The Procedural Unconscious

Video Games and the Nonsynchronous Contemporaneity of Racial Capitalism

Video games are an art form that saw early experiments in the mainframe computing era, emerged fully in the personal computing era, and has proliferated amid the ubiquitous computing era. This new media form introduced an expanded sensorium through aesthetics that include mechanics, kinesthetics, proprioception, networked interrelations among players, and haptics. An exemplary element of video game aesthetics is proceduralism, a concept first theorized by media scholars such as Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In this essay, we approach the expanded field of media aesthetics via video game proceduralism and its computational foundations, but with particular attention to traces and absences that gesture toward the unconscious. Instead of the individual unconscious, we are most interested in something more akin to Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious,” which is historical and collective, though still nonrepresentational. Our inquiry focuses on how game aesthetics feel out connections among terms that might otherwise seem distinct, including computational abstractions, speculative finance, and racial capitalism. To explore this point, we turn to American designer Lucas Pope’s 2018 Return of the Obra Dinn, an independent puzzle game that asks the player to explore a merchant ship that disappears and returns several years later in 1807. This game is unusual, even singular, but it also stages more generalizable ways that proceduralism accesses history. In place of the game's own logic-driven murder mystery, we substitute a media aesthetic mystery: why would a late 2010s video game use a contemporary perspective and a 1980s graphical style to explore a narrative about early 1800s marine insurance? By making sense of Obra Dinn’s medium-specific operations within the context of political hermeneutics, we seek to theorize what we call the procedural unconscious. Though human beings lack direct access to the opacity of contemporary computation, algorithms, and networks, video games use procedural and affective interactions to extend our sensation and perception into the contemporary media ecology and allow us to play and experiment with it. The procedural unconscious complicates a rationalist approach to video games through careful attention to their sensory dimensions and opens up a more layered approach to historical thought, especially the trajectory that leads from the transatlantic slave trade to racial capitalism.

Abstract

“Commerce is indubitably the grand Source, from whence is derived all that enriches, strengthens, and adorns a State; and without Insurance, that commerce could never have been promoted, nor carried on;—nor can it ever proceed, unsupported by insurance.” —John Weskett (Merchant, Complete Digest, 1781)

“A curse like that does not lift for nothing.”—Alfred Klestil (Bosun, Return of the Obra Dinn video game, 2018)

“The middle passage never guessed its end.”—Derek Walcott (Poet, “Laventville,” 1970)

Introduction: Proceduralism and the Video Game Sensorium

Video games are an art form that saw early experiments in the mainframe-computing era, emerged fully in the personal-computing era, and has proliferated amid the ubiquitous computing era. Across these periods, video games extended conventional media aesthetics organized around image, text, and sound, which had already received careful attention through art forms like painting, literature, and music.¹ This new media form also introduced an expanded sensorium through aesthetics that include proceduralism; actions, mechanics, and interactions; mechanical, interpretive, and affective difficulty; kinesthetics and speed; proprioception; networked interrelations among players; and haptics and physical feedback devices.²

An exemplary element from this list of video game aesthetics is proceduralism. Proceduralism is a concept first theorized by media scholars such as Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.³ As Murray argues, computers “execute a series of rules,” which allows an art form like video games to present an “interpretation of the world” through game rules and algorithms.⁴ A procedure, such as an algorithm, is clearly articulated, logical, systematic, and rigid in its application. Computational procedures execute processes and can be applied to solving problems from mathematical calculations to image recognitions to self-driving car navigations. Bogost uses video games as a key example of how procedures can also be used to represent aspects of the world. He highlights the uniqueness of procedural representation by noting that it “explains processes with other processes” rather than language, images, or sound alone (emphasis in original).⁵ In other words, video games are not merely about procedures but they make systems, from assembly lines to economies, aesthetically sensible through actions taken by a player—ranging from immediate joystick shifts or button pushes that translate into avatar movements to choices, tactics, and strategies that carry longer term consequences. Video games, then, express meanings through procedures. To borrow philosopher Jacques Rancière’s terms, aesthetics are “a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” If so, the moment-to-moment procedural engagements of games demarcate and transform experience in ways that are specific to contemporary computational cultures, in accordance with their corresponding political limits and potentials.⁶

For Bogost, procedures animate and explain processes, which in turn define how logics that underlie systems—from organizations to ideologies to technologies—work.⁷ This account is immensely useful but still too rationalist and direct, treating video games as direct models, however deliberately or even ideologically constructed by designers, of processes that are in turn experienced by players. A limit of this approach is that game designers, like novelists or filmmakers, are not fully in control of their modeling. This point is particularly true when we move outside of educational, serious, and simulation games that most explicitly model specific phenomena. As generations of biased and partial technologies, from health-care risk-prediction algorithms to facial recognition software, demonstrate, even engineered procedures have an unconscious: a point that ordinary people expose by playing with, breaking, and remaking those technologies.⁸

In this essay, we approach the expanded field of media aesthetics via video game proceduralism and its computational foundations but with particular attention to traces and absences that gesture toward the unconscious. For Freud, the unconscious names the dimension of mental processes that are repressed and cannot be accessed but nonetheless influence the conscious mind. Instead of the individual unconscious, we are most interested in something more akin to Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious,” which is historical and collective, though still nonrepresentational. The political unconscious, which undergirds capitalism and responses to this system, can only be accessed indirectly through “textual form.” For us, what a text constitutes departs from Jameson’s more literary (and later also cinematic) parameters. Consequently, our medium-specific turn to video games yields results proper not to the postmodern era but to its computational and networked successor.⁹ Moreover, in this essay, the political unconscious accessible through media aesthetics is best understood as racial capitalism.

In the pages that follow, we hope to show that proceduralism can enable media archaeological investigations—or, more precisely, following Laine Nooney, “speleological” encounters that involve imprecise groping for historical discontinuities in the mode of spelunking.¹⁰ In order to achieve this analysis, the algorithmic dimensions of proceduralism must be augmented with an understanding of the political unconscious. Our inquiry, then, focuses on how game aesthetics help access connections among terms that might otherwise seem distinct, including computational abstractions, speculative finance, and racial capitalism. To explore these links, we turn to American designer Lucas Pope’s 2018 Return of the Obra Dinn, an award-winning, independent, single-player puzzle game that asks the player to explore a merchant ship that disappears and returns several years later in 1807.¹¹ This game is unusual, even singular, in numerous respects elaborated below, but it also stages more generalizable ways that proceduralism accesses history. Both allegorically and procedurally, this game approaches procedural forms from nineteenth-century insurance investigations to twentieth-century computation to twenty-first-century video games.

By making sense of Obra Dinn’s medium-specific operations within the context of political hermeneutics, we seek to theorize what we call the procedural unconscious. Most people may lack complete access to the opacity of contemporary networked computation—for instance, knowing the precise ways that deep learning algorithms reach decisions. Even so, video games use procedural, algorithmic, and affective interactions to extend our sensation and perception into the contemporary media ecology and allow us to play, hack, and experiment with it. The procedural unconscious complicates a rationalist approach to video games through careful attention to their sensory dimensions. If video games constitute a novel sensorium, their media aesthetics also enable an encounter with the unconscious that exceeds the symbolic, the imaginary, or the aural. To stress test this concept, we inquire how a medium long accused of lacking artfulness can nonetheless, beyond its conscious levels, register the longue durée of racial capitalism from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary white supremacy. Though this analysis leads to puzzle-solving mechanics that are unique to games, we do not overlook image, text, and sound, which are themselves reanimated by computational techniques. As Walter Benjamin observes, “the new and the old interpenetrate,” producing an encounter that elicits returns from distant pasts. Though his analysis concerns the Parisian “arcades” of the nineteenth century, these spaces might yet resonate with later video game “arcades” and the digital distribution services that follow in their wake.¹²

Return of the Obra Dinn : Uncanny Aesthetics

A specter is haunting Return of the Obra Dinn, the specter of untimely and mysterious death. This formulation is not particularly surprising given that a specter is also a “revenant,” or one who returns. Even in its title, this video game concerns the return of the Obra Dinn, a ship insured by the East India Company, which departed from London by way of Falmouth for Asia in 1802, disappeared without explanation in 1803, and resurfaced off the coast of England in 1807 with its fifty-one crewmembers and nine passengers dead or missing. The enumeration of these details is important because this is a game not merely about but also of accounting. In a video game medium characterized by extraordinary protagonists with superheroic powers, Pope’s 2018 game has the player adopt a comparatively mundane role. In Obra Dinn, you play as the chief inspector of the London office of the Honourable East India Company, the British joint stock company that played a major part in territorial, linguistic, and cultural colonization from 1600 to 1874. Your employer has sent you to solve the mystery of the returned ship and to resolve all insurance claims associated with the deaths of all crewmembers and passengers.

