Assassin’s Creed : Project Legacy

In September 2010, Ubisoft achieved a coup with the launch of a strategy game on Facebook: Assassin’s Creed: Project Legacy, aiming to prepare the way for the arrival of Brotherhood, the saga’s third console game. The game offers web-users the opportunity to synchronise their Facebook and Uplay accounts.

Using this synchronisation, a bonus system interlinks the gaming experience of both games: playing Project Legacy, the web-user gains experience and money that can be transferred to the console game. Similarly, playing the console game gives the web-user the opportunity to unlock 25 exclusive missions in Legacy.

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Assassin’s Creed : Aquilus

The second volume of the Assassin’s Creed graphic novel series, an integral part of the campaign preceding the launch of Brotherhood, came out in November 2010. Writer Eric Corbeyran and artist Djillali Defali, who created the first volume in 2009, return to the story of Desmond to recount the next chapter. Entitled Aquilus, the graphic novel presents events which take place after Assassin’s Creed II, leading to the search for an artefact with great unknown potential.

Assassin’s Creed : Ascendance : a short animated film

Created by UbiWorkshop, the animated short Assassin’s Creed: Ascendance was released in November 2010. The animated adventure, which was produced and developed by Ubisoft Montréal, was available on Xbox Live, PlayStation Store and iTunes for around 2 Euros. The short film was designed to fill in the narrative gaps between Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Plots, betrayals and assassinations… The film brings together all the ingredients behind the series’ success, with a focus on the irresistible rise of Cesare Borgia and Ezio’s role behind the scenes.

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According to Louis-Pierre Pharand, director of UbiWorkshop, Ascendance was a profitable exercise.  “Even today it’s in the top twenty short films sold on iTunes,” confirms the film’s producer.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood: becoming the perfect assassin in “multiplayer” and “training-ground” modes

Released in November 2010, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is a direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed II. Surprisingly, while Wired reviewed this new version as a novelty-free retread of the previous title, it was also awarded best video game scenario by the Writers Guild of America in the same year.

In this instalment, Desmond is again controlling Ezio, and the player is called on to explore Renaissance Rome, a city under the thumb of the infamous Borgias. Ezio re-forms the ancient Order of Assassins, recruiting opponents to the Borgias’ power, and together they work to confound the actions of the corrupt family.

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On the gameplay side, Brotherhood brings two significant improvements to the saga: multiplayer mode and a training environment to become the perfect assassin.

Developed by Ubisoft Annecy, multiplayer offers several playing modes, based on the solo dynamics. So, depending on mission aims, the player may have to assassinate other players, or become defenceless prey with no option but to hide. This particular mode received strong criticism from the Wired reviewer, who was, however, impressed with “Manhunt” mode, where the player can work as part of a team, with other online players.

In less than a week, Brotherhood sold over a million copies in Europe, making it the fastest selling Ubisoft game ever on the continent. In May 2011 the games developer announced that this third episode in the Assassin’s Creed saga had sold over 8 million copies.

Assassin’s Creed : The Fall

At the end of 2010, the assassins’ saga attracted a major US comic publisher! The Fall is a series of three Assassin’s Creed comics published by DC Comics, where we follow the adventures of a Russian assassin and his descendant. Published in the US and the UK, the series steps away from the characters we have met so far in the saga.

In Russia in 1888, Nikolai is a member of the Russian order of Assassins, who we meet at the start of his new mission: to assassinate Tsar Alexander III and retrieve a mysterious artefact. As with the games, the reader also follows the story of Nikolai’s descendant in modern day America…

According to Cinecomics.fr, the series contains “excellent revelations and a taut and well-developed plotline, alternating between 1888 and 1998 in a perfect rhythm.”

In the Around the Transmedia World interview series, Louis-Pierre Pharand, transmedia producer and director of UbiWorkshop, adds some extra insight into this transmedia approach to the franchise:

“Whatever the medium, we never tell the story of the game: that would be cross-media. With transmedia we open up a new narrative avenue within the brand, which is connected to the brand and respects the parameters of the brand, but is entirely independent, a stand-alone product which will give someone who doesn’t play the video game an excellent experience within the given medium. We also call it an entry point into the brand.”

That’s certainly what has been achieved with The Fall, which can be read, understood and enjoyed without ever having played one of the games. The comic book remains within the framework of the brand, without becoming a derivative product or a mere marketing tool.

For more details, why not listen to what series’ creators Karl Kerschl and Cameron Stewart have to say, talking in this video about how they created a comic book that contributes to expanding and enhancing the game’s world.

