Assassin's Creed Syndicate: Not Enough Like Gangster Rap
Last year, at some point in the calm before the flood of Fall releases, I decided to give Assassin’s Creed Syndicate a shot. I was in the mood for something big, formulaic, and comforting that I didn’t have to think too hard about that I could ditch in case I didn’t finish it before Game of the Year season began.
This is the story of how I fell deeply in love with Syndicate, then decided to stop playing well before the story had concluded.
Context
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate takes place in Victorian London in the years after the height of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, as Wikipedia informs me, it take place in 1868. It’s the era we typically associate with the London soft coal fog, thick cockney accents, and pie-eyed Dickensian orphans. During the game’s main storyline, you literally interact with Charles Dickens himself.
In the game, you play as Jacob and Evie Frye, twin siblings who’ve been initiated into the Assassins and follow the titular Creed. (At this point, I don’t even remember what that means anymore. For our purposes, it’s not really important.) Though both are quite adept at committing stealthy murders and all the other Assassin stuff, Jacob is the brawn and Evie is the brain. They disagree over approach, but they share the same goals and values. Templars bad, kill Templars.
Other than the setting, the characters, and the well-above-average Austin Wintory score, it’s a fairly standard pre-Origins Assassin’s Creed game. There’s a power hungry upper-crust Templar oppressing the common people and bankrolling a number of assets and organizations that benefit his plan to seize political power and find a mythical object that’ll grant him some sort of superpower, and you and your Assassin buddies set out on a quest to stop him by defeating his factions and underbosses and take him out.
One of those organizations is the Blighters, a street gang that controls factories, extorts businesses for protection money, and all the usual gang stuff. They wear red. In response, you create your own gang to take their territory and their revenue streams. Jacob names the gang the Rooks. They wear green.
Why I Gave Up On Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
Whenever it was my choice, I elected to play as Evie. Though I found the individual character writing in Syndicate wooden as a whole, Jacob struck me as a fairly typical video game meat head who didn’t stand out amongst the sea of wisecracking jocks and dumbasses we’re usually stuck with as protagonists. Evie, on the other hand, has swagger and finesse. She doesn’t lose her cool. You don’t see her coming until you’re bleeding on the floor.
I had been playing the game for only a few hours, and at that point, I decided to prioritize getting Evie a dope outfit. So I looked up Syndicate’s armors online and learned of the existence of the Aegis armor, which you unlock by finding all of a certain kind of collectible. So I did so with the help of a trusty internet guide, and I came out the other end looking dope as fuck.
Once I equipped my gaudy white and gold suit, I decided to strut around in a neighborhood I controlled when I spotted a Blighter casually walking through my turf. I moved a little closer to him and not only did he start insulting me, but the little meter that begins to fill based on the probably that you’re about to enter a combat situation started going up.
This man was insulting me. Threatening me. In my neighborhood. While I’m wearing this suit.
So I casually walked over and shot him in the head.
Maybe it was the audio design of the gun shot. Maybe it was the feeling that justice had been served. Maybe it was something else. But a weird sensation took hold of me, as if Syndicate had reached into my head and touched a certain part of my personality and taste that video games rarely touch.
Specifically, it was the part of me that discovered my love of music during the reign of 50 Cent. (Hey, we all have to start somewhere.) The part of me that ended up pulling an all-nighter during my family’s beach vacation because I bought a copy of Ready To Die from the local CD shop earlier that day and after I was done listening to it, I could feel my brain being rewritten. The part of me that, to this day, enjoys the perverse rebellious pleasure of listening to black artists take the shitty hand they’ve been dealt in America and flipping it into something that makes “news” correspondents and church folk clutch their pearls. The part of me that loves gangster rap.
I’m usually not one for yelling. But when the Blighter’s body hit the ground, I found myself yelling Westside Gunn’s signature “brrrrrrrrrrrr” machine gun noise at my TV. Allow the man to demonstrate it himself.
Up to this point, I found the writing lifeless and the gameplay frustrating. But with this one murder, I fell head-over-heels in love with this game.
From this moment on, everything I did, I did for the Rooks. All my attention turned to taking over Blighter territory, and I did so with a renewed sense of purpose and gusto. Normally I play open world games for the storyline, but in this case, I only interacted with the main quest in order to level up so I could take more territory. When my actions were altruistic, like saving child laborers from factories controlled by Blighters, those child slave loving motherfuckers, I felt genuinely righteous.
I was a badass, and I was loving it. And I wanted more. I wanted to roam the streets and feel untouchable. I wanted to blow cigar smoke in the face of my enemies before I blew their brains all over my expensive art work. I wanted to sell literal mountains of crack cocaine and spend the profits however I pleased. (Sure, crack wouldn’t come to prominence until over a century later, but this is a series that found a way to bring Pythagoras into a storyline that takes place decades after his death in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch by Assassin’s Creed standards.)
