A Close-Playing: The Videogames of Patrick Chamoiseau

Sarah Juliet Lauro

Resumen (en traducción)

En sus muchas obras, el autor martiniqués Patrick Chamoiseau lucha con la identidad caribeña, la influencia colonial, la complejidad de la negrura y la historia de la esclavitud. Mejor conocido por su novela Texaco (1992), ganadora del Prix Goncourt, Chamoiseau es considerado una voz importante en la literatura francófona, contribuyendo significativamente a la literatura de la diáspora africana y su autodefinición. Sus obras trastocan las expectativas de género y forma: Texaco, por ejemplo, entreteje tipos dispares de narrativa (entradas de diario, cartas) y referencias culturales (incidentes históricos y conceptos espirituales). Esta actitud ante la polivalencia de la narración puede haber llevado al trabajo de Chamoiseau a otra forma narratológica, el campo de los videojuegos. Se le atribuyen dos títulos, ambos producidos por Cocktel Vision: Freedom: Rebels in Darkness, un juego de 8 bits producido en 1988, y Méwilo, un juego de aventura point and click en primera persona de 1987, que al igual que Texaco, dramatiza la erupción del volcán de 1902. que destruyó Saint Pierre. Freedom: Rebels in Darkness combina el juego de aventuras (e incluso un toque de botones al estilo Street Fighter) con la intensa realidad histórica de la resistencia de los esclavos. Méwilo es un juego de detectives en el que el personaje jugable debe resolver un misterio sobre un fantasma paranormal que tiene sus raíces en la revuelta de esclavos de 1831. Este artículo ofrece una lectura de estos dos juegos junto con varias de las ofertas literarias de Chamoiseau y la teoría más amplia propugnada en su obra para analizar estos textos como conmemoraciones de la resistencia de los esclavos que hacen uso de una estrategia de opacidad evidente en gran parte de la obra de Chamoiseau. Este artículo surge de un artículo que estaba escribiendo sobre “Criolizar los videojuegos”, y pienso en estos dos artículos como hermanos. Aquí, ofrezco una interpretación cercana de los juegos, y mi objetivo es presentar estos textos poco estudiados a aquellos que quieran jugarlos. En este medio, puedo compartir capturas de pantalla y videos de mi juego.

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Part I. Introduction.

A “close-playing,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is like a close-reading of a literary text, but for videogames; it is a term coined by Edmond Chang, comprising analysis of the game’s “intersection of form, function, meaning, and action.”¹ Just as performing a close-reading requires paying particular attention to the way form works in tandem with the content (in a poem this may mean scrutinizing enjambment, line length, eye-rhyme, etc.) a close-playing pays special attention to the ludic operations of the game—the game mechanics— for the part they play in enhancing the narrative. What are we going to be close-playing?

The famed author Patrick Chamoiseau had a role in scripting aspects of two videogames, Méwilo (Coktel 1987) and Freedom: Les guerriers de l’ombre (Coktel 1988), to which we will turn our attention directly. But I want to emphasize from the start that these games were produced by Muriel Tramis, a notable Black woman video game designer from Martinique. Given the accusations of misogyny with which Chamoiseau’s Éloge de la creolité (co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphael Confiant) was met, I want to make sure that we begin by acknowledging her work, even though this essay focuses on Chamoiseau’s contributions to the written scripts.² Tramis’s body of work includes “les jeux Adi” (Accompagnement Didacticiel Intelligent), early childhood education games well-known to French school children, and the infamous sexual adventure game Emmanuelle (Coktel 1989).³ Recent interviews that Tramis has given might suggest that she would object to sharing equal credit for these labors.⁴ I want to provide more than a sidelong glance at Tramis, inasmuch as her work provides a way of introducing some of the key themes discussed in the gamic narratives.

Muriel Tramis was the first female game designer to be awarded France’s Legion of Honor in 2018. In the wake of Gamergate and increased attention to gender in videogame studies—and one also might suggest, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the 1619 project, and a broader moment highlighting legacies of slavery—Tramis’s work has garnered some interest even in Anglophone games journalism and scholarship. In the 2020 article “Une vie bien jouée/A Life Well Played: The Cultural Legacy of Games Designer Muriel Tramis,” Alenda Chang compares Tramis to “France’s own Roberta Williams.”⁵

The greater attention paid to Tramis also might be a function of the retrogaming trend, wherein old games enjoy reinvigorated popularity due to the internet. Tramis had been on my radar since Maddi Chilton published an article in Killscreen titled, “A Forgotten, Decades-old Game about Slavery has returned.”⁶ Chilton was right to note how “ahead of its time” the game now feels, writing that the creation of Freedom, “a game by an Afro-Caribbean woman about a violent slave revolt on the plantations of Martinique,” at the birth of mainstream videogame culture, “is frightening in its honesty.”⁷ Since 2016, two books have emerged that take on the subject of videogames about slave revolt: Alyssa Sepinwall’s exhaustive study, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Videogames⁸, and my thin volume for the University of Minnesota’s Forerunner series, Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance (2020). The theme of slave rebellion is at the heart of both of these games upon which Chamoiseau worked, the aforementioned Méwilo (1987) and Freedom: les guerriers de l’ombre (1988) both produced by Coktel Vision. Part III of Sepinwall’s monograph is devoted to “Video Games on Slavery and the Haitian Revolution,” with chapter 8 addressing the Assassin’s Creed franchise and its depictions of Haiti and Haitian rebels and chapter 9 on Tramis’s games about slavery. Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance (Lauro) focuses especially on games that make the resistive slave a playable character, and it profiles Tramis’s Freedom: les guerriers de l’ombre briefly, among its discussion of educational games made for use in the classroom, art games, and mainstream console games.⁹ Méwilo describes the reverberations of an event that took place during a slave revolt in Martinique, and Freedom makes a game of attempted slave rebellion.

