An Assassin’s Creed
An examination of violence as ideology across Ubisoft’s major franchises
The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.
Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
War never changes — or so it goes. What exactly this means precisely is not entirely clear (as is the case with most pithy aphorisms of the sort), and largely depends on who you’re asking. Is it a heroic statement, meant to evoke the enduring humanity of those who fight and perish within battles? Is it an admission of pessimism, a recognition of the essence of warfare? Perhaps a patriotic sentiment, intended to establish a historical lineage of conflict, with the goal of rallying the spirit in the present?
Does it really matter?
Few other major contemporary creative forces — corporate or independent or anywhere in between, working in games or otherwise— have dedicated as much time, energy, and budget to portraying and exploring a certain kind of mythology of warfare as Ubisoft has done in recent years. Whether this is intentional, hell, self-aware even, is beyond the point: what matters is that Ubisoft’s broad canon of franchises demonstrates with startling clarity a remarkably singular and coherent thesis about warrior ideology and war as a state of mind: a framework not only for existentially justifying nations and societies, but individual lives as well. The result is a compelling and deeply pessimistic view of a world in which war exists as the fundamental existential force for its own sake, providing a structure and logic that transcends ideological boundaries or structures.
This article will examine, across a wide number of (probably) disparate topics, vignettes, and discussions, the ways in which this broader idea is manifested across several of Ubisoft’s major franchises, with a focus on more recent titles. While I’ll try to be as comprehensive as possible in my presentation, this is by no means meant to be all-encompassing and I am intentionally eliding from mention a good amount of nuance in certain topics:
- I’m not gonna be discussing issues such as the influence of the military-entertainment complex or the precise legal/political nuances of international policies regarding military conduct or protocol over the years.
- I’ll try to keep my comments/speculation on the role of 9/11 and the War on Terror brief, out of respect for the fact that literally everyone’s talked about it at this point and there is absolutely nothing I can say about it which someone else hasn’t already offered a more qualified or interesting take about.
- I (probably) will not discuss the cultural legacy of Tom Clancy much or try to parse the enduring influence of his politics on Ubisoft’s Clancyverse. While there’s certainly much to be said in that direction, I’m frankly uninterested in Clancy’s work in general (having read a decent amount of it back in the day) and I think it’s a pretty safe conclusion to draw that Ubisoft’s works under his name at this point are, for better or worse (probably the former), a far cry tonally, aesthetically, and ideologically from anything Clancy wrote or would have written.
- I acknowledge that many of these points can be applied more broadly to other works and franchises. As a matter of fact, the impetus for this article was based on plans to write about Modern Warfare’s treatment of special operations as heroic myth. However, I stand by the fact that Ubisoft’s presentation of these topics is unique in how coherently and homogeneously they’re developed across all their titles, almost as if in service of an overarching thesis. (Do I really think that Ubisoft, a corporate publisher with an international audience, is intentionally crafting a broad canon of works with a unified and relatively sophisticated argument about the nature of violence? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that thesis doesn’t exist.)
- Lastly, all discussion of gameplay and story elements is drawn from my personal experience with said titles.
The premise of most Ubisoft games is, after all analysis, pretty straightforward: an individual (or very small group of individuals) singlehandedly wages a campaign of terroristic violence against a much larger group, using a litany of subversive methods including sabotage and assassination. These individuals — whether they’re from an ancient fraternity of prophet-assassins (Assassin’s Creed), a T1+ special operations unit (Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six), or a global syndicate of vigilante hackers (Watch Dogs) — are always exceptional in both their talents and backgrounds, their extraordinary individual lethality multiplied even further by the tactical and logistical support of their respective parent organisations, who offer everything from cutting-edge tech to diplomatic invisibility. They may be severely outnumbered, but they more than compensate for it through a combination of technological supremacy and sheer ingenuity (and easily exploitable AI pathfinding, to be fair).
There is a heroic element to each of these character’s stories, lent by a common invocation of “extraordinary circumstances”: events whose magnitudes and natures defy common ability or reason, which require responses liberated from the confines of traditional law and order, even morality. A deep-state network of embedded sleeper cell agents is activated after a biological catastrophe in order to save America (The Division); an elite unit of soldier-assassins is deployed to singlehandedly dismantle and secure a rogue sovereign state (Ghost Recon). It’s worth noting that in many of their games, the sense of heroism quickly falls apart at even the slightest inspection however: the Strategic Homeland Division’s primary (and possibly sole) targets are American citizens themselves, gunned down mercilessly with overwhelming firepower on American soil; and the Ghost teams are no more or less than professional hitmen operating loosely under US military command to advance American interests where traditional diplomacy and armies cannot reach.
All of these are, of course, by no means unique, and might in fact even come off as quite cliched in their own rights. What makes these works interesting is the framework in which all of these genre cliches are situated: a singular, all-encompassing vision of a world beyond saving.
There is a seemingly straightforward and basic fundamental struggle at work at the heart of Assassin’s Creed: liberty versus authority. It is from this seemingly simple dichotomy that an ongoing recondite war lasting millenia, possibly even predating the existence of humans as Homo sapiens, spills out thus, forming the backbone of the franchise’s narrative.
On one side, there are the Templars — descended ostensibly from their namesake organisation, widely implicated in no small number of conspiracies throughout our history which the games confirm as verifiable canon — representing a belief that human beings are inherently savage, naturally prone towards chaos and spiritual/moral weakness; and consequently must be tamed through obedience to enlightened authority. On the other, there are the Assassins — descended ostensibly from the more obscure hashshashin, a Levantine warrior sect who are portrayed in the series’ first entry to be religiously-neutral humanitarian philosopher-warriors (but who in reality were probably closer to a fringe extremist cell, whose jihadic violence today would be considered rather radical and possibly even heretical) — who represent a belief in skeptical liberty and self-determination, and who seek peace through education and tolerance rather than force. Each side believes steadfastly in the moral supremacy of their respective visions, each generation of new converts and disciples, of sons and daughters, killing and dying in the name of a better tomorrow that has yet to be seen.
Liberty and authority. Free will and obedience. Self-determination and conformity. The individual against the collective. The one against the many.
Of course, though, the reality is never so cleanly delineated; and throughout the history of the world as presented in the franchise — much like our own history which the fiction attempts to mirror — this central conflict is repeatedly interrogated, deconstructed and reinterpreted, both by groups and individuals alike who reframe it towards their own ends, their personal histories and motivations and ambitions and desires. The pursuit of liberty becomes indistinguishable from the desire for vengeance and the hedonism of anarchism; the restraint of authority inextricable from the temptation of tyranny and a lust for power.
Both the Templars and Assassins were founded on a genuine shared belief that the world deserves to be bettered, that it can be bettered — and yet they are undone, time and time again, by the very things against which they fight so desperately. The Assassins become tyrannical and dogmatic in their ethics; the Templars fall victim to their own basal natures and become drunk with greed and lust. In the world that they’ve created in their stead — a world in which laws are written at the ends of blades and the worth of institutions weighed in blood and gunpowder — a principle ceases to carry much weight, it’s little more than an abstract talking point, a palette swap for your new linens, a choice between hood or hat. The only truth that remains beneath it all is far simpler: that nothing is true, that everything is permitted.
