From Cardboard Settings to Ludo-anthropological Experiences: The Failures and Successes of Victorian London’s Adaptations in Video Games

Abstract

Historical games deserve to be examined not only by video games academics but by cultural studies academics. The environments in which historical games are set, and how their gameplay and game design allow the players to explore them, give new opportunities to the public to learn about history. Furthermore, the excitement and interest players have for locales has reached the point where a “tourism/educational mode” has been added in the Assassin’s Creed games series, allowing them to freely explore ancient Egypt (Assassin’s Creed Origins) and Greece (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey). This mode features information about historical monuments recorded by academics, which allows players to learn about the environment. Interestingly enough, industrial Britain and especially Victorian Britain have often been chosen as a setting for numerous games. This paper compares the representations of Victorian Britain in two games. The first is Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, a game in which one plays an assassin in a realistic representation of Victorian Britain; the second is The Order 1886, a game set in a fictitious alternative world in 1886 in which one plays Knights of the Round Table fighting against gothic-themed creatures such as werewolves and vampires in a steampunk setting. Examining historical representations in fiction is interesting, but video games bring a new component to the experience compared to other media, as they let players create their own experience and narrative interactively. Gaming can thus be considered a worthwhile cultural practice because it succeeds in giving history subjective, sensory and experimental dimensions that other media lack. It enables the player to play in history as much as playing with it, sometimes giving the player an anthropological stance. In this respect, Assassin’s Creed stands as a successful adaptation of the Victorian context because it manages to integrate its historical setting into its gameplay mechanics, while The Order 1886 only uses it as a cardboard setting with limited interest to the game itself. This article attempts to create a system by comparing the two games, presenting new means of analysis of the use of history in video games.