But long before I started studying this or reading through history books, I watched my dad walk through history using a controller... And that is what I will be exploring in this essay.
The Assassin's Creed franchise stands out most for this point. The first game came out when I was 6, and I have been hooked ever since. It also stands out because it is not perfectly accurate, but because it places us inside detailed recreations of past eras, from Renaissance Florence to ancient Egypt. These digital worlds let us climb cathedrals, explore city grids, wander the marketplaces and absorb the culture of the time in ways that feel almost educational.
Though these games are works of historical fiction, that fiction is built on extensive research and thoughtful reconstruction. Players often come away with a deeper sense of how cities felt, looked and what daily life may have felt like, even though the events and characters are fictionalised.
This essay explores how Assassin's Creed functions as a form of experiential history, and why that matters for how we engage with the past today.
One of the most striking aspects of the Assassin's Creed series is not its narrative, but its environments. Each title reconstructs a historical setting with emphasis on scale, texture, and atmosphere, which invite players to not only witness history, but to inhabit it.
These worlds are not random fantasy. Ubisoft developers have spoken openly about collaborating with historians, consulting architectural records, visiting real-world sites, and studying archaeological research to inform their design choices. Landmarks are often placed according to historical maps; political contexts reflect real tensions; languages and clothing draw from documented sources.
In Assassin's Creed II, Renaissance Florence and Venice are recreated with navigable cathedrals, marketplaces, and skyline silhouettes that reflect real architectural references. In Assassin's Creed Origins, Ptolemaic Egypt feels vast and sun-bleached, with deserts that stretch beyond the Nile and cities dense with layered cultural influence. And in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Classical Greece unfolds as a world of marble temples, island harbours, and war-torn landscapes shaped by the Peloponnesian conflict.
These efforts demonstrate that the designs of the game are not random. They are informed by scholarship, research and personal experience of the spaces. They are not just for show, but to make the feeling of being in that era convincing.
There is something that feels powerful about the level of scale they provide. When you climb a cathedral tower and look down at the densely packed city grid, you begin to understand, spatially, how proximity may have shaped daily life in those times. When you traverse down a narrow street, move in the marketplace or sail between islands, you experience the geography as constraint and possibility.
This is what makes the series feel educational, without announcing itself as such. The learning is embedded within movement. Architecture becomes navigable. Urban design becomes experiential. Political history becomes environmental.
In that sense, the city itself becomes a silent teacher. Unlike a textbook, the games restore dimension to the context. You can grasp how big those monuments were, how crowded streets might have felt and how landscape influenced trade, war or pilgrimage.
It is important to keep in mind what the games are and what they aren't.
They are historically inspired. Real periods, real places, and real figures sometimes appear. But they are not strictly accurate historical texts. They take narrative and gameplay liberties, dramatise timelines and insert fictional conflict for entertainment value.
If we are to use the correct terminology, this makes the games authentic rather than accurate. They capture the spirit and texture of history without claiming factual precision.
Ronald Deibert, a historian writing about historical games, notes that these worlds work when they give players a believable cultural and material context, even if dates and personalities are adapted or invented.
For example, Ancient Greek cities in AC Odyssey reflect the archaeological and historical research, but embellish aesthetics to meet player expectations. And Ancient Egypt in AC Origins shows careful reconstruction of monuments, thanks to expert consultation, but narrative events still involve invented characters and plotlines.
In other words, Assassin's Creed is best understood as a simulation grounded in research and not definitive history.
One moment that helped capture the cultural significance of these digital reconstructions occurred in 2019, when the real Notre-Dame de Paris was severely damaged by fire. Almost immediately, articles began circulating suggesting that the detailed model of Notre-Dame created for AC Unity might assist in restoration efforts. The game’s version of the cathedral had been built using extensive visual research and reference materials, and many players remembered being able to climb its towers and trace its architecture with surprising precision.
In reality, conservation teams relied primarily on professional laser scans and architectural documentation taken before the fire. The game model was not a technical blueprint. Yet the story spread for a reason. For many, their most intimate encounter with the cathedral was the digital version. When the real structure burned, the loss felt personal, even to those who had never visited France.
The difference between reading about a place and the option to move through the spaces is not just aesthetic; it is cognitive.
Traditional historical study often relies on abstraction. We encounter dates, political shifts, architectural descriptions and summaries. Even when these aspects are illustrated, the past is flattened into an image and explanation. It becomes something that we simply look at and observe.
Interactive environments change that perspective.
When we navigate a reconstructed city, choosing where to walk, what to climb, and which direction to turn, we engage in spatial reasoning, decision-making and sensory interpretation. We stop simply processing information and begin simulating presence. It allows us to see scale as intuitive rather than theoretical. Distance is felt. Geography becomes a constraint.
The act of choosing where to go, of having agency within the space, creates a subtle sense of ownership over the experience. There is also an emotional dimension. Immersion fosters atmosphere: light, sound, crowd density, and environmental detail. While these elements are stylised, they create a felt sense of historical life.
Many players have reported that after playing a historical game, they feel motivated to look up real history, especially when the setting invokes a strong sense of place. This mirrors how interactive museum exhibits often stimulate learning more effectively than descriptive plaques.
This sensation, that the past has a 'presence', is a form of embodied learning. In this manner, immersive games do not replace historical study, but they can often initiate it. They transform history from distant record to traversable space. And when something becomes navigable, it becomes harder to dismiss as abstract.
Perhaps the most compelling value of the Assassin's Creed franchise is not whether it achieves perfect historical accuracy, but that it reshapes how we encounter the past.
It does not replace scholarship, nor should it. It does not resolve debates, and it doesn't fill archival gaps. But it does change the relationship between distance and familiarity.
History, in academic form, often demands patience and extended periods of study. It asks us to sit with fragments of information, to tolerate uncertainty and to accept that much has been lost to time. That creates discipline and can protect the past from romanticisation.
Yet immersion introduces something that I think is far more important: orientation.
When you travel and explore a reconstructed city, the scale and environment become intuitive. Moving through those streets, architecture stops being decorative and starts becoming structural. When you stop in a marketplace or at the edge of a harbour, the tone shifts from abstract narrative to a lived environment.
What lingers, especially for me, is rarely the fictional plot but instead the memory of the space I explored. The skylines at sunset, the heights of the towers, the density of the crowds, the distance between landmarks and the swoop we get when we jump into those large haystacks.
Those impressions, especially within Assassin's Creed, are stylised, but they certainly anchor curiosity. They made the past feel less distant, less sealed off or inaccessible. And sometimes that feeling is enough to prompt deeper inquiry within people or players, to read further, to question more and to return to the archive with renewed interest.
In that sense, immersive historical games function less as substitutes for learning and more as a threshold. They lower the barrier to entry, they transform the intimidation of a horde of information into accessibility, and they make engagement possible before expertise.
For someone already drawn to history, to systems, to cities, to the physicality of power, this matters a lot. It suggests that the past does not only live in books or institutions. It can be encountered, explored and navigated, even if imperfectly.
That is where I feel the potential strength of experiential history: it can remind us that the past was once lived in three dimensions. Not as footnotes, nor timelines, but as streets, walls, movement and light. To know history is valuable, to feel oriented within it is powerful. The two together create something far more durable than either alone.
References and Sources - Wikipedia | Deibert, R. (2014). The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games. American Historical Association. | Ubisoft (n.d.). Discover the real history behind every Assassin’s Creed. | IFPH. Does Historical Accuracy in Games Really Matter?
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