There are four fundamental freedoms, as articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a now-famous State of the Union address in 1941, which he believed everyone in the world ought to enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of want, and freedom from fear.
There is, however, an additional fifth freedom that exists unbeknownst to the public, granted only to a select, almost infinitesimal minority of individuals: freedom from the law. The fifth freedom is “the right to defend our laws, by breaking them. To safeguard secrets, by stealing them. To save lives, by taking them. To do whatever it takes to protect our country.” And this freedom belongs to one man, and one man only: Sam Fisher.
Sam Fisher is an extraordinary figure in many ways. In-universe, he’s a legend amongst soldiers and intelligence operatives, a man who has survived and accomplished the impossible not once, but over and over again, enough times to have made a career for himself running missions that for others would end careers (and probably lives). As a cultural figure, he’s the perfect embodiment of a new kind of world order, one that’s been gradually emerging since the end of WWII but has since taken on new life in the grainy phosphorescent glow of DEVGRU operators decked out in Crye Precision gear, stalking down pitch-black hallways in some dusty compound with their panoramic NVGs and IR lasers and short-barrel M4s with built-in suppressors: a far cry from the days of young GIs fighting a noble war in the mud and grime, towards a murky shadow world defined by the precise movements and trigger-pulls of professional ghosts-for-hire, whose actions will not be recorded and whose deaths will not be noted.
Fisher’s world is one in which nothing is true, and therefore, everything is permitted. Allegiances shift at a moment’s notice; no matter what you do, you might find that your best friend in one moment is suddenly on the other end of your gun in the next, and if you fail to pull the trigger you could risk either blowing your own cover (Double Agent), or failing to prevent WWIII (Chaos Theory), or both. Either way though, it doesn’t matter: the only truth is that no matter what you feel in this moment, you will pull the trigger, and what happens next has already happened, and there is nothing you can do to change it, to prevent it from happening exactly the way it just did.
Look at it this way: it’s 2002. Your best friend has just been discharged as a patsy over a friendly fire incident. Using the money he earned from a successful lawsuit against the United States Marine Corps for defamation, and a long history of connections forged through superlative service, he is able to establish a private military company — Displace International — which very quickly rises to the top. Now it’s 2007 and you’re holding a gun up to his head in a shitty bathhouse somewhere in Tokyo, and he’s telling you that America is sick, that America is dying, that all of it — the politicians, the bureaucrats, the whispered backroom deals — it’s all life support for a sick old woman who’s died long ago. He’s telling you that the world is built off of three things — honour, courage, and fidelity — and that he knows you believe in these, more than any government. He’s telling you this and then you respond by shooting him, because if you don’t, he’s gonna pull a gun on you anyways and do the same to you.
Or consider this: it’s 2011. Your long-time employer, Third Echelon, is infiltrated by a mole (Conviction), but your supervising officer, whom you’ve just shot in the head to maintain your cover within a homegrown American terrorist organisation (Double Agent) dedicated to reforming the country’s corrupt government through forceful decapitation of the executive command, has faked the death of your daughter without your knowledge, sending you spiraling into a decade of grief. Third Echelon is hunting you down: the new Director, who was the mole all along, and the Vice President are conspiring to kill the President and seize power via laws of succession, so you storm the White House, executing dozens of other nameless corrupt Splinter Cell operatives along the way, and shoot them both (well, only one canonically, but…).
Because of your actions, you’ve been promoted to take leadership of a new Echelon unit(Blacklist) following the dissolution of the former, and now you’re infiltrating Guantanamo Bay under the guise of a political detainee to interrogate a prisoner who has been feeding the CIA false information about a rogue MI6 agent who is the ringleader of an organisation claiming responsibility for a series of devastating attacks against American interests in order to force the country to recall its troops abroad, effectively ending the reign of American imperialism. You deploy from an unmarked air fortress with advanced stealth technology and full living facilities that floats outside of any national boundaries yet can mobilise to any location in the world in under a day. Nobody knows who you are yet everybody knows your name; nobody’s ever seen you and yet your footsteps have been felt in every corner of the world, on every continent and in every major (and otherwise) conflict across the globe. You’re both everywhere and nowhere at once; but you’re growing old, and soon, like others, you’re gonna die, whether by somebody else’s hand, or by the telomeres in your genes, which since the age of 25, maybe 26, have been slowly unraveling, breaking down the organs and muscles in your body, so that even though at the prime age of 60, you can still effortlessly execute six men half your age in 10.2s, the joints in your knees pop a bit and the oxygen seems to burn in your lungs a little hotter than before.
It’s 2013. Your partner, a man named Briggs, the most promising operative in the new organisation known as Fourth Echelon, your organisation, crafted in your image, is executing the Secretary of Defence because he’s been compromised, because he’s about to give them — who are they again? The Engineers? John Brown’s Army? Displace International? — the launch codes, because no individual life is worth more than the continuity of the United States of America. This is your legacy. What is the United States of America? What does it mean? Honour, courage, fidelity — does it matter? Your name is Sam Fisher, and you are a Splinter Cell. The fifth freedom is yours and yours alone. Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.
One of the defining traits of the War on Terror’s reimagination of the modern battlefield is that every space is a single gunshot away from turning into a warzone, that any moment can suddenly blow up (forgive the pun) into an “active situation”. The greatest threat of terrorism isn’t the bomb or even the detonation itself, but the ensuing terror (in case that wasn’t obvious enough from the word) which resituates the savage Other — previously conveniently segregated by geography or appearance —as being ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet invisible at any given moment. Unlike deterrence, where the the sword hanging above you can be seen at any moment, and the fear comes from a question of when the thread might snap, terrorism is based around creating the idea of the sword, so you always live in fear of the possibility that it’s there, lurking in the shadows, dangling from a pipe above you, a blade hidden in a sleeve in a crowd.
The beauty and cruelty of terrorism as a form of warfare is that, in practice, it has a tendency to be truly egalitarian in its effect: the truck bomb and the drone strike are equivalently ambivalent in their impacts, and in fact become more efficient in their delivery the more “collateral damage” they soak up. In a single moment it erases the boundary separating the civilian from the combatant, the home from the battlefield; it displaces all authority and agency and creates a vacuum, in which, for just a moment, the only logic is its own. There’s a twinkle in the sky, a low roar; and then you’re gone. This too was the fear of God, and the lesson to Job: that at any moment our environment will rise against us and strike us down without warning, for reasons that we cannot possibly begin to comprehend.
Rainbow Six Siege is ostensibly a game about the actions and operations of an international syndicate of crimefighters (technically under NATO command, although I’m not sure that context even matters here) known collectively as Rainbow, who have been drawn from some of the most elite police, military, and even private counter-terrorism units (CTUs) in the world. In the present, the game is functionally little more than (but certainly no less — it succeeds spectacularly at its current ambitions) a hero-driven shooter in tactical cosplay, starring a litany of unusually good-looking and demographically diverse “operators” with lovable personalities and a wide variety of gadgets that would make Q jealous. In its original conception, however, there is evidence of a much different approach, which reflects more directly both the series from which it draws its name, and Ubisoft’s broader approach to the notion of terroristic violence.
