After completing Assassin's
Creed: Freedom Cry I decided to dive in to Assassin's Creed: Liberation.
It was, at least in part, influenced by my drive to remove the last
vestiges of Assassin's Creed 3 and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag from my
hard drive. Those games, while amazing,
have been taking up space on my disk for almost two years. There was another less silly motive at work,
however: still stinging from Freedom Cry's
ham-fisted Africanization of all people of color, I wanted to see if
Liberation, with its tight focus from the ground up on a mixed-race female
protagonist living in colonial North America during the time of the revolution,
might do better.
I was not disappointed.
Part of what I found so irksome about Freedom Cry was the tacked on feel of the whole affair, the way it
felt less like an attempt to tell a story the developers found important, and
more a mercenary attempt to tap an underserved market. Freedom
Cry felt half baked, as if someone in the office pointed out that it was
conspicuous that characters of color were so frequently absent from video games
and, in a rush to make up the difference, Ubisoft Montreal threw together a
game after reading a Wikipedia entry on the slave trade. The story was light, the mechanics nearly
carried over from Assassin's Creed: Black
Flag wholesale, with a slight dumbing down for the sake of streamlining
progression. The only real new edition,
the slave economy, seemed to function as a sort of background noise. Whenever the slave trade or the issue of
slavery entered the plot, it was haphazardly engaged with at best. A mission objective here, a cutscene there,
an aside in a conversation in the other place.
With the exception of one mission, in the midst of the plot, there was
little mechanical relationship between Adewale's history as a slave and the
gameplay I engaged in through him.
Liberation takes
the opposite approach. Sure, it
prominently features the running, jumping, and stabbing mechanics that players
have come to know and love the Assassin's
Creed series for, but those mechanics are overlaid with a "social
visibility and context" mechanic that relies heavily on protagonist
Aveline's position in society as a woman of mixed racial heritage. See, Aveline has three outfits to choose
from. Depending on her style of dress,
she becomes more or less noticeable in certain context, and acquires and loses
certain abilities. If Aveline dresses as
an Assassin, she can run across rooftops and dish out hurt like nobody's
business, sure, but she kind of stands out in a crowd. A leather-clad woman covered in knives and
pistols with the world's most fabulous braid will tend to do that. If she wants to blend in and still move she
can choose the slave outfit, which grants her a sort of invisibility when she's
engaged in menial labor (varying, in this case, from just standing next to
other people dressed like slaves or carrying boxes from place to place
randomly) and lets her keep some of her combat abilities and, most importantly,
retain her ability to navigate the world vertically by free-running. If she wants to be treated like the lady of
privilege she was born as, Aveline will need to choose to wear one of her many
fine dresses. Those let her walk through
any areas that are not explicitly guarded, seduce men, fire darts from her
pretty pretty parasol, and pick pockets and loot corpses while attracting
little, if any, attention. The downside:
Aveline must behave in a "ladylike" fashion while dressed this way:
no running up buildings, flashing her business to the world, no brandishing
machetes or swords. If you want to move
at more than a brisk trot and fight with more at your disposal than a parasol
and a pair of hidden blades, you'll have to abandon long skirts and the
privilege they bring.
This "persona" mechanic both grants the game an
explicitly (arguably offensively) feminine tone by asking players to engage in
a layer of "dress up," a traditionally feminine play-construct, and
engages with the idea of "passing" directly in its play
structures. To those who grew up in
homogenous communities, here's how it works: when you're of mixed heritage,
most people look at you and use cultural context clues to try and figure out
"where you belong." They
assign a set of values and expectations to you based on your style of dress,
since they have trouble sorting out what your expected social position might be
based on the somewhat obfuscated context clue of skin color. It's the tragic outcome of a tableau of
racist habits, but it's a reality, one that black and mixed race identified
people have been living with for their entire lives, and one that many people
can spend their lives conveniently removed from. Unfortunately, this fundamental aspect of
personal identity is relatively rarely explored for how effusively it presents
in our society. Even "high
art" forms rarely grappled with directly.
