In general, the game is beleaguered by a stuttering
framerate and twitchy polygons. Several times during the opening sequence, the
non-player characters (NPCs) that I was supposed to engage during a skirmish
were looking in the wrong direction, vigorously hacking at phantoms of their
imagination. Maybe, though, they perceived some other version of my character
in a parallel universe, some ghost in the machine that, in previous iterations
of the code (entangled as this final release is, apparently, in its alpha and
beta instantiations) was supposed to be standing at their 3 o’clock instead of
their 9.
Indeed, my own avatar—in this opening sequence, a
Templar rather than Assassin; perhaps that’s why the game got turned around on
itself, leaving, for the briefest sequence, its tried-and-true anti-Orientalist
discourse—also got turned around several times, the code dragging him
magnetically forward to the next checkpoint while his martial instincts tugged
his sinews in various other directions—namely, back to the battle and the
Templar’s foes. Sometimes these were phantom foes—there was no enemy to be
facing. “Calm down,” I wanted to tell him, wishing that the Kinect 2.0 could
deliver for once on the promise of a more human interface with the virtual
worlds inside the Xbox. As the avatar’s spastic twitching continued, the
tension between his agency, my own, and the linear plot of this sequence was
almost unbearable, and not unlike the struggle that ensues when one picks up a
cat in its less affectionate moods.
The character was in a maelstrom of forces pulling
him every which way but certain. An appropriate metaphor for the forces of
history at play in the series. Perhaps, an appropriate experience of the
asynchronies that abound when we connect to the past, become entangled in the
thick network of temporalities that make up, to borrow Carolyn Dinshaw’s term,
the “heterogeneous now” (37). There
is a degree of disconnect that occurs in such moments, though. As much as I
wanted to feel immersed in the game’s lushly textured medieval environs, the
glitches constantly broke the suspension of disbelief that would normally
anchor me in the fictional world. My avatar—and thus I—felt out of time and
place. “Desynchronization” is a feature of the game, occurring when your
character dies and thus reminding the player of the game’s frame narrative—you are
playing a person playing a person from the past. Desynchronization in Assassin’s Creed shouldn’t be this
chronic and pervasive, though.
Nonetheless, to risk what is perhaps an absurdly
generous reading, these glitches contribute to a differently immersive
experience. I’ve noticed before a problem with the game’s combat and violence:
the anonymity of enemy NPCs makes hacking and slashing them a routine and often
boring affair. Once the player is extricated from the very particular
assassination missions, and slung into the throngs of marauding soldiers who
patrol the cityscape and look to be put down, enemy identity and (fictional)
humanity is enormously diminished. This glitching, among other things, adds a
contingency to the whole experience—it reasserts a particularity to these NPCs. If
my immersion in the world was hampered, so too was my ability to objectify and
instrumentalize its fictional inhabitants: the will bumping up against the real.
The fictional inhabitants took on a life of their own, my entertainment
purposes be damned.
Note, for instance, the following clip from an early
sequence in the game, in which I unsuccessfully attempt to grapple a fleeing NPC in order to advance the plot:
This asynchrony of gameplay is complemented by
thematic asynchrony in the plot. How appropriate it is, for instance, for the
second sequence to depict young Arno (the game’s primary playable character) dropping a timepiece given him by his father, shattering it to pieces (see the clip below.) His father
had, earlier in the sequence, told him to look to the timepiece in expectation
of his return—a return his father would never make, as he is assassinated
whilst Arno kills time cavorting with the young Elise. The shattering of the
timepiece is a sign of Arno’s now being out of time, insofar as its meaning no
longer frames his world. He can no longer count time (the time until his father
will return, as he will not return) and so can no longer count on it as
guarantor of his experience. Thus the timing of button pressing by the player,
due to the glitchy nature of the game, likewise cannot guarantee contact with
the virtual world and other of its inhabitants. Observe the above clip, in
which I (I swear) press B to tackle a character at the scripted moment, but he
nonetheless slips past me. Asynchronies abound in this game, and they violate
our expectations of what a fictional world should do, and the frameworks
(linear time being one of them) under which we’d subjugate them.
The mechanics of gameplay are as inherently
transgressive as, and intimately bound-up with, its asynchronies. Long
acclaimed for its incorporation of parkour, Assassin’s Creed appropriates that transgressive art
form to the end of transgressing temporalities. I’m reminded of this every time
I vault across a medieval cathedral replete with rose windows, or sprint atop
the corps de logis of baroque buildings, only to—felicitously or infelicitously?—plummet
to my death and thus desynchronize my character, returning, for a brief moment,
to the frame narrative’s present. Heterogeneous time is certainly well
represented in AC: Unity. Awash in temporality and detail—the game
makes use of an engine allowing it to populate a 1:1 scale Paris with thousands
of unique NPCs simultaneously—AC:Unity can even be overwhelmingly
heterogeneous. The glitches stand testament to the code’s inability to neatly
contain all of this heterogeneity. Sometimes, as in the final clip below, the
game jumps into a fathomless abyss, where no certainty can ground the
experience, no knowledge can frame and shuffle this world into organized
clarity.
Assassin’s
Creed:Unity is far from perfect. Nonetheless, I’ve
fallen for it. Dinshaw writes that “love and knowledge are as inextricable as
the links in chainmail” (3) in order to get us to embrace the emotional
attachment inhering in any attempt to touch the past. But if love for
instrumental knowledge is your goal—if you want AC:Unity to do some very particular things for you—then you’re
going to be disappointed. Love and knowledge might be inextricable in one
sense, but love and instrumental knowledge are, I think, at loggerheads. AC:Unity, like an intractable other,
invites acknowledgment and the uncertainty of that form of relationship.
But who has time for that?
Sources cited:
Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012
