Medievalists are going to medieval, but I can't help but feel like the framing is strange...
An article that describes how today's pigs are different from yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs; neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more entertaining game for them...
My opinion is: make it correct unless it distracts from the story/gameplay. Most people won't notice but those who do will be happy. On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of medievalists and get these details correct.
Sometimes, factual errors are actually deliberate in order to improve gameplay. For example, accurate architecture may take a back seat to level design. Weapons may react in completely unrealistic ways, but it is understandable because in real life, people didn't fight with controllers. People go much faster than they should, distances are shortened, there is either too much or too little variety because having too much of the same thing is boring and having variation is every small detail is too expensive. All that is not just excusable, it is actually good design, it is a game, not a history lesson. Sometimes, though it is more relevant in movies, there is a deliberate inaccuracy just because that's what people expect and doing it differently would make the audience focus on an unimportant detail or mess with the pacing. And sometimes, it is just to save money that is better spend elsewhere.
I don't think having period accurate pigs is any of these, so for me, it is a mistake, no more, no less. Not the worst, but it deserves a "bug report".
Among things that if done realistic, might take you out of the game experience, I'd also expect dialog. Leaving out how any given vocabulary and pronunciation has radically changed, I'd also expect just the flow of a conversation, what people valued and what they took for granted for things like social hierarchy and everyday customs would be completely alienating. I have no concrete examples, but I am sure that just observing interactions within a family or between a store keeper and a customer would be totally alien to anyone playing a modern video game.
>… what people valued and what they took for granted for things like social hierarchy and everyday customs would be completely alienating
One such historical custom which has gone by the wayside: an entire family used to share a single bed. If you had a stranger over, they were likely to hop in as well for the night.
In the case of recent Assassins Creed games, it's both.
"...freely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
Regarding the latest Assassin's Creed, that reminded me of a (long) blog post [0] by a historian, though it deals more in themes than all the historical inaccuracies present in the game. He then did another post on Expeditions: Rome, a game that claimed historical verisimilitude and all the mistakes it made [1].
The first two mission chains in England involve replacing the ‘bad guy’ anti-pagan king of Mercia with a good guy reasonable king Ceolwulf (and his good guy reasonable son) and rescuing the Dane-ruled settlement of Grantebridge where, I kid you not, we are told that this settlement was just a tiny village when the Danes moved in and built it up into a big, multi-cultural trading town and all of the local English folks are just totally OK with this and it is just the mean nasty Saxon army (led by a bad guy member of an evil conspiracy) who are ruining everything. Apparently all of the Danish vikings only really came by for infrastructure week.
This problem is infinitely compounded by the way the game treats, or more correctly does not treat, the Norse practice of slavery.
This, for me, is a much bigger - history-wise - problem than a color of pigs.
Loadouts in most RPGs are so absurd even with limits. I'm surprised no game (that I know of) capitalizes on this issue by giving you access to stuff but making you stage it strategically, eg leaving ammo along your line of retreat so you can surprise your pursuers. Maybe designers have found that it's too much prep and planning whereas players want action, but then again the From Software * Souls games suggests many players enjoy having to work at it.
Most games try really hard to make it impossible to paint yourself into a corner where you have to re-do a large stretch because you messed up. I guess somthing like this would be a great difficulty option - much better than bloated HP enemies.
For how long? Over what type of terrain? How would it impact your stamina level? Could you fight with the backpack on? When you set it down to fight, could an opponent steal it?
A sword can weigh as little as 1 lbs. On average maybe 2-2.5. If the weight is sensibly allocated, that is not something that will significantly bog you down. If it is, you really need cardio.
> On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of medievalists and get these details correct.
The financing of AAA titles is actually rather tight; the fact that AAA titles hardly ever do experiments in gameplay and the fact that in many studios crunch time happens show how tight the financial planning of AAA titles has to be to work out.
This is not because the publishers can't afford to spend a bit more. But because they would rather capture every last dollar of profit.
There's an argument to be made that getting some of these details right would improve their profitability. For sure people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering around outside the villages.
I would love to know what percentage of that budget has anything to do with development vs advertising. I see ads for games on buses, billboards, tv commercials, etc that do not seem cheap.
A lot of the marketing happens post launch and is thus low risk as you can adjust the budget based on sales performance. The same isn’t true for game development itself, which must be limited to a fixed budget based on anticipated future sales.
> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are?
Details like this are a big part of what makes historical fiction compelling! The more things one encounters that diverge unexpectedly, yet believably from the present day, the greater the sense of immersion.
And the more we can learn from it! Ubisoft has shown an interest in using this series to teach history, with museum modes where you can harmlessly walk around, appreciate the architecture, and talk to locals about what life was like at the time.
I like to start from historically accurate then go from there in my hobby games.
My friends ask why I care about accuracy. It's really simple! The world 1,000 or 2,000 years ago was VERY different than today, and trying to replicate it is usually enough to create an interesting and foreign world.
If you want to morph things for gameplay's sake, you still can. But there's a difference between purposefully introducing inaccuracies and ignorantly doing so.
FTA: With their ability to digitally animate fantastical fauna, videogames are the perfect medium for breaking with the stereotype and bringing academic insights to the larger public.
I agree.
