When an invitation to work on Assassin’s Creed Shadows first dropped into Sachi Schmidt-Hori’s email inbox, the Ivy League professor deleted it without a second thought. She’d never heard of the franchise before, nor Ubisoft – the company that was now keen to secure her services. And so when another email arrived, asking for a second time if she would like to lend her expertise to Shadows’ development, Schmidt-Hori deleted the request once more, continuing to believe it was spam.
“This was repeated a few times,” Schmidt-Hori tells me via video call, “until eventually they contacted my university’s administration to ask if I actually existed.” Only after her colleagues intervened – and her husband who plays video games assured her that Assassin’s Creed was a big deal – did she then reply. “I finally realised, ‘oh, this might not have been a scam after all’.”
Over the coming months and years, Schmidt-Hori grew to understand Assassin’s Creed well – but also the worst of what working on a video game can look like when it becomes the centre of a culture war. Her ease to be found online, her work as an academic, her racial identity – all reasons she had been selected by Ubisoft as perfect for working on Shadows – were all utilised against her. But this isn’t the story of that abuse. Instead, this is how Sachi Schmidt-Hori survived it and pushed back – with surprising results.
A leap of faith
“Initially I think they didn’t know how useful I would be,” Schmidt-Hori begins, discussing her earliest research work to help Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows team in Quebec. As Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Dartmouth, a prestigious university just over the border in New Hampshire, she was well positioned to help – though had never assisted on a video game project before. “I didn’t know any of the background, the back stories,” she says. “They just asked me to conduct some research and I agreed to do it.
“It was the kinds of things you cannot just Google.”
Schmidt-Hori’s contributions began by completing what she describes as “small projects” researching various themes. “Sometimes they’d send me photos of Buddhist temples that exist in today’s Japan and ask me to verify if something similar could have existed in the 16th century,” Schmidt-Hori says. “Or they’d ask me about, like, how certain groups of people were treated in the period. It was the kinds of things you cannot just Google,” she smiles, “or maybe they didn’t have ChatGPT back then.”
Impressed with Schmidt-Hori’s knowledge, Ubisoft soon invited her to work more closely alongside Shadows’ writing team, analysing the game’s script for historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies, as well as anything that could be deemed culturally insensitive.
But while an expert on the subject matter, Schmidt-Hori had not worked on anything like Assassin’s Creed before, and says it took time for her to find her groove providing assurances of historical authenticity in a game where players can also run around like ninjas and leap hundreds of metres into hay bales.
“Sometimes we had to compromise,” Schmidt-Hori says, though acknowledging that when it came to historical details, this was typically for smaller details. One example was the Westernised styling of main character Naoe’s father, Fujibayashi Nagato, which had already been popularised outside the game. (“Nagato is not his name,” Schmidt-Hori admits. “Nagato is the province of which he was the governor, so his real name would be Fujibayashi Nagato-no-kami, something something.”)
Still, as time went on and her work continued, Schmidt-Hori says she found herself enjoying her projects, and accepting it was part of something bigger, more fun – right up until Shadows’ first public reveal to the world. After that, all hell broke loose.
“I can kind of understand what happened”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was unveiled on 15th May 2024, via the launch of a trailer featuring the game’s dual protagonists: female shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke, a Black man. The announcement also came packaged with interview snippets from members of the game’s creative team, such as its director and associate narrative director – and Schmidt-Hori was also involved.
“I flew to the studio in Quebec City to be part of this promotional event,” she remembers, “and as soon as the materials came out… I became a very easy target.
Schmidt-Hori’s day job as a university lecturer, as well as her status as a published author, meant that much of her life was in the public sphere and easy to find, as Shadows became a lightning rod for those with an axe to grind over how they saw the game handling its Japanese setting and choice of protagonists.
“You could look me up, my email address, my office location in a non-secure building of our campus, multiple social media accounts,” she recalls. “I was just so surprised. But now, looking back, I can kind of understand what happened.”
While Ubisoft reeled from Shadows’ backlash, Schmidt-Hori had her own perspective. Amidst the countless insults and threats, the academic of Asian cultural studies saw the response as like something straight out of her textbook.
“There were, like, multiple factions among the people who were complaining.”
“There were, like, multiple factions among the people who were complaining about the game, each with different motivations or reasons to be upset with the company, or the game, or me,” Schmidt-Hori notes. “Which was interesting.
“One of the major groups who were upset were male gamers living in the west, of Asian descent. There were many, many robust, reddit communities – not just for gamers, but Asian masculinity communities – mad at me because, in their eyes, I’m like a sellout,” she says. Which is a very different reaction to that of people living in Japan – they didn’t have that kind of reaction.
“But for Asian men living in the West, this game perfectly fitted their narratives – including that Asian females in the Western world are complicit in erasing the existence of Asian men. And because of my last name they assumed I was married to an Anglo-American,” Schmidt-Hori says. “Well, he’s actually biracial.
“Still, they would post on reddit and say things like ‘oh my god, this bitch, she has the gall to prioritise her white husband’s last name over her maiden name,” she continues. “It’s something that only Asian men would really pick up on, and it’s very interesting. I mean, the real reason why my name is hyphenated this way is when I tried to do it as Hori-Schmidt it just sounded like ‘holy shit’. So I decided I would just do the other way.”
Rather than just take the abuse and stay silent, Schmidt-Hori says she decided to try and contact some of the individuals talking about her online. Why? Because, she says, she knew why they were saying the things they were – and because she knew they were wrong.
“I tried to contact many people through reddit,” Schmidt-Hori continues, admitting that many didn’t respond. “But with one person, we actually had a Zoom meeting for one hour. Later we became Facebook friends, and he agreed to be interviewed by my friend who is making a documentary about this.