As a video game, Obra Dinn is not merely a story to be read, watched, or heard, even as it includes all these elements. To progress, the player must take actions. To reach a finale in which you produce an insurance appraisal and compensate or fine the estates of each person, you must determine their identity and precise cause of their death or disappearance. As soon as it introduces its forensic objective, the game takes a turn toward the supernatural. To accomplish your assignment, you wield a magical stopwatch, called the memento mortem, that can return you to the moment of each death to enable you to re-member or reconstitute it (fig. 1). You also have access to a book with the ship’s manifest and images of the original crewmembers and passengers. After arriving at the ship, you begin your work of locating human remains. Upon seeing a body and activating the memento mortem, you can hear (but not see) the scene that unfolded at the moment of death. Immediately following this audio, which plays alongside white text on a black screen, you are invited to navigate a still version of the three-dimensional scene. Through this investigation, you must deduce each person’s identity, the exact means of their death (e.g., whether they were “burned,” “clawed,” “clubbed,” “decapitated,” or met another grisly end), and the person (or beast) that committed the murder.

Figure 1

The protagonist wields the memento mortem stopwatch to solve murders in Obra Dinn ( Return of the Obra Dinn [Lucas Pope, 2018]) (Screenshot courtesy of authors)

Given the spectral palimpsest that this game turns out to be, it is also worth noting how unusual the graphical style is in its mix of influences, including 2010s independent 3D video games rendered in the Unity game engine, 1980s Macintosh 2D computer games, and early modern woodcuts rendered in a pointillist style. You view the ship you traverse from a first-person perspective popularized by first-person shooter (FPS) games, yet the scene is conveyed using “dithered 1-bit monochrome graphics.”¹³ Beyond the black-and-white default, the player also has the option of choosing other color-palette simulations, including a green IBM 5151, an orange-yellow Zenith ZVM 1240, and a blue Commodore 1084 tint (fig. 2). Instead of operating as parody or pastiche, this intermixing of the new and the old evokes the Freudian uncanny, the ambivalent aesthetic in which the “heimlich” of the domestic or familiar grows distorted “until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”¹⁴ In Obra Dinn, the strange familiarity of the scene is made all the more unhomely aboard an uninviting ship that was the home of sixty people who allegedly met their untimely deaths and which can only be a temporary refuge to the player who must solve for these deaths before a coming storm makes it impossible to take a rowboat back to land. The game’s uncanny hovers between forgotten memories and deferred recognition.

Figure 2

Screenshots of Obra Dinn showcasing various monitor-inspired color palettes including the Commodore 1084, IBM 8503, LCD, IBM 5151, Zenith ZVM 1240, and Macintosh ( Return of the Obra Dinn [Lucas Pope, 2018]) (Screenshot courtesy of authors)

Visually, Obra Dinn shares qualities with a first-person-shooter crosshair perspective, yet arguably has more in common with the cinematic point-of-view or subjective shot.¹⁵ Unlike the quick action of the FPS game, Obra Dinn’s slow exploration puts it into the category of a “walking simulator”: a genre Pope explicitly wanted to innovate beyond the forms of audio logs and journal entries common in games such as Dear Esther (2012) and Gone Home (2013). Though it is not a primarily user-interface (UI) or database-driven game, its procedural action focuses on meticulous observation and the superimposition of character and player perspectives. You are put in the hybrid position of detective, historian, and insurance agent as you try to assess the past to produce monetary justice in the present.¹⁶ You are surrounded by death but free from it, as both player and player character. You are left alone to explore the claustrophobic space of the ship, slowly moving down from the main deck to the lower gun deck to the orlop deck and to the cargo hold. The downward-moving discovery of one ghastly death after another arguably operates as a spatial allegory for a descent into the unconscious. Through the magic of the memento mortem, you walk through a scene of a gun firing or a knife penetrating flesh but, unlike in FPS games, remain immune from those threats. As an employee of the East India Company, and by extension the Crown, you are hardly the sovereign, but you nonetheless have the power to discover and record who lived and died, and ultimately their value.¹⁷ You witness but do so through the Western perspective of an agent who follows orders and serves the empire, rendering justice only through imperial financial techniques.

Even as the narrative that the player’s investigation pieces together from myriad fragments includes too much intrigue to summarize here, it is important to review some key coordinates. You discover that the Obra Dinn set sail for Formosa (a Portuguese/European name for Taiwan, from the period). Near the ship’s passage by the Canary Islands, Second Mate Edward Nichols sought to steal a chest, which was brought on board by Formosan passengers and contains a magical glowing shell that is both compelling and valuable. After plotting and misdirection, Nichols convinces several crewmembers to join him in kidnapping several Formosans and their treasure. During the escape attempt, the fleeing party is attacked by mermaids who wish to recover the shell. Following this attack, the surviving crewmembers bring the shell, several mermaids, and bodies back to the Obra Dinn. While on board, the kidnapped mermaids are brought through the lazarette and locked in the hold from where they attract all manner of beasts, including giant rider-mounted crabs and a Kraken that kill several people. Overwhelmed by these curses, the remaining crew members eventually set the mermaids free and allow them to take their magical shells. In the end, all remaining people on board, except for four who flee to some unspecified location in Africa on the final lifeboat, die on board, primarily from infighting.¹⁸ The details of this narrative do not arrive chronologically but spatially, as you discover bodies from the main deck down to the hold.

As with the visual style, Obra Dinn’s narrative evokes an uncanny strange familiarity. The specter of cultural theft and imperialism haunts this narrative and its bloody on-board fates. Though it begins as a realist nineteenth-century narrative, the maritime milieu is quickly overrun by magical objects and beasts. Obra Dinn could easily be approached as an interactive story where puzzle solving exists largely as an extension of close reading—a means to the end of forging connections and seeking truths across a narrative network. Yet the return of the repressed exceeds monsters, marking an unconscious dimension that can only properly be understood at a procedural level in which we address the video game as a video game. Before theorizing the game’s procedural unconscious, the next section turns first to Obra Dinn’s central mystery that is mediated through insurance investigation.

Media Aesthetic Mysteries: Playing at Insurance in the Black Atlantic

A specter is haunting Return of the Obra Dinn, the specter of insurance and its accumulated history. If the game thematizes the return of a ghostly ship cursed by death, beneath its gothic façade lies the revenant of revenue—income that might return to the company and the Crown, be deducted as fines from the estates of the parties that committed murders, or enrich the estates of those who suffered untimely deaths. The conclusion of the game is as procedural as it gets: a detailed and laborious, person-by-person accounting of harms and rewards. Given that certain fates can be solved in different ways that result in varied merits and demerits, the total claim amounts to somewhere between £28,000 and £29,975 (fig. 3). Yet these exact numbers conceal something murkier beneath the surface.

Figure 3

The summary of a twenty-three-page insurance claim at the end of Obra Dinn ( Return of the Obra Dinn [Lucas Pope, 2018]) (Screenshot courtesy of authors)

At a formal level, Obra Dinn’s core gameplay loop—the cycle of actions undertaken repeatedly by a player during gameplay—amounts to an investigation-based logic game. To adjudicate the correct distribution of funds, the player must solve the mystery of what exactly happened aboard the Obra Dinn. Instead of reviewing the game’s narrative mystery in greater detail than in the previous section, we would instead like to highlight the game’s media aesthetic mystery. The game’s style, which is often celebrated as a case of nostalgic or quirky indie game aesthetics, nonetheless raises a more complex question: why would a late 2010s video game use a contemporary perspective and a 1980s graphical style to explore a narrative about early 1800s marine insurance?

The answer to this question begins with the significance of insurance claims. Insurance may appear boring and bureaucratic but in fact captures an entire worldview within its unique contractual form. Literary theorist Ian Baucom encapsulates the transhistorical importance of insurance succinctly when he writes, “The genius of insurance, the secret of its contribution to finance capitalism, is its insistence that the real test of something’s value comes not at the moment it is made or exchanged but at the moment it is lost or destroyed.” Even without the supernatural or fabulist dimensions of Obra Dinn, then, insurance is already, in another sense, speculative. At a basic level, insurance “exists the moment an object is insured … conferring upon that object a value that neither depends on its being put to use or entered into exchange as a commodity.” With insurance, an object gains value “purely from the ability of two contracting parties to imagine what it would have been worth at [an] imaginary future moment in which it will have ceased to exist” (emphasis added).¹⁹ In this alchemical transformation of time and value, insurance moves from an actual knowledge of what is to a past conditional knowledge of what would have been.