Even ignoring that, there’s a relatively broad interest in movie bloopers, where people complain about such things as “2011 Chargers were replaced by the earlier models. You can easily tell it by the taillights” (https://www.carthrottle.com/post/alqlmmp/) or “Both Apatosaurs and Stegosaurs went extinct before the point of divergence of this alternate history”https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1979388/goofs/). I think that naturally extends to game bloopers, and this is one.
The way we perceive the past informs our perception of the present. Of course there are elements of fantasy in fiction, but the conceit is that outside of what is clearly fictional everything is real.
In the case of Assassin's Creed, there is a special draw regarding historical accuracy since the game purports to tell the "real" story, so everything that's immediately outside the fiction should be accurate -- and in fact the games have been noted as arousing interest in history among players.
This is why this kind of approximation can be problematic: if you play the original game from 2007, sure you'll disregard the conspiracy theory story, but will you notice that there are buildings in Jerusalem that didn't appear until centuries later, making the city look much more "arabic" looking than it historically was at the time? And if you think the modern pig is in its natural state, won't you have a subtly different outlook on modern animal husbandry?
> do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs
Of course, but this particular author chooses to focus on the pigs. Possibly because of personal expertise? The fact that other errors exist does not mean this one should be ignored.
In any case, it's an interesting thing to learn about.
Well, it's not exactly the only blog post on this site about medieval pigs. At the bottom of the post there is a link to their other posts about those animals[0], of which there are 12 at this moment.
It seems like some medievalists at Universiteit Leiden are interested in pigs, and that looking at medieval video game pigs is just one of the ways they talk about them.
For Kingdom Come Deliverance I thoroughly enjoyed the focus on historical detail. It gives the game a creative edge and for me also an educational edge “a glimpse of medieval life.”
It really has enabled me to “get” medieval life more. How people and society worked together and what was important to them. And by proxy how my ancestors lived. Absolutely one of the best games!
My wife trains horses. It irritates her to no end seeing characters in movies who supposedly spend their lives in the saddle, played by an actor who has clearly never been on horseback before.
Having done tech support I think it’s possible they made the decision deliberately on the assumption that users would complain the (period correct) swine looked wrong.
Don’t think this is important for gameplay at all, not like I expect skyrim to be historically correct, but as a random trivia and kinda of a tongue-in-cheek article I find this super interesting.
I'm (badly) paraphrasing Brett Devereaux, but for most people, knowledge of the past comes not from history books, but from popular culture. When pop culture is wrong about some aspect, the collective mental representation gets a little more distant from the historical reality.
We could make it the catalyst for a whole new vocabulary. Yesterman. Yesterland. Yesterlore. Yestergames. Yesterfood. Yestersex. Yesterlife. Yesterdeath. Yesterdog. Yestercow. Yestertech. Yesterworld.
You have no idea about how much Tuscan municipialities care about medieval pigs, especially if they can get a protected designation of origin out of them (also not everyone is willfully ignorant, but I support accurate medieval pigs in videogames, too).
In particular, no, most people don't care about the accuracy of medieval pigs. In general though, realism is often important for its consistency and for the ability to link the game to outside resources.
A lot of writers, artists, worldbuilders, etc like to incorporate realism into their creations, but in my opinion the more important part is having consistent systems, and realism is just used as a shortcut to consistency. Obviously a fantasy story with dragons isn't realistic, nor is a sci-fi story with superluminal starships. But what good media does is ensure that what it shows is consistent, that there's no magic or technology that would break the system or create a plot hole, and that in general what you see on the screen or read on the page is the natural result of background systems. Like, the article says that mature male pigs were rarely found in pens in the village; this is the result of the background system of how pigs are farmed. If you're watching a movie or playing a game and see a pigpen in a village and it only has sows and piglets (assuming you can somehow tell male and female pigs apart), then that hints that the creator knows about those background systems and takes them into account in their works.
The second reason that realism is values, especially in games, is that it means that you can use your existing knowledge of real systems in game, and similarly use your game knowledge to better understand real systems. For example, I play a game called Hell Let Loose, a WWII multiplayer shooter whose maps are created with period maps and aerial footage. Going into the game for the first time, I may not know how the game plays or what its specific mechanics are, but I know that, for example, Pavlov's House is going to be a great defensive position. Similarly, when I watch a WWII documentary or show like Band of Brothers, I can see where they're fighting and recognize the location from my experience on the Normandy maps, and think about how difficult it is to take those objectives in the game. Of course, the game is a game, its systems aren't directly transferable to real life, and playing a game isn't nearly as difficult as real life would be, but because the core of the game system and the real system are the same, the game helps me better appreciate what the real soldiers went through.
In my opinion, people fundamentally like making connections between things they know. Novelty is appreciated as a way to form new connections. If people can look at a piece of media and make connections to it, they'll enjoy it more. Similarly, if people can look at a piece of media and make connections within that media, making predictions as to what's going to happen, or connecting the actions of two characters when the media doesn't make an explicit connection, then they'll enjoy it more as well. These connections are facilitated by consistency and accurately following the rules of the systems in play. If the show is realistic, then people have an intuitive better understanding of those systems and can make more connections, increasing their enjoyment of the piece. Realism isn't required, but it offers more potential connections and helps ensure the background systems are being followed.
An article that describes how today's pigs are different from yesterpigs is indeed interesting, but do we particularly care how medievally our video game pigs are? Surely Assassin's Creed holds more important factual errors than the correctness of its pigs; neither of which detract from the game. It's probably a much more entertaining game for them...