The games I am looking at here foreground Creole culture and folklore, including mythical figures like zombis and soucouyans in Méwilo; and, at least according to the game manual, the rebels in Freedom can be aided by sorcerers and even a goddess.¹⁰ Méwilo is based on a folktale about a slave master’s buried gold that was previously featured in Chamoiseau’s novel Chronique des sept misères (1986), and which, according to Renée Gossen, “symbolizes the wealth that the békés, white French settlers and plantation owners, have wrongfully reaped from a land which is not theirs and, quite literally, on the backs of African slaves.”¹¹ Tramis explicitly mentions this as a long-standing myth in her interview with Tristan Donovan in  Replay: The History of Video Games: “The game was inspired by the Carib legend of jars of gold,” explained Tramis. “At the height of the slave revolts, plantation masters saved their gold in the worst way. They got their most faithful slave to dig a hole and then killed and buried him with the gold in order that the ghost of the unfortunate slave would keep the curious away from the treasure.”¹²

I am interested here in thinking of these games as “Creole” not only in their content—that is, by making reference to various aspects of the Afro-Diasporic-Indigenous-European cultural stew that one finds in the Caribbean and other sites of colonization— but also in their form, as by defying expectation, instructions, or genre boundaries. The word “Creole” has a long history, signifying, first, both white persons of European descent and enslaved persons born in the colonies; and later, a population with mixed heritage; it can signify both language and culture. I understand “creole” through Glissant’s antillanité and Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé’s “créolité,” as that which pushes back against “false universalism, monolinguism and purity” (Éloge de la créolité). For me, Creole defies rigid compartmentalization. Elsewhere I have sought to articulate more specifically a new category of “creolizing videogames,” that reference oral culture and folklore even as they exercise a kind of Creole modality in their multisensory forms, linguistic play, defiance of genre, emphasis upon collective subjectivities, and more (in Russworm and Murray). I am especially interested in creolizing as a hermeneutic process, as in the series Creolizing the Canon put forth by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Lastly, I want to emphasize here that Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé insist that the concept of créolité “is not limited to the American continent … [but] refers to the brutal interaction, on either insular or landlocked territories […] of culturally different populations”¹³ and thus invites broad application. The sense in which I use it here stresses a willful defiance of monolithic categories, as in recent efforts to creolize the canon.¹⁴ At the nexus of form and content, we might consider the ways that digital games can remap written archives (as by referencing oral narratives).

One goal of this essay is to emphasize that the archive of a people’s oral history, which we find in song, literature, and folklore, may also sometimes turn up in unexpected media, like videogames. Tramis stated this intention in an interview with game blogger Ilmari:

[T]he dictatorship of sugar has caused an imbalance in the environment and human relations of [the Caribbean] region, and the Creole society still bears the aftermath. I felt a great emptiness on the side of our myths and founding legends, on the side of our history, unknown or suffocated under a bundle of shame. I wanted to extend the Creolity [sic] movement to video games too.¹⁵

It is an important intervention to emphasize the créolité of videogames, and most of the articles on Tramis’s games about slavery speak of it as testimony.¹⁶ “Fugitive slaves, my ancestors, were true warriors that I had to pay tribute to… It was my duty to remember.”¹⁷ A videogame can, if not overcome, at least draw attention to, the elisions of the historical archive. Sepinwall reports in her interviews with Tramis that this was one of the designer’s explicit goals: “Tramis sought to overcome archival silences; she wanted to bring enslaved people to life by drawing from community memory rather than documents left by colonists”¹⁸ (italics added). It is for this reason that her games turn to folklore for the political experiences, traumas, and victories of a people without ready access to ink and vellum, exploring oral histories as an alternative archive.¹⁹

The insufficiency of the historical archive is a major point of discussion in slavery studies. Many scholars have grappled with this lack and how to fill it.²⁰ The voices of those humans who were considered property are rarely found among the holdings of libraries. Just as créolité, as articulated by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant in their 1989 manifesto, rejected the colonial imposition of the French and experimented with linguistic play, so do these games celebrate Caribbean blackness and culture by looking to folklore and local histories of resistance for inspiration. Further, this essay seeks to articulate the way these games use a particular device that we associate with Chamoiseau’s literary œuvre, opacity. In brief, I argue that the narrative complexity of these ludic texts raises a question about whether or not the history of slavery (and resistance) ought to be made playable. Extrapolating from Edouard Glissant’s invocation of opacity in theorizing identity, we can consider opacity as a literary and artistic device that has broad application for establishing limits to encroachment, cultural consumption, or the prurient interest of outsiders.²¹ In terms of identity, opacity signifies “the survival of diversity, of irreducible otherness … an irreducible particularity, the stubborn otherness of the Other.²² In artistic practice, opacity might be a bulwark against exoticization, fetishization, othering. It can be a tool of resistance. It may look like a narrative barricade through which only certain readers can pass to a deeper level of understanding, when, as with the use of an untranslated Creole expression in the midst of a francophone passage, the text selects its reader. It’s a mode we see often employed across Chamoiseau’s body of work. I theorize that some uses of Glissantian opacity in the games productively block this history from complete commercialization.

In the “Afterword” to her translation of Chronique des sept misères, Linda Coverdale writes, “Chamoiseau is not fond of glossaries and believes that the ‘Creole dimension’ of his work should be safeguarded against the alienating ideal of ‘transparency,’”²³ but rather than just using Creole, he is apt to create his own words, what one scholar called his “Chamoisifying” of language.²⁴ As he wrote in the introduction to Creole Tales, “the storyteller must take care to use language that is so opaque, so devious—its significance broken up into a thousand sibylline fragments…” ²⁵ (italics in original). We might go so far as to hazard that the collaborative process of reading is the reassembly of these fragments into a picture, and that the participatory nature of the videogame narrative only makes this more visible. With a hat tip to Edouard Glissant, Chamoiseau continues, “the Storyteller’s object is almost to obscure as he reveals” (italics in original).²⁶

Opacity and creolization are of a piece: both work against unilateral apprehension. Chamoiseau’s œuvre is also creolized in form: it challenges notions of authorship, genre, media, and language. The author’s diverse output includes screenplays, multimodal works, and collaborations. For example, Chamoiseau’s 1999 fable Seven Dreams of Elmira is a collection of different versions of a folktale accompanied by photo portraits of the tellers by Jean-Luc de Laguarigue. The text is written from the perspective of an old worker at the Saint-Etienne Rum Distillery, a man who tells us that he is over one hundred years old and recounts the distillery’s various mythologies. A note from the author (signed P.C.) lists his informants, “commanders of memory,” as his sources for the various ideations of the folktale included therein. Chamoiseau also penned a comic book—in Creole and in French—with Georges Puisy, Delgrès, Les Antilles sous Bonaparte, about the struggle against the reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe by Napoleon. One aspect of creolized texts is a disruption of authorial expectations. Inasmuch as they are inherently collaborative, videogames are a ripe medium in which to stage conversations about collectivity and identity, thus the form lends itself to being considered through the lens of creolization.

