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In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
What's even the point of this? It's all so tired. Ubisoft games are practically a parody of themselves at this point, and have been for years. They are the defining example of monogame slop. Soulless open world games with the same generic tedious grab bag of decade old game mechanics, with a sprawling cluttered minimap full of OCD bait. This one has a giant red flag that a DEI consultancy group ratcheted up the The Narrative a few notches? So what? The games before this weren't worth playing, the games after this won't be worth playing. It's just the same battle lines between people who are tired of demoralization propaganda, regardless of it's plausible alternate explanations, and people who are 100% aboard with current year NPC updates. No one will ever give an inch of ground.
If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.
I agree that they should just play better games, though.
You know, this does hit on a curious experience I had.
I was going through my big stack of George Carlin DVDs, and I got to one which opened on about 10 minutes of unadulterated white bashing. Now I recall, way back in the day, when I first watched this special, that never bothered me. But that was also performed in an era before State and Federal governments were nakedly discriminating against me. Or the schools I would send my children to began gutting the curriculum to cater to lower black achievement levels. Or preposterous notions of "restorative justice" allowed feral blacks to terrorize schools with impunity. Or before decent, productive, law abiding people were punished to the maximum extent of the law for refusing to allow themselves to be victimized by habitual criminals with a politically relevant melanin content.
It reminds me how I laughed at similar bits by Louis CK about how whites have had it so good, we've gonna get fucked so hard when the tables turn. It was funnier as a hypothetical, in the context of lots of other challenging and awful bits. Now it just makes me angry beyond reason to watch it happening in earnest.
Did I care about AC2's pope shiving when it came out? Nope. But it also came out in a very different cultural climate. Things that were hypothetical back then are actually happening now. I also never cared when the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman involved an airplane crashing into the twin towers, and it was all framed as marginally goofy hijinks. But things happened between now and then which significantly changed the cultural context in which an episode like that, made today, would be received. This is not hypocrisy or evidence of any sort of inconsistency.
Edit: I want to note, I know "feral blacks" might be an inflammatory phrase, but I am honestly at a loss as to what else to use. There is a massive cohort of aggressively and confidently antisocial and violent blacks in our schools, enabled by feckless "restorative justice" policies. They are a force of destruction, disruption and violence, unaccountable to all, and utterly untamable, as though a pack of feral animals had been loosed in schools. Some protected species nobody was allowed to do anything about.
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