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.
