OverviewUbisoft's Assassin's Creed series is one the entertainment industry's most popular titles set in the past. With a new game released on an annual basis—each full of distinct historical places, events, and people—the series has unfolded across post-classical history, from the Levant during the Third Crusade to Victorian-era London. The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed: Origins, which entailed a massive reconstruction of Hellenistic Egypt, pushed the series even further back in time. With it, Ubisoft also launched its Discovery Tour, allowing players to explore the game's setting at their leisure and without combat. These trends continued in 2018's Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, set in Greece during the Peloponnesian War. This review discusses the narrative, world, and gameplay of the latest Assassin's Creed within the series more broadly. We provide a critical appraisal of the experience that Odyssey offers and link it to this question: in the Assassin's Creed series, do we engage in meaningful play with the past, or are we simply assassinating our way through history?

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Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization “from the Stone Age to the Information Age” (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing “technologies” and “civics”—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.

The video game market is a big part of the current popular media landscape and is growing rapidly. Developers of video games are keen to make use of a variety of historical pasts as this provides them with recognisable themes, settings or narrative frameworks. Video games can be seen as the manifestation of experiential learning theory: they provide a unique informal learning How to cite this book chapter:

More and more, people do not experience the past through books, museums, or even television, but through video games. This chapter discusses how these popular entertainment products provide playful and fun experiences of the past.