Maxime Durand is a franchise historian for Assassin’s Creed at Ubisoft. He was also the third speaker for the Shannon Lectures, Performing History: Re-Staging the Past.
The concept for each lecture is how art conveys historical significance because, he said, “history can be used publicly for anyone, and that’s where my field comes in.”
“I help video game designers, programmers, and the teams at Ubisoft create video games that use history for fun,” he said.
Assassin’s Creed is just one example of the history-based genre of games, and is accessible by 17 gaming systems, including Xbox, Wii, PlayStation, and cell phones.
“My work, it is literally everywhere,” Durand said. “It can be in the script—I helped the team with what characters would be talking about, their accent, and how it looks.”
His research also influences graphics, music, and the behaviour of background characters.
The methodology of studying the time period relies on sources consisting of “public libraries, archives, digital too. With the Internet it is so easy for us to use university archives,” Durand explained.
Research also leads to interviews and lectures from specialists in various fields such as “for the French Revolution, we used professors from the University of Paris, both English- and French-speaking.”
Not everything is completely accurate, and exceptions in accuracy are made to fit into gameplay.
“Our goal is not to recreate documentaries or 100 per cent accuracies from the past, but we try to reproduce a credible system of the past, where players can interact with the past and have fun,” Durand said.
“History really affects everything . . . We need really high points on the map so players can go there and look around and know where he is,” Durand said about bending history. “So in Paris, the highest point that we know was destroyed for a couple years back in the revolution, so we cheated a little bit.”
He also said video games can function as a learning opportunity because “it is different in a book, not replacing books, but the motivation for a player to play the game, have fun, and experience history is very clear . . . It is a good way to attract people to learn more but it doesn’t replace one or the other.”
Even though “90 per cent of the historical details don’t get noticed by players . . . we have been challenged by historians,” Durand said. This relates back to the beginning concept that the goal is to produce a fun video game, not a historical documentary.
In response to the debate surrounding whether video games are an art medium or not, Durand said, “Of course it is art. Look at the talent that my colleagues have, just imagine a technical artist,” he said. “He does the way the sun rotates around the earth in a video game. He recreates that, and with programmers they do reflection of the sunlight on textures over objects, and mirrors, and glass. That is very technical and scientific in a way, but it is also art.”
