Kill the Overseer!

The Gamification of Slave Resistance

Sarah Juliet Lauro

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781452965499
• Subtopic: Media Studies

Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Kill the Overseer! 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. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro 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. 

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Table of contents

• Cover
• 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
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author