What’s Up With the Controls of Assassin’s Creed?

One of the things that’s dropped out of our collective memory of the series that set the blueprint for the Ubigame1 is just how weird its early control schemes were.

The AC Face Buttons

In the tutorial for the original game, the face buttons don’t control specific actions (or even types of action) but body parts. First comes the head button, at the top of the face panel. This turns on first person mode and triggers the now-infamous mapping cutscenes that are available at the top of the highest point in each district. Next are the hands: empty and armed. Altair, unlike subsequent assassins, only has one hidden blade, and it only goes on his left hand, which has been surgically altered to make room for the weapon. Thus: the empty hand gets the right face button, and the armed hand the left. Finally, the legs are represented by the bottom face button. The controller, in Assassin’s Creed, becomes less an input device and more a map of Altair’s body.

A tutorial popup from the first Assassin's Creed, titled Puppeteering Concept.

The game calls this the “puppeteering concept;” i.e., the player is controlling Altair like he’s a marionette. Cameron Kunzelman observes that this offers, in contrast to the later games, a sense of “absolute control”: that gameplay is awkward and frustrating to the extent that control is direct instead of abstract. To this day, fans of the series will regularly bemoan the loss of this system as AC’s controls have converged with more standard third-person action controller maps. If you ask them, some will tell you that they like the chunkier, more concrete actions because they introduce difficulty into the parkour at the core of early AC games. Others might complain that the new system is terrible at guessing what they want: it climbs up or down walls when they don’t want to, for example, or takes away the hidden nonlethal takedown options from the first game.2

But neither of these can explain why Ubisoft would develop such a weird, disorienting control scheme in the first place. It’s not like this was a common way of mapping controllers in the period–Gears of War, GTAIV, and inFamous play nothing like this, nor do the PS2 Prince of Persia games, AC’s direct predecessor. Contemporary titles swap between sets of contextual commands, while Prince of Persia plays much more like a traditional platformer with a static moveset.

So–why? Why prefer this awkward simulation of complete control to a system that more elegantly swaps between relevant sets of verbs, translating intention into result (as opposed to the puppeteering concept, which translates intention into action)? I think fans of the system are right to observe that control is the key concept here. But I also think that the fixation on detailed control demands more examination; it’s not as though people are begging for games to be more like QWOP! So, we’re going to take a couple detours. Both center around games as a technological art form, an interface between the human mind and hard metal, although they’re two very different angles.

Abstraction and Immersion

I think it’s relatively easy to forget that games, despite being a relatively open-ended medium, are still constrained by the conventions of software development. The AC franchise, however, calls a ton of attention to this fact through its exceedingly strange frame narrative. Although it’s dropped out of the franchise in tandem with the puppetteering system, early AC titles were structured around a machine called the “Animus.”3 The Animus is a computer interface through which the player character accesses the “genetic memories” of the true protagonist. (Set aside how stupid the pseudoscience is for a minute.) The first four or five games are absolutely obsessed with this interface, constantly emphasizing it in plot, gameplay, and visual design: the player’s health, for instance, is actually a measure of their “synchronization” with these memories, and loading screens are full of static and digital artefacting. Now, on the one hand, this is clearly a cheeky way to lampshade the presence of UI elements like the minimap and weapon selection wheel. But that hardly justifies the constant, intrusive presence of an enire frame narrative about the battle for control of the computer–at a certain point, it just isn’t funny anymore!

In light of the puppetteering concept, though, these elements read less like jokes and more like an apology. Specifically, the Animus interface marks the places where the fantasy manifested in the puppetteering concept fails. Puppetting Altair around is about control, right? But, again, the question at hand is why someone would care about whether controls are linked more closely to action or intention. There has to be a core fantasy, a fundamental desire, that’s satisfied by this type of control. The games’ emphasis on the Animus interface leads me to propose that this fantasy, the core of the puppetteering concept, is the desire to defeat abstraction.

