Assassin's Creed II
The Animus as Ideology: Assassin's Creed II and the Pleasures of Passive Revolution
There is a particular kind of cultural product that flatters its consumer by letting him rehearse the gestures of liberation while leaving the architecture of domination perfectly intact. Assassin's Creed II, Ubisoft's 2009 prestige title and the franchise's true commercial breakthrough, is the consummate example of this trick. You spend forty hours stabbing cardinals, bankers, and conspirators in a meticulously rendered Quattrocento Italy, and at the end of it the world looks exactly as it did at the beginning, except you feel, somehow, that something has been done. This is not a flaw in the design. This is the design.
To understand what the game is actually doing, it helps to remember that the Italian Renaissance was the founding scene of the most penetrating critique of bourgeois historiography ever written. From a prison cell in Turi, a Sardinian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci spent years arguing that what we call the Renaissance was not, in fact, a popular awakening but a "passive revolution"—a transformation engineered from above by merchant elites, princes, and a cosmopolitan intelligentsia that floated free of the peasants and artisans whose labor underwrote the whole spectacle. The frescoes, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the humanist epistles in their elegant Latin: these were not the cultural property of the Italian people. They were the self-portrait of a class that had won, and that had no particular interest in including anyone else in the picture.
Assassin's Creed II inherits this self-portrait and renders it in 1080p. Ezio Auditore da Firenze, our protagonist, is the second son of a Florentine banker. His father wears velvet. His mother collects art. When tragedy strikes—his father and brothers are framed and executed by rival elites—Ezio's response is not to organize the Ciompi wool-workers, who in actual 1378 had stormed the Palazzo della Signoria and briefly seized state power. His response is to acquire better armor and a personal vendetta. The game's emotional engine is the wounded patrician learning to take back what is his. This is not a story about Florence. It is a story about a particular Florentine, and the city is merely the backdrop against which his property rights are restored, his honor avenged, and his villa renovated.
The genius of the game's ideological apparatus is the Templar/Assassin binary, which performs the work of obscuring class antagonism so efficiently that one barely notices it has happened. The Templars, we are told, want order and control. The Assassins want freedom. Every actual historical conflict—the Pazzi conspiracy, the rise and fall of Savonarola, the Borgia ascendancy—is funneled through this metaphysical contest between two secret societies who happen to be staffed entirely by aristocrats, popes, and condottieri. Notice what this framing accomplishes. The question is no longer who owns the wool guilds, who eats and who starves, whose daughters end up in which convents. The question is which faction of the ruling class will run things. The masses do not appear as historical agents. They appear as a crowd you push through to reach your target, occasionally as a thief you hire, never as a subject of history in their own right.
This is the cultural function of the Animus, the science-fiction conceit that frames the game: a machine that lets a present-day everyman relive the "genetic memories" of his ancestor. The device is more ideologically loaded than it appears. It tells the player that history is something inherited, fixed, replayable—a sequence of choreographed events whose outcomes are already determined and whose meaning is locked inside the bloodlines of exceptional individuals. The peasant ancestors of the player are presumably also stored in there somewhere, but the game does not invite us to relive their memories. Why would we? They did not assassinate anyone famous. They simply worked, died, and produced the surplus that funded the cathedrals we are now permitted to climb.
What makes the game so seductive—and worth taking seriously rather than dismissing—is that it does deliver an authentic pleasure of insurgency. There is a real thrill to leaping from a rooftop and burying a hidden blade in the throat of a man who has wronged you. The game knows how to choreograph defiance, and it knows that its players, most of them young men inhabiting the late stages of a financialized economy that offers them little, are hungry for the feeling that something can be done. The Renaissance setting is not incidental to this hunger; it is the perfect alibi. It is far enough away to be exotic, recent enough to feel like the origin of our world, and famous enough that the player can congratulate himself on absorbing a bit of cultural capital while he gets his catharsis. The game is, in this sense, a textbook lesson in how hegemony actually works. It does not impose its worldview by force. It offers a deeply pleasurable experience, and the worldview is the price of admission.
Consider the figure of Leonardo da Vinci, who in the game functions as Ezio's quartermaster, upgrading his weapons and decoding his ancient documents. The historical Leonardo was many things—a queer outsider, an illegitimate son, a man who designed siege engines for whoever could pay him—but he was emphatically not a free agent serving the cause of human liberation. He was a court intellectual, the kind of dependent client of princes that an analysis of organic versus traditional intellectuals would place precisely. The game's Leonardo, by contrast, is a charming friend who happens to be a genius and who happens to hate the bad guys. He has been laundered. His patronage networks, his compromises, his place inside the hegemonic bloc of the Italian courts—all of this is washed away so that he can hand you a flying machine and a smile. This is what cultural hegemony looks like at the level of character design: not propaganda, but the quiet reorganization of historical figures into ahistorical friends.
