Post-Digital Games: The Influence of Nostalgia in Indie Games' Graphic Regimes

Frank G. Bosman's article examines how the Assassin's Creed series reinterprets Christian mythology through a rationalistic-reductionist lens, treating the games as "playable texts" and applying cultural theology and reception-history methods. Its central thesis is that the franchise recasts miracles and sacred relics as products of an extinct advanced civilization, the Isu, within a pseudoscientific "Ancient Astronauts" meta-narrative in which Templars and Assassins contend over Pieces of Eden. The analysis focuses on how this framework reshapes concepts of anthropogenesis, teleology, salvation history, and Christology, rather than on the games' commercial or industry-level dynamics.

The most significant argument concerns the series' inversion of Genesis. Assassin's Creed reads Adam and Eve's expulsion as liberation and locates the origins of the Templar-Assassin conflict in Cain, while drawing on Gnostic traditions such as Marcionism. The author highlights the in-game "Glyph #7," which connects Joseph, David, and Jesus's red garments to a Piece of Eden called the "Shroud of Eden," identified with the real-world Shroud of Turin. This identification is presented as "almost certain," though it rests on intertextual clues within the games rather than on external evidence.

The study further finds that the series engages earlier heterodox Christian ideas, including the swoon hypothesis and Docetism, as well as Islamic theology's denial of Jesus's crucifixion. Within the game's narrative, the figure Al Mualim portrays Jesus's miracles as illusions generated by Pieces of Eden. The authors conclude that the overarching narrative offers a radically immanent, rationalistic account of monotheism in which the sacred and transcendent give way to manipulation by false godheads. The article's contribution lies chiefly in this scholarly framework and its sources in religious history, Gnostic and Ismaili studies, and the Shroud debate.