Historically themed videogames as visual art: Conscious anachronism and creative licenses in the representation of urban spaces in the assassin's creed series

Abstract

From the revision of specialized bibliography and the critical-constructive analysis of Dow's work (2013), which studies the existing anachronisms in the digital recreation of the city of Florence in the videogame Assassin's Creed II (2009), this study explores the capacity that these types of videogames have to rebuild the setting of a specific historic period from the use of anachronisms that arise from the creative licenses and the artistic needs that are typical of videogames. The results show that the anachronism is a tool that historical videogame developers use in a deliberate way to transmit an image from the past that seems current and attractive for the present. We observed the need to develop our own methodology within the area of game studies to tackle videogames as an artistic object of study, such that it is different from research areas such as historical game studies and other humanistic disciplines.