Gamecast: Assassin’s Creed and Empathy

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Assassin’s Creed is more than a game. If used correctly, it can be a tool to teach various historical events. In our podcast we play Assassin’s Creed Unity, which takes place during the French Revolution. We look at the pros and cons of using Assassin’s Creed as a teaching medium and whether or not Ubisoft created the game to teach history.

Pacifist Role-Playing Game


Lotus Dimension is a new tabletop RPG up on Kickstarter that explicitly frames the game as pacifist — they’ve removed all the combat dynamics traditionally included in such games:

“If you can’t kill it, get creative” is the first thing any novice D&D player would learn during their maiden venture into its world. Lotus Dimension is simply removing step one. If you know you can’t kill it from the beginning, what else can you do? In Lotus Dimension, that question underlies the whole game. As the Kickstarter states, it “[replaces] violence and weaponry with empathy and ingenuity.” You’re forced to work around combat, and in an adventure game like this, that mentality can completely change the way you play the game.

What possibilities do you see in games that attempt to foster empathy?