And the Assassin's creed itself—"nothing is true, everything is permitted"—deserves a closer look than the franchise's fans usually give it. As a slogan, it is impeccably suited to the libertarian individualism of the late-capitalist subject. It is not a politics. It does not propose a different ordering of social life. It is the cry of the lone operator who recognizes no authority, which is convenient because the lone operator, freed from collective obligation, is precisely the consumer-citizen our economic order requires. The creed sounds transgressive. It functions as common sense. You can imagine it embroidered on a hoodie sold by a multinational, because in fact you don't have to imagine it.
None of this makes Assassin's Creed II a bad game. On the contrary, it is a very good game, and its quality is part of what makes it worth thinking about. Bad culture rarely tells us anything; good culture tells us what a society wishes to believe about itself. What this particular piece of good culture wishes to believe is that history is made by exceptional men in hoods, that rebellion is a matter of personal vendetta against bad individuals rather than collective struggle against structures, that the Renaissance was a glorious cosplay opportunity rather than a class settlement whose costs were borne by people who never got to wear velvet, and that the proper response to injustice is to acquire better gear. These are not idiosyncratic beliefs. They are the operating system of an era.
The critical task here is not to denounce the pleasure the game provides. The pleasure is real, and contempt for the audience that takes it has always been the laziest move available to the cultural critic. The task is to notice what the pleasure is doing, what it is teaching us to want, and what it is teaching us to stop noticing. Somewhere in the unrendered margins of Renaissance Florence—outside the assassination missions, beyond the climbable monuments, below the line of sight of the camera—the wool-carders and the dye-workers and the women laboring in the silk shops are doing the actual work of producing the world Ezio gets to play in. A game that took them seriously would be a different game. It might also be a different kind of education. Until then, we have what we have: a beautifully rendered passive revolution, sold by the millions, in which the player is invited to feel, for a few dozen hours, like the hidden hand of history, while history itself proceeds untouched.
There is a particular kind of cultural product that flatters its consumer by letting him rehearse the gestures of liberation while leaving the architecture of domination perfectly intact. Assassin's Creed II, Ubisoft's 2009 prestige title and the franchise's true commercial breakthrough, is the consummate example of this trick. You spend forty hours stabbing cardinals, bankers, and conspirators in a meticulously rendered Quattrocento Italy, and at the end of it the world looks exactly as it did at the beginning, except you feel, somehow, that something has been done. This is not a flaw in the design. This is the design.
To understand what the game is actually doing, it helps to remember that the Italian Renaissance was the founding scene of the most penetrating critique of bourgeois historiography ever written. From a prison cell in Turi, a Sardinian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci spent years arguing that what we call the Renaissance was not, in fact, a popular awakening but a "passive revolution"—a transformation engineered from above by merchant elites, princes, and a cosmopolitan intelligentsia that floated free of the peasants and artisans whose labor underwrote the whole spectacle. The frescoes, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the humanist epistles in their elegant Latin: these were not the cultural property of the Italian people. They were the self-portrait of a class that had won, and that had no particular interest in including anyone else in the picture.
Assassin's Creed II inherits this self-portrait and renders it in 1080p. Ezio Auditore da Firenze, our protagonist, is the second son of a Florentine banker. His father wears velvet. His mother collects art. When tragedy strikes—his father and brothers are framed and executed by rival elites—Ezio's response is not to organize the Ciompi wool-workers, who in actual 1378 had stormed the Palazzo della Signoria and briefly seized state power. His response is to acquire better armor and a personal vendetta. The game's emotional engine is the wounded patrician learning to take back what is his. This is not a story about Florence. It is a story about a particular Florentine, and the city is merely the backdrop against which his property rights are restored, his honor avenged, and his villa renovated.
The genius of the game's ideological apparatus is the Templar/Assassin binary, which performs the work of obscuring class antagonism so efficiently that one barely notices it has happened. The Templars, we are told, want order and control. The Assassins want freedom. Every actual historical conflict—the Pazzi conspiracy, the rise and fall of Savonarola, the Borgia ascendancy—is funneled through this metaphysical contest between two secret societies who happen to be staffed entirely by aristocrats, popes, and condottieri. Notice what this framing accomplishes. The question is no longer who owns the wool guilds, who eats and who starves, whose daughters end up in which convents. The question is which faction of the ruling class will run things. The masses do not appear as historical agents. They appear as a crowd you push through to reach your target, occasionally as a thief you hire, never as a subject of history in their own right.