That one of Caribbean literature’s most notable authors collaborated on the production of two videogames in the 1980s has been largely left unconsidered by Chamoiseau scholars. This is especially surprising given how the games echo (or foreshadow) his novels.²⁷ Many of the major elements of his work appear in these ludic texts: Méwilo, like his novel Texaco, evokes the tragic eruption of Mont Pelée in 1902²⁸ and, like the novel Solibo Magnifique, features a detective trying to solve a magical mystery.²⁹ Similar to Seven Dreams of Elmira, Méwilo stages some of its action in a haunted former plantation and, as with The Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, the game contains a tale of buried treasure and the ghost (or zombi) of its enslaved guardian.³⁰ What’s more, at least one scholar has referred to Chamoiseau’s use of creole folktales as “ludic,” so one would think that the literal games he designed would be of interest.³¹ I second Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s surprise that major books on Chamoiseau fail to address these videogames, given the diversity of the author’s artistic output and scholars’ attention to it.³² The games are rich with themes that we see across his wider œuvre —slavery, colonialism, language and folklore—but they are also exceedingly difficult to find and to play successfully, which may account for their scholarly neglect.

I believe that frustrated interactivity (a concept in videogame studies) reverberates with potential for Creole storytelling as a mechanism of opacity.³³ What does this look like, in practice? On the one hand, it looks like games that include challenges that are not easily solved, that incorporate uses of operational weakness and in-game frustration to make a point about the subject matter. On the other, it may look like games that are explicitly unwinnable. My own gameplay, described in the pages that follow, consisted of much running into brick walls (figuratively in these games, but elsewhere, literally). The gamic obstructions concretize the mechanism of opacity, making the path forward obscure, difficult, or unfun.

Freedom and Méwilo rely significantly on productive opacity. They are difficult, if not altogether unwinnable. Their opacity evokes the near-impossibility of resistance to the plantation machine, but on a deeper level it may also protect this history from appropriation or even amusement. As Coverdale has written, opacity can be “a mode of pushback against cultural appropriation” (“Afterword” 128). The game mechanics demand that the player work to understand Caribbean history. And even then, the legacy of slave resistance may be beyond the player’s control.

Part of what makes the videogame an ideal form in which to create Creolizing texts is its inherent plurality: there is no one experience of the game, just as creolizing texts emphasize collaborative storytelling above individual authors.³⁴ My experience of the gamic text will be radically different from that of any other player, due to all the permutations of play. As such, the experience of playing is one of collaborative meaning-making between the player and the design(er/s). My play of these games is as an outsider, non-Caribbean, a middle-aged woman not very good at gaming, and making attempts to play in the years 2019-2021, in which the technology of the original games has become obsolete. That is, because I do not have a functional Atari lying around, I can only play these games through online emulators that come themselves with a range of problems. All of this is part of my experience of the game.³⁵ Yours would no doubt be different.³⁶ But a question that arises is: Who are these games for? The French child who had perhaps visited Martinique on holiday but knew little of its history? Or the child of Caribbean ancestry who would recognize in the games something of their own heritage? This essay will not try to answer that question definitively, but instead will highlight, through the presentation of my own gameplay, the ways that the gamic narratives change depending on the player’s lived personal experience. Leaning upon my previous scholarship, I’ll present here my own (perilous, difficult and often failed) journey through the games.³⁷

Part II. Unwinnable.

On the unwinnability of Freedom, game blogger Ilmari proffers several options:

Chances are:

It’s a bug

It’s an intended feature, meant to teach you cruelly that rebellion never pays

There’s something wrong with the copy I’ve been playing

It’s a clever copy protection that will fail you at the very last minute

I've still missed some implicit winning condition³⁸

It was a great relief to me to find these words, written by a more adept gamer than myself; it means that it’s not me and my poor gaming skills that have resulted in me failing the game, over and over again. I have played Freedom: Les guerriers de l’ombre in two different languages and through two different platforms over a period of some years. I have played as all four playable protagonists. I have tried tweaking the settings, and (when the game system allowed me to do so) I have opted for different skill levels and side-characters, using the manual’s descriptions to try to pick the weakest foes. And yet, I consistently ended up mauled by dogs, captured, whipped, burned alive, cut up, my bones broken with a hammer, with molten lead poured into my wounds.

Yes, it’s a ghastly game. It should be acknowledged that the manual claims that the game is winnable: “Le but à atteindre varie avec le type de maître,”³⁹ and Sepinwall verified that a code for Victory exists in the game files.⁴⁰ The manual states that if you are playing with Pommeraie as the master, for example, it is sufficient to kill all the dogs and flee the plantation, having reduced his crops by 50% and 25% of his buildings. For Arnaud de Ronan, you must kill all the dogs and flee after reducing his slaves by 75%, presumably by enlisting them to join you. In both cases, the manual further states, killing the owner of the plantation resets the game. He can be defeated only by progressively weakening his personnel. The master cannot be killed. Make of that what you will.

Ilmari has suggested that the unwinnability of these versions of the game—which many of us now, 30 years after the game’s original release, must access via emulators—may be an ingenious copyright mechanism, presumably meaning that the game is unwinnable only because the software is not running on the original hardware. Regardless of the reason, I personally have made very little headway. I will go into more detail about my failures below, but I first want to suggest a possibility that Ilmari has overlooked, and which I suggested as a larger strategy of game design concerning “the gamification of slave resistance” in Kill the Overseer!: the difficulty of the game may be intended not to teach the player “cruelly that rebellion never pays,” but to safeguard this history from appropriation, to make sure that it eludes the grasp of the gamer, to signify the sacredness of this history that ultimately should not be reduced to an entertainment commodity. From our vantage point in 2021, as Ilmari suggests, it is very difficult to tell where the game’s planned difficulty ends, and technological obsolescence begins to have an effect. The emulators are glitchy, and the manuals are hard to find online, all of which we might think of as what Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux call “metagaming,” that is, belonging to the text’s totality. In the spirit of considering this totality, I have divided this discussion of my own close-playing into two phases: pre-play set-up (which remains part of the world of the gameplay) and in-game play.

