My plan is to make my symposia focus on various aspects of Assassin’s Creed for the foreseeable future. To that end, this Thursday I want to try to uncover as many prior questions as we can, and see if we can come to rough answers for them, before we proceed to my ultimate aim of a kind of consensus description of the relation of Assassin’s Creed to the practice of history in the modern world.

Off the top of my head, we’ll be talking about

• What is the practice of history?
• What is the practice of history in the modern world, if we think it’s different from the practice of history in any other period or culture?
• What does a description of a relation of an artwork, and in particular of a practomimetic possibility-space, to the practice of history look like?
• (The off-ramp strawman) Should we refrain from the description I envision, whether because the makers of Assassin’s Creed have made it clear that the practice of history doesn’t matter to them, or because we have better uses for our time and humanistic attention?

I’m guessing the discussion will be robust. There’s no need to have played a single Assassin’s Creed game, let alone any installment of the franchise in particular, to participate.

We’ll meet on Thursday, July 3rd at 9:30pm EDT / 6:30pm PDT; voice chat over Skype.