Carriage Night Riding in the City of London | Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Carriage Night Riding in the City of London | Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Reductive, superficial, beautiful - a historian's view of Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
It may be visually striking, but King’s College’s Alana Harris found Ubisoft’s game seriously lacking: ‘If we’re liberating poor children, what are we liberating them to?
Victorian London is something we think we know. The architecture and urban planning of the era remain visible in today’s 21st century metropolis, while TV programmes like Ripper Street, Jekyll and Hyde and the forthcoming festive treat, Dickensian, celebrate its culture, both high and low.
It was no surprise, therefore, when Ubisoft decided to set the latest instalment of its historical action adventure series Assassin’s Creed in the 19th century capital. Following the members of a secretive assassination sect from the 12th century to the modern day, the games have already taken in Renaissance Italy and Revolutionary France; the promise of the series is that you get to explore cities and cultures at key moments in time, investigating their iconic buildings as you carry out your missions.
But does the historical tourism of Syndicate actually give us any viable insight into 19th century London? To find out, the Guardian sat down to play the game with Alana Harris, a social and cultural historian of modern Britain at King’s College London and filmed the experience. This is what we discovered.
Politics
The Assassin’s Creed series often features historical figures who provide missions to the lead character, helping to anchor the game’s fictitious plot in an authentic setting. In Syndicate, Karl Marx provides a series of tasks relevant to his trade union activity during this period. It’s an inclusion that Harris finds immediately intriguing. “The interesting thing in concentrating on Marx is that you’re also getting a sense of the connections between London and the European continent and the cross-fertilisation of European ideas and political ideas,” she says.
Gladstone and Disraeli also appear, but Harris laments the missed opportunity to include lesser known characters of Victorian politics. The extension of enfranchisement is mentioned (the game takes place after the second reform act), but only in the context of working men. “Why no John Stuart Mill, and the proposal for the extension of the franchise to women?” asks Harris. “In some ways I would have thought he’d be a much more interesting character to focus on if you open out a gendered perspective on political discontent.”
In some ways, the game confirms common beliefs that the Victorian period was a time of class struggle, with gender issues arriving later in the early 20th century via the suffragettes. Syndicate missed a chance to explore some interesting and lesser known elements in women’s history, which might have been a great way of engaging with the period.
Child labour
Children run about the streets in Syndicate, often shoeless, searching through piles of rubbish. It is a familiar depiction of poverty in the 19th century city. The game seems to explore the Victorian cult of the innocent child - the Dickensian picture of innocent cherubs waiting to be saved.
However, Harris argues that the game’s jarring mechanic of allowing players to “liberate” a select few children working in a factory is an example of us imposing our own anachronistic views of Victorian London onto the past. “Child labour was an ongoing concern for the Victorians, and there were concerted efforts to address it, particularly as we start to move into the 1870’s and 80’s with the Education Acts,” she says. “But, of course, the ongoing issue was the need for child labour to actually supplement the family income, so if we’re liberating these children, what are we liberating them to? And what does this actually mean for their families and the family structures that were dependent on their wage?
“The socio-economic underpinning that was the reason behind child labour and the persistence of child labour, despite the efforts of various authorities to address this, is not acknowledged in the liberation strategy. The game has a very reductive understanding of what liberation for children might have meant in 1868.”
Prostitution and gender
Prostitutes are notably absent across the landscape of Syndicate’s London, despite the fact that prostitution was the cause of both moral and medical panic throughout society at the time. The issue also represents an interesting clash between modern culture and an engagement with women’s history.
“In the wake of Contagious Diseases Act, there was an opportunity to engage critically with the issue of the regulation of prostitution and a feminist debate around this too, which might have added a really interesting dimension to this,” says Harris. “Josephine Butler campaigned to protect female prostitutes and to acknowledge [prostitution] as a wider social and moral issue. Perhaps that is too much to expect of the game.”