Pre-play set up.

Some might say that the game Freedom begins with the title card, which reads:

Night is falling over the prosperous Grand Parnasse plantation. The slaves, under their supervisor’s thumb, have left the carts of cane and gone back to their huts. Meanwhile, the owner sips his rum on the veranda and the director rubs his hands; the plantation makes a considerable profit. The accountant finishes his records; there are 200 casks of sugar piled up in the buildings. The supervisor is worried. The lashes of his whip are no longer enough to keep the rhythm in the fields. The wind of rebellion is blowing over the negroes’ huts! But who would dare become the leader of a rebellion? (English version via Internet Archive)

Yet, it also might be argued that the game begins much earlier. The material reality of the game is the technology that it runs on—and different versions of the game will begin differently, with slightly different loading screens, and different levels of graphics and sound.⁴¹ Perhaps we might think of this like different editions of a book, which may be prefaced by translator’s notes or forewords, ragged covers, or pristine ones, all of which contribute to one’s experience. I have used this analogy elsewhere to explain what videogames can do for narrative: imagine encountering a book that refuses to be opened. For those players struggling to find the right emulator upon which to run the program, the game might feel as if it begins when (huzzah!) the loading screen finally appears. In the various versions of the game, this loading screen depicts a nearly naked human of ambiguous gender. The person appears to be genuflecting, but then they break their chains over their head. On Atari, the image is accompanied by drums and set against a lush background featuring huts and fire, and in the lower bit version, there is a simple purple sunset. But in both high- and low-resolution versions, the invitation to gaze upon this naked prostrate body causes discomfort—there is something vaguely inappropriate about rendering this historical material playable—even if the person’s gesture is ultimately one of empowerment.

Regardless of whether the game is played via an emulator or on a platform that allows the player to bypass downloading the game to play online (such as DOSzone), the first true interface screen is a copyright protection. First, the player is asked for a passcode, included with the manual to eliminate piracy: this is a large sheet of color-coded boxes to which the player gains access by telling the program the color of the given box number (such as A123) on the rainbow-colored sheet. Even without this code, the patient player can keep guessing among the provided answers until they turn up the right one; but locating the correct box is a dizzying proposition even with the code sheet. The commercial aspect of the game, the fact that it was an entertainment commodity made available for purchase, is thus the first thing the player understands. Our entry into the game may entail a sense of unease, as we begin to play a game about the commodification of human bodies from within a capitalist system dependent on the legacy of transatlantic slavery. It is only after the player has navigated to the correct color option to bypass the copyright protection that the character selection begins.

At the start, the player is given a choice as to which one of four playable enslaved characters from the Grand Parnasse plantation they want to incarnate—Solitude, Makandal, Delia, or Sechou—and whether to play them as “Defiant,” “Rebellious,” or “Fanatical,” which the manual intimates (but doesn’t specify) are akin to easy, medium, or hard difficulty settings for gamers of disparate skill levels. As Sepinwall emphasizes in her discussion of the game in Slave Revolt on Screen, these characters are based on historical (or symbolic) freedom-fighters from various places in the Caribbean, thereby making Grand Parnasse representative of the whole region and its history.⁴²

In the easiest iteration, the game allows you to tinker with the skill settings even further.

My desk is papered with sticky notes that read:

“Defiant” Solitude: 76 fire-starting ability; 8 climbing; 16 lock-picking

“Rebellious” Solitude: 72 fire-starting ability; 8 climbing; 20 lock-picking

“Fanatical” Solitude: 76 fire-starting ability; 8 climbing; 16 lock-picking

And so on, with variations for all four characters. Though some slight difference might be noticeable in how many enslaved people agreed to join me if I played as a character with high charisma (meaning their persuasiveness in rallying non-playable characters to revolt), like Solitude as opposed to Sechou, and I might be more likely to defeat a weak enemy like Bonnetierre, who the manual says “se bat mal”⁴³ as opposed to the overseer Nelson, described as “brutal et sevère”⁴⁴, on the whole, I still found the game unwinnable. The selection of levels, characteristics, and non-playable characters (NPCs) had little discernable effect.⁴⁵ The arbitrariness of the game mechanics heightens the player’s frustration in a way that echoes the unfairness of the plantation system.

Further, it might even be said that the manual itself is untrustworthy. The manual states that named characters like Afoukal (sharing the name of the protagonist in Chamoiseau’s novel Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows) or Canope bring special skills to the team, if you can manage to recruit them. Canope, for example, has the ability to poison dogs, which is immensely helpful, as the dogs that rove the plantation often send up the warning and can easily end your mission. Having played the game countless times however, I have never managed to recruit one of these named persons. In an exciting moment, I discovered an NPC in a different place from where I usually encountered him; still, he declined to join me. The manual also claims that the deity Manman Dlo may help a player, but I never spotted her. If this untrustworthiness in the manual were a purposeful orchestration on the game designers’ part, it might be read as an ingenious commentary on the injustice of slavery, but it is more likely that, as Ilmari says, the game is exceptionally difficult, especially from the vantage point of contemporary gamers accessing the technology via the interface of glitchy emulators.⁴⁶ All of this is to say, whether this difficulty is the result of the techno-temporal opacity or is endemic to the game as designed by Tramis is a moot question: the opacity of the game is a part of the gamic text writ large, and thus is fitting for a game about an attempted slave revolt.