“Another person, I messaged and he was defensive in the beginning – he just repeated something similar, like, ‘Asian women like you have it so much easier than us, and by contributing to this game you have contributed to the ongoing erasure of Asian males from global media’. Well, [I told him] that this is the kind of stuff I teach in my classes, that I’m a faculty member in the Asian Studies Department, I talk about Asian masculinity.
“‘Why are you attacking me?'” she asked the person. “‘I’m trying to educate the general public about people like you.’ And then eventually he apologised and took down his post.”
“Good job, white supremacist”
Another “faction” who claimed to be upset by Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ reveal was the group Schmidt-Hori lumps together under “general anti-DEI people”. These, she says, “just seized the opportunity and utilised the lament of the Asian men” – another textbook tactic.
“It’s white supremacist, nationalist ideology couched as being sympathetic. White supremacists tend to use Asians or Asian Americans as a tool to oppress Black people, Latinos,” she continues, often by comparing racial stereotypes. “It’s very, very typical. And it’s unfortunate that some Asian Americans also become sympathetic to like white supremacy [through this].”
While Schmidt-Hori messaged some of this faction sending abuse at her too, she notes that she did not engage with those warring over whether Black historical figure Yasuke was a samurai or not – or even if he ever existed.
“I could make a perfect argument to prove something is correct, and they will still use something else to complain about the game or society,” she says. “The reasoning doesn’t matter, they’re unhappy and need to blame it on someone else.”
Alongside general abuse and death threats, Schmidt-Hori says she was personally targeted due to her published work as “someone who promotes child molestation”.
“And here I was, this woke so-called academic who wrote this book.”
“I wrote a research book about trans-generational male-male love in medieval Buddhist monasteries, and they must have felt like they just dug up a gold mine,” she says. “In the US, a favourite denouncement of the far-right is that the left, including people like Hilary Clinton, run child molestation rings. And here I was, this woke so-called academic who wrote this book.”
While Schmidt-Hori was brave to contact those sending her abuse, she was not naive. She recalls emailing a particular right-wing influencer with a large online following who wrote an article about her, sending hate in her direction.
“He is a professional troll,” Schmidt-Hori acknowledges. “He has a media company dedicated to anti-DEI activities. So I emailed him and said ‘you wrote an article about me, and because of that I’ve been receiving threats, my life is inconvenienced, it’s very difficult to attend to my family, my students, my courses, and what do you think of what you did?’ I requested a Zoom conversation, but then he said ‘oh, we can do it on my platform’. I said, ‘no, no, I don’t want your fans to be there cheering for you. This is just between you and me as two individuals. And I just want you to realise what you did was so much more than you probably intended. Imagine your wife receiving hundreds of death threats and her picture is all over the internet. You’d be worried about her, right? Well, that’s my husband.’
“He didn’t reply,” she says of the troll, “but he took it down, so that was good enough for me. I was like, good job, white supremacist.”
Ubisoft’s struggles
Numerous other staff members suffered abuse through the development of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, something that Assassin’s Creed boss Marc-Alexis Coté previously described as “devastating” during a BAFTA event attended by Eurogamer last year. “When the work they pour their hearts into is twisted into a symbol of division, it’s not just disheartening, it can be devastating,” he said. “What keeps me going is the resilience born out of conviction that I see in our teams every day. I am especially proud of the Shadows team for staying true to their creative vision and the core tenets of Assassin’s Creed.”
Even this week, with the announcement of the game’s post-launch content, Ubisoft still continues to refer to members of the game’s development team only by their first name, in order to make them slightly more anonymous.
But could Ubisoft have done more to protect Schmidt-Hori and others? The professor has a mix of views.
“When this chaos started, naturally I contacted them thinking that they might do something – I don’t know what,” she tells me. “But all they did was tell me to ignore it and suggest I take down my social media profiles. That made me really, really upset.
“They would just ask me ‘do you think they’re actually going to do it?'”
“They never prepared me or warned me beforehand. I was completely blindsided, and they knew that my profile was just out in the open. I had done video interviews to be circulated online, and of course, I had agreed to do them. But yeah, I think they could have easily imagined that I’d become a target.”
Schmidt-Hori says she relayed details of the abuse she was facing, though was told Ubisoft could only act if there was a credible threat to her safety. Ultimately, despite “death threats and threats of violence”, she surmised this was unlikely to happen.
“They would just ask me ‘do you think they’re actually going to do it?’ And I’d say, ‘maybe not’. And they’d say, ‘once something becomes credible, and if you’re actually worried about your safety, we’ll send security personnel’.”
Regardless, Schmidt-Hori said she was frustrated by this response, and it was something which ultimately contributed to her decision not to renew her contract with Ubisoft further.
“We do not condone harassment or bullying in any form,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told Eurogamer, when contacted about Schmidt-Hori’s experiences. “Unfortunately, some members of our teams and close partners have faced online harassment. We are committed to creating a supportive and collaborative environment and we’re constantly learning how we can improve this process.
“We commend and appreciate Sachi Schmidt-Hori for addressing these topics directly and are grateful for her approach and expertise.”
And now? As time passes since she worked on the project, Schmidt-Hori says her email inbox is largely back to normal, and she can take a longer view. The abuse is “very, very sparse now”, she says, and anyway “I was only perturbed by the backlash for the first month or so”.
“They have this imagined version of this academic who is super woke, who wrote about weird stuff, who’s married to this loser white man and doesn’t like Asians. It’s an image of a figure that they are mad at, which is not me, so I don’t take it personally.”
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