In essence, insurance is risk management, which could also be a way of glossing what one does in many video games, whether through the moment-to-moment logistics and resource management of turn-based tactics games like the Civilization or XCOM series, real-time strategy of the Age of Empires or StarCraft series, or simulation in Stardew Valley or Cities: Skylines. We also see risk management inform metagaming practices such as “theorycrafting” (in which players apply mathematical analysis to optimize gameplay) or “speedrunning” (in which players often balance risk in real time to complete a game as quickly as possible).²⁰ By distinction, Obra Dinn is a less risky logic game. However multilinear the game might be, given the various ways you can solve for the sixty fates, the gameplay does not involve risk management so directly. Yet insofar as it is a response to uncertainty, risk management is, as game designer Greg Costikyan argues, central to what makes all games interesting. We see approaches to risk play out in the form of “performative uncertainty” (physical execution), “player unpredictability” (in multiplayer games), “randomness,” “hidden information,” and other factors.²¹ Costikyan’s category of “solver’s uncertainty,” which characterizes puzzle games as varied as Zork, Lemmings, and The Witness, most directly captures the relationship to risk and play in Obra Dinn. Even more profoundly, the game could be characterized as a kind of metagame that uses procedural aesthetics to think through the broader phenomenon of game risk in a medium-specific manner thematized through insurance.

The mystery of Obra Dinn’s strange media aesthetic juxtaposition of twenty-first-, twentieth-, and nineteenth-century elements cannot merely be resolved through an analysis of game form. Here, a turn to the history of marine insurance of the type engaged in the game proves crucial. Briefly, historians have shown that the growth of British Empire, and its expansion to China and India, would have been unthinkable without insurance’s risk management in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in the face of hazards from storms to pirates. As financial historian A. B. Leonard contends, modern premium insurance emerged in Italy and in London as early as the fifteenth century and, unlike earlier loans, promised “only replacement capital in cases of actual loss, in exchange for a fee or premium, stated as a percentage of the value of the whole indemnity purchased, and paid in advance by the insured.” This contingent capital allowed merchants to take greater risks. As early as 1700, “marine insurance was commonplace.” In fact, insurance became so widespread that “the total sum insured by underwriters in Britain in 1809,” just two years after the events of Obra Dinn, amounted to £162,538,905 (approximately £10,820,994,375 adjusted for 2023 inflation).²²

Marine insurance blossomed in Britain, and it was optimized, as Baucom contends, through the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Of course, the most tangible horrors of slavery took place through the violence of the transatlantic slave trade and American plantation slavery. Nevertheless, “its conditions of possibility are the speculative, abstract, money-into-money trades that Liverpool, in duplicating London, inherited from the turn-of-the-century financial revolution,” especially through “the trades in insurance, stocks, bills, and all the variant forms of ‘paper money’ derived from the establishment of a modern, credit-issuing system of banking.”²³ The slave trade and the labor of enslaved African people would became crucial to the rise of the Atlantic and capitalist global economies starting in the nineteenth century.²⁴ Even earlier, however, the transatlantic slave trade was an experimental test ground for whether a practice of maritime insurance and speculative abstraction could be generalized to the entire system. In Greg Grandin’s phrase, but exceeding the medical research he highlights, slave ships were not only “floating tombs” but “floating laboratories.”²⁵ The idea was that if people could be translated into abstract speculative values, anything could be.

Among the most exemplary cases of the violent imbrication of the logic of human enslavement and speculative finance by way of insurance, during the centuries of transatlantic slavery, was the 1781 massacre on board the merchant ship Zong. This event is revisited, and becomes exemplary of the Middle Passage, through texts ranging from Baucom’s theoretical Specters of the Atlantic to M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetic Zong!. According to common business practice, the owners of the Zong took out insurance on the lives of over a hundred enslaved people who were treated as cargo. On September 6, 1781, the Zong left St. Thomas off the coast of West Africa and began its planned voyage to Jamaica. On November 29, when the ship’s water supply ran desperately low because of navigational errors, Captain Luke Collingwood issued an order that led to driving 132 human beings—all enslaved Africans—overboard across a time span of three days, with the understanding that they could collect on these losses via the maritime insurance taken out prior to the voyage.²⁶ The following year, there was a court case. As Baucom observes with an impossible speculative optimism:

That the ship, the Zong, was not a Royal Navy but a merchant vessel, that the dead were not British sailors but the 132 slaves the ship’s captain had thrown overboard, that the petitioners were not bereaved family members but those drowned slaves’ Liverpool owners who had sued their insurance agents for the underwritten value of the slaves and convinced a jury in the Guildhall Court that in drowning the slaves the ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, was not so much murdering them as securing the existence of their monetary value—all these things might, of course, have convinced the Lords Commissioners that the matter was none of their business, nor, in any important sense, that of the empire’s.

Yet the result of this case instead proved a legal triumph for the white Liverpool owners in supporting the logic of abstract speculation and slavery, even amid manifest mass murder.

Figure 4

Depiction of enslaved Africans being thrown overboard from a slave ship, created as a woodcut and published in The Illustrated London News , March 18, 1854. (Courtesy of Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora , https://slaveryimages.org/database/image-result.php?objectid=792)

Figure 5

Zoom in of the Obra Dinn book interfaces showing off its 1-bit monochromatic style reminiscent of woodcut prints ( Return of the Obra Dinn [Lucas Pope, 2018]) (Screenshot courtesy of authors)

Though the fictional Obra Dinn is a merchant vessel like the historical Zong, the 2018 video game does not seem to directly reference the 1781 massacre, the transatlantic slave trade, or even any explicit colonial trade route from the age of imperialism. At the level of visual style, we could identify close similarities between the woodcut aesthetic of a piece like the 1832 Brazilian woodcut “Africans Thrown Overboard from a Slave Ship” published by the American abolitionist newspaper The Liberator (which depicts an event similar to the Zong massacre) and the woodcut images of maritime scenes in Obra Dinn’s organizational book interface (figs. 4 and 5).²⁷ Admittedly, there is no evidence that the game’s creator, Pope, was aware of the Zong massacre or sought his game to make any explicit connections between speculative finance and slavery. Perhaps the tightest conceptual connection comes with the game playing out entirely in the chaotic medium of the ocean—so important in Black studies—that promotes an unregulated capitalism en route to everything from the transatlantic slave trade to emergent global supply chains.²⁸ Though if the suspended “oceanic” of the Middle Passage evokes, as when Hortense Spillers riffs on Freud, the “undifferentiated identity” of the enslaved person who is “removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American’ either,” the deceased people of the Obra Dinn meet a different fate. The game can be abandoned at any point, though a partial solution ledger will only yield partial endings. Yet to unlock the more detailed ending of Obra Dinn, each person must be accounted for, by name. These deceased are not left suspended in the “nowhere” of the Atlantic Ocean.²⁹ Indeed, in a complete playthrough, the only remaining person who is not accounted for is an “unidentified stowaway” who wishes to find “free passage and eventual freedom” but is crushed inside a barrel before anything about them can be known. Regardless, Obra Dinn, through the process-oriented actions that it requires of the player, still situates us in the Freudian mechanism of repression, if not the oceanic feeling. To understand the structure of that repression, we now turn to the nature of the game’s transhistorical connections and its procedural hauntings.

Absence, Allegory, and Nonsynchronous Contemporaneity

A specter is haunting Return of the Obra Dinn, the specter of Black absence. Obra Dinn takes place in 1807, though it does not convey much about its historical context to the player, aside from the framing sense that the East India Company was still thriving at this time as an extension of the Crown of England. It is worth noting that 1807 is also the year in which the United Kingdom passed an Act of Parliament that prohibited the slave trade across the British Empire (even as slavery would remain legal in most of the empire until the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, and in the United States until 1865). The debates that surrounded this watershed 1807 act, and its implications for maritime commerce, are completely absent from the game.³⁰ In some sense, this fact is not surprising as, in both historical and artistic archives, slavery is felt everywhere but so often absent. Yet absences, like specters, take many different forms.