In-game play

The player of Freedom navigates a maze-like layout on the main screen, being careful to avoid the dogs on patrol. The game was made in 1988, so we are closer to Pac-Man level graphics than to the rich cinematics of today’s games: on the navigation screen, you are a blinking light moving across the space, amongst the small boxes that represent the buildings. Smaller boxes are the slave huts and larger ones are the various storehouses (where you can choose to commit acts of sabotage, like setting casks of sugar on fire) and other buildings, including the residences of the overseers, the religious officials (one of whom is Père Labat), and the masters.⁴⁷ When you pilot your dot to a location and select it, it brings up another scene in which you can decide to explore your surroundings, commit acts of sabotage, set fires, encounter adversaries, or try to convince other enslaved persons to join you.

There seems to be no mechanic for killing the dogs one encounters on the plantation’s map screen. Presumably, Canope could take them out of the equation if you could stumble upon the algorithm that tempts him to join you, but you can also face off with the dogs by encountering them in a fight screen, which is by no means pretty to look at. Given the centrality of dogs to the game mechanics, it is worthwhile to briefly address Chamoiseau’s novel Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997). The novel tells the tale of a very old, enslaved man who flees his plantation one day and struggles mightily to evade his master’s monstrous dog. The narrative comes to a head as the dog nearly drowns in quicksand but is ultimately spared; and while the old man is injured and dies, he finds a sacred AmerIndian stone, and something appears to transpire between the man and the dog. At the end, the beast returns to his master profoundly changed into a docile creature, and the dead man’s bones are seen laying by the stone, leading the author to conjure—or to channel—this tale. There is a sudden shift from third person to first person upon the discovery of the magic stone engraved by the indigenous peoples of the island, and a sort of spiritual fusion between man and beast occurs. The final chapter is narrated by the author himself, who shares the events that led him to uncover this story and to write the book.

The novel has many of the hallmarks of Chamoiseau’s œuvre, including made-up words (“eleventy-thousand,” 36), genre-crashing, meta-moments (such as the shift in perspective), references to folklore (diablesses, 4; mermaids, 19; zombies, 24, 84; living dead, 32; femmes-zombies, 40); and the weaving together of the history of these “bitter lands of sugar” (3) and the meaning-making produced by fantastical storytelling about this painful history. On the surface level, Freedom’s horrible dogs (witness them in action in the embedded clips below) call to mind Chamoiseau’s molosse. But on the level of aesthetics, the game’s mechanics, which obstruct and frustrate, also echo the techniques that Chamoiseau espoused in his literary œuvre, particularly in his preference for texts that defy genre and cross the threshold between fiction and reality by blending the author into his characters.⁴⁸ In addition to the specific detail of the man-eating dog, a horrifying aspect of the historical reality of the slave plantation, the videogame presents an inscrutability that recalls the opacity of Chamoiseau’s literary works. In videogames more broadly, frustration becomes part of the gameplay, and in the best cases, we can read this as the game’s productive opacity.⁴⁹ But there are also moments when the limits embedded in this game seem unproductive.

The most problematic aspect of Freedom is the fact that, although there appear to be dozens of cases nègres⁵⁰ on the plantation, there are only two different graphic frames that reappear, over and over. As the player navigates to each abode and selects it, a dialogue box appears, allowing the player to try “recruiting” the person dwelling therein. Sometimes the person is a fieldhand, sometimes a craftsman, and sometimes a named character who, presumably, would bring special skills to the revolt if ever they could be convinced to become an ally, as outlined in the manual.

The same two male faces are used over and over for the unnamed fieldhand and the craftsman, representing scores of anonymous enslaved persons. Because there is no narrative to the game, it is very hard to feel as if one is advancing—and this is complicated by the fact that the slaves’ houses seem to repeat themselves, so that even though, looking at the map, it would seem as if there are hundreds of recruitable persons (and the manual provides numbers—“Ils sont 204 répartis en 14 cases de 10 esclaves aux champs + 6 cases de 10 ouvriers petits chef + la case du quimboiseur + la case du séancier + la case du leader + un prisonnier”)⁵¹—in the actual gameplay the same two pictures of slave huts (Fig. 4, 5) repeat infinitely. The fact that the same two images of the slaves’ quarters repeat gives the sense that these persons are interchangeable. It might have been better, I humbly suggest, to use a blank avatar like a silhouette, rather than two distinct faces to represent a range of different persons. I realize that this is likely due to the limitations of the technology (and especially to the memory capacity of the 1980s gaming system), but the outcome is unfortunate: the repetition of the same places and the same faces gives one the sense of an indistinguishable horde of the enslaved, apart from the few named characters, who are rarely encountered in your mission.

Detection points (represented by the butterfly icon on the main navigation screen) signify how dangerously close the player is coming to failing the mission, and these diminish with each encounter one has with other individuals, regardless of the outcome. The player’s objective is to try to convince others to join their cause, and yet points are lost each time one visits the cases nègres to recruit others, whether the attempt is successful or a failure. As such, sometimes I lasted the longest (in terms of game-playing time) when I made no attempt to rally anyone, but instead merely meandered about, committing acts of damage to the plantation’s various buildings. This is an important aspect of the game’s construction because it speaks to the historical reality of slave resistance and to the difficulty of increasing one’s chances of successful revolt by taking on numbers: risk is heightened with each person with whom the plan is shared. As such, the game avoids a potential pitfall: more efforts to recruit result in a loss to one’s detection points, but this avoids the sense of running about “collecting” enslaved persons.⁵²

Because the game is not stacked in levels, the player can directly encounter the plantation master, albeit to disastrous effect. Otherwise, they can continue traveling through the landscape, avoiding the man-eating dogs, encountering the same two images of slave huts over and over, and occasionally finding a new enemy to face in hand-to-hand combat or a set of buildings to ransack and destroy. Although one’s points diminish more slowly the less the player avoids committing acts of senseless damage (for example, burning down only those buildings that contain things of value, like the stores of sugar), it is arguably more fun to run around the plantation setting everything on fire.

In summation, Freedom: les guerriers dans l’ombre is essentially a slave revolt sandbox game. I am not convinced that it can be won, given my own experience with the game and having read others’ critiques of it.⁵³ Admittedly, I am a poor gamer: after countless attempts, I have yet to figure out what the climbing function is for, though it is counted as one of the chief skillsets to be valued among the four playable character options. A game designer might say that the architecture of the game is simply inferior to that of Méwilo, to which we will turn in the next section, though contemporary reviews were mixed.⁵⁴ For example, there is no cursor that returns the player to a specific spot on the map in Freedom, whereas navigating the hummingbird to the hibiscus flower in the bottom left corner of the screen in Méwilo allows the player to zoom back out to the map. It is impossible to determine with certainty what is due to temporal opacity (the difficulty of accessing the technology), what is the result of my own poor gaming skills, what is planned obfuscation, and even whether the game’s manual is a trustworthy document.

