Conspiracy Thinking Is Flourishing. Some of Our Most Popular Franchises Aren't Helping.

Gaming may be turning players into conspiracy theorists, but so is everything else. For nearly 20 years, the video games have presented themselves as sprawling works of historical fiction. They cast players as noble assassins during big inflection points in history--the French Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, the end of Japan's Sengoku era--and give them freedom to romp around stunning re-creations of these eras, interacting with historical figures along the way. You can do secret missions for Cleopatra, you can get Socrates out of a jam after he pisses a mob off, that sort of thing. They're extremely popular to the point of being taken for granted, the way a ubiquitous CBS procedural might be.