The aesthetic absence of Blackness in Obra Dinn can be analogized to the problem of “archival silence”—a concept with older origins in critical theory and used commonly since the 1990s by archivists and humanistic scholars. As digital humanist Lauren Klein puts it, the term is employed “to describe the gaps that are created by information that is absent from the archival record.”³¹ Such silences, which are especially prominent in archives of slavery, in both their analog and digital forms, have been theorized extensively by scholars such as Stephen Best, Marisa Fuentes, Avery Gordon, and Saidiya Hartman.³² In some cases, absences are unrecoverable in either textual or media archives, which raises methodological challenges that Klein articulates as follows: “How does one pursue the silences in the archive without simultaneously reinforcing a narrative of silence?”³³ Especially in cases when voices cannot be recovered to be heard or images cannot be seen to be believed, spectral absences can still linger and be felt.³⁴

An artwork like a video game is not a literal historical archive, though it operates analogously as a sensory archive, which captures, sometimes unwittingly, accumulated affects within what Harry Harootunian describes as the “mixed temporalities” of our “historical present.”³⁵ Artworks can give us limited access to this historical accumulation through what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling”: a concept that marks “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.” For Williams, such thought-feelings are not just loose; they take a “structure” or “a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.” These structures are neither universal nor essential; they have histories. As the indirect nature of Obra Dinn and our staging of it suggests, structures of feeling only become available “at the very edge of semantic availability.”³⁶ For visual-studies scholars such as David Marriott, “the occult presence of racial slavery,” which is “nowhere but nevertheless everywhere, can be glimpsed in images.”³⁷ In contrast, a video game presents such historical traces through procedural gameplay. We can even dub walking simulators like Obra Dinn as “archival adventures,” to borrow Melissa Kagen’s term, which invite us to encounter historical evidence.³⁸

If “structures of feeling” are to be taken seriously in video games, it is important to be precise about the processes of Obra Dinn’s gameplay loop. The investigatory procedure to which one returns again and again, includes five action-oriented steps. First, you find the remains of a deceased person. Second, using the memento mortem, you trigger the sound that would have been heard before and during their death. Third, you explore a still three-dimensional image of the scene in which they died. Fourth, though not always immediately, you access the ship’s manifest and deduce the deceased person’s identity, the agent of their death, and the means of their death. Fifth and finally, your findings are recorded automatically in your mystic writing pad, the book in which you assemble and reassemble the fragments of the recovered past. In sum, this procedure is evidential, inductive, and systematic in its accounting.³⁹ This forensic loop feeds the fantasy that whatever is absent or disappeared can be recovered. The game instructs the player to discover and process data, but without an understanding of what that data means in context. The memento mortem watch itself moves us from the general reminder of mortality (memento mori) to an instrument that points to this or that specific death. In shifting from the fact to a technology of death, we are promised accuracy but with only the traces of context.

Even when the narrative is reconstructed and we finally know what occurred on the Obra Dinn, between its disappearance and return, we have only, as the opening page of the book suggests, “A Catalogue of Adventure & Tragedy.” The meaning and structure of this affective catalog is another story. Prior to meaning making, to pursue the induction necessary to progress in the game, you must make unproved assumptions, including about the gender, nationality, and race of characters. The only information you are given to determine the identities of each person is a list of names, roles, and nationalities. The imperative to solve each death reduces every person to a type—the Austrian bosun, the Irish butcher, the Indian ship’s steward, and so on—with details such as accents becoming invitations to induction. Indeed, critiques of orientalism have been cast against the game, especially for its representation of the Taiwanese passengers. Though much more could be written of those racial typologies, which is relevant to this essay’s critique, we focus on Obra Dinn’s Black absence. However, even as Blackness is largely absent in the game, strictly speaking, there are three Black characters, including one Black American character: the US carpenter Winston Smith who is assisted by the carpenter’s mate and fellow American Marcus Gibbs.⁴⁰ Despite the racial dynamics of the period, Gibbs (a White American) does not seem to have any problem addressing Smith (a Black American) as his boss. However, online forums about the game reveal that many players assume that Smith is subordinate to Gibbs because of their respective races. For example, a player on a Reddit forum notes, “I wrongly thought that Marcus Gibbs was the boss and Winston smith was the mate, using the reasoning that with two americans, one white and one black in 1807, the white one would likely be in a position of power, with Winston maybe even being a slave. I felt kinda bad after realising I was wrong.”⁴¹ This common error shows just one instance in which evidential collection and induction depend on preexisting social categories, including generalizations and stereotypes.

In a more speculative vein, moments like the Smith and Gibbs identifications encourage some players to fill in the context that the game does not provide. For example, on a different Reddit thread, a player debates whether Smith “escaped slavery in the states,” “was granted freedom through manumission or buying himself out of slavery,” or “may have been impressed (fancy term for forced) to work for the British navy”—the last of which was among the causes of the War of 1812 between the United Kingdom and the United States that would take place just a few years after the events of Obra Dinn.⁴² Regardless of which backstory might be the case, it is almost certain that Smith, a Black American in the early nineteenth century, would be a former slave. The Reddit thread on this topic demonstrates how the game’s structures of feeling—sensed through misrecognitions and eventual identifications—encourage speculation beyond explicit givens.⁴³ Yet what the game offers is merely typological, which in Smith’s case, reinforces Baucom’s observation that one of the violences of the transatlantic slave trade was that of “becoming a ‘type’: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money.”⁴⁴ As Calvin Warren puts this, in broader philosophical terms, metaphysics materializes, dominates, and objectifies “nothing through the black Negro” who is granted the barest existence but not a human form of being.⁴⁵

Neither the mechanics of inductive reasoning nor the speculations that proliferate from Obra Dinn’s absences are a smoking gun for the indispensability of slavery or Blackness to its structure. We can only identify such conclusive evidence if we turn from the forensic to the allegorical imaginary that is rarely invoked (or engaged beyond first-order interpretations) in discussions of this game. At the center of Obra Dinn’s tragic narrative and insurance fiasco is the magic shell that is transported by the Formosans, stolen by English officer Edward Nichols, causes a series of supernatural attacks on the ship, and is finally returned to the ocean. Obra Dinn’s shell is commonly treated as a MacGuffin that propels the narrative forward but is itself ultimately insignificant beyond its vague supernatural genesis.⁴⁶ Yet with one level of abstraction, we can also approach the shell as a fetish. Marx draws his well-known concept of “commodity fetishism” from supernatural and religious fetishes to demonstrate how precious metals and money operate as fetishes that reify or abstract social relations.⁴⁷ That is, capitalism buries the economic value created by a workforce by embedding it within an object that has no inherent significance. As an object like money takes on excessive abstract value, human workers grow increasingly estranged from each other amid labor exploitation. In Obra Dinn, the sought-after shell operates as such a commodity fetish that substitutes fantasy for reality while simultaneously giving material form to the repressed.

The allegorical significance of the shell can be pushed further if we note the actual use of shells, especially cowrie shells, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. As economic historian Jan Hogendorn and African historian Marion Johnson explain: “The shell money of the slave trade consisted of thousands of millions of little cowrie shells, most of them fished in the lagoons of the far-off Maldive Islands of the Indian Ocean. They came to West Africa in a journey lasting a year or more. … Thence they were shipped by the barrel-load to the West African coast, where they were an indispensable currency before, during, and after the slave trade, in purely quantitative terms overshadowing all others.”⁴⁸ Though they entered circulation centuries earlier, even by 1802, the year of Obra Dinn’s disappearance in the game, British cowrie-shell exports to West Africa amounted to an estimated 259,728 pounds or nearly 130 tons. As Hogendorn and Johnson contend, cowrie shells may seem like a primitive currency but were a general equivalent every bit as sophisticated as the British pound or American dollar—and often in much wider circulation. During their height, shells served as a common “medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, and standard for deferred payment.”⁴⁹ Among the various uses of cowrie shells, there was no greater than the slave trade, particularly in West Africa.

Beyond its literal glow, the shell of Obra Dinn beams with excess that withholds latent layers of both commodity fetishism and the slave trade’s medium of exchange. In an allegorical mode, much more could be made of other seemingly insignificant or unexplained details in the game, such as the fact that the shell’s protectors are mermaids who are captured and imprisoned under decks in the ship’s hold—the very same space into which enslaved people were thrown during the Middle Passage and which Christina Sharpe theorizes as “the womb that produces blackness.”⁵⁰ Thus far, we have approached allegory flatly as a layered operation, with manifest or surface-level signs pointing to latent or deeper meanings, which reveals Obra Dinn’s narrative as the mere shell of much more complex internal processes. None of this is inherently incorrect, but allegory, as literary theory has repeatedly demonstrated, is no simple matter, and this form of abstraction is complicated even more by the medium specificity of a video game.

