After much dilly dallying, delaying, and pussyfooting, I
finally sat down and played Assassin's Creed:
Freedom Cry, the standalone expansion to Assassin's Creed: Black Flag that places players behind the eyes of
Adewale, Kenway's long time black friend, quartermaster, and escaped
slave. Ade is something of a moral
compass in the main game, a counterpoint to Kenway's relatively amoral (for the
Assassin's Creed series) approach to
life. Ade, throughout Black Flag, grows into a trusted
confidant, a fully fleshed out character in a world already bursting at the
seams with such faces, and by game's end he feels like the character you wanted
to spend time with the most, the character you'd be most likely to sympathize
with. Paired with the troubling representational
politics of video games in general, wherein characters of color are not just
rare, but also all too often cartoonishly one-dimensional in their
representation when they do manifest, I was excited to see what this character,
who in the game proper had been a keen source of insight and a constant friend
to a man in whom he saw value where everyone else saw liability, would do given
a chance to not only explore the world on his own, but also explore the nuance
of his own identity in that world, as a black man and escaped slave who moved
through the world with full agency and fluidity.
I was disappointed by Freedom
Cry for a number of reasons, and many of them center around that particular
draw. Ade, in the original game, was an
amazing character. In Freedom Cry, he is in many ways
reduced. This isn't the only problem
with Freedom Cry: it's a woefully
short given how much it costs. It weighs
in at a meager nine missions, even with the grind-content included in that
game, which feels tacked on given the tiny area that the expansion occurs
within. Many of the mechanics from Black Flag proper are transferred over,
like ship and weapon upgrades, but their progression is so condesned that they feel
like reminders of the central game instead of fully developed progression
trees. With only four machetes and four
blunderbusses, the bulk of which are uncovered through exploration, some of the
core mechanics, like liberating slaves, feel disconnected from any kind of
meaningful power curve, and involve engaging in activities that can sometimes
feel unnecessarily grindy. The story
missions mostly occur Santa Domingue, and by the time I finished I was bored
with the tiny town and its surrounding plantations far. For $15 there just wasn't that much to keep
me engaged, spare a central story that, as I'm about to explain, made me like
one of my favorite characters a little less, and generated a construction of
race that, by the end of my playthrough, I found problematic.
First, a piece of context: while I consider myself an ally
to PoC fighting for visibility and representation in media, I am a white
cisgendered man. My opinion, as such,
rightly counts for less on this subject than other people's opinions. That's not to say that I can't have an
opinion, or that white people in general can't have or express thoughts on how
minorities are represented in games, it's just that, inherently, the opinions
of people in the majority matter less about this subject. After centuries in the front seat, it's
important that white men, as a generalized group, get comfortable with the notion
of other people taking the wheel for a while.
So my thoughts on this game matter less than arguably any other group's
thoughts on this matter. But I've still
got some, and they are, namely, that the construct of Adewale as a person of
color in Freedom Cry is somewhat
insultingly shallow, especially when you consider the wealth of information
available about what his life might've been like at the time, the complexity of
the environment he explores, and the complexity of his position in society as a
free black man living outside the law during the sunset years of the Golden Age
of Piracy.
The game opens with Ade dutifully carrying out his mission
as an Assassin and, for the first thirty minutes, is just a solid tutorial that
gets players back in the stride of how to play an Assassin's Creed game. Then
the first unique mechanic opens up: you're given a machete and asked to
dispatch a slave overseer who is pursuing a young woman. So far so good. A brief period of exposition follows. You learn about a woman who runs a brothel
populated mostly by slaves, a woman for whom you just happen to have a package.
Then the world opens up and the
hiccoughs begin.
Freedom Cry is
littered with opportunities to free enslaved people. You can buy their freedom, dispatch their
masters and unchain them, help them while they're already running away, or
reunite injured runaway slaves with their friends so they can find their way to
freedom. That's all awesome and great,
but much of the dialogue that Ade shares with the people he liberates veers
into micro-aggression territory, taking the form of generalized notions of
"Africanism," constructing all enslaved people as culturally uniform
and possessed of a single religious or cultural mindset. This is problematic for a few reasons,
foremost among them the fact that it relies on an underpinning myth that
slavery perpetuated in order to strip enslaved people of their cultural
identity as well as their social agency: the notion that "the
African" was a cultural identity, and not a marker placed upon people to
strip them of their humanity and frame them as "others" in society.