Of course, there are horrible implications at play here. I am a white guy, I control a majority white gang, and I’m connecting it to music created by disenfranchised black people in America. You can see the many many points you could bring up here, and all of them would be valid. I’m also under no illusion that many innocent people probably suffered under my gang’s rule and that I was little more than a mass murderer. But this wasn’t about real life gang violence or real world issues so nuanced and complex that most people will never comprehend them or their solutions. This was about the fantasy. The pipe dream that my actions don’t have consequences. The utter fiction that I can shoot a rival gang member in the middle of the street and nobody else would suffer or that the implications aren’t vast and horrifying.
What I really wanted to partake in was the rebelliousness of gangster rap. The giant middle finger to the powers that be and the patricians that keep a broken system broken in order to benefit from the suffering of others. I wanted to fight and look good doing it. I wanted those in charge to fear me.
But then I took all the territory there was to take, and the further into the story I progressed, the more the gang material fell into the realm of non-vital side quests I could complete for money. I wanted to stay in gangster rap dreamland. The Assassin’s Creed game wanted me to do Assassin’s Creed stuff. It wanted me to enjoy the usual stalking and sneaking and lore and all the things that started boring me years ago.
The more the game leaned into all the non-gang material, the grumpier I got and the pickier I became about certain aesthetic choices. The guttural cockney accents weren’t thick enough anymore. Death animations weren’t as snappy or brutal as I wanted them to be, cane kills aside. I wanted more green shit around my territory and I wanted the blood to splatter against the wall when I shot people and so on and so forth. The game’s sense of bravado was beginning to fade.
Moreover, my motivation began to fade. Sure, we were doing ignorant bullshit. But we were also liberating child slaves, killing oppressors, and setting people free. Once the gas ran out of that tank, the only motivation the game had left for me was the knowledge that I was a cog in a secret war between two ancient orders that will probably spend the rest of human existence killing each other. I had a more righteous cause than that once. Then I didn’t. So I stopped playing.
The Point
There are a few points we can take from this story. Again, there’s the highly problematic undertones to much of what I’ve said or the understanding of the allure of gang life in general. Maybe the obvious conclusion is that I like stupid things for stupid reasons.
However, I think this story demonstrates a unique quality to video games. All art is up to interpretation, but video games offer their audience an opportunity to participate a little more on their own terms.
When you watch a movie, be it in a theater or on your couch or wherever, you’re watching a screen. You’re a passenger, watching from the outside as the filmmakers bring you on whatever journey they want. What you take from that experience is entirely up to you, but the one constant is that you showed up to sit down and take in a story.
With games, you’re much more of a participant. Its motivations don’t have to be your own, and you have some say into how events unfold. While some games allow you to make literal story decisions, your approach to gameplay has just as big a role, if not bigger. Maybe you’re playing a Mario game and you died a lot. Maybe you played it and beat every level unscathed. Maybe dying frustrates you. Maybe it pushes you to keep going. Whatever the case may be, what you do in a game and how you feel when the game responds to your actions forges your emotional connection.
Assassin’s Creed games often encourage a stealthy approach to taking out your target. But usually, there’s nothing stopping you from kicking in the door and swording your way through every guard before cutting your enemy from his mortal coil. Though the game may not reflect your approach in any meaningful way on a literal level, it will in your head.
Though there are things the game will make you do in order to finish the story, you don’t have to kill every enemy or rescue every child worker. In this game in particular, you don’t really have to move the story along if you don’t want to. You can roam around the city and murder random Blighters until your heart’s content, leaving the story and the state of the world in stasis forever. You’ll barely be rewarded for doing so, but that’s your choice.
It all depends on your motivation. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate wants to be an Assassin’s Creed story about Victorian London. It wants you to crawl across rooftops and stab aristocrats because the Assassins are good and the Templars are bad people who do bad things. For some, that’s surely enough, and this game has a lot of fans.
My motivations were much different. In my head, I was basically playing King of New York, but swap out pre-gentrification Brooklyn for Victorian London, swap out inner city street gangs for cockney thugs, and swap out the corrupt NYPD of the Reagan administration for the ruling class of Victoria’s court. I was a criminal in a system where those in charge are just as culpable in the suffering of the city as I. In this case, more so.
It’s the exact same kind of broken political system that creates a response in the form of something like gangster rap. Its mere existence, that young artists felt the need to make music about violence and crime, points to an unfathomably unjust system. For a brief moment, I got to participate in a consequence free power fantasy of fixing that system by force. But the game lost track of that vision. Maybe it was never there.
