Interviewed Workers and Industry Worldviews at Ubisoft Montréal's Assassin's Creed

This paper, a DiGRA 2024 study by Lars de Wildt, examines how worldviews come to be built into videogames by looking at the people and corporate processes behind Ubisoft Montréal's Assassin's Creed franchise. Its central question asks who decides to place particular worldviews into a game, and how and why they do so. The author combines cultural-sociological analysis of individual workers with political-economic analysis of the large-scale AAA production context, a pairing the paper presents as a gap in existing literature that tends to study either small independent teams or corporate structures alone.

The study draws on 22 interviews with people who worked on the franchise between its first installment in 2007 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey in 2018. Participants include nearly all Creative Directors who worked on the series, most of its Brand Team, and designers, writers, programmers, and artists, with many interviewees identified by name as expert informants rather than anonymized. The findings are supported by five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Montréal and analysis of internal and external documentation.

The author's central finding is that the franchise originated with a distinctly anti-religious, anti-dogmatic vision associated with its original creator, Patrice Désilets, but that over time the series became standardized into a codified manufacturing process. Marketing, editorial, and production teams, the paper argues, steer creative teams toward reproducing a formula: a commodified, "marketable" worldview designed to be consumed regardless of cultural background or conviction. The study presents this as an empirically grounded account of how a cultural industry successfully commodifies worldviews through its workers.