The Archivist

The Archivist is meant to explore the inherent impossibility of giving a voice to voices that have been violently suppressed in the traditional archive. The central gameplay loop is reading through colonial-era documents, which will be gathered from primary sources like Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century. The player will try (and fail) to fully recover the lives of the enslaved in the eighteenth-century anglophone Caribbean through their engagement with the colonial British archive.  These archives were designed to uphold the colonial regime, and narratives or texts that ran counter to the white and British supremacist colonial ideology were suppressed and erased. As such, scholars must look for traces of enslaved persons within objectively horrible primary documents. The goal of The Archivist is to educate players on how the colonial archive upholds Eurocentrism and white supremacy and allow the player to experience the affective horror of reading through the archive of the enslaved. How do you recover Black and indigenous voices that have been erased? The Archivist aims to explore, but not answer, this question.