X+Elevsp¢rsmål+til+historikeren


 * Nedenfor er den siste mailen jeg sendte historiker Marcello (den var lang og kjedelig, så jeg har redigert den ned litt), og svaret jeg fikk. Som du ser var han opptatt av at vi fikk spillt drapsforsøket på brødrene Medici,** **som han også har skrevet bok om****. Så langt kom vi ikke, men jeg har boka hvis noen vil låne.

Nedenfor er svar på spørsmålene gruppene stilte. Les dem, og bruk gjerne informasjonen til en siste oppdatering av deres egen wiki.**

Hi Marcello I wanted to write to you earlier, but I spent all of the easter in my "Villa" in the Norwegian mountains with no net acces. The friday before easter we had a great day playing AC2 and relating it to real Renaissance history. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to reach the murder/murder attempt of the Medici brothers, as the students had also been encouraged to explore the city, its buildings and people. If I do it again, i will try to give them even more gaming time to get there. The student's main task was to write articles on topics related to their experiences in the game world. On a basic level that would mean to copy some of the information about, say, a building from the data base, and elaborate a little bit on it using internet sources. Some of the groups, however chose topics more independently.

Towards the end of the day, they were also instructed to write one article arguing for or against the using of games in learning and they were told to come up with questions to a historian involved in the making of the game. The class is really looking forward to reading our answers to them, Marcello. Yours, Magnus

Hi Magnus, Glad you relaxed at your villa far from internet distractions. I don’t think Monteriggioni had a wireless service either… Too bad about the Pazzi Conspiracy. I took a look at the wiki links and yes, I can’t read all of it but I noticed one typo in Italian (Pallazo = Palazzo) and most importantly a reference to the assassination of the Duke of Milan, which means that they watched the lineage movie – the episode with which my book begins, so we are on a good path:)

Here are my answers to your students’ questions:

===1.Is it hard to combine reality (i.e. historical facts) and fiction,and how do you as historian manage this? Have you had disagreementswith developers who did not have the same insight into the history ofthe epoque?=== Combining facts and fictions can be fun. I am not only an historian, I’m also a storyteller, so I don’t mind mixing a bit the two – as long as it is clear when you are playing and when you are reseaching. I did not have much to do with the development of AC2 since I came into the picture a bit too late for making too many changes, though I think I influenced the decision on where and how to end the game. Now I’m consulting for the next AC episode (sorry, I cannot talk about it or they will send assassins to my door!) and I can say that I’m learning how complex the building of a game is: my main contact is the scriptwriter, but I also have to deal with the producer, the art director, the level designer – in short, any decision is the product of a complex dynamic. I can tell the writer what is utterly impossible in historical terms, but the final decision is in their hands. Sometimes it’s exhilarating and sometimes it’s frustrating.

2.Was it really as much prostitution as we see in the game (withgroups of prostitutes nearly on every corner in the city)?
Well, that’s a bit much – isn’t it? The prostitutes, who were actually called courtesans like in the game, were mostly active in Venice and in Rome (near the papal court…) but not as widely in Florence. At the time of Savonarola, the friar who is a character in the game later on, all the courtesans were driven out of Florence. But luckily Ezio helped the citizens get rid of that moralistic preacher…

3.How long time did it take to make this game?
The main writer read A LOT about the history of the period (about a year) and then they went to Italy, took a lot of pictures of the main cities, and while they were recreating them in 3D they wrote the script (which took at least another year, or more).

4.Ezios clothes look very similar to the hero of Assassins Creed 1,which took place hundreds of years earlier. is ezios clothes typicalfor the fashion of the renaissance?
No, the Assassin’s clothes are a brilliant invention of the design team. But the people walking around the cities are to the ones we see in Renaissance paintings.

5.Why did you choose the renaissance as the epoque for the game?
===6.In the game, the houses of Firenze are so close to each other thatit enables "parcour" (running on rooftops, and jumping between themand so on). Were the houses really that close to each other, and didpeople perform parcour?=== In Medieval towns like Florence the houses tended to be quite close, especially not on the main roads. However, nobody would fly like Ezio from rooftops – breaking their necks was not their favorite sport.

7.It seems like Leonardo Da Vinci is portraied in a somewhat femininway, and there are rumours about him being gay. But was he?
The classic image of Leonardo da Vinci is an old man with a big beard. It’s a drawing he made, but it’s probably a portrait of someone else, not a self-portrait. The chronology of Leo’s life is accurate (he was slightly younger that Ezio) and yes, there were rumours if not records of his being gay, but at the time bisexuality was quite common and, like in ancient Greece, sex among men was considered by the elite a somewhat noble activity. Not by the Church though – and people like friar Savonarola were preaching against it because it was “against nature”. ===8.It is probably a difficult task to ensure that all the facts anddetails of the game are historically correct. In a game like Barbienothing needs to be in accordance with reality, but a game that claimsto be "historical" has to be accurate. Both the creators of the gameand those playing it would be disappointed if other historianscritisise game elements that are not historically correct. Does thatmake the historian one of the most important persons in development ofthe game?=== No, as I said before the historian does not have power on final decisions, but with some patience he or she can influence the level of historical accuracy of the game. However, it IS a game and fiction is allowed, as long as it does not pretend to be fact.

9.Did you learn something new while working with the game?
I’m learning a lot about how games get made. I also am learning more about certain details of Renaissance life and even making some archival discoveries (I love cryptography and paleography, the science to encode and decode messages and the science to read ancient scripts) while I read or reread the original sources, to give more credibility to the characters and their more or less fictional adventures. ===10.We have tried to search for a connection between the assassins andthe renaissance, but we have not been able to find it. is the "secretsocieties" just a game element without any connection to the realrenaiccance?=== The Templars were pretty much extinct during the Renaissance (they’d been massacred centuries before, also with the help of Altair…) But plots were hatched all the time, and often involved the Church. That is the case of the Pazzi Conspiracy, on which I wrote my book.

11.Is the Auditore family real?
No, it’s fictional, but it could be real in the sense that there were families like that in Florence. Not many Florentines would have a secret room behind the fireplace, filled with armors, weapons and funny clothes – and none of them would be jumping around like Giovanni or Ezio:) ===12.Could you give a comment on the enmical relation between Auditoreand Viero de Paci? It reminds us of Romeo and Juliet: The Capulets andthe Montagues, because they seem to fight every time they meet and wehave to navigate away from them (we see them as red dots on the map)=== There was a real enmity between the Medici and the Pazzi families, rival bankers. The hatred between them had very little romantic content, unlike Romeo and Juliet’s story… Btw banking was invented by the Florentines! Check out this article: [])