Nonetheless, the inscrutability of Freedom is not unlike Chamoiseau’s own literary inscrutability and, further, this inscrutability befits a game about slave resistance. In Kill the Overseer! I discussed how scholar and video game designer Ian Bogost’s concepts, “selective interactivity” and “operationalized weakness,” are useful to addressing the history of slave rebellion.⁵⁵ I will confess, though, that Freedom can just feel frustrating in an unproductive manner.

Freedom’s chaos and futility, at once in those aspects crafted by Chamoiseau, those designed by Tramis, and those that result from vintage gaming, are all part of the game text’s totality. In their combination they not only depict the difficulty of slave resistance, but they also obstruct “enjoyment” of what is ultimately a sacred history. That being said, Freedom’s opacity feels somehow less generative than my experience of Méwilo, a game made the year before Freedom, to which we turn our attention now.⁵⁶

Part III. Winnable(?)

Méwilo serves as a perfect example of a creolized videogame: it foregrounds Martinican history, culture, and folklore; and, as a co-authored videogame, is necessarily multimodal. But not only does the game rely on text, sounds, visuals, and animation, but it also includes a variety of paratextual elements—a manual featuring a story by Patrick Chamoiseau, “Les derniers jours d’une mulâtresse,” a glossary of select terms, and a recipe. The original packaging supposedly also came with a tape by a band called Malavoi.⁵⁷ The game and its packaging constitute a kind of Creole stew, which may be intentional given that the recipe for callaloo will play an important role in the player’s path through the game.

Chamoiseau’s commitment to opacity is evident in the game’s limited invitation to participate in the narrative. Méwilo is rigidly compartmentalized on a structural level. The player faces multiple challenges, some of which can only be solved through trial-and-error, and others that, in my experience, required seeking the help of others online. Whether the game is more opaque for the retrogamer—obliged to find workarounds in order to get it to load—or easier, thanks to the internet and access to google—is a matter for another place and time. Whichever the case, I found the game’s puzzles very difficult to solve.

Even more so than with Freedom, Méwilo seems like it should be simple, as the structure is logically plotted from one episode to the next. Nevertheless, the game holds the player at arm’s length. Its form accords integrally with the central theme of its narrative: the challenges of putting the ghosts of slavery to rest.

Axiomatic Play

Méwilo, like Freedom, is a videogame “about” slavery in the Caribbean, and both games use a map as the central home screen. That is where the similarities end. Unlike Freedom, which is set on a plantation, in Méwilo, the player steps into the shoes of an unnamed PC, who appears to be a detective with paranormal abilities, in order to solve the case of a ghost that haunts a former plantation.

Méwilo’s stated objective is to calm the restless spirits that literally haunt the residents of the plantation Grand Parnasse. Figuratively, the game grapples with the tensions that exist between descendants of the enslaved, slave-masters, and the cast of so-called mixed-race people. By the time gameplay has ended, the player has been asked to figure out a genealogical map of the various characters they have encountered in order to set free the zombi, the trapped spirit of a murdered slave, whose ghost guards the master’s buried gold.

The opening title cards read: “Nous sommes le 7 mai 1902, après 15 jours de traversée vous arrivez en vue des cotés verdoyantes de l’île aux fleurs. Dans ce pays de magie, vos pouvoirs paranormaux sont décuplés.”⁵⁸ It then explains how to use the cursor to navigate the map, but even this is put in terms of shapeshifting: “Pour vous déplacer aisement, vous prenez l’apparence d’un colibri…”⁵⁹ Aside from this instruction regarding how to zoom out to the map, little direction is provided, and part of the gameplay involves exploring the space to discover what is or is not interactive.

Many sites on the map, like the Pitt, do nothing until that dimension of the quest has been unlocked. Other sites remain insurmountable until all the other pieces are in place: traveling to Petite Savane, for example, results in the player’s instant death because of the presence of a deadly snake. One may die here several times, before finally accepting that it is a dead end. The “game over” card reads: “Vous etes transformé en soucougnan, condamné à errer l’éternité durant…”⁶⁰ Only once the gamer has obtained a mongoose (successfully bribing it with fruit obtained in a different part of the game) can this landscape be traversed. But that comes much later.

The game thus begins with the illusion of choice. The player thinks they can pilot to any of the many named locations on the map, but soon learns that the game operates by a kind of locked door mechanism: only one door will open at a time, bringing up new content to learn, or a challenge to be solved, at which point another door opens somewhere within the game. Figuring out which door has been activated is part of the gameplay. The map will look the same, but by navigating to the various locations, the player may discover a new element. Suddenly, a character may appear, or a spot that yielded nothing before will now activate when clicked upon.

Until very near the end of the game, clicking on Montagne Pelée brings up only the following warning, “Le 8 mai 1902 à 8h02, c’est l’enfer: le flanc sud-ouest de la montagne s’ouvre pour vomir une énorme fumée ardente sillonnée d’éclairs. 30 000 morts! St. Pierre n’existe plus…”⁶¹ We might assume that it is the PC’s psychic ability that allows us to access this advance knowledge. Chamoiseau’s stamp on the game makes for uncommonly vivid videogame copy.

The first door of the game’s narrative is opened by visiting the location on the map called Grand Parnasse. Yes, it is the same name as the plantation in Freedom, and Arnaud de Ronan, named here as the ancestral master of Grand Parnasse, was one of the potential NPC masters in Freedom, suggesting that the two games are set on the same plantation.⁶² In Méwilo, much of the backstory concerns a slave revolt, furthering the sense that the two games are connected. At Grand Parnasse, one encounters Monsieur et Madame Hubert-Destouches, the pair who have hired the PC to fix their haunted plantation problem and who provide the important backstory about the haunting.

