Assassins Creed 3 Liberation

Find pieces of promotional material related to Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. These may include the following:

• Posters

• Banner ads

• Assassins Creed is oversaturated.

Pen Portrait

Name: Jack

Age: 15

Gender: Male

Class: Working

Lifestyle: At secondary school, average student, goes out with friends occasionally, no part time job, plays U16's football.

Cultural Capital: low social status, not very cultured.

• There are certain amounts of merchandise that appeal to a niche audience.

• Henry Jenkins - Fandom.

• Ubisoft created a Youtube channel to advertise the trailer.

• Ubisoft use social media to advertise the game.

• Your attitude towards other people changes if you play too many videogames.

• You become stupid if you play too many videogames.

• You may become antisocial if you play too many videogames.

• Hypodermic Needle - Is not a true theory because people who play videogames do not go out and kill people and are ordinary people.

• There is a representation and a cultivation of the theory that video games are violent and that violence is the only way to get anywhere in a the majority of videogames.

• Doom caused a Moral Panic - where an event is over exaggerated in the media.

• Media pushes something out of nothing.

• Reception Theory - encoding and decoding model.

• Encoding - the producer places a message or an ideology into a product.

• Decoding - the consumer identifies and takes on board the ideology of the product.

• Preferred Reading - agreement with the ideology.

• Negotiated Reading - you choose what to believe.

• Oppositional Reading - you completely reject the ideology.

• Aberrant Reading - where you don't understand the ideology at all.

• Assassins Creed 3 Liberation with Reception Theory

• Preferred / Dominant Reading
• Violence is acceptable.
• There is a binary opposition between good and bad people.
• Women can be violent.
• Gender equality.
• Celebration of French history and culture.
• Suppressed their french ideologies so the product can target a larger audience.
• Anti-Slavery ideologies within Assassins Creed 3 Liberation.
• Intertextual reference to Django Unchained.
• The preferred reading is that violence is acceptable as we want to save our main character and give her freedom.

• Negotiated Reading
• They may agree with the anti-slavery message but they do not agree with the violence therefore the game is then boring and no fun.
• They may only play the game to kill people so they find the narrative boring and do not agree so they skip all the story and just go round killing people which gives no meaning to the media product.

• Oppositional Reading
• The oppositional reading is that violence doesn't solve problems and if the audience believe this then they will find the game boring and not enjoyable.

• Multiple interpretations, Multiple experiences

• Lore - deeper story that isn't apparent in a videogame.

• Environmental Storytelling - you get the story not from cutscenes but from other elements (talking to characters, descriptions of items) - Dark Souls 3

• Does a videogame have to be fun?

• The Silver Case: The 25th Ward (Grasshopper Manufacture, 2018)

• The silver case series are visual novels or text based adventure games. However, they are highly atypical of the genre, with little characterisation, a deliberately difficult 

• This game is atypical
• It doesn't let you choose anything.
• No characterisation.
• A long build up until any action.
• Lack of any structure.
• Lack of gameplay.
• Not even a videogame.
• Conversations were odd.
• No type of continuity at all.
• Horrible sound with the typewriting noise, it is an identifying factor and they do not care about what the audience think.
• The audience are positioned in a way where they don't know what's going on.
• The intended response is to make you not want to play the game anymore, almost as if it is challenging you to stick through it.
• The extensive use of strong language.

• Jenkins - Fandom

• Fandom refers to a particularly organised and motivated audience of a certain media producer franchise.

• Unlike the generic audience or the classic spectator, fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.

• Fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully intended by the media producers ('textual poaching'). Examples of this may manifest in conventions, fan fiction and so on.

• Manifestations of Fandom
• Main benefits of fandom is that it improves social interaction, and people are allowed to come together to socialise about their interests.