This is the cultural function of the Animus, the science-fiction conceit that frames the game: a machine that lets a present-day everyman relive the "genetic memories" of his ancestor. The device is more ideologically loaded than it appears. It tells the player that history is something inherited, fixed, replayable—a sequence of choreographed events whose outcomes are already determined and whose meaning is locked inside the bloodlines of exceptional individuals. The peasant ancestors of the player are presumably also stored in there somewhere, but the game does not invite us to relive their memories. Why would we? They did not assassinate anyone famous. They simply worked, died, and produced the surplus that funded the cathedrals we are now permitted to climb.
What makes the game so seductive—and worth taking seriously rather than dismissing—is that it does deliver an authentic pleasure of insurgency. There is a real thrill to leaping from a rooftop and burying a hidden blade in the throat of a man who has wronged you. The game knows how to choreograph defiance, and it knows that its players, most of them young men inhabiting the late stages of a financialized economy that offers them little, are hungry for the feeling that something can be done. The Renaissance setting is not incidental to this hunger; it is the perfect alibi. It is far enough away to be exotic, recent enough to feel like the origin of our world, and famous enough that the player can congratulate himself on absorbing a bit of cultural capital while he gets his catharsis. The game is, in this sense, a textbook lesson in how hegemony actually works. It does not impose its worldview by force. It offers a deeply pleasurable experience, and the worldview is the price of admission.
Consider the figure of Leonardo da Vinci, who in the game functions as Ezio's quartermaster, upgrading his weapons and decoding his ancient documents. The historical Leonardo was many things—a queer outsider, an illegitimate son, a man who designed siege engines for whoever could pay him—but he was emphatically not a free agent serving the cause of human liberation. He was a court intellectual, the kind of dependent client of princes that an analysis of organic versus traditional intellectuals would place precisely. The game's Leonardo, by contrast, is a charming friend who happens to be a genius and who happens to hate the bad guys. He has been laundered. His patronage networks, his compromises, his place inside the hegemonic bloc of the Italian courts—all of this is washed away so that he can hand you a flying machine and a smile. This is what cultural hegemony looks like at the level of character design: not propaganda, but the quiet reorganization of historical figures into ahistorical friends.
And the Assassin's creed itself—"nothing is true, everything is permitted"—deserves a closer look than the franchise's fans usually give it. As a slogan, it is impeccably suited to the libertarian individualism of the late-capitalist subject. It is not a politics. It does not propose a different ordering of social life. It is the cry of the lone operator who recognizes no authority, which is convenient because the lone operator, freed from collective obligation, is precisely the consumer-citizen our economic order requires. The creed sounds transgressive. It functions as common sense. You can imagine it embroidered on a hoodie sold by a multinational, because in fact you don't have to imagine it.
None of this makes Assassin's Creed II a bad game. On the contrary, it is a very good game, and its quality is part of what makes it worth thinking about. Bad culture rarely tells us anything; good culture tells us what a society wishes to believe about itself. What this particular piece of good culture wishes to believe is that history is made by exceptional men in hoods, that rebellion is a matter of personal vendetta against bad individuals rather than collective struggle against structures, that the Renaissance was a glorious cosplay opportunity rather than a class settlement whose costs were borne by people who never got to wear velvet, and that the proper response to injustice is to acquire better gear. These are not idiosyncratic beliefs. They are the operating system of an era.
The critical task here is not to denounce the pleasure the game provides. The pleasure is real, and contempt for the audience that takes it has always been the laziest move available to the cultural critic. The task is to notice what the pleasure is doing, what it is teaching us to want, and what it is teaching us to stop noticing. Somewhere in the unrendered margins of Renaissance Florence—outside the assassination missions, beyond the climbable monuments, below the line of sight of the camera—the wool-carders and the dye-workers and the women laboring in the silk shops are doing the actual work of producing the world Ezio gets to play in. A game that took them seriously would be a different game. It might also be a different kind of education. Until then, we have what we have: a beautifully rendered passive revolution, sold by the millions, in which the player is invited to feel, for a few dozen hours, like the hidden hand of history, while history itself proceeds untouched.
Mini Review: Assassin’s Creed II lets players rehearse liberation while leaving domination intact. Its Renaissance is a Gramscian "passive revolution"—a playground for a wealthy patrician seeking revenge, not collective struggle. The game obscures class antagonism; the masses are merely crowds to push through. It brilliantly sells the thrill of rebellion, but its underlying creed is late-capitalist individualism: the ultimate response to systemic injustice is simply acquiring better gear.