It has done something useful for the world": how Ubisoft uses its games

For some time now, Ubisoft has been involved in the creation of educational content via its video games.

"It started with Assassin's Creed because history is probably the most rich environment to tell stories," Ubisoft's SVP of new business, Deborah Papiernik tells GamesIndustry.biz, following a stage presentation on the topic at the iicon conference.

"It has the characters, it has the architecture, it has everything. With all the research, all the homework that we do and consulting both internal experts and external historians, we have all that. We gave it back to the players through the codex in game, and through the Discovery Tours, we developed educational models based on our world."

Initially released alongside 2017's Assassin's Creed: Origins, the first Discovery Tour allowed players to explore the game's Ancient Egyptian setting. Available as a free expansion to the game or a purchasable standalone title, it has since become a staple of the franchise. Versions have been released for the Viking age (based on AC Valhalla) and Ancient Greece (based on AC Odyssey) with a standalone mobile app for touring medieval Baghdad based on AC Mirage.

Having created the experiences, Ubisoft started contacting museums with related exhibits to offer the Discovery Tour to feature alongside. "But little by little, as we got to know them, understand their needs and their challenges, we started doing other types of collaboration where we cater more precisely to their needs," says Papiernik. "Because sometimes it's not the Discovery Tour that they need but a large projection, or maybe a movie."

Even a five-minute CGI movie is very expensive for a museum to make, which lead Ubisoft to start creating digital films inside the worlds of its games. "We can produce films that correspond exactly to their needs and tell the historical, the scientific stories that they need, at a very affordable cost and quickly," Papiernik continues.

She points to the Museum of Mankind in Paris, which currently has an exhibition on mummies and the mummification process, and to which Ubisoft has contributed thanks to the wealth of research the company did for Assassin's Creed Origins.

Initially, museums were reluctant to accept Ubisoft's advances, with many feeling that "games are not that serious", but that lack of enthusiasm soon changed.

"They say it increased their visitorship by 20%."

"We've worked with the Arab World Institute in Paris, and we cooperated with them on an exhibition about Baghdad in the ninth century," Papiernik says. "There were very few objects because Baghdad was completely destroyed, but thanks to concept art, maps and videos filmed inside Assassin's Creed Mirage, we were able to create an evolving exhibition, and it was there for about a year. They say it increased their visitorship by 20%."

Ubisoft's games have also helped spawn full documentaries; the company partnered with an international co-production to use 2016's Far Cry Primal to help illustrate the lives of prehistoric women in the film Lady Sapiens. Similar to Assassin's Creed, Primal had been meticulously researched.

"We filmed tens of hours of content with them inside Far Cry Primal, and then they chose the moments that they wanted," Papiernik explains. "In the end, there was around 20 minutes of Far Cry Primal footage showing daily life – the role of women and how they were bringing in 70% of the resources of the household. For them, it's fantastic. It's affordable, it's quick, it's images that no one else has. The result is there because in France, viewership was double on that slot on TV. It was shown everywhere. It was on PBS in the US."

"For them, it's fantastic. It's affordable, it's quick, it's images that no one else has. In France, viewership doubled."

All of this is alongside other initiatives; there's a Rabbids educational app for the Garden of Versailles, and there are city-wide XR experiences detailing the Freedom Trail in Boston and the Revolutionary Trail in New York which show what those cities looked like 250 years ago using assets from Assassin's Creed 3.

"We repurpose our content to help other sectors innovate and increase engagement. We know that we can spark interest in history within the games, but we can also help other people do it differently," says Papiernik.

Despite Ubisoft's presence in this educational space, the company isn't looking to make specific or bespoke content for third parties. Asset development is solely lead by the games, says Papiernik, and the company's commitment to historical accuracy means that it captures museum-friendly content by default.

"When we worked on Assassin's Creed Mirage, the expansion Valley of Memory is about AlUla, a region in Saudi Arabia. This region is opening up for tourism. It's not well-known yet, but it's the most concentrated group of archaeologists in the world right now. As we were developing the content, we were in contact with the archaeologists, we were doing calls twice a week with them. And as they were making discoveries, they were telling us new things like: 'Oh, you need to change the name of that tomb because we just found it was a different thing.' That was fantastic."

Ubisoft's work with museums brings in a small amount of money but is not a significant business – "It's not going to change our lives," says Papiernik of the financial side – and it currently isn't designed to.

"We're doing it in such a way that this team doesn't cost anything to Ubisoft," she says. "It's also a great way for the [games] industry to be part of culture in general. We're the largest cultural industry by membership, we're also the most international, and we're rather efficient, in terms of engagement." Users are more likely to remember the game-based experiences, she says, "because it's a mix of content and interactivity and education, which makes it more memorable."

Looking forward, Papiernik wants Ubisoft to expand these kinds of initiatives around the world.

"We want to do more, especially more countries, because for the moment we've developed France and the UK," she says. "Right now, there's an exhibition at the British Museum about the Samurai, and there's a section with a video with Yasuke, the samurai in Assassin's Creed: Shadows and the curator just loves it. He was so impressed with and respectful of the work. In the US, we're starting with Boston and New York, and we want to do more. The idea is to do it in more countries because we think it's meaningful. When you go as far as educating people in museums, in a fun way, it has done something useful for the world."