Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Banality of Death
A blue symbol on the map alerts you that something deserves your attention. You slow your horse to a trot as you approach a small house on an embankment between the road and the river. The house is roomier and made of sturdier material than many of the huts and hovels that dot the landscape of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. You speak to an old farmer who addresses you as his daughter. The old man has dementia.
This side quest is easy and characteristic of side quests in Valhalla. It’s both short and slow-paced, and its content is narrative rather than active — in other words, the quest is much more about listening and hearing than about doing. In this one, you move some crates for the old man. You have the choice to indulge his delusions or insist that you are, in fact, not his daughter. You can pop into his house as he naps on a bench under a soporific sun and find letters that confirm the strange sense of foreboding that Valhalla is so good at infusing into the fabric of this game: his daughter, along with his wife, are dead. The old man is alone, by turns wracked with and nurtured by delirium.
When I completed my first side quest in Valhalla I was utterly puzzled. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in an open world RPG game, my genre of choice. I love the immersion, the sense of agency, the creative layering of content that they offer. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s typical for these games to structure activity into tiers of consequentiality and scale. While each game has its own unique rungs on the ladder, it’s standard for the most important division to lie between main quests and side quests. Main quests, as the name implies, constitute the primary narrative arc and are required to progress along the linear path of the game. Side quests are a fairly heterogenous mixture of smaller activities that may, but need not, impact upon the main story. Nailing the side quest is one of the biggest challenges that seems to bedevil video game developers, and the AC teams have historically struggled. Side quests can easily devolve into pointless pablum that transparently function only to bulk out the number of gameplay hours. In Odyssey, for example, there was no shortage of side quests that created some flimsy pretext for getting you to raid forts over and over again. The most detested side quest of all, those colloquially know as “fetch quests,” simply ask you to travel somewhere, pick something up, and bring it back. Ugh.
Valhalla is a radical departure from the tried and tired model. As I said, there are few if no fetch quests and very few that require violence. If the first side quest I undertook left me feeling out of sorts upon its abrupt ending, after a few I soon pieced together what the developers were trying to pull off. The name should have given it away. Valhalla calls these not side quests, but ‘world events.’ The world events aim to flesh out the immersive elements of an open world RPG set in the past by exposing you to and implicating you in the quotidian minutiae of daily life. I really have to commend the Valhalla team for their inventiveness here. The side quest template was old and overcooked and desperately in need of bold intervention. The developers have done this. They’ve also done so with a laudable aim in mind, one that sharply anticipates what I think will be the future of open worlds: increasingly immersive and totalizing engagement with a fictional world. Unfortunately, from an actual gaming perspective, they have not fully succeeded. So far as I can tell, the ‘world events’ have little to no discernible impact on how the main story progresses, and they are so idiosyncratic and passive that you wind up tempted to forego them in favor of simply finishing such a large game. But in their capacity as world-building material for a game set in the past, they are the warp and woof of the game’s historical narrative. Naturally, historians should take note!
Let’s return to the old man, who we left reminiscing about his wife. Death hangs in the air. Before you find any concrete indications, you just know, somehow, that she’s dead. How? In my experience as a medievalist, violence, death, and deprivation loom large in the popular imagination about the middle ages. This association is itself a historical phenomenon, a tangled weave of actual historical information and successive waves of modernizing propaganda. Thinkers of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment each ‘otherized’ the middle ages as a time of barbarity to present themselves as agents of deliverance. Historians have played their part as well: by averaging the aggregate ages of mortality, they have created an artificially depressed life expectancy for the middle ages. The average is dragged down by the high rate of failure to survive early childhood, as well as high rates of death during childbirth. But if you managed to overcome these obstacles, your prospects for living a decently long life were not so bad as we’d assume. Nevertheless, I’d imagine that, for medieval people, death was far more omnipresent than for it is for us. Warfare was endemic, especially pronounced during periods of major social disruption. Examples include the tenth century dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, of course, the ninth century viking invasion of England, during which Valhalla is set.
In the ‘world event,’ as the old man babbles, your attention is gradually directed to a nearby tree, under which his wife and daughter are buried. What I find interesting about this episode is the banality of it. The game eschews the spectacular staging of death borne of pillage and war for the comparative tameness of old age and disease. But the flip side of this tameness is a sort of domestication of death — it is atmospheric and thereby ever-present, accepted and assumed. In what I’d imagine to be a thoughtful decision on the part of the developers to avoid making a caricature of the pervasiveness of violence, they’ve lured Death out of the battlefield and into the home.
I often find there’s a misconception when we talk about historical narrative and the way it functions as a vehicle for certain ideologies of — and in — the present. How can we call ‘ideological’ a relatively faithful representation of the past? What this assumes is that ‘ideology’ is something sinister or biased, a diversion from reality with an intentional and propagandistic objective. Ideology can certainly take this guise, but it need not. Ideology or imagination enter narratives precisely because the past is gone. It is not and cannot be immediately accessible and therefore requires a complicated process of ingesting historical relics, assembling them into coherence in the mind, and then re-presenting them in narrative form. The laboriousness of this project is even more awesome when we consider that the sources it’s based upon are themselves a rendering of the limitless expanse of human existence into narrative fragments, even more fraught with ideology then our own attempts to re-present them. Ideology and historical assumptions are not just inevitable in creating historical narratives, they are in fact requirements. What to tell and not to tell, how to tell it, why we tell it, how we assume we will be received, all of these require the artist to make decisions. Since developers can’t be expected literally to recreate the past, they will have to make deliberate choices from the infinite repository of history. What they choose to privilege and what to exclude says much about their understanding of the past.
It’s been my experience teaching a class on this very subject that attending to these decisions and interrogating them, not with malice but with curiosity, can spark productive discussions and get students to engage with historical media more thoughtfully. We’re on the precipice of unfathomable disruptions and innovations that virtual reality is soon to unleash. If historical representations come along for the ride — and I see no reason why they won’t — it will present new challenges and new opportunities for historians who aim to reach students where they are. Spending too much time on Twitter as I do, I’ve become convinced that historians must avoid the lure of what I call ‘well-actually’ public history, which reacts to popular shows, books, and games with dreadfully erudite lists of inaccuracies. These are boring, unhelpful, and often condescending. Encouraging thoughtful engagement with historical media requires flexibility and creativity, and I urge people with a dog in the fight to look to video games: the possibilities are endless.
