Do what thou wilt (in political science)

Everything is Permitted: On Assassin's Creed written by Cameron Kunzelman and published by the University of Minnesota Press is not the most academic book I've ever read, but it is one with a set of features that I think academia could benefit from emulating.

Now, I have to admit something from the jump here. I am 100 percent operating on recency bias.I just don't often read works like these. And so I do imagine there are many others I could have drawn the same kinds of conclusions from. But, in any case, the particular way that the book handles its different materials resonated with me because I can so clearly see how it relates to my own projects. I thought it was worth unpacking that a bit more.

There is the scale of the endeavour, of course. Assassin's Creed is a massive video game franchise, and Kunzelman played through most of them, if not all of them (some of them multiple times at that). That in itself is a feat. But what is far more impressive is how Kunzelman darts back and forth within the space of a few paragraphs between this franchise, its distinct trilogies, and its individual game. The breadth of approaches---pseudoarchaeology, belief in aliens, conspiracy theories, historiography, the Templars, games criticism, and just general game design---should have made this book as voluminous as its subject matter.

That all said, it's hard to imagine I can get someone who neither cares about Assassin's Creed or about the podcasts that the author hosts to read the book. And that's a serious problem: The book's chapters and sections that deal with conspiracy theory alone should be mandatory reading for anyone working on the topic in political and social science. The franchise revels in its conspiracy plot of a shadowy clique of Templars fighting an order of assassins hell-bent on undermining their control over humanity. Kunzelman notes that this is difficult to detach from the appeal of conspiracy theories within modern day politics.

Playing the Assassin’s Creed games is not like being involved in QAnon, and I don’t want to be mistaken as arguing for this. What I am claiming is that the thing that makes conspiracy a fertile ground for game narrative and design is also what makes it so compelling in our real-world relations. It is what makes the gimmick of conspiracy do the work that it does to grab us and get us to invest in the games’ interrelations across the series. The thrill of connection is the center around which some Assassin’s Creed games entirely revolve.

The narrative forces that AC mobilizes towards these ends are more concrete than we might be comfortable in thinking (like asking if games cause violence it's a bit gauche to speculate too much on game-to-real-life linkages). Near the end Kunzelman explains the strange algorithmic consequences of researching the franchise.

My computer’s cookies and the predictive forces of internet infrastructure have decided that I am a true conspiracy theorist. My social media recommendations are plagued with pseudoarchaeology and borderline hate speech, secret society garbage. I am not flooded with information about interesting historical battles, video games, or even the real-world groups I have researched. The ideas of the Assassin’s Creed games have been read by the software that directs the flows of the internet and has decided that I am a prime subject for being indoctrinated into absolute falsehoods about the past and “those people” who control the world from behind the scenes.

In fact, I will be experimenting with assigning these as readings for my upcoming class on media and politics. This might be particularly fruitful for reasons that the book could not possibly have addressed. When Assassin's Creed: Shadows came out---the first game to be set in Japan---right-wing influencers promoted conspiracy theories regarding the inclusion of the character Yasuke, an African slave freed and made a samurai by Oda Nobunaga.

Yasuke was a real historical figure and has been celebrated within Japanese culture well before the advent of Black Lives Matters. But a strange set of circumstances led to this particular depiction being taken as a psi-op. And all this prior to the game's actual release.

I won't say much more about this at this point since I am still considering how to continue to research this, but this is a clear example of the franchise's approach to history and conspiracism having an actual political effect in the world. The game was even mentioned in the National Diet, although for a slightly different reason concerning gameplay mechanics that were seen as potentially condoning damaging shrines and temples.

But I was also considering this book for another reason. It has a fairly difficult to grasp argument. Its puzzle is straightforward enough: How does such a massive franchise of interconnecting media properties establish coherence among its disparate parts? The way it answers this question is less so. That is not to say that it is not argued well ---I think it is argued pretty expertly. Rather, it elaborates an argument that requires you buy into the formalism of the book itself. After all, the book mirrors the paradox of the franchise. There's a coherence, but there is no pithy one-liner you can trot out that really encompasses the entirety of the argument.

And that's clearly not a problem for media studies. The humanities allow for elaboration a bit more freely than political science does. And this is not a matter of standards as much as it is a judgment about the value and shape of an argument. Arguments are the currency of academia, but what counts as an argument often depends on what the field already considers to be an important puzzle worth answering. It's not self-evident what kind of valuable insights may lurk in a franchise like Assassin's Creed; they won't come to you until you do the work often uncovering them.

Political science arguments usually work best if they're parsimonious. That is to say, they keep it short and simple, they explain a lot, and they explain across different contexts (cultures and countries). A book like Everything is Permitted proposes a different sort of value. If I did not actually give a good sense of what that value is it is because I don't have too much time to dwell on this right now. I suggest reading it yourself. It's an entertaining read even if you are not interested in the franchise or in games studies for that matter.

This might end up being a surprisingly large influence on my book project. Of course, political science is still a field with pretty strict conventions and expectations that I have to address. But my work, too, faces a incommensurability problem. The different chapters are spread across different spaces (parties) and different ways of formulating (and answering) questions about the politics of emotion. These chapters come together, but they do not easily lend themselves to a parsimonious synthesis.

But the main point I have to make here is simply that I would be happy to write anything half as entertaining and accessible as this book.