Obviously, everything that happens on a computer is an abstraction of one kind or another. Data is an abstract representation of something real, windows are abstract interfaces for complicated processes, a filesystem abstracts a messy pile of data on a hard drive. But some of these abstractions feel more real, more “immersive” than others. Flipping pages in an ebook feels more like moving through physical space than scrolling an infinite social media feed. The shutter-click sound your smartphone makes when you take a screenshot is more immersive than the silence that follows when you punch in a phone number. In games, immersion means a bunch of different things to different audiences. But one of the most persistent meanings is that the game has somehow replaced reality, transcending the screen that separates it from the player. More precisely: immersion in games speaks to a perfect, one-to-one identification between the software abstraction of the game and the real world it aims to represent.

The bizarrely detailed control of the puppetteering concept–the fantasy of it–reaches for this kind of immersion. These early AC titles, after all, were console-forward releases. The 360 and PS3 controllers are the core of the experience. The face buttons of a DualShock are abstractions, of course, but they abstract Altair’s body the same way one might, if pressed, abstract their own. We puppet Altair’s head, hands, legs: the senses and limbs through which he interfaces with the world are mapped onto the player’s interface with the game. This perfect alignment of map and territory is why, amongst those of us who still remember the game fondly, the original game is the high-water mark of the entire series: it aims for immersion in a way that hasn’t been replicated since.

But, as an abstraction, the immersion produced by the puppetteering concept can never be perfect. We can control Altair’s arms, but not his fingers; we can control his head but not his (quite stupid and annoying) mouth. Our experience of Altair is, in fact, thoroughly on rails. Here, the Animus steps in. We’re not controlling Altair at all–we’re experiencing his memories! If we can’t solve problems nonviolently, it’s because Altair never tried; if we can’t shake someone’s hand or pet a dog, it’s because Altair was an antisocial freak. The fictional computer interface of Assassin’s Creed declares itself responsible for the technical limitations of the system. Probably the funniest example of this is the way the scientists operating the Animus regularly pull the player character out of the machine, citing his need to “take breaks” like a Nintendo character scolding you for not going outside. Anywhere, it seems, that you could claim the technical system of the game fails to provide the fantasy of perfect abstration, the Animus rears its head. Sorry, everyone, but Abstergo says the game can’t be what you want it to be.

Open World Fantasies

The puppetteering concept is, of course, not the only place that Assassin’s Creed fantasizes about perfect immersion, and it’s far from the most influential one. Up top, I asserted that the game’s legacy includes the entire subgenre I’m calling the Ubigame, a particular type of open-world game. There are a lot of things happening in this definition, but at the core of my understanding is the flat ontology at the core of AC gameplay. That is, even when the game declares some activities to be more important than others, this hierarchy isn’t implemented mechanically–within a single chapter, any activity can be approached at any time. Altair can spend three hours helping citizens in need, finding hidden banners, and executing Knights Templar before attempting a single story mission. Instead of gating parts of a distict behind one another, the game opens itself up to the player; it is an open world game to the extent that the player’s choices determine the relative importance of each objective, not the game’s (implicit or explicit) design. As the franchise grew up, this flat ontology was emphasized to the same degree that the puppetteering concept was attenuated. If the first two ACs have a linked-list structure4 (each district or city must be cleared before activities in the next one are avaiable), Brotherhood, the third title in the franchise, transitions to a random-access5 model: the entire city of Rome is available from beginning to end. This random-access model is a computational equivalent of a flat ontology. Every part of the game is equally accessible, with only the player’s whims determining what to use–access is as random as the player likes.

This is another fantasy of immersion and, I think, it looks very similar to the fantasy represented in the puppetteering concept. If that system offers fine control over a character’s body, the flat ontology and open world offer control over their mind. Instead of being driven by the priorities and desires of the fictional Altair, the player imposes their will directly on his. Actually, Altair wants to find all the King Richard banners. Actually, Altair wants to finish this assassination and unlock a new weapon. Actually, Altair wants to knock over every single pot in Acre’s middle class district. And so on. The lack of a hierarchy insisting on any particular prioritization of goals, especially in contrast to other blockbuster games of the period (Modern Warfare and what have you) is at the core of the open-world genre’s claim to immersion, and this property emerges directly from the random-access structure of the game’s activities.