Siege’s (unfortunately barebones) solo experience, consisting of several “Situations” in which the player takes the role of an operator and performs an objective (usually securing a hostage or defusing a bomb), begins with a cinematic starring the now-former commander of Rainbow, a woman known as Six, who delivers the following monologue (with excellent gravitas, might I add):
I called you here today because we face dire circumstances. Our intelligence has confirmed the existence of a new threat that is unlike any we have seen before. This organisation has the ability to carry out attacks anywhere in the world. They are highly lethal and indiscriminate of age, religion, or nationality. The potential for loss of human life and psychological terror is substantial and cannot be ignored. They are the very definition of an unknown quantity.
Our only choice of action is to meet force with force. As of this moment my programme is reactivated and I am handing over command of all global field operations to you. Recruit your operators from among the world’s foremost elite. Borders and protocols are irrelevant. We must be the shield that safeguards the civilised world from those who wish to do it harm. No matter how ore where our enemies strike, no matter what defence they cower behind, Team Rainbow must stand ready.
Her monologue is intercut with a series of dramatic shots featuring the presumed enemy force — later identified as a faction known as the White Masks — preparing what appear to be highly portable chemical and/or biological weapons. An official blog post made prior to the release of the game further clarifies the lack of available intel regarding their nature: “We don’t know who they are. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know where they’ll strike next. We only know that they present a big enough threat for the Rainbow program to be reinstated years after its deactivation.”
The phrase “stochastic terrorism” saw a surge in usage shortly after a series of unrelated back-to-back mass shootings in two American states during August of 2019, and has since become closely associated with far-right violence and ideology, including the ways in which the kinds of language now characteristic of the Trump administration have contributed to the weaponisation of pre-existing mental instability towards convenient political targets. Stochastic terrorism does not refer to the actor who depresses the switch on the detonator, or even the act of detonation itself; but the voice which pollutes the public space with paranoia and uncertainty, which actively seeks to cultivate a volatile atmosphere in which unstable individuals can be tipped over the edge, so to speak, like intentionally filling a room with gas fumes knowing there’s a risk of a spark. At the end of the day a bomb or a rifle is just a vector for the immaterial; terrorism is not about an act, but a state of mind.
Team Rainbow, initially conceived of in Tom Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six (1998) as a coalition rapid-response team designed to address the potential emergence of extra-national terrorist actors following the demise of the Soviet Union (“and other nation states with political positions adverse to American and Western interests”), still very much operated in a post-Cold War understanding of the world in which the greatest terrorist threats ultimately still had probable origins in old political intrigue: disenfranchised former intelligence agents, or corrupt political leaders with criminal connections.
The reconstituted Team Rainbow of Siege, however, is in many ways a unique and potentially novel reaction to the emergence of a previously-unimaginable culture in many ways defined by stochastic terror, in which the origins and identity of the threat are unclear and potentially even nonexistent in terms of a coherent sense of purpose, and in which terror has taken on an autotelic function in perpetuating itself for its own sake. Barring the likely reality that there was simply very little budget allocated to the writing team for Siege, the White Masks are presented as entirely without discernible structure, organisation, or even purpose: “They are the very definition of an unknown quantity,” the former Six intones, and their completely rhizomatic nature is made all the more threatening by their choice in weaponry: a highly toxic biochemical agent which manifests as a dense, pollen-like yellow fog deployed from portable, seemingly homemade canisters.
In the first and only major story event included with the base game, a mission ominously named “Article 5”, the newly-assembled Rainbow team faces a “trial by fire”: the White Masks have inexplicably targeted “one of our most notable institutions of learning” (whose logo looks an awfully lot like Harvard’s, and which also just so happens to apparently be located in Cambridge, MA), where they have unleashed copious amounts of their mustard-coloured gas and, armed with light machine guns and plastic explosives, have proceeded to lock the campus down and rig it with powerful explosives.
What exactly they’re attempting to communicate with said attack is unknown, but judging from both Six’s narration (“This is more than an attack on our soil… this is an attack on our future.”) and Ubisoft’s official description (“blast through the brick walls that have protected the leaders of tomorrow”), it’s quite clear that the attack is received not as a political statement, intended to advance any specific goal or agenda, but an existential threat, an attack on the very idea of a nation’s future. In this sense, the attack needs no motivation or justification beyond its very own existence: violence for the sake of violence.
There’s been a good amount of speculation amongst fans as to what exactly is going on in the multiplayer section of the game, which pits two teams of five Rainbow operators against one another in tense objective-oriented standoffs. The common consensus — which seems to have basically been confirmed as canon by recent official cinematics — is that the operators are participating in elaborate training simulations taking place in very detailed reconstructions of the environments to which they’ll eventually be deployed (never mind the logistical gymnastics of that). This is not altogether unbelievable — after all, militaries around the world are certainly no stranger to building vast and incredibly detailed artificial cities in which they run combat simulations, accurate down to the very scents and sounds — and it would certainly explain the oddities of the maps upon closer examination: why are there no doors anywhere? Why are there no civilians — the most volatile element of an active urban situation? Why are there ventilation holes punched seemingly randomly into the walls which just so happen to perfectly accommodate the drones that the operators use? Why is there only one bathroom in a multistory building???
So what of Terrorist Hunt?
The Terrorist Hunt game mode (which has since been rebranded to the equally generic but probably more immediately accessible “Training Grounds”) is the one place in the game where the game’s supposed main villains, the White Masks, appear with some regularity. If the multiplayer matches are meant to be Rainbow’s simulation training, Terrorist Hunt is typically regarded to represent the actual missions Rainbow undertakes as part of its (largely invisible) campaign against the White Masks.
If so, however, the nature of the White Masks’ goals becomes even more incomprehensible. If the maps are anything to go by, taken either literally or as Rainbow’s simulated approximation of their perceived threat evaluation, the White Masks suddenly seem not only like an untraceable group with access to ungodly amounts of hazardous biochemical material; but one which can successfully strike at any given moment any number of targets across the world ranging from upscale suburban houses to grungy biker clubhouses, from derelict theme parks housing drug labs to fancy skyscraper towers done up in traditional Japanese regalia. Their choice in targets seems completely arbitrary, devoid of any similarities or conclusions beyond the fact that there might just as well be none. The only mention of something even remotely close to betraying some kind of identity comes with a map named Oregon, described as “an assault on a fortified survivalist compound”; and yet, in context of everything else, it’s just another mystifying and seemingly discrete node in a vast scattering of seemingly discrete nodes.
In a way, there’s a kind of elegance to this. Long before anyone could have imagined that it would eventually become the e-sports titan it now is, Siege was compared to the War on Terror as sport:
[Conflicts] feel hollow at first, like dramatized chess puzzles, but the absence of narrative context or characterization begins to feel purposeful, embodying the fantasy of the specialist who doesn’t need to know why he’s invading a fortified chalet in the French Alps, only that the order was given. The decision happens elsewhere, the debate about strategy and potential consequences out of his hands. For a game about guns and combat, “Siege” often makes one feel oddly vulnerable, powerless to do anything but follow orders and oversee the efficient discharge of one’s weaponry.
