My presentation slides for virtual The Interactive Pasts Conference Online 2 (TIPC2), (held 5-6 November, notionally, at Leiden) are on slideshare.

The twitch stream for the conference is at https://www.twitch.tv/valuefnd (my talk from yesterday is on there somewhere).

Swords Sandals and Selfies in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey: The Cultural Tourism Package You’d Kill For

Schedule November 5 Session 2: 12:00 – 13:30

This paper explores Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as a way to explore idyllic historic landscapes and heritage sites with some degree of questing and simulated danger. It applies Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in two ways, as discovery tour option mode and as a metaphor to explore in more general and speculative terms how questing and historical dilemmas and conflicts could be incorporated into both fan tourism and cultural/historical tourism  (Politopoulos, Mol, Boom, & Ariese, 2019).

Keza MacDonald views Assassin’s Creed as a virtual museum, Ubisoft regards it as the recovery of lost worlds: “ “We give access to a world that was lost” said Jean Guesdon (MacDonald, 2018). “Discovery Tour will allow a lot of our players to revisit this world with their kids, or even their parents.”

Origins’ Discovery Tour mode “promises” educational enlightenment (Thier, 2018; Walker, 2018); Odyssey’s additional Story Creator Mode (Zagalo, 2020) adds personalized quests. Beyond the polaroid fun of sharing landscape selfies with other players and ancient history voyeurs across the Internet, there is also the prospect of “Video game–induced tourism:  a new frontier for destination marketers” (Dubois & Gibbs, 2018). Plus physical location VR games. Game company Ubisoft created escape game VR and virtual tours inside physical exhibitions such as Assassin’s Creed VR – Temple of Anubis (Gamasutra Staff, 2019). Is there a market for historical playgrounds as virtual tourism?