Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles

The Templars Won, and Their Headquarters Is Everywhere: Notes on Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles

There is a temptation, when one is confronted with a cultural object like Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles—the 2008 handheld prequel that shuffled apologetically alongside its console-sized parent—to dismiss it as a corporate exercise in brand extension, an inert tie-in unworthy of serious thought. This dismissal is, of course, entirely correct, and for precisely that reason it tells us nothing. The properly critical move is to take the object at its most degraded and ask: what does a franchise reveal when its production values are stripped away, when the visual seduction collapses, when we are left with nothing but the ideological skeleton?

Here we encounter what we might call the decaffeinated Assassin's Creed: the experience of the franchise without its experiential weight, the form of stealth-and-parkour shorn of the texture that made it feel transgressive in the first place. Just as we drink decaf coffee (coffee without its dangerous supplement, caffeine), practice safe sex (sex with its threatening kernel of the Real prophylactically sealed off), and consume alcohol-free beer (alcohol without alcohol), so too does Altaïr's Chronicles offer us Assassin's Creed without Assassin's Creed—the Crusades reduced to corridors, the Hashashin reduced to a polygonal homunculus ricocheting between rooftops on a Nintendo DS. And yet—this is where the dialectical twist begins—it is precisely this reduction that renders the ideological machinery legible. The handheld port is the X-ray of the franchise.

Consider the Creed itself, the famous slogan the series treats as its theological mystery: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Marketed as a postmodern transgression—the refusal of authority, the embrace of radical freedom—it functions in practice as the most rigid ideological injunction imaginable. The assassin is told: you are free, no master binds you, no truth constrains you. Now: kill these specific targets. Climb these specific towers. Obey this specific Mentor. The supposedly liberatory mantra of nihilistic freedom is the precise alibi by which the Order produces obedient soldiers. This is the structure of contemporary ideology in its purest form: the more we are told we are unconstrained, the more thoroughly we are interpellated into a hierarchy we are forbidden from naming. "Nothing is true" really means: do not ask too many questions about who issues your orders.

And what does Altaïr seek, across the dusty levels of this miniature crusade? A Chalice. Not the Holy Grail—that would be too suggestive—but a Chalice, an unspecified vessel whose contents are deferred, whose meaning is structural rather than substantive. It is objet petit a in its most undisguised form: the lost object that organizes desire precisely by remaining empty. The plot does not really care what the Chalice does; the plot requires only that someone must have it, that both factions must crave it, that its possession would tip some cosmic balance no one will define.

And then comes the twist, which I would not spoil were it not so philosophically obscene: the Chalice is not a vessel at all. The Chalice is a woman. Her name is Adha, and the two rival fraternities of armed men have been pursuing her across the Levant under the cover of cosmic-artifact discourse for the entire campaign. This is so on-the-nose Lacanian that it borders on self-parody. The empty signifier is at last filled, and what fills it is the oldest content imaginable: a woman circulating as object of exchange between male orders, with the metaphysical wrapper functioning as alibi for what is, in the last instance, a perfectly banal patriarchal economy. Here is the formula of courtly love rendered literal—the Lady as inaccessible Thing, the cosmic quest as cover story for the traffic in feminine flesh, the secret of the Holy Vessel turning out to be the same secret it has always been since Helen of Troy. The handheld game does not merely strip away the theological wrapping; it accidentally confesses what was inside the wrapping all along, which is to say, what is always inside such wrappings. In this sense, Altaïr's Chronicles is more honest than its sumptuously rendered siblings: it dispenses with the theological wrapping and presents the ideological structure naked—and the structure, when finally naked, turns out to be a woman.

This makes the Assassin/Templar opposition, which the franchise will spend the next two decades and approximately forty installments insisting represents the fundamental ethical division of human history—freedom versus control, chaos versus order, the people versus the elites—even more transparently a sham. Altaïr's Chronicles, in its abbreviated and undisguised form, makes the joke visible. Both sides covet the same woman-artifact. Both sides deploy violent secret operatives. Both sides organize themselves into pyramidal hierarchies in which charismatic leaders dispense gnomic wisdom to faceless underlings. The "opposition" is the structure that holds them together as twin functions of a single apparatus—rather like the spectacle of contemporary liberal-versus-conservative, in which the two camps grow indistinguishable in their organizational logic even as they perform their cosmic enmity for the cameras. The dialectical truth is not that one side is correct; it is that the appearance of opposition is itself the ideology, the screen behind which their structural identity is allowed to operate undisturbed.

Now consider what is being asked of the player. You are not Altaïr—you are someone holding a DS or a flip phone on a bus, tapping buttons between station announcements. Altaïr does the actual work of killing, climbing, suffering, pining. He kills for you. He bears the moral weight for you. He even enjoys, in some attenuated sense, the violent transgressions and romantic losses you cannot perform yourself. This is the deep structure of interpassivity: the cultural object that does our experiencing on our behalf and thereby frees us from the burden of actually feeling anything. The canned laughter on the sitcom laughs for us, the professional mourners weep for us, the porn actors enjoy for us, and Altaïr assassinates—and loves, and grieves—for us. We are not even violent voyeurs anymore; we have outsourced the voyeurism itself to the protagonist, who watches the world through our eyes only to do, on our behalf, what we no longer need to feel ourselves doing. The handheld format only intensifies the structure: medieval grandmasters murdered during the morning commute, between bites of a sandwich.

What is finally most revealing about Altaïr's Chronicles is how it embodies the franchise logic of late capitalism itself: every property must metastasize across every platform, every brand must occupy every commercial niche, every gap in the consumer's day must be filled with the appropriate corporate content. A console game generates a handheld game generates a mobile game generates a film generates a comic generates an animated series, and so on, ad infinitum. The Templar conspiracy that Altaïr resists is, in this regard, a perfect mirror of the corporation that produced him: a hidden order operating across all territories, seeking total saturation of the social field, masking its hegemony beneath a rhetoric of choice. The deepest and most unintentional joke of the Assassin's Creed franchise is that the Templars won—and the question of where, exactly, they are headquartered is itself the perfect demonstration of the Order's dispersed sovereignty. The franchise's Mentor-studio sits in Montréal, but its corporate parent answers to Montreuil, while this particular handheld iteration was farmed out to a Bucharest outpost of a Paris-based outfit called Gameloft. The Order, properly speaking, is not located anywhere; it is distributed across a transnational mesh in which each studio performs a partial function for a totality that resists localization. They release on schedule.

And yet—we must resist the easy cynicism that would close the matter here. The fact that millions of players accepted this watered-down version of a watered-down myth and found in it some genuine satisfaction is not simply false consciousness to be denounced. It points to a real and unmet hunger: for narrative, for kinetic competence, for the fantasy of moving through the world with secret purpose, for a beloved whose loss might confer meaning. The ideological packaging is precisely what permits these hungers to remain unconfronted, half-fed and half-betrayed. We "know very well" that Altaïr's Chronicles is corporate filler, "and yet" we play it—and this fetishistic disavowal is not a failure of critical intelligence but the very mode in which contemporary subjects function. The interesting question is therefore not whether the game is bad (anyone can answer that) but what authentic desire is being half-satisfied in its consumption. To which the only honest answer is: probably the same desire that drove people to the original Crusades, repackaged now for the touchscreen, requiring of us neither faith nor blood nor even, in the end, a beloved—only the patience to wait out the loading screen.