Benjamin, in his analysis of Baudelaire’s literary transformations of Paris, argues that far from a merely aesthetic or literary mechanism, “allegorical form” is “bound up with the specific signification which the commodity acquires by virtue of its price.” He adds, “The singular debasement of things through their signification, something characteristic of seventeenth-century allegory, corresponds to the singular debasement of things through their price as commodities.”⁵¹ This point raises the question of how precisely literary signification corresponds to commodification. As literary critics Richard Halpern and Baucom argue, this is not merely a matter of the abstract commodity logics causing something like a superstructural residue of literary allegory in a Baudelaire novel. Halpern insists that the inverse is actually the case: “The commodity renders allegory obsolete by perfecting and globalizing the latter’s logic of representation. Under mature capitalism,

allegory is no longer simply a literary technique but is rather the phenomenology of the entire social-material world.’”⁵² In other words, if allegorical signification in a novel is a procedure for converting people and objects into more abstract meanings, the commodity is an extension of this logic from the page and into everyday life.

Baucom builds on Halpern’s reversal to show that allegory is neither an effect of capitalism nor “merely even the literary counterpart of a full-blown commodity capitalism.” More than this, allegory is “an epistemological condition of possibility: a mode of representation which enables and clears the ground for a form of capital which is an intensification and a wider practice of it.” If we think of allegory as an “epistemological condition” of a regime of knowledge, it is possible to understand the relationship between this technique and the socioeconomic practice of the slave trade. As we have argued, the transatlantic risks of the slave trade would not have been possible without either insurance or credit that secured risky transatlantic voyages. However, and here Baucom brings the point about allegory full circle, “for such a system of credit to operate[,] both a theory of knowledge and a form of value which would secure the credibility of the system itself had to be in place.”⁵³ In this formulation, allegory is no longer a literary device but a broader concept for a way of knowing and valuing made possible through procedures of abstraction that convert one thing into another that is unlike it.

A working account of allegory sheds light on the media aesthetic mystery that we substituted for the game’s own imperative to solve for its murders. To reiterate: Obra Dinn is a late 2010s video game that uses a contemporary perspective and a 1980s graphical style to explore a narrative about early 1800s marine insurance. The theoretical approach we borrow to address this mystery is the one that Baucom adapts from Giovanni Arrighi’s world-systems analysis; namely, the historical paradigm of “nonsynchronous contemporaneity.”⁵⁴ This spectral approach to history marks the ways that the past survives in the present, and that distant histories accumulate and haunt each other through structural resonances. For Baucom, this idea also raises the more challenging question of “why a particular genre should survive, recur, repeat itself within, or find itself inherited by some subsequent historical moment, why a later moment should find itself compelled to reengage the ideological struggles of an earlier moment” (emphasis added). Building again on Benjamin, Baucom puts forward an account of history in which “as time passes the past does not wane but intensifies; as history repeats itself it repeats in neither attenuated nor farcical form but by ‘redeeming’ the what-has-been.”⁵⁵ For him, the logic of the legal decision about the Zong massacre and its insurance is the condition of possibility that repeats within the speculative financial revolution and, we would add, corresponding digital platforms that support growing inequalities and exploitations of the twenty-first century. Along similar lines, the uncanny return of the fictional Obra Dinn is a different kind of supernatural tale than it purports to be.

The field of Black studies gives us even more direct and elegant ways of thinking about such uncanny historical repetitions and continuations. Simply, the transatlantic slave trade changed everything, well beyond the financial dimensions on which Baucom focuses. Rinaldo Walcott characterizes this form of slavery as “more than a political-economic phenomenon; it is more than the history of early capitalist accumulation; it is a seismic human cultural shift in economy, thought, and culture and, thus, in human alterability.”⁵⁶ Riffing on Maurice Blanchot’s sense of “disaster” as that which simultaneously ruins and leaves intact, Sharpe argues, “Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster.”⁵⁷ Her name for living with Blackness after slavery is the “wake.” In its polyvalence, this concept captures wakeful consciousness, vigilant witnessing, awareness of incomplete emancipation, and even the disturbance left by an ocean-faring vessel upon the water’s surface. Like nonsynchronous contemporaneity, the wake gives us a way of thinking the historical uncanny as an aesthetic trace and trail that extends and recirculates the flow of socioeconomic systems.

The wake’s myriad connotations return us to the Middle Passage but also to the Obra Dinn. In the wake of your initial arrival on the ship, you see a bright disturbance upon the water, in the vessel’s wake, but are unable to determine its cause. Later in the game, you recognize the refulgent light as the shell that was at the center of the game’s bloodshed. In a literal sense, the visual trace of this shell is the epiphenomenon of code that underlies all the images that the player sees on the screen. At an allegorical level, as we have argued, the shell is another kind of abstraction, a fetish that stands in for the murder, torture, and exploitation that make up transatlantic slavery. But the shell is more than an abstraction. In the conclusion of The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, Hogendorn and Johnson capture this physical reality most poignantly when they remind us about the origin of the cowrie shells that underwrote the slave trade: “The shells, so it is said, came from the off-lying waters, where they fed on the cadavers of less desirable slaves thrown into the sea as their food. The bodies, or sometimes dismembered limbs, when pulled ashore were covered with attached cowries. Though macabre, this tradition as allegory is right on the mark—slaves certainly did in an economic sense ‘feed’ the shell trade.”⁵⁸ All of the abstractions that make up the nonsynchronous contemporaneity of slavery, insurance, finance, and code cannot ultimately escape this vicious cycle of materiality in which Black absence returns in an undeniable fullness.⁵⁹ In the final section, drawing on this insight, we transition from the representational to the material and medium specificity of Obra Dinn as a video game. For all its singular elements, this game also serves as a model for understanding a more generalizable procedural unconscious—one that signals a simultaneously allegorical and algorithmic structure of video games.

The Procedural Unconscious and the Real of Blackness

A specter is haunting Return of the Obra Dinn, the specter of video games. If slavery has its “afterlives,” as Saidiya Hartman famously puts it, video games have their extra lives.⁶⁰ Obra Dinn complicates the sense that a medium characterized by cycles of safe failure and associated with frivolous entertainment gives us access to a practice as irrevocably hazardous as slavery—especially at a level that exceeds content.

Prior to inviting a more cerebral mode of allegory that depends on signification, a video game taps into feelings and affects that are elicited through player actions. In Obra Dinn, everything feels wrong as you move through the contained space of the ship where gruesome deaths and corpses appear at every turn. In the face of such horror, you must focus on methodical procedures of induction and accounting. To take a step back from this game, video games in general offer an affectively intensified proceduralism that synthesizes art and technology. The medium is also a formal accumulation that brings together elements of the novel, the film, theatrical performance, and the analog game. Media theorist Alexander Galloway has a neologistic concept that helps us approach the video game’s qualities of amalgamation and accumulation: namely, “allegorithm.” This term combines the literary “allegory” with the computational “algorithm.” As Galloway puts it, winning a game “means to know the system.” Consequently, “to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’)” (emphasis in original). In his reading of Sid Meier’s Civilization III, he argues that the simulation game allegorizes not its manifest historical materials but rather “information society itself” and the game’s own code.⁶¹ A version of this is also true of Obra Dinn. The “manifest” level of the game, its skinning of the nineteenth-century insurance investigation scene, comes across through the ship’s 2D manifest and the modular 3D maritime environments. However, the “latent” dimension of our contemporary control society and its aesthetic form of games is expressed through elements such as the flexible nonlinearity (of solution order), automation (of clue sequences), and quantification of outcomes (deaths converted to numerical sums). The player traces Pope’s puzzles, reverse engineering the algorithms embedded within the game by its designer.

Through these clicks, maneuvers, and movements around the ship, you experience the if-thens of computer programming and information society at a visceral level. Alongside this tracing, however, there are less prominent traces—the absences and nonsynchronous repetitions—that we have been highlighting throughout this essay. The problem is that, for its core demographic of gamers, even with occasional exceptions like the handful of Reddit speculations about Winston Smith’s backstory, Obra Dinn does not promote curiosity about these absences. The game’s completion leaves none of the layered uncanniness that we see in scholars from Benjamin to Baucum to Sharpe. As with Galloway’s analysis of The Sims, as distinct from the depth model elicited for Fredric Jameson by novels or films, Obra Dinn mostly expresses itself at the surface of its gameplay. The player unpacks procedural meaning while progressing to the final solution of accounting. As the game reaches its culmination, history feels more like a stylistic effect or solvable puzzle. The mystery genre of the game overwhelms the sense of an unconscious, which psychoanalytic theory has shown us to be unreachable and irretrievable.

And yet even with the alignment between gameplay and interpretation, the allegorithm leaves a residue below its surface. What you see is not entirely what you get, especially in terms of ideological components that exceed what the designers put into the game. Here, Miguel Sicart’s critique of proceduralism is helpful as a reminder that this model “grants great power and influence to the designer,” who creates a system for the player to traverse and interpret, while ignoring the interpretive work that happens through play itself.⁶² In more open-ended or open world games, such as Grand Theft Auto V or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, such play is primarily an emergent property of how people experiment with and activate complex environments to create novel meanings. Play can also be a property of the game critic who speculates about or deforms a game through interpretation, as we have been doing in this essay.