The reality of any combat situation, but particularly counterterrorism efforts, is that it exists as a consequence and at the confluence of a much larger interplay of known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and, most scarily of all, unknown unknowns. Every round fired — or not fired — is a political statement, and a physical acknowledgement — or lack thereof — of a line between the world of civilians and the world of active combatants, which is simultaneously impermeable and infinitely fragile. Hell, a war conducted in an urban environment is in itself already a kind of political statement, a tacit admission of a profound failure to uphold the most basic and arguably sacrosanct promise of a government to its people to act as a safeguard, a kind of thin red(/blue/green/whatever) line as someone once put it, between savagery and society, law and anarchy.
How liberating then, how thrilling would it be to fight a war freed from geopolitics, from hypocritical commanders worried about their promotions, from an apathetic and mocking snowflake public that cannot possibly understand your struggles and sacrifices, the rush of terror and adrenaline and ecstasy— against an enemy with no discernible face or name or purpose, who exists solely to be fought? Honour, courage, fidelity — people talk about these things, but who can say what they really mean? It is the dream of the warrior that the war shall never end, that the battlefield shall one day stretch across the face of the earth, that even the gods should become swallowed by it: everything else after that is just pretense for weaker men.
This is after all the great illusion of Achilles’ shield, whose supposedly invulnerable face bore an intricate mandala of the entire Homeric cosmos in all its banalities and its contradictions, divinely sanctioned by the gods themselves: that somewhere beyond the battlefield, there lies peace and civility, abundance and song, all of which bring into focus the sacrifices and horrors of war. But we should do well to remember that after all the ekphrasis and microcosm, metaphor and cosmogony, it’s just a trick, a nice painting by a lame god cast into the darkness by his own brethren; and that Achilles’ shield is just a shield, whose face was meant to be seen not by its hellbent and bloodthirsty bearer, but by the victim, as a mocking prelude to a blade in between the ribs.
At the end of the day, after all analysis, only two facts can be discerned for certain about the White Masks: we know absolutely nothing about them, except that the threat they pose is great enough to singularly justify the continued existence of Rainbow. And it’s with that knowledge alone that the war must continue to be waged, no matter the cost.
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war’s appeal.
Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
There exists a concept in military science known as fourth-generation warfare (4GW), used to describe a conflict in which the traditional boundaries delineating acts of warfare — direct vs covert action, combatants vs civilians — begin to erode or outright collapse into one another. In 4GW, ultimate control over violence becomes decentralised from forces representing the state, and instead becomes redistributed over a wide playing field made up of a variety of violent non-state actors, oftentimes representing a diverse range of backgrounds and interests in the conflict. There are typically understood to be three layers of 4GW: the physical layer in which direct combat occurs, and which is considered to be the least important in determining the outcome of the conflict; the psychological layer, which involves things like morale and spirit; and the cultural layer, which includes morals, values, and traditions, where the primary conflicts of 4GW — “to destroy the moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist” — are both waged and won (10).
Few other games have dealt with this last layer — symbolic and culture violence as the site of warfare — as directly or explicitly as The Division (I’ll proceed to treat both games under the general umbrella term of The Division from here on out). Others have written far more eloquently than I can about the specific ideological structures and struggles which underlie the broader politics of The Division; but my interest lies specifically in examining the ways in which violence is enacted anathema to ideological lines and tensions, existing as a self-propagating force irrespective of cause.
Much has been written as of late about The Division given its uniquely timely and bleak portrayal of a world lain to ruin by what is confirmed in-game from the start to have been a man-made virus. A good amount of this writing tends to focus on the physical devastation: the smouldering ruins of upended vehicles stacked up at the intersections, the looted pharmacies and department stores riddled with shell casings and debris, the mountains of bodies wrapped in body bags and eventually in trash bags when they ran out of the former, stacked up two, three stories against the sides of apartment buildings. There’s plenty of talk as well about the astonishing efficacy of The Division’s fictional CDC/FEMA stand-in, CERA, and its response to the Dollar Flu pandemic: the proliferation of mobile testing sites and field hospitals throughout the cities, the abundance of medical stations that seem well-equipped, many even with advanced tech such as UV checkpoints for sterilisation. Compared to the response of many real world governments to the threat of COVID-19, what might have been taken for granted before — that the CDC in the event of a pandemic would actually over-respond in the way that we’ve been conditioned to believe by so many years of pandemic films and zombie apocalypses — pales next to the casual cruelty and gross inefficiency and ineptitude of reality.
The most attention by far however has easily gone — with fairly obvious reason — to the games’ astonishing ability to render with eerie accuracy a vision of our very world in ruins: our monuments converted into makeshift hospitals, their once-recognisable facades desecrated by graffiti or draped in tarps; the very streets we walk down on a daily basis in reality emptied of vehicles and covered in heaps of trash and detritus, some of it once human.
The totalising effect of this extraordinary devotion to a certain kind of psychospatial verisimilitude — not just in recreating the city in its exact proportions and visuals, but also in imagining how the city itself would react, where people would flee (and alternately, where they would go to die), where barricades and evacuation routes might be realistically set up, how shelters-in-place might be constructed based on the inhabitants and purpose of the building — is not just that we are left with an unbelievably impressive “recreation” of one possible (albeit unlikely) future; but that we become invariably immersed within the logic of the fiction, which is intentionally designed to mirror that of our reality. The desecration of a familiar sight — for me, it was seeing a section of the High Line, which I often walked with my friend, collapsed right next to a bench I swear I’ve sat on multiple times — disrupts the very nature of the semantic relationship between player and avatar, reality and fiction. War becomes a force through which all things become alienated from their original associations and contexts, and are repurposed by a logic of sightlines and probable cover, machine gun nests and sniper posts. A defensible position is, at the end of the day, a defensible position, whether it’s the Capitol Building or a nondescript sewer atrium.
The Division deals extensively with this kind of symbolic disruption and violation on nearly every level of its design, and built into this is a deeply cyclical vision of violence enforced directly through, amongst other things, the game’s loot-driven RPG mechanics. The weapons themselves become decontextualised from their physical properties by their damage stats, their talents, their attributes; the missions, many of which take place in dramatic interpretations of iconic real-world locations themselves repurposed by catastrophe, are played again and again until each one loses all narrative and even visual significance and becomes a fixed pattern of repeated inputs and motions.
Very quickly, exposed to the meat grinder of the game’s mechanics, the ideological differences between the various factions, each of them otherwise remarkably complex and nuanced in their grievances and desires, rapidly collapse: the LMB become indistinguishable from the Rikers who become indistinguishable from the True Sons who become indistinguishable from the Cleaners who become indistinguishable from the Outcasts, ad nauseam. The game’s mechanical thesis becomes quite clear, a kind of diluted reflection of a callous reality which by now would be something of a cliche if only we weren’t living in its shadow every moment: the fight for America is not a revolution but an arms race, and it will be won by those with access to the best tech.
