GHASSAN ALSERAYHI
MSc. Arch, M. Arch, B. Arch, Assoc. SCE
ARCHITECT + EDUCATOR + RESEARCHER
Playable Worksites: Notre-Dame de Paris as a Public Exhibitionary Apparatus
Abstract:
Game engines are arguably being more frequently used by digital-heritage projects and by popular games to simulate historic monuments, and the Notre-Dame in Assassin’s Creed Unity has become a widely-spread point of reference, particularly following the 2019 fire. There is a tendency in public and academic debate to treat this modern form as either a spectacle setting or as a singularly more “accurate” model the detail of which is assumed to be conservative and educational. What has not been adequately discussed is how the game-engine Notre Dame operates as an collected object within a virtual collection and as an exhibitionary device that curates access, perspective and knowledge. Current descriptions seldom follow the cathedral through various regimes of representation, or break down the parameters of engines, in lighting, shaders, collision rules, nav-meshes, scripted cameras, as display scripts generating a rhetoric of plausibility, especially when scan-derived or photogrammetry-derived assets are involved. The musealization of Notre-Dame by screenshots, YouTube tours, and myths of restoration (with the assistance of Ubisoft as a model to help rebuild) has not been put in the context of the practice of exhibition and museum theory, the use of social pedagogy, or heritage ethics.
The paper contends that Unity’s Notre-Dame ought to be considered as an accessioned object in a distributed “museum without walls,” and that its engine parameters act as display scripts. By tracing an object through three regimes (1) pre-accession cultural life and mass-media framing (guidebooks, postcards, tourist photographs, films); (2) musealization within display scripts (tours, captions, installation photographs, catalog metadata); and (3) engine-based representation in Unity, the paper demonstrates how the third regime discursively erases scaffolds, soot, blocked chapels, and partial access to create a continuous image of the cathedral that is idealized. Playable access, in this regime, silently replaces the engagement metrics (platform likes, watch time, completion rates) with the historical fidelity to the game, and exposes the game assets to being transformed into survey-grade evidence without making their conditions of production explicit.
In terms of methodology, the project is a mix of exhibition theory (apparatus and audience) and an epistemic frame that enquires what type(s) of knowledge are being produced and constructed regarding atmosphere, materiality, scale, structure, and surface. It (a) contrasts the explorable spaces, blocked areas, and reproduced/invented details of Unity with the real cathedral and its photographed/filmed documentation; (b) carefully examines the lighting/material environments, collision points, nav-meshes, and guided viewpoints as display scripts that define what is visible, accessible, or knowable; and (c) reviews the post-2019 coverage and commentary on the cathedral as a digital-heritage proxy in the media.
The contribution is conceptual and methodological. Conceptually, the paper defines how game engines can be used as virtual collectable architecture/museum and usable exhibitionary machines, in which pedagogy of the public can be more instructive in shader and camera effects than in cloth or chronology, and in which a single historical-less timeless build folds previous historical condition. Methodologically, it provides criteria of more accountable public reconstructions: treating the parameters of the engine as curatorial grammars; stating the reconstruction assumptions and uncertainty; drawing the line between plausible visualization and documentation; and explicitly attributing the modeling and display scripts such that the invisible pipelines behind the virtual copies of Notre-Dame become part of the exhibit instead of its infrastructure.
Game engines are arguably being more frequently used by digital-heritage projects and by popular games to simulate historic monuments, and the Notre-Dame in Assassin’s Creed Unity has become a widely-spread point of reference, particularly following the 2019 fire. There is a tendency in public and academic debate to treat this modern form as either a spectacle setting or as a singularly more “accurate” model the detail of which is assumed to be conservative and educational. What has not been adequately discussed is how the game-engine Notre Dame operates as an collected object within a virtual collection and as an exhibitionary device that curates access, perspective and knowledge. Current descriptions seldom follow the cathedral through various regimes of representation, or break down the parameters of engines, in lighting, shaders, collision rules, nav-meshes, scripted cameras, as display scripts generating a rhetoric of plausibility, especially when scan-derived or photogrammetry-derived assets are involved. The musealization of Notre-Dame by screenshots, YouTube tours, and myths of restoration (with the assistance of Ubisoft as a model to help rebuild) has not been put in the context of the practice of exhibition and museum theory, the use of social pedagogy, or heritage ethics.
The paper contends that Unity’s Notre-Dame ought to be considered as an accessioned object in a distributed “museum without walls,” and that its engine parameters act as display scripts. By tracing an object through three regimes (1) pre-accession cultural life and mass-media framing (guidebooks, postcards, tourist photographs, films); (2) musealization within display scripts (tours, captions, installation photographs, catalog metadata); and (3) engine-based representation in Unity, the paper demonstrates how the third regime discursively erases scaffolds, soot, blocked chapels, and partial access to create a continuous image of the cathedral that is idealized. Playable access, in this regime, silently replaces the engagement metrics (platform likes, watch time, completion rates) with the historical fidelity to the game, and exposes the game assets to being transformed into survey-grade evidence without making their conditions of production explicit.
In terms of methodology, the project is a mix of exhibition theory (apparatus and audience) and an epistemic frame that enquires what type(s) of knowledge are being produced and constructed regarding atmosphere, materiality, scale, structure, and surface. It (a) contrasts the explorable spaces, blocked areas, and reproduced/invented details of Unity with the real cathedral and its photographed/filmed documentation; (b) carefully examines the lighting/material environments, collision points, nav-meshes, and guided viewpoints as display scripts that define what is visible, accessible, or knowable; and (c) reviews the post-2019 coverage and commentary on the cathedral as a digital-heritage proxy in the media.
The contribution is conceptual and methodological. Conceptually, the paper defines how game engines can be used as virtual collectable architecture/museum and usable exhibitionary machines, in which pedagogy of the public can be more instructive in shader and camera effects than in cloth or chronology, and in which a single historical-less timeless build folds previous historical condition. Methodologically, it provides criteria of more accountable public reconstructions: treating the parameters of the engine as curatorial grammars; stating the reconstruction assumptions and uncertainty; drawing the line between plausible visualization and documentation; and explicitly attributing the modeling and display scripts such that the invisible pipelines behind the virtual copies of Notre-Dame become part of the exhibit instead of its infrastructure.
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