregard the conspiracy theory story, but will you notice that there are buildings in Jerusalem that didn't appear until centuries later, making the city look much more "arabic" looking than it historically was at the time? And if you think the modern pig is in its natural state, won't you have a subtly different outlook on modern animal husbandry?
Of course, but this particular author chooses to focus on the pigs. Possibly because of personal expertise? The fact that other errors exist does not mean this one should be ignored.
In any case, it's an interesting thing to learn about.
[0] https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/tags/medieval%20pigs
They dedicated a lot of time to getting all the details right.
My wife trains horses. It irritates her to no end seeing characters in movies who supposedly spend their lives in the saddle, played by an actor who has clearly never been on horseback before.
Or not.
A lot of writers, artists, worldbuilders, etc like to incorporate realism into their creations, but in my opinion the more important part is having consistent systems, and realism is just used as a shortcut to consistency. Obviously a fantasy story with dragons isn't realistic, nor is a sci-fi story with superluminal starships. But what good media does is ensure that what it shows is consistent, that there's no magic or technology that would break the system or create a plot hole, and that in general what you see on the screen or read on the page is the natural result of background systems. Like, the article says that mature male pigs were rarely found in pens in the village; this is the result of the background system of how pigs are farmed. If you're watching a movie or playing a game and see a pigpen in a village and it only has sows and piglets (assuming you can somehow tell male and female pigs apart), then that hints that the creator knows about those background systems and takes them into account in their works.
The second reason that realism is values, especially in games, is that it means that you can use your existing knowledge of real systems in game, and similarly use your game knowledge to better understand real systems. For example, I play a game called Hell Let Loose, a WWII multiplayer shooter whose maps are created with period maps and aerial footage. Going into the game for the first time, I may not know how the game plays or what its specific mechanics are, but I know that, for example, Pavlov's House is going to be a great defensive position. Similarly, when I watch a WWII documentary or show like Band of Brothers, I can see where they're fighting and recognize the location from my experience on the Normandy maps, and think about how difficult it is to take those objectives in the game. Of course, the game is a game, its systems aren't directly transferable to real life, and playing a game isn't nearly as difficult as real life would be, but because the core of the game system and the real system are the same, the game helps me better appreciate what the real soldiers went through.
In my opinion, people fundamentally like making connections between things they know. Novelty is appreciated as a way to form new connections. If people can look at a piece of media and make connections to it, they'll enjoy it more. Similarly, if people can look at a piece of media and make connections within that media, making predictions as to what's going to happen, or connecting the actions of two characters when the media doesn't make an explicit connection, then they'll enjoy it more as well. These connections are facilitated by consistency and accurately following the rules of the systems in play. If the show is realistic, then people have an intuitive better understanding of those systems and can make more connections, increasing their enjoyment of the piece. Realism isn't required, but it offers more potential connections and helps ensure the background systems are being followed.