Recently Dan and I celebrated our third anniversary with a Chinese takeaway, a box set of the first season of The Closer and an Xbox 360. Needless to say, we have not left the house since and our relationship is heading rapidly towards the rocks because I have had a boyfriend to play with for three years and an Xbox 360 for merely a matter of days. One of the first games we bought was Assassin's Creed, a game of such profound and overwhelming beauty that I - next generation console virgin that I am - can stare at it for hours with my mouth hanging open and drool pooling on the carpet.

We bought it in full knowledge that it came with issues - a rather incoherent plotline, a rushed ending, and so on and so forth, things that pretty much come as standard with games these days. But who cares: you got to be an assassin and, as everybody knows, assassins are as cool as ninjas, pirates and necromancers. So for the first six hours of play, I was utterly swept away by the sheer pleasure of being an assassin. The game has atmosphere out the wazoo - you can practically smell 11th century Jerusalem wafting out of your Xbox - but the thing Assassin's Creed does best and the reason it knocks the socks off pretty much any other game out there is that it make you feel awesome.



I understand there are a whole range of reasons people might want to play computer games, including for the strategic or physical challenge of it, but one of the main reasons I play games is because I want to try my hand at being something I'm not and could never be, and, if I'm meant to be awesome at it, I want to damn well be awesome. If I start a game as a humble farmer's son then I'm okay about killing rats with a garden fork until I gradually accumulate enough skills and experience to be able kill larger animals with real weaponry. But if I'm meant to be the goddamn God Of War, I don't also want to be The God Of Spaz who minces along narrow ledges like a big gay ¹ and inevitably falls to his death about two seconds later. Arthur told me a story once about a game of Hitman in which, due to a moment of abstraction on his part, Agent 47 got killed by a passing, randomly generated car when crossing the road. It makes for an amusing story but that's the kind of incident that kills a game for me. You can't be a cold, calculating, super-efficient, uber-hitman and an object lesson about the importance of the Green Cross Code at the same time.

The thing that made me fall so passionately in love with Assassins Creed is that it establishes you as a leet assassin and then lets you feel like you genuinely are one. And by genuinely I don't mean 'confronts you with the very real moral repugnance of killing dudes for cash', I mean 'lets you leap across rooftops as fluid as quicksilver and stab people in the neck with your concealed dagger'. It's fucking brilliant, and a large part of that brilliance lies in the control system, which is beautifully intuitive. There are two modes, accessed by holding down the right trigger button: low profile (in which you perform manoeuvres that let you move through a crowded city without drawing attention to the fact you're actually a leet assassin, things like pushing people gently out of your way, blending into the crowd and stabbing people stealthily with your concealed dagger) and high profile (in which you do amazing assassin-like things such as climbing just about any piece of scenery you care to name, running up walls, leaping from tall buildings, and doing the super neck-stabby assassin move).

But the thing about the high profile climbing-and-leaping mode is that you can simply hold down the button and the character will do it all for you. You just point him in the direction you want him to go and watch him - or rather watch yourself - be awesome. There's no need to worry about making the jump or catching the ledge or getting the timing right. Unless you're completely dumb and have the poor bastard hurl himself eight thousand feet into nothingness, he'll basically skim along the rooftops with the sort of superlative grace that makes you catch your breath. It's just about the best thing ever.

My favourite part of the game is actually one of the simplest. It involves gathering intel on the surrounding landscape by climbing view points. These are basically tall buildings you scale. From a jutting promontory at the very top, the assassin drops down into a pose we dubbed "the assassin crouch" (and it looks exactly as you'd imagine) and the camera pulls back and pans round to offer a gasp-inducing sweep of the landscape. Scenery surveyed and goggled at, you can then take a leap of faith into a handily placed hay bale way below. The assassin spreads his arms like a bird about to take wing and plunges downwards, as straight as an arrow. And even though I know it's not real and even though I know if he crashes head first into the cold hard ground I can reload and even though I know there's probably some hay there to stop him turning himself to puree, it still makes my stomach flip with the sheer delight and exhileration of it. You'd think climbing buildings and jumping off them would get old after a while but, here's the thing, it never does.

