“What Else Have These People Hidden Away in Here?” Unsilencing Slavery in the Archives in Historiated Games' Blackhaven

Academic historians have been slow to recognize the cultural importance of historical video games (a billion-dollar industry), especially compared to colleagues in allied fields. This paper fits into recent efforts (by me, Chris Kempshall and others) to focus historians’ attention on video games and to subject them to the same kind of scrutiny directed toward other public history forms.

Historians of video games often study games by commercial game studios. My own book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (UP Mississippi, 2021), one of the first monographs by a historian on video games, focused on games by multinational companies like Ubisoft as well as the defunct French studio Coktel.

In this paper, I turn to the next frontier in historical games: those developed by professional historians themselves in collaboration with students, to instill complex historiography and theory in a game format. I will examine Blackhaven (2021), the first release by Historiated Games, a studio at the University of Connecticut led by Prof. James Coltrain. Blackhaven is set in a plantation museum, where an HBCU student/intern named Kendra notices the skewed way the museum presents the history of slavery. Later, she sneaks into the plantation’s archives to discover stories about enslaved people that are omitted from public displays. Coltrain developed this game not only with UConn students but also with Prof. Shearon Roberts and her Communication students at Xavier University in New Orleans (an HBCU).

This paper will examine how Blackhaven exposes the gap between what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called historicity #1 (what happened in the past) and historicity #2 (what we say about what happened), using a game form.