The Cake is a Lie: Post-Racialism in Assassin’s Creed III and Games Advertising

The cake is a lie. Especially when you are talking about having your cake and eating it too. For years video game developers and company execs have been telling us that their use of racial stereotypes in games was not as racist as we wanted to make it seem. That it really wasn’t racist at all. That they were just trying to add some diversity to the medium, but that with the limitations of the medium it was sometimes necessary to over-exaggerate certain things in order to make that diversity clear. Yeah, right. 

No matter how much the games industry wants us to believe that they believe that we live in a post-racial society where killing hundreds of obscurely brown men in a sandy environment does not foster any anti-Arab sentiment, or that representations of white slavery and drug running in GTAV is not a shot at Eastern Europeans, or that representations of the Redguard in the Morrowind series as having hearty constitutions and being fleet of foot is not based on stereotypes of people of the African diaspora, we can no longer deny that the post-racial cake is a lie when we look at the upcoming release of Assassin’s Creed III.

Now it is no secret to those who listen to the podcast that I am really looking forward to the release of ACIII and ACIII:Liberation. I have pre-ordered them both and I am making plans for how to best disconnect myself from my family and the office for at least a week after release. (Ok, I am kidding about that last part, but just barely). With last week’s (October 4)  release of the new ACIII trailer (to use a phrase) shit got real! Ubisoft released one trailer for the UK and a different one for the US. Now this is important to note because of the historical period that ACIII is situated in. ACIII takes place on American soil during the time of the Revolution and our new Assassin, Connor, is both Native American and British. 

The UK version of the trailer seen here gives us a fuller picture of Connor as our new assassin and includes a good amount of footage of him killing American soldiers and walking through a field strewn with the corpses of American soldiers.

Interestingly, the US version of the trailer is edited so that it is approximately 30 seconds of footage is missing, including the field of bodies. The focus here is definitely on the killing of Redcoats. Even Forbes gets in on the historicity of the narrative that is implied in the different trailers.

It’s unsurprising that Ubisoft left out that part in the US trailer. After all, many Americans still consider the American Revolutionary War to be a battle between the United States vs. the British Empire, rather than the actual battle between the United States, the British, our Native American allies, their Native American allies, our European allies, their European and Canadian allies, our freed/enslaved African Americans soldiers, and their freed African American soldiers.

There is even a suggestion at one point that he is not “fight[ing] alone” but rather with the colonial soldiers. Check it out.

This is interesting considering the fact that the opening narrative of the trailer (and theoretically the game itself) suggests that Connor becomes an assassin because he watches soldiers kill and burn his entire village. The assassin is “born” from the flames and goes about getting some serious payback and doesn’t care what color the uniforms are (this is less clear in the US version of the trailer than it is in the UK version). I can’t wait to see the whole “making of an assassin” section of the narrative. There are some serious implications about terrorism that folks just may not be ready for (too soon?). Do we make terrorists/assassins with our actions? I like the fact that a game might just be addressing this issue and making people think about it! I don’t want to talk about this too much at this point because there will definitely be more posts about them post-release. Oh boy, don’t let this game be a letdown!