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Assassin’s Creed: Oliver Bowden’s novels

The writing may be excellent, but Oliver Bowden’s series of linked novels is above all a “novelisation” of the games, a common phenomenon in the video game industry. By remaining faithful to the plotlines of the games, these books bring little in the way of new insight, making them crossmedia rather than transmedia.

Nevertheless, enthusiasts have been able to appreciate this opportunity to get to know the characters better, to learn more about “their thoughts, feelings, fears, pains and hopes… a worthwhile addition to the video game, certainly enjoyable.”

Assassin’s Creed: The Secret Crusade is the third book in the series, published in June 2011. Bowden plunges the reader into the childhood of Altaïr, hero of the first video game; the narrator is none other than Niccolo Polo, father of Marco Polo and… a member of the Brotherhood of Assassins, tracked down by Ezio in Revelations, the latest game in the series.

So while part of the book faithfully follows the events of the first game, The Secret Crusade moves away from it to successfully link to an additional storyline. Fans of the series were therefore able to detect hints in the book of the premise of Revelations, launched a few months later.

Assassin’s Creed : Embers

Released on Xbox Live, PlayStation Store and UbiShop, a few days after the publication of the comic book Assassin’s Creed: Accipiter, Embers is a 22 minute animated film and an epilogue to Ezio’s story.

According to Louis-Pierre Pharand, Embers was “produced in a way that is entirely unique and different from usual production methods. We reused the game environments as well as the characters, animations and models, pulling them together within a more traditional pipeline of linking animations and images. We took our material from inside the game!”

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The production technique may be interesting, but can Embers reach a public beyond the fans of the game series? What if, by dabbling in animated production, expectations are raised even higher? Reactions to its premiere screening at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma provide a good indication of the sort of debate this kind of ambition can provoke.

What next?

Assassin’s Creed Revelations is now on sale, and like its predecessors, provoking plenty of reaction. Whether from hardcore gamers or fans of the game’s world, opinions will differ, and if one chapter of the saga is now complete, another will surely follow, and with it, a new departure resolutely anticipated by the most demanding.

Meanwhile, we can wind up this analysis with a promise for the future: Variety has announced that Sony is hoping to adapt the Assassin’s Creed universe into a film franchise. Crossmedia? Transmedia? We’ll just have to wait and see!

“Authentic in All Caps” The Story:

The project’s website presents the story as a dark investigation between two worlds: “An Underworld gambling philosopher desperately trying to earn a living in the Overworld as an autopsy pathologist takes on a bet to find the meaning of death. Despite help from her part-time Time Traveling Assistant, she finds her investigation upsets fellow Gambling Philosophers, Ticket Inspectors, Artist Assassins and the Quantum Physicists’ Organized Crime Boss. Ultimately, her inability to fit in with either the Overworld or the Underworld makes everyone involved want to kill her.”

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Christy Dena was kind enough to answer our questions and to give us special insights into the project’s creation, without spoiling your future experience of “Authentic in All Caps”:

How would you qualify Authentic in All Caps? Is it a new form of entertainment?

It actually is a new form of entertainment! This is surprising, since new things are quite rare and publicity spin usually claims a project is new when it is not. But I have researched for a long time to find out if anyone has ever created a project where characters guide you via audio across websites, and I haven’t found a single one. Many people have created alternate reality games, where fictional websites are created and the players need to traverse the web to find them. I’ll be doing that. And many people have created audio-driven street games, where characters guide players through streets via audio. I’ll be doing that, but across the web. So it really is a new form of entertainment, and a new way of navigating and experiencing the web.

Were you inspired by your research in the transmedia field?

I was inspired by my research and work in the transmedia field, and beyond. The design of this project is based on my research insights into the way people respond to complexity, and the role media plays in that experience. It is also based on my work as an experience designer, writer and producer on transmedia projects – both alternate reality games and the expansion of films, TV shows, games and theatre. I’ve learnt a lot over these past eight years, and I am keen to act on them in an independent setting. I’m also inspired by my experiences with and excursions into a variety of artforms and interests: animation, pervasive gaming, experience design, music, emotions, performance, philosophy, mortality, ritual, and my ongoing attempts to feel at home in this world.

What transmedia rules or practices did you apply in the creation of your project?

There are some things I’m utilising that have worked for me and for others in the past, and there are some things I’m not utilising even though they appear to have worked for others in the past. I’m drawing on a variety of things I’ve learnt regarding audience/player behaviour whether they have been enacted before for others or not. These include accessibility, simplicity that encourages mastery, “beauty”, pacing, and so on. Creating creative projects, and especially the role of a director, requires making decisions all the time. Nothing happens as you intend it and so you continually have to figure out ways to reach your vision through a different path. This sometimes means letting some things go.

Will the social networks play a role in the plot?

