Assassin's Creed 4 News: Ubisoft Responds to PETA Protest of Virtual Whaling

Ubisoft has responded to the protests the animal rights group PETA has leveled against the company for including the hunting of whales into Assassin's Creed 4:Black Flag. In a statement to Polygon, Ubisoft's senior PR manager, Stone Chin, released the following statement concerning the inclusion of whaling into the game.

"History is our playground in Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a work of fiction that depicts the real events during the golden era of pirates. We do not condone illegal whaling, just as we don't condone a pirate lifestyle of poor hygiene, plundering, hijacking ships, and over-the legal-limit drunken debauchery."

In addition to Ubisoft's statement, Matt Bruce, of PETA's International Grassroots Campaign, added his two cents to the argument.

"This would be a different story if the game portrayed the cruelty and horror experienced when a whale is literally fleeing for her life and then shot with a harpoon - or even several harpoons - and forced to struggle for hours or be hacked apart while still alive aboard a ship..In Assassin's Creed 4, you get ahead by killing. Joe Shmoe who plays this game in his mother's basement in the safety and comfort of his home will feel a sense of accomplishment by killing this whale."

Hunting whales is a bloody, ugly business, but Ubisoft has every right to include it in Assassin's Creed 4. Ubisoft has gone to extraordinary measures to make the games in the Assassin's Creed series historically accurate, so to take this part of the game out would conflict with the studio's game design philosophy. However, it is disappointing that Mr. Bruce chose to use the banal stereotype of gamers sitting in the mother's basement alone in order to get his point across. I'm sure that many people who play video games also support animal rights, so to hear Matt Bruce belittle the millions who play video games is just sad. Let's hope he gets some more PR coaching before the next round.