As one navigates the game, with each conversation leading to a clue as to how to find and attempt the next activated challenge, three things become evident. First, there is ample foreshadowing of the volcano’s eruption, with characters noting strange natural phenomena. Second, the characters paint a portrait of political tensions among the various classes inhabiting St. Pierre and the neighboring plantations, with much strife evident between the various social classes, including the white béké class, the “mixed-race” freedmen and women, and the Black enslaved population.⁶³ My focus will be on the game’s productive difficulty, and what that tells us about interpellation of this rich history.⁶⁴

Méwilo is decidedly a better game than Freedom, with more structured scaffolding and a clear and compelling narrative that might interest many scholars of Caribbean history, as well as those familiar with Chamoiseau’s work. It is a simple point and click adventure game, very much in the same vein as Roberta Williams’ Kings Quest series (1980 Sierra Entertainment). For example, a loupe (magnifying glass) on a table in the salon of a plantation house can be touched, but only once the player obtains a mysterious old letter does its utility become clear.⁶⁵ Similarly, only upon learning the story of how the Ronan family, in escaping the slave rebellion of 1831, sought shelter with their neighbors, the Banvilles, can the player navigate to the Banville plantation, Lys Vert. Prior to obtaining this piece of information, clicking on Fond Cacao on the map led only to the player being turned away after viewing an image of a cart in a field.

Thus, the game proceeds with the discovery of various keys that open various doors, giving the game a linear trajectory. It operates on a funnel mechanism, as there is only one path forward. However, this is not to say that gameplay is always smooth, with one step leading logically to the next. There are several hurdles in the game that feel insurmountable, and it is to these we now turn. The game’s true variability is the matter of how long it takes the player to solve each challenge, many of which are very difficult, explicitly embracing Chamoiseau’s preferred modality, opacity.

Opacity

There are several hurdles in the game that take quite some time to master. Echevin, a man living on the plantation, has information you need about the strange goings-on at Grand Parnasse. But he will only reveal the necessary information if given a bottle of rum.⁶⁶ To get this rum, the player must go to the distillery and correctly answer eight questions on Caribbean history and culture, including about Martinique’s original peoples, its conquest by the French, and various aspects of its language and culture. These questions are hard. Miss even one, and the player has to go off and do some other things before the distiller will restart the quiz. The questions also rotate, so it can take several tries to get past this part of the game.

The questions posed in the quiz contain colloquialisms unique to Martinique, which makes it difficult to cheat by using Google (I know, I tried.) Within their multiple-choice options, they impart a sense of the weight of the history of slavery, as slavery and resistance haunt various questions and their potential responses. For example, a possible answer for the definition of a “fer de lance” is “a weapon used by a rebel slave,” whereas snake is the correct response. A “collier de chou” might be a device used to yoke slaves to each other (which it is not) or a kind of jewelry (which it is) or a type of vegetable (which Google erroneously led me to believe.)⁶⁷ Finally, by successfully answering all eight questions given by the distiller, the PC is given a bottle of rum, which can be brought to Papa Echevin. A player from the Caribbean would have a vastly different experience of this part of the game and might sail through the test on the first try; Thereby, the game’s cultural opacity functions as a sieve, allowing certain players to pass and holding up others, at least until they learn a few things. Although certain moments in the game feel pedagogical, where clicking on a particular spot brings up extra information, such as the names of common flowers in Martinique (as in the garden at Grand Parnasse) or information about the types of crops (at Fond Cacao), these moments only serve to contrast with the episodes of profound opacity, in which the game refuses to yield to a certain type of player.

Like Timolet in Freedom, Echevin was modeled as Chamoiseau’s doppelganger.⁶⁸ And like the author, the character of Echevin has a way with words. He first states, “Un rhum comme ca, c’est une clé pour mon cœur, pour ma gorge, pour ma mémoire,”⁶⁹ which admits the broader mechanics of the game that work on the level of closed doors and object or information “keys.” He then states, “Il faut haïr les chiens mais reconnaître leurs dents blanches,”⁷⁰ an idiom that, as he swiftly explains, means that despite the whites’ many faults, they make good rum. Sepinwall notes from her interviews with Tramis that the games are “suffused with Creole proverbs” and cites this as an example.⁷¹ Thus while the game is available only in French and German, Chamoiseau has infused it with his trademark creolizing linguistic play.⁷²

Echevin gives us another aphorism that is harder to decode: “Menteur est sans mémoire mais la mémoire n’est pas menteuse,”⁷³ before divulging that the angry spirit plaguing the household is a member of the ancestral family. That decoding everyone’s familial relationships is central to the game is already suggested in this early scene (when the point count is 03/99) in Echevin’s passing reference to his sister “Celucie,” whom the player later comes to know as Man Cécé, a woman serving callaloo at the port.

Another major stumbling block for the player occurs with a visit to Gwanzong the quimboiseur (defined in the manual’s glossary as a “sorcier craint et respecté” a feared and respected sorcerer), who lives at the top of the mountain that is already spewing ash and convulsing (as is gleaned from conversation with the various characters one encounters). The player is told by Malou at the lycée to bring the quimboiseur a gift of a black frizzled chicken. The presence of the Pitt on the map (which, as the gamer may learn from the distiller’s quiz, signifies a cock-fighting ring) makes the next move obvious, and this location at last becomes active. But the keeper of the cocks is a prankster who says he will only donate a chicken if the player correctly answers one of his mysterious riddles. They are very difficult, even nonsensical, and seem to have been invented by the author. As with the distiller’s multiple-choice quiz, there is a large pool from which the questions are drawn, but there is no multiple choice to help here. This time, with a blank to fill in, trial-and-error is not an option. Even if one finally guesses correctly, the cheeky character insists that the player answer a second riddle to prove that the first time was no fluke!

