Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins

Abstract

This article is an exploration of one of the bestselling single player RPGs from the Assassin's Creed series, 2017's Origins, as understood through a framework of cultural race and identity theory. This article relies on theories of identity and how we experience gameworlds as players, and how our sense of self is represented in virtual bodies. The article also considers and closely analyzes the game on its historicity—the franchise is one which is often touted as being extremely accurate, but as the article shows, there are inherent flaws and longstanding tropes which remain. This approach is an interdisciplinary one, using cultural history drawn from both an Africanist and a Classicist perspective alongside more recent theories, in particular those of Stuart Hall, to interpret the power of the immersive single player game.