18: “There and Back Again”: the Rebooted, High-tech Logic of Revivalism in Assassin’s Creed

Kevin Moberly, @kevin_moberly, Old Dominion University

I’d like to dedicate this paper to Alicia McKenzie @merovingianist, who passed away earlier this year. Alicia presented at this conference and one I hosted on medievalism and games way back when. I’m so sorry you can’t be with us, Alicia As with C.S. Lewis’s Wardrobe, Ubisoft’s 2017 Assassin’s Creed interpellates players as protagonists into the spectacular antagonisms that define its ludic space via the narrative expedient of a technology that is at once real and unreal, magical and mundane.

This is the “Animus,” a lounge-like bit of high-technology that “renders genetic memories in three dimensions,” producing a high-resolution, immersive simulation of the 12th century Holy land from Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad genetic memories. To borrow J.R.R. Tolkien’s phrase, the Animus takes players “there and back again” not only between the past and the present, but to what, in the game, counts as the pre- and postlapsarian: the period of time immediately preceding the crisis and that following its aftermath.

The Animus thus transports players from the outside to the inside—from a position of relative obscurity, anonymity, and ignorance to one of knowledge, expertise, and prestige. In doing so, it transforms them from a somewhat paunchy, milquetoast New York bartender to kick-ass medieval assassin (and back again).

As a means of delivering players to the moment before the fall—to the trauma that is imagined as connecting past and present in an unbroken continuum—the Animus enables and reifies what Michael Bright identifies as one of the central fantasies of medieval revivalism:

we should reassess the usual attitude toward the Gothic Revival, common from its beginning to its present, that it is essentially retrogressive…. One might claim, to the contrary, that many exponents of the Revival, believed as fully in the new idea of progress, especially of evolutionary progress, as those who accused them of being perverse and musty antiquarians; for although it is true that they went backward, they did so only that they might move architecture off its dead center and propel it forward once more. (35)

This is, of course, the fantasy that it is possible for the modern to not only master the past but harness it: to leverage its potentials to address the trauma of the present and thereby start over—to stage what, in popular parlance, has become known as reboot.

Yet unlike Lewis’s Wardrobe, the Animus immerses players in a hyperreal version of the past: a simulation that, “more real than the real” (Baudrillard 108) allows participants to access and relive specific moments of their ancestors’ lives as if reading data from a hard drive. As Frederic Jameson writes about high technology, the Animus appears as a “machine[] of reproduction rather than production” (37). It offers players a version of the present-as-past constructed in the image of what he characterizes as the “high-tech paranoia” genre: Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society 49

is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating, not so much in its own right, but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp—namely the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature, which one is tempted to characterize as ‘high tech paranoia’, in which the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hook-up are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. (37-38)

Working through the expedient of the Animus, Assassin’s Creed thus foregrounds (and inverts) an aspect of medievalism that is often left unsaid, if not deliberately effaced in more traditional works and in revivalism more generally.

It presents high technology not as an afterthought or (necessary) evil, but integral to one of the central concerns of revival: the fraught question of how to produce something like value or, better yet, progress in the present from the ruins of a lost or inaccessible past.

To borrow Jameson’s term, Assassin’s Creed constructs the high technology of the Animus as a kind of “ultimately determining instance in its own right.” Which is to say, as the product of a long and ostensibly evolutionary trajectory of historical and cultural development.

As both answer and origin for what Jameson’s describes as the “postmodern or technological sublime” (37), this trajectory originates in the doubled trauma of the Middle Ages and Middle East---at the moment during the third crusade when the aptly named “Apple of Eden” was lost to history---and culminates in the spectacle of the Western video gamer as privileged consumer of the past.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006.

Bright, Michael. Cities Built to Music: Aesthetic Theories of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Columbus, Ohio UP, 1984.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014.

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