Nella Larsen, Walter Mosley and, to a lesser extent, Chester Hines are
all authors who have touched on it to some extent, and I'm positive there are
other literary examples that I'm not thinking of, but in "low art"
forms, forms like video games and television, explicit discussion, or even
subtextual discussion, is hard to come by. Assassin's Creed: Liberation went so far
as to make this a mechanic: if people see Aveline in slave garb, they'll assume
she's black, the child of a slave perhaps and, as such, beneath notice so long
as she attends to her duties. If people
see her in fancy clothes, they'll assume she's white, the child of a plantation
owner, perhaps, and, as such, to be given every allowance so as to avoid any
particular social conflicts that might come up.
Liberation's choice to engage
with this dichotomy directly forces players to recognize the fluid nature of
identity, and presses them into inhabiting a number of roles they might
otherwise be unfamiliar with.
In my twelve hours of play, I spent a great deal of time in
nearly every guise and, for many purposes, the relative invisibility of the
slave persona was the most useful.
Aveline, still able to run around and capable of blending ubiquitously
into a dehumanized labor force, was perfectly suited to infiltrating enemy
compounds and emerging with sensitive materials in a hurry. Likewise, if a mission called for me to avoid
conflict or kill an isolated, easily seduced man, the lady persona would come
out. The underlying issues of identity
politics and prejudice behind these mechanics were addressed only occasionally,
but they were actually addressed, quite directly at times in the form of
micro-aggressions directed at Aveline by members of high society while she was dressed
as a lady, and in the form of the jeers of overseers and the oppressive
"ticking clock" of detection that they present to her when she is dressed
as a slave. And even while not being
directly addressed through play, the presence of these mechanics constitutes a
compelling subtext upon which the game builds itself. Players are forced to engage with the world as
a woman, a member of a group of people already considered less than in Colonial
society (and arguably still seen as such today), little more than property
waiting to be claimed, or as a slave, a member of a group of people reduced to property
freely traded in Colonial society, and examine the manner in which they can
manipulate these circumstances to their benefit.
That's quite ambitious for a game originally produced for
the PSP, but that Liberation is even
willing to make the attempt is compelling.
Sure, it's not without its problems: Aveline's agency still relies on a
number of sympathetic white men which, while realistic for the setting, is a
bit disheartening to consider. What's
more, her privilege insulates her against some of the more terrible treatment
that might have otherwise been visited upon her, treatment hinted at in the
game's first mission, where Aveline is called upon to investigate the
disappearance of slaves from various farms, and in another mission, later in
the game, where she is mugged and held hostage by criminals.
But that begs the question: does Aveline's journey need to
be about confronting the darkness of early America? She does so at times, and in doing so acts as
something of a role model. She embraces
the duality of her identity, finding strength in her ability to code shift at
will and transcend the limitations of other's perceptions. Aveline is her own person, more than the mere
sum of her parts. It is figures who see
her and know her best through her Assassin persona, the one most thoroughly
removed from cultural markers, who know her best: Gerard and Élise, her closest
friends, see her as a capable young woman dedicated to improving the lot of
others and generally cleaving to Enlightenment principles of freedom (indeed,
her French heritage is no mistake in this regard). There are exceptions to this rule: Agaté, her
mentor turned foe, composes his perception of her in a highly racialized light,
and is something of an abusive figure, especially in his final appearance, though
this is mollified somewhat by Agaté's irrational turn later in the game wherein
he begins to lash out at everyone around him for working against him while
simultaneously withholding crucial information from those he works with. Aveline, in the end, acts as something of a
post-racial feminist superhero: she takes the qualities that people might
criticize her for, the qualities that make her something of a misfit in society
in general, and turns them into her greatest strengths. She breaks every mold and takes every
advantage that her status as a woman of color could grant her, while abandoning
the parts that could hold her back.
While these mechanics do gloss over the underlying privilege
that permits them, it's a sight better than Freedom
Cry's construction of a character of color as an "also-ran." Aveline's is that rarest of video game
unicorns, a female protagonist of color who passes the Bechdel test in the
game's opening bars. Liberation's very
existence as a game gives me hope. Sure,
I'm coming to it three years late, but it's still there, and its presence means
that other, similar titles can and will emerge again.
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