I play games in a pretty lame way, so truthfully just running around the various cities and landscapes (occasionally on horseback - yay!) was enough to keep me entertained. As for the assassin missions themselves, they're fairly linear but there's plenty of other stuff going on as well so they also offer a reasonably satisfying illusion of freedom.

So. What went wrong?

The first part of any mission tends to involve investigating the victim - you can't just go stabbing people in the neck in total ignorance of their habits. Apparently. Anyway, in Jerusalem, I had to talk to an informer, a fellow assassin who recognised me and acknowledged my awesomeness, and who had managed to gather some vital information for me.

Excellent, say I, cough it up then you NPC you.

"I would be happy to give it you," he continues, "but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask for your help first."

Oh well, that's fair. I've being playing games since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I'm used to this kind of side-questy bullshit. Lay it on me.

"The thing is," he says, "my master asked me to bring him twenty flags..."

Twenty flags? Okay. Right. Whatever. Assassins must need flags for something.

"But then I was set upon by thugs..."

You're a fucking assassin dude and you got mugged in the street?! And why are flags so damn valuable in Jerusalem anyway?

"And my flags got scattered across the city. Would you able to collect them for me? But since my master is returning in 3 minutes...you must be like the wind and bring them back before he gets here."

Okay. So. What the fuck?! What the fucking fucking fuck?

I'm a leet assassin and you want me to pick up a bunch of flags you were dumb enough to drop? And, moreover, you want me to do within in a rather tight time limit? This isn't a side quest, this is fucking Crufts! It's not only tedious, it's humiliating and it's so transparently an arbitrary computer game task that I found it utterly immersion breaking. I know there are probably plenty of players it just wouldn't bother, a few who would roll their eyes and do it anyway and probably some who would find it an enjoyable challenge ... but it's pretty much ruined the game for me.

I made a couple of half-hearted attempts to do it but my will just wasn't in it and I gave in and switched off the game. I may, in fact, never turn it back on again. The problem is that most of the other in-game arbitrary tasks (for what else is a game if not a series of arbitrary tasks...) seem reasonably in-keeping with the spirit of being a leet assassin. Interrogating citizens, pick-pocketing vital documents, eavesdropping on conversations ... that's all well and good but nothing makes you feel less like a leet assassin than falling off a window ledge while attempting to pick up a lost flag within an annoying time limi to land gracelessly in a pile of outraged citizens.

Seamus Young of 'Occasionally Being Quite Insightful On the Internet' fame wrote quite a nice blog post on this theme called Do It Again Stupid which articulates very well why some people find this type of game of challenge frustrating and depressing:

The thing that annoys me with these games is that there is no fail-safe. No matter how many times you fail, no matter how badly you fail, and no matter how long you remain stuck, you are never any closer to beating the mission than you were the first time you tried. There is no system to help frustrated players along or let them skip after so many attempts. There is no consolation prize. You have no new items or stats or experience to show for your work. You're in stasis until you can jump through these hoops. It really is time wasted.

I'm not going to cover the same ground since he's already said it for me but, basically, I feel the same way. But what particularly annoys me about the inclusion of the Do It Again Stupid task in the middle of Assassin's Creed is that, as well as feeling like an arbitrary task, it also feels like arbitrary punishment. It's almost as if the designers were designing away and then stopped and said to themselves: "Hey, wait a minute, this is too much like fun." Having spent the game thus far basking in the warm glow of being a leet assassin, the sudden collectaflag quest essentially amounts to a forcible and painful reminder that I'm actually a reaction-devoid spaz sitting in my bedroom with the curtains drawn, probably wearing just my pants, and playing a computer game. It's inclusion seems to me to be a symptom of the mindset that being cool, or effective, in a game has to somehow got to be earned which surely defeats the whole point of playing. I mean, don't we all get enough of that in real life?

1. For the record, I know it is Not Okay to use gay as a pejorative but, as a big gay myself, I feel I have the right.