Time travel to the middle ages on a Viking adventure: video game part of new Ubisoft, university partnership

MONTREAL -

If you're looking for a getaway that doesn't involve taking a lot of COVID-19 precautions --or even leaving your couch, a new video game by the makers of the Assassin’s Creed series may be just the ticket - and it’s rated ‘G.'

“We're super proud of that,” said Maxime Durand, one of several historians on Ubisoft’s payroll, and project director for the video game company’s latest release Discovery Tour: Viking Age.

“We can illustrate that we can interest people in history without even having conflicts or violence. We can really put our focus on what is rich about time periods,” said Durand.

The immersive trip through the period of the Anglo-Saxons and the Viking age is an interactive history lesson and a bit of time travel all in one.

This is the third Discovery Tour the video game house has created and it took about 18 months to develop and complete.

Like the first two videos on Ancient Greece and Egypt, the Viking theme is an offshoot of Assassin’s Creed adventures.

But whereas the earlier offerings took explorers on a colourful and detailed virtual tour, the Viking video is also a game that allows players to pursue the narrative by diving into eight different interactive quests.

You won’t find scenes of Vikings putting on a show of their pillaging prowess, however. The options are more mellow - though the images are just as rich and the musical score, just as dramatic.

“We can play as Vikings, as Thorstein and Gunnhild. Their goal is to go and sail from Norway to England to settle there and to do that they have to build a boat,” Durand explained.

Participants are invited to build alongside them and learn about Viking shipbuilding in the process for example.

“They were great navigators and this is really one of the most powerful features. They sail to Constantinople which is modern-day Istanbul and on the western side, they go as far as North America in the Atlantic and the Arctic,” Durand said.

The historians on the project stayed as true as possible to what is known about the Middle Ages, and took pains, Durand said, to “play from different perspectives.”

“We play as Vikings and we play as Anglo Saxons, the people who lived in England at that time,” Durand said, which helped ensure the varied viewpoints of say, a Viking merchant and an Anglo-Saxon monk were included.

UNIVERSITY AND VIDEO GAMING HOUSE ALLIANCE

Ubisoft also partnered with university researchers in Montreal who have created a curriculum-guide website to accompany teachers who would like to incorporate the video games and content into their lesson plans.

It’s the first time they’ve all collaborated, and the educators are now working to make all three Discovery Tour subject matter more classroom-friendly, with the video on Ancient Greece, already launched.

“I'm also a gamer myself, and I've played the Assassin's Creed series since the very first one,” said Adam Dube, an associate professor and the Associate Dean of Academic Programs in the Faculty of Education at McGill University.

Dube’s research revolves around educational games, and he said he joined Ubisoft’s project because he could see “they were taking the educational approach to this quite seriously.”

He could also see the history videos’ relevance because “teachers were using them already as learning tools,” he said, “but teachers aren't necessarily sure how to fit a game into their teaching.”

So he and his graduate students -- whom he credits with doing all the heavy lifting, created a free online guide that provides ideas and suggestions about how to use the activities in the games and “translate [them] into learning outcomes.”

“These types of experiences give us a sense of immersion in the world,” said Dube.

He said there’s a place for these types of interactive games and videos in classrooms for older students as well - even for adults.

“There tends to be less play-based learning, as we move up in the grades. We get all serious and we abandon useful tools to some extent in the name of preparing people for that really hard work,” said Dube.