OverviewUbisoft's Assassin's Creed series is one the entertainment industry's most popular titles set in the past. With a new game released on an annual basis—each full of distinct historical places, events, and people—the series has unfolded across post-classical history, from the Levant during the Third Crusade to Victorian-era London. The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed: Origins, which entailed a massive reconstruction of Hellenistic Egypt, pushed the series even further back in time. With it, Ubisoft also launched its Discovery Tour, allowing players to explore the game's setting at their leisure and without combat. These trends continued in 2018's Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, set in Greece during the Peloponnesian War. This review discusses the narrative, world, and gameplay of the latest Assassin's Creed within the series more broadly. We provide a critical appraisal of the experience that Odyssey offers and link it to this question: in the Assassin's Creed series, do we engage in meaningful play with the past, or are we simply assassinating our way through history?

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The video game market is a big part of the current popular media landscape and is growing rapidly. Developers of video games are keen to make use of a variety of historical pasts as this provides them with recognisable themes, settings or narrative frameworks. Video games can be seen as the manifestation of experiential learning theory: they provide a unique informal learning How to cite this book chapter:

Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization “from the Stone Age to the Information Age” (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing “technologies” and “civics”—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.

As the metropole and main harbor city of a colonial, maritime empire, much of Amsterdam's development has been the direct or indirect result of colonial activities. Yet, many aspects of colonialism and its lasting entanglements were not (widely) spoken about. In response, within the cultural sphere, de-colonial engagements have arisen across various institutions and related to multiple aspects of colonialism, most prominently the topic of slavery. This paper identifies and analyzes recent examples of such de-colonial engagementse.g., the exhibition Afterlives of Slavery, the installation Blood Sugar, and the publication Words Matterwhich have created or amplified conversations about colonial pasts. It seeks to show that artists and activists are often the initiators of these challenges to existing paradigms and perspectives, but that afterwards these voices are amplified by cultural and scientific institutions, before resonating within the public sphere. The recent (2019) controversy surrounding the use of the term "Golden Age" is a case in point. Yet, despite these amplifying de-colonial conversations, there are still significant silences and absences, revealing the borders of tolerance in terms of dealing with colonialism in the contemporary. The intention is therefore also to understand how these voices are not only amplified but also potentially altered or even limited as they move from activist arenas, through cultural institutions, into the wider public eye.

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Practicing decoloniality in the museum is the myriad of approaches through which the current hooks of colonialism are being untangled from the museum institution. This chapter provides both an introduction to and an overview of the rest of this book, which is based on a conceptual framework of six aims of decolonization. This framework is coupled with practical examples from the field and around the globe. In this chapter we discuss the process of writing this book, the creation of the framework, the selection of examples, and the audience for whom this book is written.