In the period of time Ade inhabits, this myth would've been
especially nascent, as the cultural mélange present in many slave holdings in
the Caribbean was painfully clear to enslaved peoples in particular. People from a variety of cultures, ranging
from Igbo to Yoruba to Akan to Ashanti to a sprawling set of cultural groups I
can't recall the names of offhand, were all enslaved together and, despite the
best efforts of their oppressors, often retained their cultural identities, and
the conflicts, alliances, beliefs, and all related idiosyncrasies. Ade, who does not identify himself past the
notion of being a "former slave," is, in his construction of self, demonstrative
of a cultural myth we've come to rely on when discussing the history of enslaved
peoples. That he lives in a world where
everyone shares his belief is especially troubling: there's no hint of the
cultural conflicts that sometimes plagued nascent revolutions in the Caribbean,
or that colored the interactions between enslaved people in their daily lives. Ade is wholly comfortable telling people who
he's never met to "make their ancestors proud," imposing a notion of
"African-ness" on to those peoples.
This cultural whitewashing expands to the various third
parties that Adewale cooperates with while pursuing his goals. Ade enlists the help of a free black woman
who runs a brothel filled with enslaved girls and a Maroon resistance leader in
his quest, but the predatory nature of the groups from which these characters are
drawn is wholly unmentioned in both the context of the narrative and the
supplemental information provided in the game's "Codex," an
especially problematic consideration given the Assassin's Creed series' tendency to revel in the moral ambiguity
of its various factions. Bastienne, the
brothel-owner, represents a subgroup of people who historically would often do
some downright cutthroat shit in order to survive the harsh reality of slavery,
but in the game she's portrayed only as carving out a safe space for her
people, even collaborating with local revolutionary elements while advising
against a social revolution that would render her business obsolete. The complexities of her place in society are
wholly absent, and there's no recognition that, even as she ostensibly supports
freedom, she has everything to lose by it, and is more thoroughly involved in
the machinery of the slave trade than any other character.
More troubling in the construction of Maroons as noble
revolutionary soldiers. While Assassin's Creed always plays fast and
loose with history it's important that they get shit right when they're framing
a subject as sensitive and important as race and culture in the Caribbean
during the height of the slave trade.
Maroons did some good in the Caribbean, and sometimes actively worked to
resist the slave trade and facilitate revolutionary activity, but just as often
they enabled or sustained the infrastructure of the chattel slave trade. Most of my knowledge on the subject comes
second hand from dramatic portrayals in literature, specifically Marlon James'
superlative novel, The Book of Night Women, which portrays
Maroons more even handedly as a collective of free black people barely holding
on to their livelihood and, as such, living a life removed from ideals, engaging
in activities like selling escaped slaves back to plantations, or forcing
escaped slaves to fight for them.
These criticisms are, I'll admit, nitpicky, but whitewashing
the cultural complexities surrounding slavery is kind of a troubling
phenomenon, all the more so in light of recent events in South Carolina, where
our inability to come to terms, as a culture, with the reality of our shared
history of racism has been made so visible in such a tragic fashion. In a series that seems at times obsessed with
moral ambiguity, moral certitude is a gesture towards simplicity, and a gesture
of disrespect towards the complex subject of race in North America and its related
cultural frameworks.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, laying too much burden on the
shoulders of one game, really just one expansion to one game, but in a
landscape where there are so few non-incidentally black characters it feels
like the few we get deserve more respect, more effort and concern than their
pabulum white counterparts. Adewale went
from being a complex character who held nuance below his surface to being a
stereotype in short order for me. Was
his presence as a playable character unwelcome?
God no, it's great that he's there, and I hope that Ubisoft and other
developers try again to tell culturally relevant stories about and from the
perspective of people of color. The attempt
to do so is in and of itself important, and however muddled I believe their
effort was it seems to have been well intentioned at its core. But the kind of blithe positivity on display
in Freedom Cry can be interpreted as
a type of disrespect, and it's important for developers, who are still woefully
monochromatic in our time, to recognize that people of color need not be
paragons to be important characters, and that it is arguably more important
that we recognize them as people than as heroes. In the end, that's what we all are: nothing
more and nothing less than human. The
failure to recognize this, and to recognize the importance of the nuance of our
individual human experiences, is at the core of racism, of prejudice, and of
the failings we engage in when we look at a person and refer to them not by
their defining characteristics, their loves and hates and skills and failings,
but by the color of their skin.
Adewale's blackness, to me, felt like a prop in Freedom Cry, while I wanted it to be a plot point, a topic for
investigation and discussion. I am
asking for a lot when I say that, it's true, but I think it's nothing less than
what we need and, to be frank, what people of color, who represent a
significant cross section of the gaming public, deserve.
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