Red Dead Redemption 2 is a better history game than Assassin’s Creed

pcgamesn.com:

Red Dead Redemption 2, on its surface, is not an historical game, at least, not in the same sense as Assassin’s Creed. Ubisoft’s long-running action RPG has taken an increasingly devoted interest in its various settings and time periods, an interest culminating in the addition of a dedicated Discovery Tour for both Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, in which players can explore the respective Greek and Viking-based game worlds as a kind of virtual tourist, and uncover information about landmarks, notable figures, and ancient culture.

Admittedly, there’s a well-meaning educational quality here – out of Discovery mode, the Assassin’s Creed series has developed a reputation for providing more worthwhile gaming experiences than some of its sandbox rivals, ostensibly offering an intellectual reward as well a more rote mechanical one. But the style of teaching offered by Ubisoft’s stealth sandbox is, in several ways, more shallow than that offered by Red Dead Redemption 2. The games have very different approaches to presenting history and historical themes, but one is much more successful than the other.

When I was an English teacher, I was naturally responsible for explaining good essay practice. There are a lot of rules, but one applied to all year groups – and to all essay-based subjects for that matter – and that was to keep your interpretations, either of quotes, characters, or narrative themes, very narrow, but very deep.

Taking a small part of something and exploring it at length is more interesting and more convincing than taking a truncated look at a lot of things. If you want to know what Shakespeare is trying to say in Hamlet, for (a slightly pompous) example, analyse each line of the famous