The work of the video game analyst includes the articulation of manifest control allegory but also exceeds it insofar as computation does not eliminate the unconscious. At a broader level, computation relies on the abstraction and surface-depth model built into object-oriented programming.⁶³ At the specific level of the video game, there are the ebbs and flows of focus that grip the puzzle solver who cannot help but sublimate during immersive gameplay. Even if we bracket games, there is already a procedural dimension to the unconscious. Of course, there is indirect linguistic access we might gain to the unconscious via chains of signifiers that reveal layers of significance—for instance, in the classical example of dream interpretation and its meanings which psychoanalysis claims to reconstruct. Without denying the movement from sign or symptom to meaning, there are also the nonlinguistic dimensions of the unconscious that Freud repeatedly emphasizes. Benjamin gives us a media version of this with the “optical unconscious” of photography and film that uses “devices of slow motion and enlargement” to capture that which evades the conscious mind but can sometimes, through aesthetic traces, be made available to it.⁶⁴ While visual media record nonconscious affect associated with a changing expression or the moment that someone begins to walk, video games capture the grammar of different rules and logics, especially as they make up abstract systems. Players may feel the embodied effects of such logics through phenomena such as psychology’s “Tetris effect.”⁶⁵ Through the repetition of mechanics and neuroplasticity, time and attention devoted to a procedural activity, such as gameplay, can influence subconscious patterns of thought and action in the world, if not always in a one-to-one manner.

In general, games operate as interactive models of both simulated and fictional phenomena that situate knowledge within contextualized systems.⁶⁶ Video games feature systems that might include physics and flight in Kerbal Space Program, a farm in Story of Seasons, or Earth’s planetary system in SimEarth. Yet even these systems, which may appear largely rationalist or formalist, cannot be separated from their broader historical contexts (say, the cold-war space race, developments in the agro-industrial complex, and generations of scientific debates within ecological thought). Obra Dinn asks the player to participate in logical systems that are underwritten by transhistorical systems such as racial capitalism. This is the procedural unconscious over which no one, whether designer or player, can claim control or comprehension. The unconscious, as Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire describe, includes “impersonal factors, agencies, psychical forces” and their underlying “machinery.”⁶⁷ Such machinery operates according to nonagential procedures and accumulates centuries of absences that cannot be wholly understood or recovered.

Even without the specificity of computational proceduralism, earlier accounts of the unconscious foreground realms beyond symbolic and imaginary meaning—perhaps most famously the vast domain carved out by Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Real.⁶⁸ The Real is an aspect of the unconscious that is without meaning or access for human beings. The player’s satisfaction of solving a puzzle, the analyst’s gratification of producing meaning, and even the critic’s speculative interpretation only go so far and cannot always yield meaning. Such limits exceed the unconscious but also demonstrate how much the unconscious, as a concept, remains useful for thinking through major contemporary phenomena. For example, the opacity of digital media—say, the frequent admission of computer scientists that they cannot precisely explain how generative adversarial networks and machine-learning models come to their solutions—points to the unknown even within rationalist technoscience.

Beyond digital technologies, most long-term historical processes remain opaque. It is difficult to track continuities and discontinuities over time given the scales of history, and this is nowhere truer than across the system of transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. For example, the unrelentingly negative affects and negational aesthetics of Afropessimism encounter slavery in a way that emphasizes its incomprehensible and unredeemable dimensions. In an interview with Hartman, Frank Wilderson III points out that “so often in black scholarship, people consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things.” Hartman supports this approach in her critique of an analytical integrationism that seeks “to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves.”⁶⁹ This indictment of meaning might account for one reason that humanists, whose foundational project has been meaning making, have often opposed Afropessimism as apolitical.

Yet it is neither absurdist nor apolitical to characterize the systematic torture and murder of so many enslaved people—Toni Morrison’s “sixty million and more”—as beyond a human capacity to make meaning.⁷⁰ Despite its own procedures, Obra Dinn leaves us with a feeling of incompleteness—a jigsaw puzzle that has lost some of its pieces. If one trusts the game’s allegorithm, you emerge as a just hero who has solved the mystery of sixty deaths and disappearance. Yet the insurance claims with which the game ends are not structural reparations; they are merely the fulfillment of a contractual obligation that allows the much greater and more profitable systems of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery to continue. The satisfaction of solving puzzles may enable you to feel like the lone detective-hero, but you are still just a bureaucrat, albeit with a magical stopwatch. From a historical perspective, you are merely a witness of something that has already transpired.

Witnessing, even belatedly, does not appear to be the primary domain of video games, as it has been for literature. When playing a game, there is rarely time or incentive to be a reflective spectator because nothing progresses without action.⁷¹ Action in games is unavoidable—in fact, Galloway reminds us that video games are fundamentally actions and cannot proceed without player involvement.⁷² We could leave it at that, placing gamers decisively on one side of the philosophical binary between the spectator (who has critical distance) and the actor (who is in the midst of things, lacking the disinterestedness and sovereignty necessary for analytical thought).⁷³ From this perspective, novels or films might promote critical contemplation, as with the sentimental abolitionist novel that encouraged both sympathy and a fictional surrogate for direct witnessing.⁷⁴ By contrast, action-oriented video games would not enable ethical reflection, except insofar as they forward the traditional media-aesthetics triad.

Contrary to this reduction, the field of game studies has demonstrated ways in which games are far from antitheoretical. Admittedly, in games you usually act to progress, to solve, or to win. The procedural unconscious, however, also foregrounds differently oriented actions. That is, an action in a game may unlock a new item or reveal a previously unseen level, but it can also reorient the player to the game’s allegorithms. One does not merely act or know, or even act to know, but can also act to experience and witness. This seemingly paradoxical maneuver does not reward action with a mechanical solution or the achievement of knowledge but with an affective reorientation to an unknowable Real. Another way to put this is that one does not achieve conceptual thought in spite of a game’s medium specificity. Even if we were to conclude that actions in the world are nontheoretical because of their lack of critical distance (a position we are not taking), video games, as an expressive art form, add a level of mediation that imbues actions and procedures with meaning. This conversion is particularly apparent in Obra Dinn, as well as Pope’s earlier 2014 game Papers, Please in which you play a different type of bureaucrat: an immigration officer at the border of a fictional Eastern European country.⁷⁵ Such games accentuate something present in countless other games—that even bureaucratic actions and algorithmic processes carry aesthetic qualities. Those qualities carry forward from the novel. As Baucom argues, during Romanticism, the greatest problem for abolition is “the problem of the unseen, the problem of nonappearance, the problem of blocked vision.”⁷⁶ After all, the concept of the unspeakable, which plays a prominent part in trauma theory, makes both witnessing and testament impossible. As the novel bears textual witness to produce sympathy, the video game often aims to do so through the added element of action.⁷⁷

Video games, then, are a procedural art form that combines contemplation and action. Jumping in a platformer, shooting in a first-person shooter, and adusting tax rates in a city-simulation game all carry meanings. In Obra Dinn, deductive puzzle solving and accounting communicate both meanings and absences that help us feel the nonsynchronous contemporaneity between nineteenth-century insurance and slavery on the one hand and twenty-first century finance on the other. For Benjamin, commodity culture already carries an aesthetic charge. For Baucom, the same is true of something as abstract as speculation and finance. As he puts it, “A system of credit encompasses more than just a set of accounting protocols, more than just a table of debts. It demands a phenomenology of transactions, promises, character, credibility.”⁷⁸ Video games further the phenomenology of speculation for a public beyond the financial sector through what Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux call “money games” in esports such as Dota 2.⁷⁹ This phenomenology is also sensible in the metagames of Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s Stalk market in which a game becomes a platform for speculative exchange. We can observe it across everyday game-cultural practices of loot boxes, skin gambling, and blockchain games. Across these cases, this co-emergence of speculation and the video game marks the historical rise of these forms amid the financial revolution and emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Beyond correlation, Baucom goes as far as to argue that finance capital relies on aesthetics and affects—that is, how it “depends on the power of the imagination to affirm the real existence of imaginary values and imaginary social relations” in order to “reify social consciousness.”⁸⁰

