Field Museum staff member JP Brown, an avid player of video games, was taking a stroll through Assassin’s Creed Origins on a big screen television.
Brown wasn’t there to rack up his kill count or hunt collectibles in-game. I’d invited him to join me for a closer look at Origins’ Discovery Tour mode, available for free to owners of that game on PC and consoles. With it players can take in the sights of ancient Egypt through 75 fully narrated and illustrated walking tours.
So did the developer Ubisoft get it right? Absolutely, said Brown... with a few caveats.
“I really like that they’ve done with this,” Brown said. “But I’m really struggling with how many of these things I would actually walk through.
“I enjoy this because I’m really interested in mummification and it’s always fascinating to me about what people think as opposed to what we know. As a museum, our job is to try and communicate what we’re finding out to people and to make the gap between what we understand and what the public knows as small as possible.”