The Division 2 even further exacerbates this process of symbolic disruption through its introduction of an ambient world event system paired with the Invasion mechanic, in which each week several locations are “invaded” by a new hostile faction introduced at the very end of the game known as the Black Tusk, changing the way those missions must be approached and effectively resetting the completion status of them on the player’s end. The climactic fight for the Capitol Building, taken over by a disillusioned band of extremist National Guardsmen who saw their government’s response as weak and inadequate and who hold as their vision of America a nation ruled by the strong with no room for the weak, marks for many players the true “beginning” of the game: the mission can only be started once the player reaches the highest achievable level — a feat which for most people will warrant at least a dozen hours of playtime at minimum — and only then does the true nature of the game — a small-arms race as RPG — reveal itself, unlocking a vast, complex system of “post-game” mechanics and storylines which serve to completely recontextualise the past several dozen hours of shooting and looting.
Even this final state has its own tiers of progression (referred to conveniently as “World Tiers”, which correspond to the player’s “Gear Score”, an aggregate abstraction of their overall lethality), in which, as the player becomes more powerful, they become exposed to even deeper layers of the game’s many conspiracies. Voices on your transceiver, on the radios littered throughout the city, are constantly talking about “taking back Washington”, “taking back New York”, “rebuilding our city”: but this is effectively impossible. Every victory is just a prelude to an even greater struggle; each enemy leader eliminated an opportunity for three more to arise.
No matter how many times you push back the True Sons from the Capitol Building, no matter how many times you empty out Manning National Zoo of the Outcasts and their central leadership, they will always return sooner than you think— and in greater force each time. You can take back every Control Point in the city, save every hostage you come across along the way, wipe out the leadership of every faction a thousand times, hell, you can even disavow the Division and go rogue as a built-in mechanic, become the exact thing the games have spent some fifty-plus hours warning you against — and it won’t mean a goddamn thing.
The games’ overarching story, with its littering of factions and conflicts, conspiracies and rogue entities, reflects a view of a world in which society and law were only ever just a mere scrim, beneath which lay concealed all manners of impulses both nihilistic and self-destructive, hell-bent on turning the world into a battlefield. At first glance, the plot seems to revolve around the atrocities of a rogue agent named Aaron Keener, who, after being abandoned by his government during the evacuation of Manhattan, disavows the Division and comes to the conclusion that human beings are irredeemable, and that the only way to build a better world is to first eliminate the existing one.
But what would he have been if not for the actions of Gordon Amherst, a lone ecoterrorist who engineers in his basement the strand of smallpox which he hopes will “reset” humanity to its natural state; which will, in a stroke of profound irony, decimate America’s capital structure through its very life and blood, the dollar bill; which will bring Manhattan to ruins, which will cause Directive 51 to be activated and Aaron Keener to be deployed into the epicentre of the infection and the helicopters to leave him behind, leave him for dead?
And what of all those who were already abandoned long before the virus hit, who in many ways become both liberated and victimised even further by it: the prisoners of Rikers Island, who are regularly exploited for de facto slave labour; or the sanitation workers, who watched and listened as their government failed them again and again in their time of need? What of the “Hyenas” — those who have no place in “the new normal”, “who build nothing, who create nothing”, who “prey on the weak”, who’ve “made our world bleed”? In-game, they’re presented as a generic faction of vicious looters and rioters whose power is derived from methamphetamine-like narcotics: but who were they before all this, and what caused them to become like this? Were they always this way? Were they just hiding amongst us all this time, waiting for the moment to strike?
Better yet — who are we? What is “our world” that we’ve built, this “new normal”? A world liberated from coffee in the morning, from free WiFi — where “for the first time in centuries, what we want is truly what we need”? And what is that which we “truly” want, or need? A camera pans over lush fields of hydroponic rooftop gardens full of fresh corn. Is this our new normal?
And somewhere in between us and the hyenas of our world, there is a third element: “a brave few” — and here, the iconic theme music kicks in, and the imagery of the Strategic Homeland Division (who up until this point have existed little more as a spectre in the minds of most people, just another fringe libertarian conspiracy theory not too different from the rest) shines through the darkness — who have “sworn to protect us and save what remains” (which is what, exactly?). “They unite us,” we are told — and it’s pretty clear by now that whoever “we” are supposed to be, it sure as hell isn’t the Division — “remind us that we are one people.” (Except for those who don’t belong, of course.) The music swells: “They are our shield and our light. But if that light goes out, who can save us then?”
This brilliantly-shot piece of what can only really be described as propaganda (for whom, it’s far less clear) is remarkable in many ways, but particularly in how clearly it identifies a certain social stratification whose layers pre-date any modern political or ideological models, and which have roots in a far more primitive model of the world: one in which the warrior exists by choice as separate from the rest of society, governed by his own logic and moral teleology; and yet is still held responsible for protecting the society, acting not only as its shield, but its light.
The conceit of the Division as an organisation, however, simultaneously affirms this and wholesale rejects it. The games make frequent reference to the very real and rather obscure National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (known also as “Executive Directive 51”), a presidential directive signed by the incumbent George W. Bush shortly before the end of his second term whose purpose was to “establish a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations” in the event of a “catastrophic emergency”. It is as a part of this initiative that the (as far as anyone is aware, fictional) Strategic Homeland Division is established. Its members are hand-picked from various backgrounds and areas of society with a focus on demonstrated loyalty and technical acumen, and after vigorous training in a variety of disciplines they are returned to their civilian backgrounds, where they are required to remain invisible until activated in the event of some kind of disaster in which all other public protection options become either unavailable or are exhausted. Once activated, however an agent of The Division outranks all other federal agents, and have complete operational autonomy that allows them to avoid red tape and legal procedures. (The World of Tom Clancy’s The Division)
It is essential to remember then that the Division exists not to ensure continuity-of-society, but continuity of Federal Government structures and operations. The game tends to conflate these two interests and portray them as overlapping; but if the history of our government’s actions, of which the recent responses (or lack thereof) to the pandemic serve as a particularly imminent example, are anything to go by, it can be said almost with certainty regardless of political affiliation that in reality, any overlap between these two interests is more or less circumstantial. Curiously enough, The Division itself actually addresses this exact discrepancy through what is shaping up to be its ultimate antagonist. The game strongly suggests that even if none of this had happened, even if there was no Amherst and the virus was never created, even if all these tensions and hairline fractures were not already in place for years, just waiting to erupt — there were already plans long in the works anyways: a deep state conspiracy even darker than the Division itself, a shadowy cabal of executives and warhawks for whom the outbreak was simply a convenient opportunity to finally assassinate the executive command and enact a plan that would allow them to seize control over the country and establish unilateral dominance. In-game, they’re portrayed, as they usually are, as sinister and cunning, hidden amongst the shadows of surveillance tapes and corrupted phone recordings. But in reality, we don’t have to look too far at all to see the machinations of those in power who would gleefully sacrifice us at a moment’s notice so that their schemes may go on.
The Division tries to temper its cynicism by frequently evoking familiar images of the near-past — images of people sitting in a Starbucks drinking cappuccinos; Christmas trees lighting up Rockefeller Centre; spotless American flags waving in the warm summer sky above a shaded boulevard; hell, even an entire level set in the National Museum of American History, in which the player fights through dioramas representing a century of cultural and moral victories — as a justification for the violence of the present. This is what we’re fighting for, so we’re told. This is the world worth saving. It’s all just an excuse though, a flimsy myth we tell ourselves to obscure a more inconvenient truth: that this was coming for us all along, and that we even knew it, and still let it happen. That there was never any chance things could have gone any other way.
