You can almost smell the drying fish as you step into Ubisoft's latest Discovery Tour, Viking Age, a free add-on for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (also available to play stand-alone, without the game). Previous Discovery Tour titles have allowed players to take a combat-free jaunt through Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and now early Viking Britain--all "curated by historians and experts," according to Ubisoft. In partnership with UKIE, the British gaming trade association, the game developer wants to introduce Discovery Tour to 52 schools across the UK. But this isn't the first time someone has deployed a video game for education. As early as 1971, when Paul Dillenberger showed The Oregon Trail to his students, the effect gaming could have in a learning environment was apparent.

Ubisoft Hieroglyphs Initiative teamed up with Google's Arts and Culture in 2017 and set to launch a hieroglyph translator at the British Museum previously. This month they posted an important update on the project. The project aimed to explore the possibility of using machine learning algorithms to translate the logographs of Ancient Egypt. The main contributors of the project include Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Brown and Harvard Universities, Université du Québec à Montréal, Macquarie University, along with countless Egyptologists around the globe. Ubisoft says "We started this project as a way of saying thank you to all the academics that had helped us make Assassin's Creed Origins so realistic, and for assisting us in developing the hugely popular Discovery Tour."

Even if you're not particularly interested in video games, you'll probably have heard of Assassin's Creed. They're a series of historically themed action games that take place in digital recreations of places such as Revolution-era Paris, medieval Jerusalem and 1860s London. Playing Assassin's Creed involves climbing up ancient buildings and mingling with the residents of cities of the past, meeting (and occasionally assassinating) historical figures as a member of an ancient, clandestine brotherhood working against the Templars. The games have been around since 2007 and have made an awful lot of money for their publisher, Ubisoft. The company employs a team of hundreds of artists, historians, writers, coders, sound designers and more to create these virtual places.

Do you know what a "Hippodamian Grid Plan" is? I didn't until I played Assassin's Creed: Origins's new Discovery Tour mode. Turns out Hippodamus of Miletus is known as "the father of European urban planning," a Greek born in 498 B.C.E. Most important: His ideas were adopted by Deinokrates, principle planner for the city of Alexandria. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Assassin's Creed series is known for its vast and richly detailed historical environments, and well... lots of murder. What you might not realize is just how much work goes into making these virtual windows into the past somewhat realistic. That's something Ubisoft is aiming to highlight with Assassin's Creed Origins' Discovery Tour. You can think of it as a museum-like experience set within the game's meticulous rendition of ancient Egypt. To turn one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world into a truly useful educational tool.