Games as Historical Immersion and Preservation: Creating Enjoyable and Believable Worlds for Players

From Assassin’s Creed to Just Dance, Ubisoft has all the time targeted on sturdy partnerships with historians, cultural consultants, and museums to create immersive historic worlds in video games. Deborah Papiernik, Ubisoft’s SVP of New Business, lately spoke with President of Games for Change Susanna Pollack within the breakout session Preserving Legacy: Reimagining History Through Interactive Worlds, at iicon 2026.

At Ubisoft, Papiernik and her workforce are a driving power behind cultivating relationships with museums and cultural consultants. This culminates in two methods: connecting consultants with builders for video games rooted in historical past, corresponding to Assassin’s Creed, and collaborating with third-parties for real-life functions of Ubisoft’s instructional content material together with museum exhibitions, augmented actuality apps, documentaries, and extra.

For Papiernik, video video games are the right medium for serving to gamers have interaction with historical past in a brand new and thrilling means, in addition to one of many largest artistic alternatives because it accommodates lots of the items wanted to craft an immersive world for gamers whereas nonetheless leaving room for artistic liberties.

“History itself is a fantastic playground,” Papiernik says. “It has characters, it has mysteries, it has architecture, it has art, it has evolution of economy, it has pretty much everything. But at the same time, we don’t know everything about History. The further back we go, the less we know because it’s less documented.”

There are occasions when builders would possibly deliberately select to take liberties with historic illustration for contemporary audiences. For instance, the Notre-Dame cathedral in Assassin’s Creed Unity is the fashionable iteration of the constructing, not the one which was current in the course of the French Revolution within the late 1700s, which was a lot shorter and didn’t have a spire. Papiernik explains that the traditionally correct model of Notre-Dame would have impeded world recognition of the monument, whereas concurrently disappointing parkour gamers who could be let down by the shorter structure. Placing the fashionable iteration of Notre-Dame within the recreation solved each issues.

Most lately, Papiernik and her workforce labored with the Assassin’s Creed Mirage workforce to develop the free app Discovery Tour: Medieval Baghdad showcasing historic artefacts discovered within the video games Codex, in a means that pays tribute to the manufacturing values of the sport, and that’s each enjoyable and academic for anybody to entry. And quickly, Echoes of Revolution, two augmented actuality apps for the Boston Freedom Trail and the New York Revolutionary Trail will overlay in-game renderings from Assassin’s Creed III on the historic trails. The apps will probably be out there quickly for guests to rejoice the United States 250th anniversary.

Papiernik, who was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2025 for her work in Ubisoft and throughout artistic and cultural industries, sat down with us to dive into the thought of video games as historic immersion and preservation, museum partnerships, and the Discovery Tour collection.

Games as Historical Immersion and Preservation

Why is it necessary for historic video games to really feel genuine?

Deborah Papiernik: If you bear in mind your historical past class, it typically feels faraway from the historical past it’s making an attempt to show. On the opposite hand, we have now lovely tales of people that have interaction in historical past research as a result of they found historical past in Assassin’s Creed! In France, the American Revolution isn’t usually a part of the curriculum, however by enjoying Assassin’s Creed III, many have discovered an enticing entryway to find out about that historical past.. People all over the world who performed Assassin’s Creed Unity have discovered in regards to the French Revolution even when it’s not a part of their faculty curriculum. Players are excited as a result of they skilled one thing compelling in video games, and that creates an emotional reminiscence.

Take the Notre-Dame cathedral for instance. After the hearth in 2019, many of the world ached for Notre-Dame. People everywhere in the world began sharing their pictures and movies of visits to Paris, whereas the avid gamers amongst them began sharing movies of Assassin’s Creed Unity. This is how sturdy feelings may be in-game! Ubisoft, like many corporations and particular person contributors, donated in the direction of the reconstruction efforts. We additionally made Assassin’s Creed Unity quickly free, and my workforce developed a five-minute, very emotional, immersive go to of Notre-Dame in VR, utilizing the attractive 3D art work crafted for the sport. Just a number of months after the hearth, we confirmed the expertise on the Ministry of Culture in France and shared it with the workforce behind the cathedral’s reconstruction. While all of them seen that it wasn’t 100% right, all of them spoke about the way it captured the emotion of bodily visiting the Notre-Dame. It was impactful to the purpose that the Archbishop of Paris requested me if he may lead a mass in that VR expertise! We didn’t find yourself doing it, however it simply goes to indicate the sort of emotion we will convey, even when the illustration of historical past isn’t totally correct. This is an instance of the distinction between accuracy and authenticity.