The procedural unconscious also marks a space beyond meaning that can only be experienced indirectly. That is, in video games, we only sense absences by acting and reflecting upon an action, both during and after gameplay. Nowhere do we sense such absences more than in encountering Blackness in video games. For all its accomplishments, a game like Obra Dinn is simply not designed for people directly affected by colonialism or the afterlives of slavery. Even with its gestures beyond the knowable, the game remains within a rationalist solution-seeking mode that animates popular entertainment genres from the mystery novel to the true-crime documentary. That is, while the game’s aesthetic briefly evokes absences through digital traces, it does nothing ultimately to address them. This is hardly surprising given that Obra Dinn was created by a white American designer. If one reads Pope’s impressively detailed developer’s notes for the game, published in the TIGSource Forums, much of its substance concerns the verisimilitude of the ship and its contents, as well as creative technical solutions to problems posed by the game’s unique visual aesthetic. For example, Pope observes that he has “always had a nostalgia-softened spot in my heart for 1-bit graphics” and “researching the period, the ships, and the sailors for this project has been a lot of fun.” The tone here is more that of a masterful craftsperson striving for accuracy than of an artist making a sociopolitical intervention. Admittedly, this binary might be overly simplistic. At one point, Pope notes that Obra Dinn has “got nothing to do with Papers Please or my previous games” and is oriented toward “more fantasy and no political underovertones.” This statement still leaves space open for political undertones, which we explore in this essay, but it also explicitly distances the game from politics. Just before the game’s release, Pope even calls it “an insurance adventure with minimal colour,” a tagline that privileges roleplaying and form over any political intervention.⁸¹

While Pope’s perspective and language is telling, the point is not to slide into the intentional fallacy. We do not seek to accuse the designer of being entirely apolitical or tapping into nostalgic experiences of games from his youth in ways that only accidentally gesture toward a transhistorical system.⁸² Our argument operates more effectively along formal lines, as when Soraya Murray elaborates a poetics of video games as a “mess” or “cultural palimpsests” that both efface and record traces of past layers of “code, mechanics, and cultural beliefs.”⁸³ These layers are simultaneously racist and antiracist, historical and contemporary, problematic and generative. Throughout this essay, we have borrowed our analytical ambivalence from literary studies, especially from postcolonial theory. For instance, Edward Said reads a novel like Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), without an accusation of self-contradiction, as “both anti-imperialist and imperialist” and therefore worthy of attention for “its massive strengths and inherent limitations.”⁸⁴ The same is true of Obra Dinn and other important video games. Unlike British novelists such as Charles Dickens or Conrad, Pope is of course creating games after decolonization—indeed even long after the now-classic postcolonial theoretical and literary writing of Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Wole Soyinka, Gayatri Spivak, Said himself, and many others. Beyond critiques of imperialism, we are also amid a golden age of Black-studies scholarship that includes such contemporary luminaries as Hartman, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, Sharpe, Warren, and Wilderson, as well as important work at the intersection with game studies.⁸⁵ Given these generations of literature and scholarship, we should expect some critical edge in a contemporary maritime video game set in the era of empire, yet the persisting nature of absences and hauntings in Pope’s game reveals just how deeply rooted these structural violences remain in our world.

Our concluding point is not an individual accusation but a structural critique. As of 2023, approximately 5 percent of video game developers identify as Black, and a substantially smaller percentage of games come from Black-run game studios or development teams.⁸⁶ As the Black Games Archive reveals, representational issues are no better, with very few Black characters in the history of video games and with most appearing as either athletes or fighters.⁸⁷ Even as representational matters begin to see some signs of improvement, there is little financial or creative space for Black artists to experiment with uniquely Black mechanics, rules, objectives, procedures, and other medium-specific qualities. This includes cooperative and collective experiences that exceed single-player games.⁸⁸

Under these abominable circumstances, it is little surprise that it takes a media-aesthetic investigation to track down the absence of Blackness, if not Black bodies, from video games. The cases available for making some of the arguments in this essay are few and far between. Still, we take seriously Sharpe’s invocation of “blackness’s signifying surplus.” Though she means this phrase to mark the way that words like “child” or “boy” mean more in the context of Blackness, it might also capture the way so little speaks volumes in a game like Obra Dinn. The development of video games calls for a radical shift in how we approach media aesthetics. But this cannot happen without parallel attention to the unconscious and to whatever remains ungraspable and unactionable. If Sharpe is right that the wake calls for “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible,” then we might add that it also demands new ways of acting, playing, or (in more ways than one) processing the historical present.⁸⁹

Along Afropessimist lines, which we treat as an aesthetic approach to politics as much as a unique philosophy, we might say that the chances for Black people playing a substantial part in this new field of media aesthetics are possible, if still low and parameterized. Another way of putting it might be that the probability of this result is as imaginable as the descendent of enslaved people, someone like the coauthor of this essay, having the time and space to play or analyze video games as a way of thinking of Blackness. This present would be unthinkable without the past struggles against slavery and racism and for Black life and civil rights that took so many lives and won so much over several centuries. Indeed, the scale and success of these struggles was itself unimaginable, to most, from within conditions of pervasive racial capitalism. The kind of imaginary toward which we gesture, then, exceeds the forensic or the allegorical and moves into a third space: the unreasonably miraculous that exceeds all games of logic.

Footnotes

1. ^{^} For a fuller account of traditional “media aesthetics,” see: W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 111–23. Mitchell builds on Roland Barthes’s earlier triad of image, sound, and text in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977). Mitchell also maps this three-part taxonomy onto Friedrich Kittler’s gramophone, film, and typewriter, as well as Aristotle’s earlier division of the “means” of drama into melos (music), opsis (spectacle), and lexis (words) (120).

2. ^{^} This point is an extension of an argument developed in greater detail in Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

3. ^{^} See Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009).

4. ^{^} Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 71–73.

5. ^{^} Bogost, Persuasive Games, 9.

6. ^{^} Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 13.

7. ^{^} Bogost, Persuasive Games, 2–3.

8. ^{^} See, for instance, Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations,” Science 336, no. 5654 (2019): 447–53. For one analytical exploration of this argument, see Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

9. ^{^} Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 82. Also, for an expanded application of a method organized around the “political unconscious” but applied to film, see Fredric Jameson. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

10. ^{^} Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2013). As Nooney puts it, “Media ‘archaeology’ implies an excavation that brings objects into the light of knowledge, constructing a larger skeleton from the wreckage of bones scattered across the historical field. Spelunking, in contrast, is a phenomenologically imprecise encounter—I can only see so much at any one time.”

11. ^{^} Return of the Obra Dinn was released for several platforms in 2018 and 2019, including macOS, Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Even with its independent status, the game made approximately $20 million in net revenue, according to the Steam Revenue Calculator: https://steam-revenue-calculator.com/app/653530/return-of-the-obra-dinn.

12. ^{^} Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 4.

13. ^{^} Chris Kohler, “Return of the Obra Dinn: The Kotaku Review,” October 18, 2018, https://kotaku.com/return-of-the-obra-dinn-the-kotaku-review-1829797772.

14. ^{^} Sigmund Freud. “The ‘Uncanny,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 226.

15. ^{^} For more on the intersections and differences between these perspectives in cinema and video games, see Alexander Galloway, “Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 39–69.

16. ^{^} Interestingly, Obra Dinn is not the only game in which you play as an insurance agent or corporate investigator. In the walking simulator Tacoma (2017), you roleplay as Amitjyoti (“Amy”) Ferrier, an employee of the Venturis Corporation. You are assigned to find out what happened on the lunar transfer station Tacoma, whose crew, like that of the Obra Dinn, is missing.

17. ^{^} For a fuller account of sovereignty in the context of death, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003). For Mbembe, the sovereign is the one who, in Foucauldian terms, has “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11).

18. ^{^} The location is only marked as “Africa” without specifying a particular country or city. This detail, or lack thereof, is not unrelated to our ultimate argument.

19. ^{^} Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 95.

20. ^{^} For more on metagaming, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

21. ^{^} Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

22. ^{^} A. B. Leonard, “Underwriting British Trade to India and China, 1780–1835,” Historical Journal 55, no. 4 (December 2012): 984, 985, and 987. Leonard draws this estimate from “an 1810 parliamentary select committee on marine insurance” number that was “based on policy stamp duty” (987). For the inflation adjustment, we are using the Bank of England inflation calculator: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.

23. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 53.

24. ^{^} Joseph E. Inikori, “Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy,” Current Anthropology 61, supp. 22 (October 2020). Inikori develops the point that “the availability of low-cost labor of enslaved Africans was a critical factor in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States” (S167).

25. ^{^} Greg Grandin, “How Slavery Made the Modern World,” The Nation, February 24, 2014.

26. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 129.

27. ^{^} “Africans Thrown Overboard from a Slave Ship,” Brazil, 1832, woodcut, I, https://www.slaveryimages.org/database/image-result.php?objectid=792; licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This event took place outside of Rio de Janeiro.