“Apocalypse” is a Greek word whose original etymological connotations implied something closer to a revelation: that the end of the human world was just an unfortunate intended side effect of God’s kingdom being unveiled to mankind. In this sense, The Division is not so much about a society that’s collapsed and is recovering, as it is about one that is trapped in the process of perpetual collapse, for whom The Big One really just revealed to it the extent of its decay: far less of a post-apocalyptic tale than one of an apocalypse in motion, one with no end — and quite possibly one with no beginning either.
For Honor has always struck me as one of Ubisoft’s strangest works to date. It’s a game that draws extensively in both its design and marketing from a kind of nostalgia of sorts for pseudo-history, with all its knights and Vikings and samurai; and yet it is blatantly ahistorical at the same time, in a way that feels at first flippant but upon closer inspection seems startlingly cogent and intentional (for reasons beyond the obvious marketing-related ones).
When does For Honor take place? The immediate natural response is to situate it somewhere vaguely in the far past — the various designs of armours across all three factions span a vast time period stretching over a thousand years, between 300 and 1700, and the ruins of stone castles lie in the backdrop of many maps, their state of degradation suggesting they’ve been crumbling for centuries at the very least. But according to some theories, which have been confirmed obliquely by official writers, the game actually takes place in what we would consider to be the near-future, around 2100, in an alternate timeline in which the 12th-century world is devastated by a series of cataclysmic natural disasters which irreparably deform the natural continental geography and plunge the world into a millennium of vicious and constant global warfare — a war so long that eventually nobody remembers what they’re even fighting for anymore. Eventually this period of bloodshed dies down towards an unofficial conclusion, after which the various factions retreat and settle into an uneasy peace for several centuries, during which they begin to grow both culturally and militarily stagnant and their former might rapidly deteriorates.
The rather scant story of For Honor takes place some time well into this period of decay, and follows the emergence of a legendary warrior named Apollyon, who has become disgusted at the decadence and complacency of the world and believes that the only way to restore it to its former honour, to remind them all of who they once were, is to usher in a new age of war by turning them all against one another: an era of wolves.
Thomas Hobbes, the infamously cynical contractarian, famously argues in his 1642 De cive that, “The natural state of men, before they entered into society, was a mere war, and that not simply, but a war of all men against all men”: bellum omnium contra omnes. The implications of this for Hobbes, which he expounds upon later in his seminal work Leviathan, are relatively straightforward: that by nature, man is like a wolf to other men, inclined towards moral anarchy and ruthless savagery; and that the only way in which mankind as a whole can have any chance at something even remotely resembling peace is through the social contract of political community, in which personal rights are ceded for mutual protection.
Apollyon, however, knows better. She was born in the mire of a massacre; she has felt the mud and the sweat and the rain and the sinew, has tasted of the metallic reek of blood and the stench of rot, and she remembers what she is. Of course, Hobbes is correct in his initial observations: men are like wolves, vicious and greedy by nature. But what good is a government, a social contract? Governments rise and fall all the time, social contracts unravel at the pettiest disputes. What is peace, but a delaying of the inevitable? Peace, which atrophies the muscles, weakens the grip, slows down one’s reflexes. Peace, which inculcates through idleness the roots of complacency, which will one day bloom into desertion and disloyalty: a betrayal of the very things upon which it supposedly rests.
For all the elaborate attention that’s gone into creating rather lavish and historically authentic setpieces, it’s notable that the only locations which seem to populate For Honor’s world are actual fortresses, ruins of fortresses, and ad hoc fortresses. Unlike in Siege, where the locations are predominantly made up of sites that have erupted suddenly into violence, or The Division, where a once-bustling urban landscape has decayed over time into a dense sprawl of skirmishes and loose fortifications, For Honor’s world seems dominated by a philosophy of militarisation that informs the very architecture and layout of nearly space: shipyards come pre-fortified with stone ramparts, villages are dense with elevated walkways. (The only locations which seem to have been spared this treatment are religious structures such as cathedrals and temples, which have been repurposed in their own ways as barracks and warehouses.)
This makes sense, of course, in the context of For Honor’s millennium-long war: this is a world in which war is not only a normal state of affairs, it is quite possibly the only state of affairs. There is little evidence of civil life that remains untouched by martial order — a market here, a garden there — and by the time the player arrives, there are not even corpses of civilians: just hordes and hordes of soldiers. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that any kind of longterm, let alone permanent structure could have been established existing beyond an army’s supply chain. There’s evidence of commerce, but who could find the time to run trade routes when there is no economy to speak of beyond the engine which churns out blades and bodies? Who’s training the priests? Who’s birthing the children? In a world like this, what does peace mean? What would it look like? Who’s even left to be able to appreciate it as anything more than a temporary respite from yet another battle ahead?
Apollyon’s philosophy seems impossibly bleak to us, as inhabitants of a timeline in which the world’s wars have been mercifully short-lived (compared to hers, anyways); but even still, perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge her from where we stand. Because really — who can say for sure? Throughout history nearly every society has had the luxury of parallax, of being able to look back and remember some golden age, whether it was actually there or not, which rectified their spirits and turned them away from their crueler inclinations. But for someone who doesn’t have that — for someone who looks both into past and future, and sees nothing but bloodshed — if men are born as wolves and have lived as wolves for centuries, then what good does it do anyone, she asks, that they should suddenly try to become sheep? Unlike either wolves or sheep though, men — for better or worse — have been granted the ability to choose: to live as a wolf, or to die a sheep. It is for this very reason that a warrior truly fights, she reckons: not for any cause, not so that he may eat or that his home may remain safe; but because it is his fate to choose, and in his choice lies his honour. And what sane man would choose against his own nature?
There is the tendency, in both fiction and reality, to assume that the past was better than the present. This is the central conceit of a certain kind of view of history: the belief that at some point, things were already good enough, that we had already reached a “Golden Age”, but something must’ve gone wrong — the kings grew too complacent, the philosophers too petty, the warriors too idle, the labourers too greedy — and after that it’s just been one long downhill slide into the proverbial ash-heap.
The ultimate expression of this is the trope of the First Civilisation: a precursor society, perhaps one made up of a distinct race of protohumans, from whom all humans are descended, and of whom all later civilisations are just increasingly degraded imitations. Their ruins paint a picture of a people whose technology far exceeds the boundaries of all latter knowledge, whose heroes seem more heroic, whose achievements seem more monumental, who seemed to have lived free from all the terribly trivial trials and tribulations and travails and troubles which plague us in our daily lives. Hesiod’s Golden Age as described in the Works and Days — certainly not the first but probably the most well-known incarnation (at least in the West) next to Eden — was a time of primordial peace and prosperity, in which humans
lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.
What triggers mankind’s lapse into eventual degeneracy and cruelty for Hesiod, amongst many others, is the discovery of knowledge — but particularly, of choice. The fire that Prometheus steals and shares with man is not just a pleasant metaphor, but a powerful tool from which technology as a discipline emerges, allowing men to see in the night, to keep warm where it’s cold, to break down and reshape the earth into all manner of tools and utensils and weapons with which to conquer and divide the earth — to transcend the limitations of his flesh, which tethered him to the earth before like all the other animals.