I cannot confirm what social networks we’ll use just yet (as I’m still doing the writing and design and I don’t want to reveal some). But at the moment we are using Facebook and Twitter (or networks that look like them). Social networks play a role in grounding the characters in this world, and also enabling the audience/players to communicate with them and contribute to the greater storyworld.
I’ve read that the user’s input can influence the story? How exactly did you imagined that flexibility of the script?

User input is a very tricky proposition at any time, and it is even more complicated in this project. This is because the project is designed to be released and experienced in real-time first (like a traditional ARG unfolds live), but then once that live unfolding happens the project becomes automated. This means anyone can experience the world at anytime (if is not a one-off event), but it does create a lot of challenging design issues. I’m using a mix of human response and automation to achieve this. And in the end, it is in some ways the creation of two projects: one that is live and one that is replayable.

What exactly do you mean by « interactive with the website »? What kind of quest or tasks would the users perform?  

The experience is designed to encourage activity in a way that is easy and rewarding. The audio (and sometimes visuals) give in-story calls to action to encourage clicking on the websites and across websites. It is not quest or task-heavy at all, but there are things to do both during the playing of the audio and after.

What can we expect from this project presented as “playful, reactive, explorable?”

Authentic in All Caps is explorable, ever expanding, reactive, playful, and replayable. What explorable means, is there are things you can take your time discovering yourself if you wish (like other websites, characters, sub-plots). It is ever-expanding, which means it is designed to keep growing during its live launch and afterwards, by our own actions as creators and by the actions of players. The world is reactive to the actions of players, in that there are certain things that the players do that will cause a response and can permanently change the world. When I say it is also a playful world, I’m referring to the fun things you can do of your own choice with little rules attached to them. And finally, Authentic in All Caps is a project you can experience more than once and people can enter at any time…which I call replayable!

After a digital marketing action open onto the whole world, Pottermore opened its doors, as a preview, for only one million diligent fans who earned their virtual place in the site’s community. For 7 days, the Internet users answered riddles on the site to find “the magic feather”: the virtual object that opened their access to the internet portal.

The search for the “magic feather”

The riddles remain anchored in the universe of the book. An element that once again emphasizes the target of this operation: Harry Potter initiates. Here is, for example, the first question: “How many types of owls are on the sign of “The Owl Kingdom” shop? Multiply this number by 49 to get the answer…”. If you can answer this question (without cheating with a search engine) you are indeed part of the little sorcerer’s community! We can therefore assume that the goal of this operation is to identify and value the most active members of this global community.

Creative Commons Licenses are born from the General Public Licenses (GPL) imagined by Richard Stallman, a researcher at MIT in Boston. By operating a free cession of rights for works registered under this license by the author to any user, Creative Commons Licenses want to offer a legal framework to share content created by the Internet revolution. After Free Software Licenses, Creative Commons Licenses have been met with great success on the web given the numerous criticisms of Internet users towards intellectual property rights, judged as too exclusive, too numerous, too heavy for a digital universe. It’s true that the efficiency of our legal systems is heavily compromised by the ease of reproduction of works on the Internet, with the numerous ways of exchanging, sharing and transferring data and documents. How do these licenses compare to classic contractual relations and what is their relationship with intellectual property rights?

The mechanism

Creative Commons licenses want to take advantage of this ease to exchange by offering a simple legal tool, which guarantees both a free circulation of the works on the Internet, but also the protection of the authors’ rights. The fundamental characteristic of these licenses is their modular aspect. The vulgarization and simplification work, namely through the use of pictograms, make them accessible to all users, who, as long as they respect the exploitation conditions of the work, can exchange it, duplicate it, change it or even exploit it commercially. These licenses allow creators to easily share their work and users to use them without having to previously contact the creator to ask for his authorization.

Any type of work, as long as it’s original, can be concerned. Authors choose the most suited contract for the distribution of their work among several types of contracts offered by the Creative Commons Foundation. The Creative Common licenses define the facts and the conditions under which the free use of the work is authorized.

In France, the author has the choice between six licenses:

-          “Attribution” license

-          “Attribution – No Derivs” license

-          “Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivs” license

-          “Attribution – Non Commercial” license

-          “Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike” license

-          “Attribution – Share Alike” license

This way, the author can agree to the duplication of their work with derivatives or share alike or on the contrary, forbid any changes. He can also authorize the commercial use or on the contrary, forbid it, or allow the distribution under the same conditions, all these different options can be combined as long as the author is always credited.

Creative Commons and authors’ rights

The system established by the Creative Commons Licenses cannot ignore French intellectual property rights. Yet, the very principle of these licenses is a paradox and a disruption of French copyright. Whereas copyrights are exclusive rights that the owner trades and sells, licenses aim to use authors’ rights to favor sharing and exchange and lead to a free circulation of the work.

