For nearly 20 years, the Assassin’s Creed video games have presented themselves as sprawling works of historical fiction. They cast players as noble assassins during big inflection points in history—the French Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, the end of Japan’s Sengoku era—and give them freedom to romp around stunning re-creations of these eras, interacting with historical figures along the way. You can do secret missions for Cleopatra, you can get Socrates out of a jam after he pisses a mob off, that sort of thing. They’re extremely popular to the point of being taken for granted, the way a ubiquitous CBS procedural might be.
They are also chock-full of almost every kind of conspiracy theory you can think of. In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens, and this knowledge is suppressed throughout history; the tide of world events is influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games with a near-limitless scope. It also echoes uncomfortable real-world conspiracy theories that have proven consequential in our lifetime.
Is this tendency to conspiracy thinking uniquely endemic to Assassin’s Creed and video games in general? And, even more thornily, is it harmful? Slate discussed these questions and more with media critic and scholar Cameron Kunzelman, whose new book, Everything Is Permitted: On Assassin’s Creed, argues that the series is the modern entertainment ecosystem in miniature, franchised to hell and shot through with conspiracy theory. And, while Assassin’s Creed games may directly reference conspiracy theories, Kunzelman argues that, crucially, following just about any modern franchise, from Star Wars to Love Is Blind, has quite a bit in common with being a conspiracy theorist.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: So the Assassin’s Creed games appear as works of historical fiction, but they all immediately have this curveball conspiracy-theory plot that is ultimately revealed to be the thread tying the whole thing together. Do you find it pleasurable to untangle the games’ conspiracies?
Cameron Kunzelman: I don’t know if I find it pleasurable as a player—I find it directing in its force. I feel myself caught up in it. There’s no moment in the Assassin’s Creed games where I’m not aware that the way they engage with conspiracy is probably bad. In some ways, the Assassin’s Creed games have grown up in the age of conspiracy being the dominant rhetorical form of American political discussion, as things like birtherism in the United States became a mainstream belief, extending into things like QAnon, and now, constant debates over what the Epstein files mean.
We’re living in a moment of profound conspiracy right now. Just a good old-fashioned Philip K. Dick-ian kind of moment—just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
That muddies the waters, right? The fact that there are real, observable conspiracies driving events that look an awful lot like the loonier, harmful ones.
Right. Conspiracy exists as a crime that you can be charged with, because conspiracies do exist! There are groups of people who make decisions together that can impact other people, and they can do that secretly. Seemingly lots of things that are involved in what’s being released right now in the Epstein files are what we would call dyed-in-the-wool, true conspiracy. From human trafficking to much more banal, but just as bad, practices of money moving around and political meetings.
But what the Assassin’s Creed games do is take all forms of conspiracy—from Illuminati conspiracies to precursor-species stuff, to pseudo-Masonic-style stuff—and squishes them all together and says that there’s a massive metaconspiracy that unites them all. Again, it’s interesting that Assassin’s Creed has grown up in the age of conspiracy that we live in because we’ve seen metaconspiracies emerge, like QAnon, fairly recently. Where conspiratorial movements at one time were seen as discrete from one another, now they kind of attach to each other and they get folded into QAnon.
Can you give me an example of what you mean by that?
So, when people were hanging out just a few years ago in campers on the streets of Dallas waiting for JFK Jr. to return as a kind of revelation, right? That is a beautiful—beautiful in the sense of “wonderfully coherent”—way of folding in JFK death conspiracy theories and the kind of messianism of political awakening conspiracies that are going on, squishing them all together and folding them into a kind of QAnon framework. I think that’s something that’s really interesting about this. Assassin’s Creed is doing that, and it’s doing that in fiction, and purposefully. Its authors and the people who are involved in Assassin’s Creed are reading conspiracy-esque things.
I have some quotes from [former Assassin’s Creed writer] Corey May in the book specifically talking about what conspiracy theories he’s reading and having fun with. But what’s interesting is that the play of conspiracy, the fun, is identical to just building conspiracies! The fun of it, and the most horrifying part that has people taking guns into pizza parlors, is the same set of mechanisms. That doesn’t mean that we can’t engage with these things. It doesn’t mean we can’t have, like, conspiracies for fun. It doesn’t mean that we can’t play with these within a framework—but it is weird. And it does mean that maybe I have to think a little bit harder about it.
By Cameron Kunzelman. University of Minnesota Press.
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This folding in of discrete conspiracy theories into bigger metaconspiracies that you’re describing mirrors how entertainment franchises are built now: never really going away, like a renewable energy source.