In Eden, the choice is more metaphorical, but it persists in the form of shame, which descends almost immediately upon both Adam and Eve alike: over having hidden themselves from God, who sees through their deception right away; and over having to hide themselves and their bodies from one another, suddenly forced to make a choice between the lust in their flesh and the love in their hearts. From their shame emerges the nascence of industry, as the earth is made barren and the bushes become filled with thorns; man must now till the earth and break his back so that he may live, he must wander the earth until he finds for himself somewhere to call a home. Freed from the ignorance which binds all other living creatures, he faces now the ultimate unspoken consequence of his liberation: loneliness.
If For Honor paints a picture of a world in which open warfare has displaced society as the source of both social and individual meaning, Assassin’s Creed represents a kind of philosophical antithesis: a world in which society itself has become the staging grounds for an invisible ideological war pre-dating mankind’s very existence. The world of Assassin’s Creed is one in which every aspect of what would otherwise appear to be a “normal” civilisation has been covertly weaponised towards an eternal hidden struggle for philosophical supremacy: intellectuals are indistinguishable from assassins, artisans live double lives as tacticians and quartermasters. Pythagoras is not just Pythagoras, a talented but otherwise human mathematician, but the progenitor of an ancient bloodline possessing quasi-psychic powers that allow them to discern the transmundane. John F. Kennedy’s assassin uses a piece of esoteric precursor tech to create a holographic projection of a shooter on a grassy knoll in order to mask the direction of his shots. Even a reckless sadist such as Jack the Ripper is given esoteric significance as a cunning manipulator and terrorist savant. At the nucleus of all of these figures and their gadgets and their schemes though is a remarkably simple and timeless question: what do we do with ourselves now that the gods have left us behind?
In Genesis, at the end of the third chapter, God has discovered the duplicity of Adam and Eve and, after cursing them, has expelled them from the garden of Eden (but not before first crafting them some new clothes). From what we’re told, it doesn’t sound like he has too much confidence in them though, or at least their ability to stray too far on their own; for at the east of the garden he has placed the cherubim — the first, and one of very few times these strange and elusive beings are mentioned — and a flaming sword which turns every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. By the beginning of the fourth chapter, one line later, Adam has “known” Eve, and she has given birth to Cain. For how profound and long-lasting the implications of this sequence of events will be, at the end of the day, all things considered, it actually comes off as startlingly banal, especially compared to the apparent gravity of the trespass which has just been committed.
In Assassin’s Creed, this series of interactions goes a bit differently.
Adam and Eve in this universe are a pair of hybrid human-Isu: just two of many, many children of a technologically advanced race of protohumans known as the Isu, who have created humans in their image to function as a subservient and docile slave race. In order to exercise control over their workforce, the Isu have constructed a number of inexplicable technological devices known as Apples of Eden (Eden being one of several major cities, the others including Atlantis and Elysium), which manipulate certain neurotransmitters in the human brain. Because they are only half-human, Adam and Eve are less susceptible to this influence, and one day, they suddenly get the great idea — no serpents or rogue angels involved in this version— that humans should not need to live in slavery to the Isu. They steal one of the Apples and, in a daring escape sequence involving humanity’s first apparent recorded usage of parkour, they escape from the concept-art green city of Eden, triggering a decades-long civil war between humans and Isu which is ended by an unforeseen and inconvenient coronal mass ejection event that scorches the earth, inverts the magnetic poles, and wipes out nearly all life.
In either scenario though, Adam and Eve survive their respective cataclysms and find themselves suddenly alone in a new and unfamiliar world, with all the time in the world to contemplate their next steps, as well as reflect upon the consequences of their betrayals. The Adam and Eve of Genesis are left with a gnawing sense of despair and the growing pains of labour; the Adam and Eve of the Isu are left with… a sense of hollow victory, maybe, but more importantly, a largely unscathed Apple of Eden.
The true curse of Eden lies not in the moment of expulsion but in its memory. Aristotle writes that there are only two kinds of beings in this universe who can endure the loneliness of existence forever: the gods, and the beasts. Man, however, has relinquished claim to either: possessing neither the infinite patience of the gods nor the peaceful ignorance of the beasts. How many sleepless nights must Adam and Eve have spent just lying there in the darkness staring up at all those unfamiliar stars, thinking about how good they had it, cursing themselves for that moment of infidelity? How much easier things had been under God; how much harder it is now out on their own, trembling in the long dark.
The Pieces of Eden in this way serve as a literalisation of the existential anxiety of separation: a kind of extended, clumsy metaphor for the ways in which humans have grappled, probably since the beginning of time, with the irreparable loss of blissful ignorance — as a child of God, as a child of one’s parents — and in their grasps at maturity, have been condemned to a fate of floundering and flailing to restore order to a world emptied of apparent meaning. In this kind of struggle, the Pieces of Eden — just like any other technology — might as well just be paper cups to amplify one’s voice, the hidden blades and trick bombs little more than elaborate props in a lethal stage play. The real war will be waged in principles and maxims.
The titular and now-iconic Assassin’s Creed goes something like the following: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. The series has devoted a remarkable amount of time and energy, especially for a AAA franchise, exploring not only the possible philosophical meanings of this cryptic phrase — derived from a quote supposedly attributed to the real Hassan-i Sabbah, the leader of the Levantine hashshashin from which the series draws its origins — but the personal implications of it as well, and how its meaning changes to reflect the dispositions and backgrounds of those who struggle with it.
I’ve always found it rather curious that the first nine entries (up to Origins, in a now twelve-part series counting only the main titles) focused so predominantly on what some would consider to be “modern” history (an era starting around, depending on who you ask, the 16th century or so), especially when so much of the series’ commercial appeal revolves around its tremendous potential as a form of historical tourism (which usually tends to be more interested in classical settings such as ancient Rome or Greece). But when considered in relation to the game’s own central maxim, this focus on modernity begins to make sense in terms of exploring the ways in which the meaning of the individual has become displaced and reconceptualised over time.
The very first Assassin’s Creed, which is a kind of coming-of-age story set in the Third Crusade about the first of the legendary Master Assassins, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad, is situated during a time period in which the geopolitical boundaries between occidental and oriental cultures became increasingly blurred via cultural exchange, introducing in both directions a wide variety of novel technologies and ideas, including the flourishing of universities across Europe in the Muslim style. It was during this time that the Islamic Golden Age, to which Altair’s discoveries indubitably belong, saw the rapid rediscovery, revitalisation, and eventually advancement of the works of the Greeks by Islamic scholars, covering all manners of philosophy including science, technology, and cosmogony, that would eventually find their way to the courts and universities of Europe.
Consequently, Altair’s understanding of the Creed is centred heavily around abstract truths, mirroring the mystical inclinations of his era, and his religious background as a hashshashin. His philosophies focus on the metaphysics of the human experience, in which the battle is overcoming the veil of the world itself:
“What is the truth?’ he asked.
‘We place faith in ourselves,’ replied Altaïr (…) ‘We see the world as it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.’‘What is the world, then?’
‘An illusion,’ replied Altaïr. ‘One we can either submit to — as most do — or transcend.’‘And what is it to transcend?’