This reversal is a “re-structuring” of authors’ rights and encounters some difficulties in terms of the legality of these licenses. First of all the term “license” is not recognized by the “Intellectual Property Code”. The only contractual mechanism recognized by literary and artistic property is cession (L. 122-7, L. 131-3 du CPI). The latter is defined in terms of length and territories, contrary to free licenses which are usually defined by the lack of timing and where the object of the contract goes further than what the law permits since it gives a non exclusive exploitation authorization, with the possibility of changing the work and redistributing it.

The work of the author registered under Creative Commons Licenses remains ruled by the Intellectual Property Code. The moral right, an inalienable right of the public order, which the author cannot give up, still binds the users of the work. The outcome is that a contract where an author would completely give up his attribution right would be worthless. Consequently, since the second 2.0 version of the Creative Commons Licenses, “attribution” has become an essential condition of Creative Commons Licenses, in conformity with French authors’ rights.

Furthermore, French law does not recognize the general cession of rights or the notion or “royalty free”. Consequently, contracts that allow a cession of rights for all forms of exploitations, all media, ad vitam aeternam and for the whole world are judged abusive and run the risk of being worthless. The reason being that they don’t clearly define the limits of the cession of authors’ rights as described in article L 131-3 of the Intellectual Property Code.

This question is a good illustration of the difficulties that these licenses met when transposed to the existing French legislation, especially in terms of moral rights.

However, Creative Commons Licenses do try to conform to the formality of literary and artistic rights contract cessions as described in article L 131-3 of the Intellectual Property Code. They thus have to mention each right yielded (specifically if the cession is with regards to a representation, reproduction or translation right) and limit its territory, its destination, the location and duration of the exploitation (which must necessarily be determined and limited in time). The protection of the work through the Creative Commons License and its exploitation duration therefore faithfully conform to the Intellectual Property Code. The territory, for the whole world, is also identified and copied on French law.

Furthermore, regarding free cession, article L 122-7 of the Intellectual Property Code says that “the right of representation and the right of reproduction are accessible for free or at a cost” and article 122-7-1 specifies that “the author is free to make his work available to the public for free, provided the approval of eventual coauthors and those of other parties involved as well as with respect to other agreements that he has entered.” These dispositions were specifically inserted into our legislation to take into account “free” licenses.

However, while jurisprudence condemns contracts that don’t allow serious remuneration for the authors based on article L.131-4 of the Intellectual Property Code, doctrine and jurisprudence admit its legality within the framework of article L.122-7, when the author makes his work available in a free and voluntary manner in exchange for the publicity seeked through an increased distribution of the work. Finally, it’s unlikely that a judge would consider a free cession through licenses allowing a commercial exploitation of the work, legal.

But the main conflict between authors’ rights and Creative Commons Licenses resides in the principles of moral rights. The latter is of public order, inalienable, imprescriptible and intangible, making it impossible for the author to give it up. With this regard, the question of the validity of licenses, whose main interest is to authorize derivatives of the work, is highlighted.

It applies first and foremost with regards to the right of respect of the work listed in article L212-1 of the Intellectual Property Code, thanks to which the author can oppose any changes that may distort his work. In a context such as that of free licenses, how can the author evaluate the change made to his work and at which moment can he decide that it impedes on his right to the respect of his work? A tentative answer to this might however be in vain since the right of respect of a work can be an obstacle to such an authorization. The principle of inalienability of the right of respect of a work, a principle of public order, was recalled by the French Supreme Court of Judicature according to which it “opposed itself to the fact that an author abandon to the transferee, in a preliminary and general way, the exclusive appreciation of the use, distribution, adaptation, withdrawal, adjunction and changes to which the latter might choose to proceed”. Consequently, only ratifications are valid, meaning approved abdications with full knowledge of the subsequent consequences. It’s logical not to conceive that the author would accept changes to his work without prior knowledge of what they might be. The obstacle of the right of respect of a work submitted to common authors’ rights therefore runs the risk of questioning the legitimacy of Creative Commons Licenses. However, the fact that an author might authorize changes in advance is not equivalent to a renunciation of the right of respect of a work since, in the hypothesis where the change would alienate or misrepresent the original work, a recourse based on the right of respect in case of prejudice is still possible.

In conclusion, despite the efforts of the Creative Commons Licenses writers, on the one hand, and by French law, on the other, compatibility problems remain regarding Creative Commons Licenses anticipating the possibilities of changing a work or using it commercially. If Creative Commons Licenses are an efficient tool to create a framework for the free sharing of work, all commercial exploitation will not be able to forgo the use of classic cession contracts.

Article initially published on avocat-l.com