Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lauro, Sarah Juliet.

Series:

Forerunners: Ideas First

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Video games--Social aspects.

Video games--Moral and ethical aspects.

Slavery in mass media.

Video games.

Video games--Political aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource 103 p..)

Place of Publication:

University of Minnesota Press 2020

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and "gamify" slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave's choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. This work questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin's Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery's victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance.

Contents:

Cover Page

Half Title

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Videogames as Commemoration

Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman

Paths to Freedom

A Close Playing: Flight to Freedom

"Make History Yours": An Introduction to Assassin's Creed

Avatar Trouble and Aveline

Untranslated

Failure and Freedom Cry

A Digital Fragment

Untitled

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4529-6549-8

1-5179-1100-1

OCLC:

1227390565