Playing at Knowing Ancient Egypt. The Tourist Gaze in Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Abstract

Assassin’s Creed is a single-player, action-adventure stealth video game franchise by Canadian developer Ubisoft. The game series lets its player delve into history from Renaissance-era Florence to Victorian London. In this article, we perform a close reading of the ‘discovery tour mode’ function in Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2018), a game taking place in ancient Egypt. Our goal is to understand the purpose of placemaking as a technology for virtual and identity tourism. We argue that due to its quasi-touristic staging of an ancient civilisation, the discovery tour mode is a particularly potent feature in exploring how games render history palatable for an implied white Western game audience.