Times They Are A-Changin’? Evolving Representations of Women in the Assassin's Creed Franchise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study analyzes representations of women—protagonists and NPCs—in Assassińs Creed games between 2007 and 2024, to explore the impact of the last decades’ work for gender rights on the English language AAA game industry. Through close playing, we explore game bodies with attention to the surface level of narrative, graphics, sound, and underlying mechanics of actions and reactions. Through netnography, we add promotional material, retail sites, and social movements of importance to the analysis. Results show four eras for female protagonists: nonexistent, protagonists in side games, defined by their male coprotagonists, and choose your gender. Over the 17 years studied, women are more present, and NPCs are more complex. Though female protagonists remain sidelined or shallow representations as female skins on male characters. We discuss how discrepancies and conflicts between artistic visions, marketing, and brand choices impact how women are represented, and the impact on representation by external cultural events, for example Gamergate/Metoo, during this period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".