Watching University Challenge a while back, Jeremy Paxman was berating students who spent their time playing video games. That kind of behaviour can alienate people and exhibits narrow-mindedness. I wonder whether he thought that Horrible Histories was a waste of time because it was 'silly'.
I've noticed, since then, that there have been a few questions on University Challenge that have referred to video games. Quite rightly, too. There is a skill to programming games and an incredible amount of research goes into preparing for some storylines. For instance, were you aware that, following the fire that virtually destroyed the Notre Dame, the makers of Assassins Creed offered their services to help with the rebuild?
My son left school with an interest (but not a useful qualification) in History, despite his teacher's attempts to put him off, and he has continued to build on that interest. Games like Assassins Creed helped to fuel this. They have fairly accurately covered many well-known as well as little-known facts over several decades and various locations, such as the Crusades, the French Revolution, Vikings and the Italian Renaissance to name a few. In fact, take a look at this feature from The Gamer.
I'm not a gamer but the related stories that are included with the gameplay can be really interesting. I'm also fascinated by some of the games' fans - see a previous post about Assassins Creed Parkour.
My biggest difficulty with Assassins Creed is where to place the apostrophe. Ubisoft uses Assassin's Creed (single assassin) but I'm aware that this is a brotherhood so, if there is more than one assassin, shouldn't it be Assassins' Creed?
