The recent fire that accidentally happened in the heart of Paris’ 4th arrondissement, a 12-13th century gothic cathedral was up in flames following an accident during restoration process. The entire roof along the tall spire was engulfed and ravaged by the fire leaving the basilica roofless. In that moment the very icon of Europe helplessly being torn asunder the amount of overflowing emotion is untapped as we watch one of history’s most cherished building slowly reduced into a sad state. It was the great effort of the Parisienne’s fire fighter that the fire could be controlled.

Following the incident, French’s Emannuel Macron took vow to gather forces to repair and rebuild Notre dame restoring the basilica into its better state. Wave of supports came from various sources one of which came from the video game industry: Ubisoft the studio and publisher behind the Assassin’s Creed Franchise.

The screenshot from Ubisoft twitter above doubles as a PR campaign that boost up the game while at the same time providing means to sympathize to the current situation of Notre Dame. Assassin’s Creed Unity is an open world free to explore, temporarily also becomes free to play game; that digitized a representation of Paris’ central arrondissiment. Equipped with many details the game also documents the amount of details such as artefacts ranging from holy relics, paintings and cultural artefacts. The game previously succeeded in digitizing a Venetian Church of Santa Maria dei Frari (also known as ‘i frari’) which to my amazement, houses some notable paintings from the Italian renaissance period, some of which are also viewable in the game Assassin’s Creed 2 upon unlocking Venice. The amount of work and responsibility the developers and historian team had undertook allowing this game to almost hold the mantle of encyclopedic digital museum.

Despite being miniaturized and incapable of presenting a 1:1 scaling of Notre Dame the assassin’s creed unity digital data can also hope to serve as a guidance helping an enormous restoration team to know what each walls, moldings, and details looked like before the fire. This is the time when video game and digitization of things can help preserve cultural heritage, be in the fight against the all-consuming time that engulfs all physical matters eventually.

Reacting to the call for help from the French government Ubisoft donated more than €500,000 worth of funding to help restore the historic building. All stood as a testament that video games are no longer mere video game, semiotically, they are starting to give pervasive meanings to how history and cultural icons can be cherished and preserved by the interactive mass media.