Games as Historical Immersion and Preservation: Creating Fun and Plausible Worlds for Players
From Assassin’s Creed to Just Dance, Ubisoft has always focused on strong partnerships with historians, cultural experts, and museums to create immersive historical worlds in games. Deborah Papiernik, Ubisoft’s SVP of New Business, recently spoke with President of Games for Change Susanna Pollack in the breakout session Preserving Legacy: Reimagining History Through Interactive Worlds, at iicon 2026.
At Ubisoft, Papiernik and her team are a driving force behind cultivating relationships with museums and cultural experts. This culminates in two ways: connecting experts with developers for games rooted in history, such as Assassin’s Creed, and collaborating with third-parties for real-life applications of Ubisoft’s educational content including museum exhibitions, augmented reality apps, documentaries, and more.
For Papiernik, video games are the perfect medium for helping players engage with history in a new and exciting way, as well as one of the largest creative opportunities as it contains many of the pieces needed to craft an immersive world for players while still leaving room for creative liberties.
“History itself is a fantastic playground,” Papiernik says. “It has characters, it has mysteries, it has architecture, it has art, it has evolution of economy, it has pretty much everything. But at the same time, we don’t know everything about History. The further back we go, the less we know because it’s less documented.”
There are times when developers might intentionally choose to take liberties with historical representation for modern audiences. For example, the Notre-Dame cathedral in Assassin’s Creed Unity is the modern iteration of the building, not the one that was present during the French Revolution in the