It’s the perpetual motion machine, right? I think it’s even more direct than that. It’s a thing that should not be. It’s the undead. A thing that shouldn’t work, but does. At the end of the book, I had this kind of existential experience about this. I’ll be dead and [these franchises] will keep going. Maybe not every franchise I grew up with, but probably Star Wars, right? And probably Assassin’s Creed, who knows. These things use the engine of capital to keep themselves revolving and moving. And part of it’s like this involution, it’s pulling the inside out. Constantly going back to the well to find additional pieces of information that you can then use to create more narrative.
And that is conspiracy, right? That’s the profundity and the power of conspiracy narratives: You can always go back to the source. You can always go back to some sort of ancillary material to say that was the real proof the whole time.
Can you tell me more about how the appeal of a big entertainment franchise is comparable to finding conspiracy theorists persuasive?
Jenny Rice wrote this book called Awful Archives, which I like a lot. Her argument about conspiracy is that it is not the individual claims of conspiracy theories that are inherently persuasive. So it’s not “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”—that piece of information is not inherently persuasive in and of itself to a conspiracy theorist, she claims. What’s compelling is that that piece of information is part of a massive archive, and it’s the weight of the archive. It’s the fact that you can point to 5,000 things that are slightly inconsistent, or reports that are weird, or information that is strange, or firsthand accounts that differ about, say, 9/11.
It’s the inconsistency, and it’s the massive chunk of data where all of that is combined together, that is persuasive in conspiracy theory, this big bulk of information. And I think that’s part of what’s going on with franchises. Franchises, I think, are broadly interesting for lots of people because they are a big block of information. When people try to get me to read big fantasy series, no one ever starts with, “They’re really good.” They say, “It’s 17 books.” Which is not persuasive to me. That’s a huge turnoff to me. But, if you pay attention to the communities that care about that stuff, that is very impressive. Part of the pitch of Brandon Sanderson is “look how big the books are!” And so I think that when we talk about living in the age of conspiracy, I think that’s part of it, too. I think Jenny Rice is correct that there’s something about scale. There’s something about the challenge of parsing all of it. There wouldn’t be so much information if some of it weren’t true—I think that is persuasive to people. I think that is part of what pulls people into conspiracies that might be doing them harm in a very real way.
Do you think this is part of the allure of massive video games? Are they uniquely prone to conspiracy?
I think that anything in the current era that is asking you to engage with it over a long period of time has to have something in it for you to dig into. One of the reasons reality TV is so good is you are able to make it very quickly and you’re able to cross things over constantly. So you can make, you know, The Bachelor of All Bachelors or whatever. We’re about to have Survivor 50, right? So you get this novelty across time and space.
What I think is interesting about games is that they’ve solved that problem that’s built into the medium in that they take human effort to work through them and figure them out. I don’t know if I think that they have an inherent capability to do that, but the way that they structure time and space through effort—the more you put in, the more you get out—that’s not really how any other media form works currently. And where you have seen that happen has been, I would say, in franchises. You can put a lot of time into Star Wars. There’s a whole thing called Wookiepedia about it. Reality TV has been able to tap into some of that too. To get the full story of Love Is Blind, you gotta follow all these people on TikTok and Instagram.
Every part of our lives where we engage with the internet is about putting us in a ditch that leads to another ditch that leads to another ditch.
You end your book on this really wrenching note about how, after researching both the history and conspiracy theories referenced by Assassin’s Creed games, algorithms on YouTube and other sites have shunted you into harder stuff, which is an extremely common occurrence. Do you have any hope that people will be able to withstand this stuff? Even our basic entertainment patterns, as you’ve outlined, can make us minor conspiracy theorists.
Let me be blue skies here: Regulate the tech industry. Every part of our lives where we engage with the internet is about putting us in a ditch that leads to another ditch that leads to another ditch, right? And unfortunately, the scale of that, the allure of that, often leads into things that will harm us in some way. It’ll remove us from our actual communities. It will put us into kind of epistemic places that are only engaged with their own ideas.
Culturally right now, politically right now, there is no serious discussion of what these platform owners owe to random people. It is seen as a pure paradise of choice. And whatever happens to you is whatever happens to you. And I have to tell you, we don’t treat anything else that way. We don’t treat the open road that way. I think being a very influential conspiracy-theorist TikTokker is probably on the whole more dangerous than being a drunk driver for an afternoon. I think it’s harming more people in serious and real ways. But we don’t take it seriously at all.
It’s a bipartisan belief that these industries should not be constrained by the law, and by any concern for other human beings. I think that’s bad.
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