Video games offer a unique space to engage in social commentary and discourse. While video games are often seen as passive, they are one of the only artistic mediums that literally force the audience to engage in an active way by applying their skills or exploring or solving puzzles and so forth. This creates a space that proliferates meaning and interpretations, especially when games offer multiple paths for players. Moreover, video games offer a strange space wherein you are both yourself-as-audience and yourself-as-character, which leads to issues of representation and ethics.
Enter Sarah Juliet Lauro and her short collection of essays Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance. She takes a look at the power of video games to represent slave revolts in particular and considers the ethics of commodifying the experience of enslaved people for the purposes of entertainment. The collection is a pretty cool exercise in close reading the formal elements of a series of games while offering insights about race, racism, history, commodification, and appropriation. Juliet Lauro offers a particularly engaging exploration of the constraints and limitations that frustrate gameplay while simultaneously preventing the over-identification of players with enslaved avatars, maintaining a critical distance and ensuring that the unfathomable horror of slavery is not rendered palatable as an entertainment product.
In the earlier chapters of the book, Juliet Lauro looks in particular at educational video games targeted towards school children and how they engage with narratives of slave revolts. An interesting detail is that some estimates reflect that one out of ten slave ships were subject to violent uprisings from their human cargo, which seems to get dismissed in discourses about slavery. Then, when educational games emulate slave resistance, they prioritize nonviolent means of escape. In discussing the game Freedom!, an Oregon Trail-like game, she notes that “There are hints that the playable character [...] may be able to fight back against the slavecatcher, and he or she can obtain a butcher knife from a house-slave in the first level, but I personally have had little success initiating any play that didn’t involve running or hiding” (13). She generalizes that educational games “may enumerate various resistive strategies, but they privilege the nonviolent option of flight from the plantation as the player’s central quest” (13). She points to a moment in the game The Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery in which Nat Turner’s picture is shown and it alludes to the face that some slaves resisted with force, burnt crops, or poisoned their masters, but all without naming Nat Turner explicitly.
Juliet Lauro makes the case that our understanding of the history of slave resistance is limited by the fact that documents were written by their biased oppressors. The central problem, then, is “how to study these histories without repeating the violence of the reduction of people to statistics” and the author acknowledges that “it is equally imperative that we find a way to represent these histories without further commoditizing historically enslaved people by either reducing them to an object of play or an empathy exercise” (87).
As we progress through the text, the essays shift from education to entertainment and from point-and-click exploration to increased level of interactivity. We also get into an interesting dilemma wherein it is acceptable to recreate narratives about slavery but the value of depicting these narratives is by frustrating the audience’s expectations of agency. This appears in educational games where escape seems nearly impossible or cyclical where the game restarts ad infinitum and where there is frequent switching between first, second, and third person perspectives, to serve as reminder that the enslaved character is not the person playing. Juliet Lauro brings in discussions of cutscenes, dialogue options, alienating language, different costumes, unwinnable situations, glitches, and so on, that all frustrate the players of slave resistance. The argument is that these conditions force the player into a situation wherein choices are impossible or that their outcomes fundamentally fraught, replicating aspects of the experience of those fleeing slavery. The final pages of the book offer a clear summary of the central argument. I offer two passages here that summarize the central claims of the book.
By withholding the subject position of the rebel slave from the player in important ways, such as interrupted immersion, the form of the videogame can acknowledge the broader insufficiency of the historical record. This might be achieved, in other media, by making use of the white space of the canvas, or the blank page, or aural silence, or a narrative gap, or a breakdown in meaning. But here, the medium can underscore the player’s separation from the historical subject through its use of false or limited interactivity. I would like to suggest that the videogame is an apt space in which to acknowledge the epistemological gap concerning the historical reality of slave resistance; it points to the insurmountable distance between the historical person and the player. (88).
In this study, we’ve examined various formal devices, such as limited interactivity and operationalized weakness, disorienting uses of perspective, and the illusion of choice. We’ve interrogated the playable character’s shifting abilities, the uses of untranslated language in videogames, and aspects of the game that are beyond either the player’s or the developer’s control, like glitches and fanshared rumors. We’ve looked at educational games intended for use in the classroom, mainstream video games that aim to entertain, and an incomplete video game that lives only online in demos and the articles that anticipated its ever-deferred release. This last example may be the best embodiment of the digital narrative that withholds itself from the player, stillborn. Just as the historical rebel slave resisted her own commodification, these games (over and above the intentions of the developers) productively refuse to allow the player mastery of the subject.
With these passages, Juliet Lauro offers a clear and accessible review of her central arguments. I find the close reading of games particularly effective. As she examines the form of very different games, ranging from Oregon Trail to Assassin’s Creed, I find that she offers compelling and accessible observations to build a case. There are references throughout to other articles that also warrant more attention but this books stands alone as a tight collection of essays that model how to engage in cultural critique using video games. While the implications of identification with historical enslaved subjects could be further defined (why is this research necessary now?), if you take it on trust that issues of representation are important, than Kill the Overseer! Stands out as a really engaging manual for using video games as a form worthy of social critique and theoretical discussion.
Happy reading!
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