‘To recognize that laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our Creed does not command us to be free.’ And suddenly he really did understand. ‘It commands us to be wise.”(The Secret Crusade)
Altair’s revelation — closely aligned with the emerging mystical secularism of the late Crusades — paves the way for the birth of modernity, in which God is displaced as the authorial subject of metaphysical attention and the focus shifts more and more instead towards the individual human as teleological subject. The next several games follow an increasingly apparent lineage tracing the emergence of the unique anxieties and issues of modernity through their respective historical eras: the Italian Renaissance, the Age of Piracy, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. In each of these, the respective protagonists struggle to understand the relevance of the Creed in relation to the unique philosophical currents of their contemporary periods, as well as their personal lives.
Ezio Auditore, poster boy of the series and ever the statesman, forges his legacy as a verifiable apostle of the Creed, mirroring the explosion of cultural expansionism of the Renaissance along with its increased focus on situating the individual human as the centre of cosmic meaning and interpretation. His Creed is unmistakably suffused with the humanism and egalitarian vision of his time, focusing on a powerful and authoritative vision of individual responsibility and dignity:
To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.
Black Flag’s pirate-turned-Assassin, Edward Kenway, initially takes to the Creed as a shallow justification for his hedonistic and mercenary lifestyle: “For if nothing is true, then why believe anything? And if everything is permitted… why not chase every desire?” This meaning is fitting when one considers the ways in which the Golden Age of Piracy itself emerged both as an indirect response to the rapid overseas expansionism of the previous centuries, as well as a perversion of the aristocratic individualism of Ezio’s era, with many of the pirates having come from emancipated slave ships, or poorer urban areas in search of an escape from widespread impecunity, overcrowding, and sometimes just sheer boredom. (A similar, although more optimistic and socially-oriented version of this Creed is later adopted by the Frye twins who, like Kenway, view its message as fundamentally liberatory, an invocation to the individual to rise above the mechanised cruelty of the industrial age and its callous capitalist overlords, and to reclaim one’s purpose and sense of self against a system built to exploit the weak and theh vulnerable.)
For Ratonhnhake:ton, the son of an American native and a Templar Grand Master, the Creed takes on a much different, more subdued meaning, reflecting the ambivalent nature of the American Revolution as a war for a certain kind of independence, which simultaneously inflicted devastation upon the lives of the natives, many of whom — including Ratonhnhake:ton’s own mother — were caught in its crossfires. Eventually, it becomes as well a kind of acceptance of his father’s enduring influence in his life, and a compromise of sorts: that the Templars may have been correct after all about the intrinsic selfishness of human nature, but that they were misled in their pessimism, and that human beings can still be led the right way. (This also acts as a tacit reflection of the contractarian values of the new American nation, which Ratonhnhake:ton has directly assisted in birthing, and is the first of the Creeds to acknowledge the individual’s place in a larger social scheme.)
This grim acknowledgement is given a sense of tragic finality in the philosophy of Arno Dorian in Unity, from whom the French Revolution robs first his father, and then years later, his beloved. Having witnessed firsthand through the Revolution the collapse of idealism into fanaticism and the fatal, however unintended, consequences of extremism, he is the first of the Master Assassins to take full responsibility in record for the irreparable tragedies the Assassins and Templars alike have wrought in their dogged pursuit of the truth; coming to the conclusion that ultimately, the Creed is not in itself a guiding philosophy or even principle, but rather an admonition of sorts to not lose oneself to violence and to always remember the human costs of abstraction:
The Creed of the Assassin Brotherhood teaches us that nothing is forbidden to us. Once, I thought that meant we were free to do as we would. To pursue our ideals, no matter the cost. I understand now. Not a grant of permission. The Creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism. No higher power sits in judgement of us. No supreme being watches to punish us for our sins. In the end, only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions. Only we can decide whether the road we walk carries too high a toll. We believe ourselves redeemers, avengers, saviours. We make war on those who oppose us, and they in turn make war on us. We dream of leaving our stamp upon the world… even as we give our lives in a conflict that will be recorded in no history book. All that we do, all that we are, begins and ends with ourselves.
There is a war going on for your mind. At every moment, all around you, it’s right there, just beneath the surface. The shadows beneath the window conceal government-contracted ghosts-for-hire on their way to take out a high-ranking lieutenant for a gang whose name you’ve never heard of, which has made a multimillion-dollar business trafficking a new hardcore street drug whose formula you’ve heard was ripped by Chinese hackers from an experimental FDA programme investigating supersoldier serums for boosting aggression and suppressing pain in the heat of combat. The woman behind you in a pink Adidas hoodie and athletic pants sucking an iced Americano from a Starbucks cup has a retractable blade concealed within her sleeve whose hollowed shaft contains a deadly serum designed by an R&D weapons lab fronting as a household pharmaceutical company to rapidly circulate through the bloodstream and seize up the muscles around the heart inducing a lethal coronary spasm, instantly killing the target in case she somehow misses the placement of the first jab (she won’t). Out of the corner of her eye she’s watching the man sitting two tables down, who’s got one hand in his pocket and the other gripping a phone, on which he’s just begun running an app after breaking into the local ctOS control tower and scrambling the verification data which will temporarily short out the transformer powering the backup generator so that in exactly twenty-seven seconds, when the power for a six-block vicinity flickers once, twice, and then goes out, the team waiting in the lobby of a nondescript office low-rise across the street can enter without risking their faces getting ID’d and draw from their briefcases custom PDWs acquired from a Russian ultranationalist dealer in Croatia which have been fitted with integral suppressors and chambered to accommodate a special proprietary supersonic round designed to punch through the ballistic armour of the CTU team that, exactly six minutes and forty-three seconds after the first silent alarm is triggered, will swarm the building from the second floor and basement simultaneously deploying smoke grenades and specialised cluster flashbang charges but by that point, they’ll already be gone. The radio fizzes in and out, and there is a man speaking through it, telling you repeatedly, Listen up. There is a war going on for you mind, and on the television CERA’s tracking a new potential outbreak of an as-of-yet-unknown biochemical threat on the Mexican border which has manifested in the shape of an ominous dark cloud and which may or may not be highly lethal. The channel’s switched now and there’s Notre Dame up in flames, its spire disappearing into the thin evening air in a column of smoke and light, and they’re telling you it’s probably some kind of construction-related fire, possibly a short-circuit, it’s too early to tell, but what they’re not telling you is that it’s a cover-up, engineered by a lone saboteur who infiltrated the crypt beneath the plaza in search of an ancient artefact said to possess mind-bending properties, buried supposedly with the remains of a former grandmaster of a fraternal order whose name you don’t recognise, whose escape was facilitated by the intentional detonation of a flashbang device which triggered a minor incendiary reaction that happened to ignite some wood paneling and now it’s in flames, it’s all burning down, billions of dollars of possibly irreparable damage. And thousands of miles above you, watching all of this right now, all at once, the lone unblinking eye of a covert satellite peers down, unfazed, its electronic brain moving teraflops of numbers every second as it traces the movements of humans and ocean waves, cattle herds and unmarked flights across the open empty earth. There is a war going on for your mind. Don’t touch that dial now, we’re just getting started.
