Remember back when you could play a game just to…. play a game?
There was a time when you could turn on your console of choice and simply play through an enthralling story. It was a way of virtually living an impassioned story from an equally impassioned writer and you, as the one holding the controller, got to walk through every moment of that story. Some of these games would tell stories of fiction, some of truth, some of learning, and all for the sake of bringing to life something that had never been seen in this medium before.
Now these stories lie to you.
Now, granted, not all of them lie to you. However, the lines are starting to blur. Do you remember the first game you played that told a moving story? I think of the Playstation 2 era when I first played Kingdom Hearts 2. For young Byrdman that was a wonderful and moving, albeit confusing, story that sticks with me to this day. It was a nonsensical work of fiction that told the story of “letting the light shine through you amid darkness.” This story was told from the perspective of a young boy who lives on an island with his friends who somehow gets sucked through a multitude of worlds throughout the universe and he attempts to save these worlds from ‘darkness’, all while being assisted in the effort by Disney characters. See, nonsense.
How about the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Last of Us? More fiction that told beautiful and emotional stories that were written as unforgettable passion projects. You may not admit it publicly, but I know you teared up when Arthur’s horse took its last breaths and when Ellie reached out to that giraffe. Even Zelda, the silent protagonist, made his way through a fictional story set in a beautiful world that had real depth and life to it.
What about from an educational and historical standpoint? Assassins Creed: Origins brought to life ancient Egypt in a way no one in history, other than those who lived it, had ever seen it. Not even a museum can bring you into an accurate one-to-one replication of Ancient Egypt and take you through hundreds of years of history that we never lived to see. But Assassins Creed: Origins did. It even had something called “Discovery Mode” that would take the player through 1st and 3rd person viewpoints of the life and and history of Ancient Egypt and walk you through the timeline of Egypt from start to finish. It was even marketed as an educational tool, and guess what? It was.
These are the things that hooked us and kept us as “gamers”; the jaded and borderline derogatory slang of someone who spent their free time playing games and made it more than just a hobby. These are the things that proved to us that what we were doing was not just merely a waste of time but rather something we could gloat with because while people were reading books on fantastical stories, we were living them out and affecting them in real-time. A tainted stripe of “gamer” from people out of touch with a world that only we understood who never connected the dots that this was more than sitting in front of a screen playing “shoot ‘em ups” but something that could turn into careers and meaningful lifestyles.
Here is where my problem lies: all those people who said to kids growing up that “those video games will do nothing more than rot your brains” are turning out to be right, just like the generation before them said about movies. What were once beautiful stories or appropriate escapes are turning into lies, brain rot, and the whitewashing of history. Storytelling in movies started a shift over a decade ago that the casual moviegoer and fanatics alike all noticed and said, “Movies nowadays are just not what they used to be.”
The times we look back upon with rose-tinted glasses in the world of movies were the precursor to what we as gamers are now seeing.
This leads me to the crux of this rambling: Assassins Creed: Shadows, based in feudal Japan. The newest travesty by the infamous publisher Ubisoft.
Thomas Lockley, a co-author of African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan, came into the spotlight long before Shadows was ever conceived due to other forms of media attempting to tell a story of who Yasuke is. Even Lockley, a scholar of this time period and Yasuke himself readily admits that he does not know who Yasuke truly was and that very little is known about him. The closest thing to knowing how much of a warrior Yasuke was, is that scholars believe the feudal lord who purchased Yasuke gave him a sword and armor with no record of him ever fighting a battle individually or for the lord who purchased him. There are many claims that he was freed and integrated into life amongst the people of his lordship's fiefdom. However, the only thing of substance that even comes close to substantiating this is ancient paintings that include a man with darker skin than those around him sitting with a group of Japanese people.
So where does this tie into Assassin’s Creed: Shadows? Well, from what is currently released of this game, it centers around the aforementioned Yasuke who Ubisoft is claiming to be the “first black samurai”. This story’s lead writer is Alissa Ralph who paints the same stereotypical picture of the infection of liberalism in media that we have all come to know and love. She has even gone so far in the whitewashed recreation of this man’s life to give the player the choice of making Yasuke a proud member of the LGBT community. Remember boys and girls, history can’t be history unless you have pronouns in your bio…
Here’s my point in all of this: believe what you want to believe but stop rewriting history. Believe what you want to believe but stop cramming it down my throat and attempting to force me to believe it too. If you want to present an idea, then simply present it but please for the love of all that’s holy, stop pretending that you can create your own “truth”. Facts are not facts just because you believe them, they are facts because they are substantiated truth.
If you want to tell a story, then tell the story, but don’t look me in the face and pretend that the story you are telling was once historical truth.
Just let me have my games back, man.
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