In fact, the two systems complement one another perfectly. The fantasy of the flat ontology is a fantasy of a game world that mirror’s the player’s experience of reality. It stands to reason, then, that this fantasy ought to be organized like that players experience; and, in particular, that it ought to be organized spatially. There are lots of random access structures available to game design, after all (the level select screen, or the multi-game collection in the style of UFO50). What distinguishes the open world game’s interface is that it’s represented by a space and that this space must be navigated by an avatar–or, more to the point, by a puppet.

To exercise one’s own values by controlling a body in space is, in fact, the fantasy that has dominated our planet for more than five hundred years.6

Moreover, as with the puppetteering concept, the Animus marks precisely the places where this fantasy fails. Like any blockbuster video game, this one has a clear final goal: the player wants to uncover the location of the Apple of Eden, a ridiculous artifact created by an impressively boring precursor civilization. But that goal sits at odds with the fantasy of the flat ontology. What if the player doesn’t care about the Apple? Just like with the game’s controls, the Animus steps in to fill the gap. The player character is, in fact, being coerced to find the apple. If you wanted to spend more time relaxing in the beautiful Assassin Headquarters in each city, those scientists will fast forward to the next available memory. If you desynchronize from Altair’s memories, they’ll reload the memory from the start. When the character refuses to participate, they kidnap him and physically force him to participate. Consistently, the frame narrative highlights the points at which the game cannot deliver on its own immersive fantasy. And, as the franchise’s budget balloons and those points of failure are cleverly minimized, the Animus falls away: what use is a frame narrative to a map without borders?

“The Myth of Total Cinema”

Games aren’t the first artform to encounter this particular problematic. For a predecessor, we can look back to the first purely technological artform: film. André Bazin, an early French film critic, argued that the medium was dominated by a myth he called the “total cinema.”7

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema in its cradle lacked all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to.

Bazin argues that the desire for cinema, and for cinematic realism–that is, the escape from the abstractions inevitably produced by the medium–predates the technical capacity to produce cinema at all. Humans, he thinks, have always had the immersive fantasy, and each successive technology, each novel abstraction, is created to satisfy that fantasy. Setting aside the absurd transhistorical claim here, I think this fantasy of total cinema is exactly what we see in these early Ubigames.8 A perpetual, asymptotic pursuit of an abstraction that perfectly captures reality, giving an artist complete control over their audience’s perception.

So, what changed? Why did the AC franchise move away from the puppetteering concept? Well, there’s no definitive answer here. One tempting narrative, and probably the one closest to the facts, is that audience realized they didn’t really want it. Reality is hard enough as it is, and abstractions are some of the only things helpign us cope. Personally, though, I think something stranger happened. In March, 2007, eight months before the release of Assassin’s Creed, a social networking app called Twitter was demonstrated at South by Southwest. Its user numbers tripled that week. People were transfixed by its capacity to flatten the world into an interface–to abstract society, instead of merely serving as an abstraction. When the puppetteering concept came into the world, it was a place that, eight months earlier, had moved beyond it. The myth of total cinema was already dead.

  1. That is, the subgenre of open world game built around maps full of small, fungible activities that are discovered by completing landmark and story tasks. Ubisoft pioneered this genre in Assassin’s Creed and the Far Cry sequels, but the model persists in Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and lots of other games that are unimaginably expensive. ↩

  2. I enjoyed this very charming (albeit quite long) youtube video exploring exactly how the puppetteering concept changed over the franchise’s history. ↩

  3. I have no idea how familiar Ubi devs were with the work of Carl Jung, but the specifics of the machine’s operation suggest the answer is nonzero. ↩

  4. “Linked-list” here refers to a standard data structure9 you’ll see in all sorts of computer programs. A linked list has a well-defined order in which you can access its elements: each element is linked only to the ones next to it, unsuring that they’re always accessed the same way. ↩

  5. A “random-access” data structure, on the other hand, can be interacted with in any order. No particular priority is enforced. One common random-access data structure is an array. ↩

  6. See MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, 1962. ↩

  7. Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” What is Cinema, 1967. ↩

  8. Check out Clint Hocking’s critical retrospective on Far Cry 2 to see how the Ubigame’s other parent purused the fantasy. ↩

  9. Data structures are classes of abstractions. If that doesn’t make sense, I encourage you to not worry about it. ↩