Historical Media Technologies and the Production of Race in "Return of the Obra Dinn"

• In Event: Race and/as Technology - II

Abstract

This paper examines the mutually constitutive relationship of media technologies and race through a close reading of the video game, Return of the Obra Dinn (2018). Set in 1804, the game takes the form of a deductive reasoning puzzle in which the player-avatar, an insurance adjuster for the Dutch East India Company, must investigate the titular ship, which has appeared at port, empty, six months after being declared lost. To advance the plot (told largely in reverse), the player, who is given a manifest and two drawings of the crew, must identify and deduce the fate of each person aboard. To this end, the player is constantly called upon to racialize bodies based on partial visual and textual data. In broad terms, I suggest that Obra Dinn should be read in the context of the rise of racial capitalism. Though the Obra Dinn is not a slave ship, historians have long noted the relationship of insurance industries and the slave trade. More specifically, however, I argue that Obra Dinn thematizes the relationship between race and media technologies – namely etchings, double ledger bookkeeping, and 1-bit pixel art – by demonstrating how these technologies do not simply reflect existing racial formations, but help produce them. (Etching, for example, literally “marks” racial difference into representations of non-white bodies). Additionally, given that the game is, in essence, a long series of “if-then” propositions, Obra Dinn offers insight into how race may be produced through algorithmic reasoning techniques employed by (for example) contemporary facial recognition software.

Author

• William Clyde Partin