Can you share extra in regards to the thought of utilizing video games as historic preservation?

DP: It’s actually about making historical past accessible. Many historians and scientists work on historic preservation in fact. There are additionally loads of very severe documentaries, however they don’t have the identical instruments, the identical artistic imaginative and prescient, and naturally not the identical objectives because the videogames business. By rebuilding historical past in our worlds, we make them accessible to a a lot bigger public. And once we associate with consultants of their discipline, we will additionally assist them understand their imaginative and prescient and innovate rapidly at an reasonably priced value.

For instance, when Ubisoft launched Far Cry Primal, we recreated a prehistoric period. True to its franchise, Far Cry is a first-person shooter journey recreation, not a historical past recreation per se, however as a result of the setting was prehistory, the event workforce labored carefully with scientific and historians. The workforce rendered a tremendous world with prehistoric animals, environments and every day life. As the sport was stay, a global documentary workforce reached out to us to see if they might use imagery from Far Cry Primal of their documentary in regards to the position of prehistoric ladies. This collaboration with the documentary workforce in the end resulted in about 20 minutes of footage from the sport being included into the ultimate documentary. Thanks to our pictures, we will immerse and have interaction individuals way over the data alone can obtain. And the info speaks for itself: documentaries that includes sturdy visuals to help the scientific narrative attain a broader and much more various viewers – a lot in order that we have now collaborated on a number of initiatives with main documentary producers.

And then there are some methods the place our impression in historical past preservation and illustration aligned with the consultants. In the case of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is ready in Ancient Greece, we rendered the statues and websites in full shade – not as you’ll see them in museums, as white marble, their unique colours misplaced to time. This consideration to historic particulars, past the standard illustration of Ancient Greece, was seen by museum curators and opened the invitation for Ubisoft to contribute to an exhibition on the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, which is the oldest museum on the earth! We contributed to an exhibition about Knossos in Greece with artifacts from the location, and we amplified the expertise by producing a movie for the exhibit using the world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to clarify how we labored with archeologists to breed Knossos because it was throughout that point in historical past.

Partnering With Museums

How do museum partnerships come about?

DP: Sometimes it’s simply assembly individuals by attending cultural business occasions or by of us who’ve seen our initiatives and need to embody them of their displays and initiatives. Then, since you’ve already labored with one group on this historic and cultural context, the work good points visibility and extra teams are excited about working with us. Most individuals in “traditional culture” are very open to working with videogames.

The first undertaking I labored on took place once I was in contact with a small startup who was conducting preservation work by photogrammetry, particularly within the Middle East. They talked about they’d an exhibit arising on the Arab World Institute about age-old cities like Mosul, Palmyra, and Aleppo, they usually requested if we wished to be a part of it. I had them ship me one in every of their fashions, and had my workforce put it into VR, and all of a sudden we had been in a tunnel of an Assyrian temple in Mosul. It felt so true, it was unbelievable! So, we determined to develop a full immersive VR expertise as a part of the exhibit.

Another instance was once we labored with the Chateau de Versailles and created an augmented actuality expertise that introduced the Rabbids into the gardens of Versailles. As a option to partaking visiting youngsters, guests can play with the Rabbids by this app on their telephones and be taught rather a lot about Versailles, the fountain, the gardens, et cetera. A pair weeks after the app was made out there, the top at Versailles confessed she was criticized for letting the Rabbids into Versailles, however she was glad she did it and noticed the worth of partaking households into the go to otherwise. There are individuals able to take the chance, they belief us to do a superb job, and we belief them on location or scientific elements they need to herald, and that makes the partnership worthwhile for each events and long-lasting. We did one other collaboration the place we introduced Versailles into Just Dance 2024, so the entire world can now dance the minuet on baroque music 400 years after it was created.

It’s humorous as a result of all these items we do with museums are referred to as hybridization, which is outlined as an inconceivable marriage between two issues. As the top of Versailles put it, a profitable hybridization is an inconceivable marriage whose result’s so apparent that everybody says “how did we not think of this before?”

Check out among the museum collaborations under: