The makers’ attention to historical detail and storytelling intrigues me. I’ve stumbled across them a couple of times in recent sightseeing: first as a display room within the Ashmolean’s excellent exhibition on ancient Knossos, and again as I was preparing to visit Monteriggione in Tuscany. The picturesque Italian fortress is the setting for the second game in the series. Ancient Crete turns up in the 11th. Those connections with my life were almost accidental. Now gaming company Ubisoft has made a full foray into the world of tourism, creating 878 AD, an immersive Anglo-Saxon experience in my local cathedral town of Winchester. They worked in partnership with the Hampshire Cultural Trust and Sugar Creative.
While I was slightly disappointed with my visit … more on the drawbacks later … overall I think this is a magnificent way to get people excited about history. Particularly one of England’s lesser-known time periods. I’d love to see similar attractions spreading across the country. It’s a particularly good introduction for children; I’d start here with any visitor to Winchester under 18.
It’s also a brilliant use of the excess retail space that’s plaguing most town centres in the UK. Functionally, it’s simply a bit of set design and video projection, some computer screens and display cases, information boards and a few costumed hosts injected into vacant space in a modern shopping mall. With the actual history sprawling just outside, 878 AD doesn’t need to be in a fancy building. It gives people an introduction and then sends them off with an interactive app to explore the reality.
The “experience” invitees you to insert yourself into the world of King Alfred and his battles against the Vikings. You join him after he’s hidden in the marshes and burned those pesky cakes (something many people seem to remember even if they don’t have a clue about the rest of his story) but before the climactic Battle of Edington in May of 878 (something few beyond fans of The Last Kingdom will know about). The citizens of Winchester are waiting anxiously for news, having waved most of their able-bodied men away.
That set-up creates an excellent excuse to then wander around Anglo-Saxon Winchester, learning about the people, their lives and the specifics of the city at the time. At one end of the long gallery two large walls form a corner onto which panning shots of the city from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla run. The graphics are both impressive and built with respectable amounts of historic research. (A small side gallery offers screens where you can explore details of how they built the game itself.) Other digital displays use the graphics as a starting point to explore different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. There are display cases with some real historical artefacts but it’s mostly re-creations.
Strip away the fiction of time travel and it’s a fairly straightforward introduction to the Anglo-Saxons. If you want to see proper “stuff” from the time period, you’d be better served getting to the British Museum to stare down the helmet from the Sutton Hoo burial ship and the other goodies in Room 41. But it’s fun, and the fiction of the pre-battle tension gives the displays a relevance you’d miss if you just walked into a museum.
You also have the role-playing support staff to help interpret while keeping up the fiction. They’re very good at staying in character. Ask them about the Romans, for example, and they’ll explain that while there are ruins scattered about town that they often plunder for building material, few outside the nobility know much about the people who left them. There are regular story telling sessions where staff members … aka 9th century residents of Winchester … dive deeper into the action and get the audience involved. Inviting all the children to form a shield wall, complete with pint-sized shields, is an inspired way to get them having fun while teaching a real lesson about how battles of the time were fought.
You end up in a small theatre where the film catches you up on the results at Edington. A resounding success for Alfred, his Viking opponent agreeing to convert to Christianity and respect borders, and the cornerstone of a united England laid. It’s well done. Patriotic and inspiring without being corny, informative enough so even the most historically ignorant can’t leave without grasping why there’s a bloody huge statue of Alfred at the top of the High Street.
But that’s only half of your experience. From here you download an app and hit the streets. There are games to play and puzzles to solve, along with excellent information about what you’re looking at. I was particularly fond of the bits where your phone super-imposes a graphic (from the game, naturally) of what was there in the 9th century over what you’re looking at today. The app takes you on a circular walk that will be familiar to locals, but offers new perspectives. It has the potential to elevate what you experienced in the mall into something really great. If your tech works.
One suspects that the game designers, used to the snazzy hardware and network set-ups of the average Assassin’s Creed player, didn’t think hard enough about the mobile experience. The WiFi inside 878 AD and the shopping mall that houses it isn’t good enough for easy downloads; only one of our group of three managed to get the app onto her phone. But her coverage then wasn’t good enough to follow us around the suggested route. After multiple frustrations we finally ended up at the cathedral when the app stubbornly insisted we were at the Bishop’s Palace. The mobile experience only works if you’re standing where the app wants you to be. So we gave up. This is one of those tickets that’s good for a year, however, so I downloaded the app onto my own phone once I got home and plan to try it again sometime in the near future.
So … five stars for fun, for kid appeal and for design. What were the drawbacks, other than tech?
If you have a basic grounding in the Anglo-Saxons already, you’re not going to learn much. And, honestly, I’m not talking about people who’d make 9th century England their specialist subject on Mastermind. If you watched The Last Kingdom and had a brief nose around the Anglo-Saxon galleries at either the British Museum or the Ashmolean, everything here is going to be familiar territory.
One of my companions, who is unusually well-versed on the topic, was particularly irked that almost all of the illustrated figures depicted in the displays were swarthy brunettes, looking more like stereotypical Southern Europeans than the famously broad, blonde and Germanic Angles and Saxons. I hadn’t noticed it but once he pointed it out it was quite irritating. All we could think of was that ethnically Vikings and Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have looked that different, but this is entertainment, so did they alter the look of the latter to create dramatic contrast? All those long dead Aelfstans, Æðelfriðs and Eadwulfs must be rolling in their graves.
But that’s only half of your experience. From here you download an app and hit the streets. There are games to play and puzzles to solve, along with excellent information about what you’re looking at. I was particularly fond of the bits where your phone super-imposes a graphic (from the game, naturally) of what was there in the 9th century over what you’re looking at today. The app takes you on a circular walk that will be familiar to locals, but offers new perspectives. It has the potential to elevate what you experienced in the mall into something really great. If your tech works.
One suspects that the game designers, used to the snazzy hardware and network set-ups of the average Assassin’s Creed player, didn’t think hard enough about the mobile experience. The WiFi inside 878 AD and the shopping mall that houses it isn’t good enough for easy downloads; only one of our group of three managed to get the app onto her phone. But her coverage then wasn’t good enough to follow us around the suggested route. After multiple frustrations we finally ended up at the cathedral when the app stubbornly insisted we were at the Bishop’s Palace. The mobile experience only works if you’re standing where the app wants you to be. So we gave up. This is one of those tickets that’s good for a year, however, so I downloaded the app onto my own phone once I got home and plan to try it again sometime in the near future.
So … five stars for fun, for kid appeal and for design. What were the drawbacks, other than tech?
If you have a basic grounding in the Anglo-Saxons already, you’re not going to learn much. And, honestly, I’m not talking about people who’d make 9th century England their specialist subject on Mastermind. If you watched The Last Kingdom and had a brief nose around the Anglo-Saxon galleries at either the British Museum or the Ashmolean, everything here is going to be familiar territory.
One of my companions, who is unusually well-versed on the topic, was particularly irked that almost all of the illustrated figures depicted in the displays were swarthy brunettes, looking more like stereotypical Southern Europeans than the famously broad, blonde and Germanic Angles and Saxons. I hadn’t noticed it but once he pointed it out it was quite irritating. All we could think of was that ethnically Vikings and Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have looked that different, but this is entertainment, so did they alter the look of the latter to create dramatic contrast? All those long dead Aelfstans, Æðelfriðs and Eadwulfs must be rolling in their graves.
My biggest frustration, however, is that the marketing probably promised more than 878 AD delivered. Words like “experience” and “digital”, combined with the creativity of Ubisoft and some great graphics in their ad campaign left me expecting something a lot more high tech. There were a lot more text-heavy information panels than I was expecting from the positioning. I thought I might be donning a virtual reality headset, walking through projections or at least getting to play some gamified learning experiences. That may be the intention of the app, but it’s certainly not what you get inside part one.
It is, however, early days. My post-visit research suggests this was a trial, and success could lead to bigger and better things. The experience has won creative and tourism awards. There was a steady stream of people coming through on the wet Sunday we decided to check it out. As someone who’s worked in Tech for my whole career, I know the high-end experience I imagined would have cost many times more than what they stood up here. Maybe something more sophisticated is to come. I’d love to see Winchester end up with an Anglo-Saxon version of the Jorvik Viking Experience in York.
Meanwhile, if I win the lottery I will be the benefactor behind a Jane Austen experience to fill up some retail space in the Basingstoke’s struggling Festival Place. Though I’m not sure there’s a logical computer gaming partner for that one. Assassin’s Creed: The Bennet Sisters seems unlikely. But if Pride and Prejudice with Zombies can work, who knows?
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