To be perfectly honest, I would never have beaten the game had I not resorted to reading gamers’ blogs for tricks and tips and to watching a playthru of the Amstrad version, which is very nearly the same (Amstrad Maniaque). This business with the chicken riddler was very hard, but I spied some familiar riddles in the playthru on Youtube, which was helpful. Watching someone else play the game does not solve all the problems. Although the sample complete playthru on Youtube posted by Amstrad Maniaque shows the player returning to the cathedral, obtaining a secret letter from Minerve Doussaint by clicking on the book under her arm, I could not get this to activate for me no matter what I tried. Was this a glitch? Was I doing something wrong? Perhaps the iterations of the game were different.⁷⁴

With a score of 63/99, and having finished more than half of the game, I was ready to call it quits. And then I found a cheat, a blog by a gamer named Oli who gives step-by-step instructions on how to defeat the game.⁷⁵ Oli calls the part of the game where I got blocked “un petit bug,” but with the help of his explicit instructions, I was able to get past it.⁷⁶ Relying on his instructions the rest of the way, which I followed like a recipe, I completed the game, but the truth is that I absolutely would never have been able to beat it on my own. Even after several more passes through the game, I still remain uncertain as to how the player is meant to deduce the solution to the final problem, in which one can release the trapped spirit of the faithful slave by correctly naming their oldest living descendants. To arrive at the answers, one would have to plot a family tree for each character from the start of the gameplay. Although there are subtle clues as to how the townspersons are related to each other, their lineage is rarely concretely and directly laid out; instead, there are obscure asides made about the mixed-race children of slave-masters, and clues to be decoded in their names.⁷⁷ With this attention to ancestry and genealogies, Méwilo adopts the opacity of Chamoiseau’s griot, who obscures as he reveals,⁷⁸ in this case, raising unspoken questions about the abuse of enslaved women. Although I now know the correct answers (thanks to Oli), I still fail to see how one could reasonably arrive at the correct answers. In a stroke of bad luck, even after getting the answers from this cheat online, I spelled one of the names wrong when entering it into the game system, necessitating that I start the whole thing over from the beginning. But then again, I was stumped by the distiller’s quiz, so another player may have a different experience: perhaps the game isn’t as punishing for all players as it was for me.

In The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments, Miguel Sicart presents “abusive game design” as fostering “dark play” to create a specific kind of aesthetic experience. “[A]busive game design creates objects that resist appropriation,” he argues, “and in that resistance they create the space of possibility in which the very point of playing is questioned”.⁷⁹ Although abusive game design’s dark play and what I am describing in Méwilo both engender experiences of frustration, displeasure, and unhappiness (as opposed to what we expect from “play”), the kind of punishing game design Sicart describes differs from the modes of opacity deployed in games that depict slavery and revolt. First, abusive game design reflects the designer’s effort to initiate a conversation with the player.⁸⁰ The aesthetics of opacity I seek to map out need not have been implemented willfully, but can also include things like bugs, glitches, misunderstandings, misinformation, and temporal opacity or technological obsolescence. Secondly, abusive game design is understood to be “highly non-ideological,” apolitical and aesthetic rather than persuasive,⁸¹ whereas the use of opacity that interests me as a resistive strategy aims specifically to protect history from becoming satisfying play.

Aside from his physical likeness and the poetic dialogue, Chamoiseau’s stamp on the game is evident in the manual. Its inclusion of a short story, “Les derniers jours d’une mulâtresse”⁸² and of a limited Creole glossary set the scene for the game; the included tale itself evokes similar narrative elements to the game, including the eruption of the volcano and a haunted atmosphere. The story may serve as an introduction for those totally unfamiliar with Martinique, to words like “colibri,” “béké,” and “vetiver,” but it is of no help with respect to any of the game’s pivotal challenges. Insofar as the manual and glossary do not actually help with answers needed at several key points in the game, they might be thought of as a clever use of misdirection. Although several of the same locations in the game are referenced in this story, the narrative has no connection to the game’s plot. And the text’s emphasis of the number 1344 (the number of pages in the diary of the deceased titular character) is repeated several times, in bold, suggesting to the reader/player that this has some significance to one of the game’s many puzzles.⁸³ It does not.

The manual also states that the callaloo recipe provided therein will be useful to answer a question at some point in the game, but the manual provides a recipe for the way the dish is prepared in Guadeloupe. The player is prompted to tell Man Cécé, who sells her dish at the port, which ingredient is added in Martinican versions of the dish. Here we might choose to read the game as hailing particular players, because those with certain cultural knowledge can pass to a higher level of the game than those without. Because the Guadelopean rather than the Martinican recipe is given in the manual, it is not a question of guessing ingredients from a given list. Rather, the player must seek outside knowledge to determine what should be added. How this would have been possible for players unfamiliar with Caribbean cuisine in the world before the internet is unclear: perhaps they would have sought out a recipe book or availed themselves of the network of game cheats provided in gaming magazines and on Minitel, the pre-cursor to the internet, now lost to us.⁸⁴ It is certainly difficult to imagine what the expectations of the contemporary player might have been. What is certain is that, as a result of playing the game, the player will have learned (or demonstrated knowledge) about Martinique’s history and culture. But many other aspects of the game remain, importantly, beyond the player’s grasp.

Part IV. Conclusion.

My study of Méwilo and Freedom has been restricted here to a broad analysis of the mechanisms utilized in the games insofar as these are similar to Chamoiseau’s literary works. Both of these games make use of opacity in order to safeguard the history of slavery and slave revolt even in this interactive, playable form. Many have asked, should gaming be the medium for telling this story? Muriel Tramis’s response to this fraught question is perhaps the most satisfying:

Like cinema or comics, videogames must be used to testify or make people think. There are very harsh themes that have been dealt with in cinema such as war or disease, yet cinema is an industry of ‘entertainment.’ The interactivity that exists in videogames offers an additional dimension of involvement for users. ⁸⁵

Perhaps Tramis is thinking here of the pedagogical benefits of interactivity, but what makes the medium of videogames ideal for staging conversations about slavery and resistance is not only its interactivity, but also the designer’s ability to withhold interactivity in structuring insurmountable challenges. Even further, the medium is well-suited to showcase narratives of enslavement and resistance because although the structure of the game may attempt to impose a rigid order, the system itself may defy even the designer—as by glitching, crashing, or presenting other technological issues. When the legacy of historical enslavement and slave revolt becomes fodder for gamers, it is all the more important that we attend to the ways that the form of videogames can work in tandem with the content, deploying opacity in ways that safeguard the subject matter from commercialization, appropriation, and mindless enjoyment.

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