— 10 September 2019 | Our games
Diving into Ancient Greece: An interview with Historian Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta
After revealing the secrets of ancient Egypt with the Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Discovery Tour, Ubisoft is back with the all new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Discovery Tour, in which you can dive into Ancient Greece like never before.
Behind this project are dozens of employees from the Ubisoft Québec and Montréal studios who are unveiling one of the richest period of history: Greece from the 5th century B.C. This precious educational tool brings to life a significant moment of the occidental civilisation, a historical moment marked by an incredible cultural awakening, the development of democracy, medicine, philosophy, theatre, art and architecture.
The idea of the Discovery Tour Ancient Greece comes from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and the hard work done by the Ubisoft Québec team, in which was involved Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta, PhD in ancient languages and literature. For this Quebec City Historian, the adventure with Ubisoft Québec started in 2016, when the team was looking for a specialist to help with the historical aspect of Ancient Greece, in order to inspire the creation of the most ambitious game ever conceived by the Québec studio.
« Younger, I was dreaming about having my own video game device to play with. While getting older, I never lost this sense of wonder for realistic videogames, created from a rich cultural knowledge ».
After helping developers during their trip to Greece, the Historian was invited to become the number one reference for this ambitious mandate. « The team’s interest for Greek history, their concern to impregnate the historical context and the essentials details of this century have been some major influencing factor for me as a researcher. My work has always been, and still is today, to understand the team’s reality: their realisations coercion, but also the importance of historical data and the way they are going to use this data in their work. »
To help them recreate fictional universe in the most realistic ways, Historians like Stéphanie-Anne work with lots of tools: museum database, texts from author directly connected to certain periods of times, stone-carved inscriptions, documentations coming from different archeology schools, artefacts, articles and scientific literatures.
If Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was an invitation to play the odyssey of a fictitious hero at the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Discovery Tour Ancient Greece is an invitation to truly live Ancient Greece. No battles or quests, we just let ourselves be guided to impregnate the universe of Greece at this century. « What we find in history books or in museum, we can now discover it in a rebuilt context and see in 3D what it was like to live in this historical century. Books nourish the mind and the imagination and videogames lead to action. A perfect match, I think. We encourage players to travel, to discover and to immerse in a historical period ».
Video games will never replace history classes or schoolbooks, but they offer a new dimension: an active participation in major events that are unavoidable in history.
So, academic learning through video games, why not?
