How One Professor Defused Online Hate, One Conversation at a Time

The release of the cinematic trailer for the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows last May should've been a celebratory milestone for Sachi Schmidt-Hori and the team that spent years creating the latest installment of the popular, long-running series from Ubisoft.

Instead, the first look sparked a flood of online hate and harassment, with many gamers convinced that the inclusion of a Black samurai in the game's fantastical depiction of 16th-century Japan exemplified the franchise's "woke" ideology. Schmidt-Hori, an associate professor in Dartmouth's Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages who had been hired by Ubisoft as a narrative consultant to support the game's development team, suddenly became an unlikely public target.

"I didn't see it coming at all," she says.

The episode thrust Schmidt-Hori into the no man's land of today's hyperpolarized identity politics, with online agitators on both sides of the Pacific Ocean making her the subject of hateful and threatening messages. It also gave the Japanese literature and culture scholar a chance to engage those same people with the generosity and kindness they failed to show her.

"I know, based on my role as a professor, that it is very difficult to hate up close. And I know I'm kind of likeable," Schmidt-Hori says with a laugh and a smile. "I decided to do something, which was to actually talk with people individually."

With the game approaching its official release on March 20, Schmidt-Hori's response offers a compelling lesson in the power of genuine, open dialogue.

Negotiating cultural authenticity, historical accuracy, and creative imagination 

Schmidt-Hori had never heard of the Assassin's Creed franchise before Ubisoft sought her help on the project. But her expertise in pre-17th century Japanese literature, culture, and religions made her an ideal candidate to provide valuable context that informed scripts, characters, and storylines.

Set in Japan in 1579, the game puts players in the feudal Azuchi-Momoyama period, a moment of transition between the civil wars of the Sengoku era and the beginning of the Tokugawa rule.  According to Ubisoft, this era of Japanese history was the most-requested setting in Assassin's Creed's existence.

"Ubisoft initially asked me a series of questions about medieval Japan that you cannot simply Google," Schmidt-Hori says. "You have to go to scholarly sources, and most likely Japanese-language ones."

Ubisoft eventually invited Schmidt-Hori to review the game script that was in development. She provided detailed feedback on everything from character names to key social dynamics to make the game as authentic as possible.

"Some names were too modern and others did not fit the class or occupation of the figures," she says. "And I ultimately came up with a list of potential names for each category: Buddhist priest, outlaw, commoner male, lady-in-waiting, pet animal, and so on."

Schmidt-Hori also helped game developers navigate the social customs of the time, like how little the noble people did on a daily basis, how cross-class communication was exceedingly rare, and how women existed largely in private, behind curtains.

"If you are a court noble, you wouldn't lift a thing. Maybe except for chopsticks. Everything else is done by your ladies-in-waiting, servants, retainers," she says. But the story sometimes requires characters from different classes to interact, such as Yasuke and Lord Nobunaga's sister. "So we had to negotiate between cultural authenticities, historical accuracies, and creative imaginations."

An unexpected controversy

As Schmidt-Hori makes clear, though, "historical accuracy" is a loaded phrase—dangerously so when applied to something that also takes creative license in the name of entertainment.

"I had to explain that there is no such thing as 100% accuracy … everything we know about the past is hearsay and mediated through layers of filters," she says. 

After the release of the game trailer, however, it became clear that no degree of faithfulness to the historical record would've softened the response to the protagonists selected for the new game: Naoe, a Japanese female assassin, and Yasuke, a Black African samurai. That the latter builds upon a commonly known figure in Japanese history, also called Yasuke, was quickly dismissed by people.

Duke professor Kimberly Hassel '16, a former student of Schmidt-Hori, detailed the upheaval around the game in a commentary in Critical Asian Studies.

"I got sucked into this 'controversy,' which was created by what was happening outside of this game," Schmidt-Hori says. "People automatically reacted to the premise of this game as pandering to 'woke' culture without knowing that there was this figure that we know as Yasuke."

Ubisoft's advice to Schmidt-Hori was to ignore and not respond to the noise—which included direct email, posts on X and her Facebook page, YouTube videos and comments, and bogus reviews of her 2021 scholarly book. But riding out the upheaval when she knew she did nothing wrong didn't sit right with her. 

At Dartmouth, the Department of Asian Studies, Cultures, and Languages issued a unanimous statement of support for Schmidt-Hori and her work in June. They wrote, in part: "In opposing this abhorrent online harassment, the members of the ASCL department declare our unequivocal support for Prof. Schmidt-Hori"

At a time when she felt like an easy target, the backing from her closest Dartmouth colleagues meant a great deal to Schmidt-Hori.

"That was so incredibly important for me to maintain my sanity," she says. "I'm so grateful for my colleagues."

Conversation and understanding

Rather than do nothing, Schmidt-Hori opted to do something: She sought out one-on-one conversations with the people who maligned and denigrated her online for her connection to the game. If she could reach them individually, one conversation at a time, she hoped they might think differently about their own actions.

Schmidt-Hori's outreach spanned myriad online platforms, where she invited individuals to chat on Zoom. While some didn't engage with her in good faith, they stopped harassing her. Moreover, the majority of the people she engaged with expressed remorse. One became a Facebook friend after their first conversation and even agreed to be interviewed on camera by NYU Shanghai professor Junnan Chen, who is developing a documentary about Schmidt-Hori's experience.

"The only thing you can do is talk to people as fellow humans," Schmidt-Hori says. "They're banking on the fact that most people they are bashing online won't say, 'Hey, let's have a Zoom talk!'"

In addition to guest lecturing on campus about her experience, Schmidt-Hori is preparing to speak this May alongside Chen and Hassel at the Japan Past and Present conference in Tokyo. She is also organizing a roundtable for next year's Modern Language Association convention that explores representations of pre-modern Japan in popular media in the West, including Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Looking back, Schmidt-Hori says she doesn't regret anything about her experience working on Assassin's Creed Shadows. She sees sharing her knowledge of pre-modern Japan as part of her responsibility to help others obtain a more nuanced understanding of the era.

What's more, the perspective Schmidt-Hori has gained over her career in the humanities gave her the tools to meet this complex moment with the values she thinks are critical to lowering the temperature of public discourse.

"I think I'm a better person because of what happened," she says.