28. ^{^} Marine themes become important in Black studies through wide-ranging references, including Kodwo Eshun, “Drexciya: Fear of a Wet Planet,” Wire, no. 167 (January 1998); Rinaldo Walcott, “The Black Aquatic,” liquid blackness 5, no. 1 (2021): 63–73; and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020). Regarding global supply chains, see, for example, Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (London: Verso, 2021). For the connections between the ocean, slavery, and insurance, see Tim Armstrong, “Slavery, Insurance, and Sacrifice in the Black Atlantic,” in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Klein Bernhard and Gesa Mackenthun (London: Routledge, 2003). For an account of how negotiations of globalization unfold across the Earth’s oceans, also see The Outlaw Ocean, 2023, 7 episodes, produced and created by the Outlaw Ocean Project, from CBC Podcasts and the L.A. Times, podcast, https://www.theoutlawocean.com/the-outlaw-ocean-podcast/.

29. ^{^} Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 72.

30. ^{^} Dave Gosse, “The Politics of Morality: The Debate Surrounding the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade,” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (March–June 2010): 127–38.

31. ^{^} Lauren F. Klein, “Absence: Slavery and Silence in the Archive of Eating,” in An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 137. Of course, the question of archival silence is discussed earlier in contexts ranging from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), to Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

32. ^{^} See, for instance, Stephen Best, “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive,” Representations, no. 113 (2011): 150–63; Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

33. ^{^} Klein, “Absence: Slavery and Silence,” 140.

34. ^{^} In Obra Dinn, one of the few such unaccounted for absences is the aforementioned “unidentified stowaway.”

35. ^{^} Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Spring 2007).

36. ^{^} Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132–34.

37. ^{^} David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), xxi.

38. ^{^} Melissa Kagen, Wandering Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 30.

39. ^{^} The similarities between the evidential paradigm and humanistic close reading are worth noting and elaborated in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989).

40. ^{^} The other two Black characters are two seamen about whom we learn next to nothing: Hamadou Diom from Siera Leone (spiked by a mermaid who is being taken on board) and Alexander Booth from England (drowned during the Kraken attack).

41. ^{^} blah2001, 2022, comment on Lady_keyz, “Which character(s) took you way too long to figure out, that in hindsight you think should’ve been more obvious?,” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/ObraDinn/comments/stllre/which_characters_took_you_way_too_long_to_figure/.

42. ^{^} Voose200, “Winston Smith was most likely on the Obra Dinn because he was impressed by the British navy,” Reddit, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/ObraDinn/comments/rvsjks/winston_smith_was_most_likely_on_the_obra_dinn/.

43. ^{^} For an account of speculative methods in media history, beyond vernacular contexts like Reddit threads, see Allyson Nadia Field, “Editor’s Introduction: Sites of Speculative Encounter,” Feminist Media Histories8, no. 2 (Spring 2022): 1–13, and “Editor’s Introduction: Acts of Speculation,” Feminist Media Histories8, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 1–7.

44. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 11.

45. ^{^} Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 6.

46. ^{^} See, for instance, “Video Game / Return of the Obra Dinn,” TV Tropes, accessed November 30, 2024, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/ReturnOfTheObraDinn. As this wiki puts it, “MacGuffin: The shells. Clearly very important to the mermaids …. But not even the Golden Ending will reveal why they are so important.” On the language of the shells as a MacGuffin, see klipty, “What are your theories about ... the shells and the chest?,” Reddit, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/ObraDinn/comments/q17wh8/what_are_your_theories_about/.

47. ^{^} The locus classicus for this much-discussed concept is the first chapter of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867). For a distinction between supernatural and commodity fetishism, in an aesthetic context, see Laura Mulvey’s close analysis of Ousmane Sembene’s 1975 film Xala in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 118–36.

48. ^{^} Jan S. Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1.

49. ^{^} Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, 67.

50. ^{^} Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 27. For more on the hold and its histories, see Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

51. ^{^} Benjamin. The Arcades Project, 22.

52. ^{^} Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 13.

53. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 21, 17.

54. ^{^} Baucom, 24. For more on world-systems analysis, see, for instance, Giovanni Arrighi,The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

55. ^{^} Baucom, 20, 21–22.

56. ^{^} Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 24.

57. ^{^} Sharpe, In the Wake, 5.

58. ^{^} Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, 156.

59. ^{^} For more on the connections between financial and computational speculation, see N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux, “Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2014): 220–36.

60. ^{^} Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route Terror (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.

61. ^{^} Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 91.

62. ^{^} Miguel Sicart, “Against Procedurality,” Game Studies11, no. 3 (2011). Sicart also develops this critique in Play Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

63. ^{^} For more on the surface-depth model in software relative to ideology critique, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room, no. 18 (Winter 2004): 26–51. Also, see Alexander Galloway. The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).

64. ^{^} Benjamin, “Short History of Photography,” in Arcades Project, 510–12. For a fuller extension of the optical unconscious to film and its dimensions of movement, see Benjamin, “Work of Art,” in Arcades Project, 37. Benjamin’s version of the concept is notably impressionistic. For an elaboration of this concept, especially in the context of modernist art, see Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

65. ^{^} The “Tetris effect” was first named by Jeffrey Goldsmith in “This Is Your Brain on Tetris,” Wired, May 1, 1994. Since that time, research in psychology and cognitive science has explored the effect of video games on phenomena ranging from visuospatial memory to PTSD.

66. ^{^} For an account of how the kind of constructivist and situated learning that occurs in games can occur, see Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

67. ^{^} Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,” Yale French Studies, no. 48 (1972): 119.

68. ^{^} Jacques Lacan elaborates the Real in his 1953 lecture called “Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le reel” [The symbolic, the imaginary and the real] in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, vol. 23, The Sinthome (New York: Norton, Polity Press, 1988).

69. ^{^} Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 183, 185.

70. ^{^} Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

71. ^{^} Millions of people do of course watch video games, such as esports events. However, we are deliberately using the language of “witnessing” instead of “watching” to capture a reflective dimension beyond entertainment or information acquisition.

72. ^{^} Galloway, Gaming, 2.

73. ^{^} For an elaboration of this binary, see, for instance, Hannah Arendt’s theory of action in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54–55. For an elaboration on this theory in the context of video games, see Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

74. ^{^} There are of course well-known memoirs and autobiographies by Black writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglas, and Harriet Jacobs. However, sentimental abolitionist novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were also important to human rights and legal discourse around abolition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

75. ^{^} For a compelling analysis of Papers, Please, see Gary Kafer, “Gaming Borders: The Rhetorics of Gamification and National Belonging in Papers Please,” American Literature 94, no. 1 (2022): 181–210.

76. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 218.

77. ^{^} To be clear, we are not advocating games as a route to either sympathy or empathy, even as they can serve as a medium of witness. Though we do not have the space to take up this point here, since the 2010s, there have been many valuable critiques of video games and virtual reality as alleged “empathy machines.”

78. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 64.

79. ^{^} Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Golden Ticket: Money Games at the Dota 2 International Championship in China,” ROMchip 3, no. 1 (July 2021), https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/137.

80. ^{^} Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 246.

81. ^{^} Lucas Pope (dukope), “Return of the Obra Dinn [Releasing Oct 18],” TIGSource Forums, last updated October 10, 2018, https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0. The original development blog posts cited here appeared on May 24, 2014; February 20, 2015; May 24, 2014; and October 10, 2018.

82. ^{^} For more on the intentional fallacy, see W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (July–September 1946): 468–88.

83. ^{^} Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 47–61. Murray builds here on Bogost and Matthew Payne.

84. ^{^} Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xviii, xix.

85. ^{^} In the present essay, we engage less pointedly with Black game studies work that concerns representational matters because our argument grapples primarily with matters of nonrepresentation and absence. For this important strand of work, see books such as Kishonna L. Gray, Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); and Lindsay Grace, ed., Black Game Studies: An Introduction to the Games (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2021). For more about how racial frameworks are imported from cinema to video games, and how anti-Blackness appears in video games, see Cameron Kunzelman, The World Is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Games (Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 101–40.

86. ^{^} See, for instance, Brianna Scott, “The Number of Black Video Game Developers Is Small, but Strong,” All Things Considered, NPR, February 27, 2023.

87. ^{^} Black Games Archive, https://samanthablackmon.net/bgarchive/archive-list/.

88. ^{^} To move from single to multiplayer games or collective ways of thinking about games would return us to the opening line of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” This line of thinking, along with Jacques Derrida’s own return to it in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994) is regrettably beyond the scope of this essay.

89. ^{^} Sharpe, In the Wake, 80, 113.