Amazon's removal of Indigenous people from New World is genocide
This is an expansion of a comment thread I wrote on Polygon. The comments of the person I was responding to have been removed for the sake of their privacy and my writing has been adjusted because of this.
New World is an upcoming MMO (think World of Warcraft) by Amazon Game Studios. Due to the cancellation of two other projects, it will be the first title the studio releases.
Yes, that Amazon.
According to the game’s webpage, in New World players will:
“Explore a thrilling, open-world MMO filled with danger and opportunity where you’ll forge a new destiny for yourself as an adventurer shipwrecked on the supernatural island of Aeternum. Endless opportunities to fight, forage, and forge await you among the island’s wilderness and ruins. Channel supernatural forces or wield deadly weapons in a classless, real-time combat system, and fight alone, with a small team, or in massed armies for PvE and PvP battles—the choices are all yours.”
Pretty standard MMO-stuff, nothing to see here. But here’s how the game looks:
Do these outfits and setting remind you of a particular time in history?
Do you notice something missing from an image of people in wide brimmed hats, steel armor, and feathers battling in front of a wooden pallisade in a verdant green field, in a game called New World?
From Colin Campbell of Polygon’s initial preview of the title in 2019:
“There are no indigenous peoples. And according to developer Amazon Game Studios, it’s not really about invasion or America.
Except ... except there are human-like creatures on this Atlantic shoreline. They are shuffling zombies, variously called “Corrupted,” or “Withered.” They don’t have identifiable cultures, but they are extremely hostile to settlers. They aren’t portrayed like, say, the Wampanoag peoples that the Pilgrims encountered, or the Algonquian-speaking civilizations of pre-invasion Virginia.
The game’s lore says they are “former settlers,” who have been corrupted by the island.”
I have major issues with games celebrating the "Age of Exploration" from a purely European perspective, as much as I enjoy the visual aesthetic and storytelling potential of the era.
The erasure of Indigenous peoples from history and in pop culture is genocide. I don’t care that New World is set on "a magical island with no native life" if the people exploring that magical island look, dress, act, and use the weaponry of the soldiers who systematically murdered, displaced, and conquered the original peoples of the Americas and Caribbean. You’re still putting on the historical costume of a conqueror and by removing any mention of indigenous people, players get to experience the power fantasy of a conquerer without that darned colonial guilt.
The fact that the player is battling "unholy, corrupted" settlers doesn’t make it better: I’m sure the Catholic Church and other organizations used similar terminology to describe European settlers who attempted to co-exist with Indigenous peoples.
My comments were met with the expected dismissals: that I was taking things too seriously, that I must be someone who looks for things to be offended by, that no, actually, this isn’t literally genocide because this game isn’t literally murdering someone.
Now, If you are really interested in a discussion of modern cultural genocide, this is a good place to start.
I’m not saying Amazon, or the developers of this video game, are committing genocide themselves, but they are participating in cultural and historical erasure which is a continuation of the colonial genocide perpetrated by European settlers on Native Americans and Indigenous Canadians which exists today through systemic racism and the discovery of mass graves on the site of former Canadian residential school grounds among many other examples.
I remember seeing an argument when Greedfall came out: “The combat is fun, so who cares about the rest?” Greedfall a French-developed RPG where the player takes control of a colonialist settler whose job is to balance the needs of multiple factions in colonizing a New World which did have Indigenous peoples, they were just based on the Celtic colonization by the British, even though the settlers themselves were clearly modelled after the English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catholic Church. Greedfall does attempt some nuance and makes an admirable attempt at creating a mid-period BioWare RPG (Like Mass Effect or Dragon Age) in a very compelling setting, but the role of the main character leaves a bad taste in the mouth unlike the one left by Commander Shepard or Hawke.
You don’t have to care about this if you don’t want to. But I do. My intention isn’t to make you feel bad or to say the people who worked on this video game are bad people who don’t deserve their jobs or for their work to be appreciated by the people who will buy it.
As I said above, someone suggested I was someone who “looks for things to be offended by” and… they’re kinda right. I do look for ways to examine the things I take for granted and I do question my assumptions about history, culture, and the imagery I absorbed through my education. I’m not offended by New World—I think the last five years of public discourse have eradicated the meaning of that word—but, as I said above, I personally have a problem with using only three of the four pillars of the Age of Exploration: early gunpowder and single-edged steel weapons, multiple-mast sailing ships, and fabulous coats paired with funny mustaches, while completely ignoring the fourth pillar of that setting: the subjugation, eradication, and assimilation of Indigenous peoples.
Should our education be separate from our entertainment? I don’t think it should. A common argument is “We can’t have games about periods in history without mentioning the bad parts of those periods” and we mostly don’t! WW2 games and modern warfare games have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to address civilian deaths and the often manufactured or fraudulent reasons for war. And there has been an examination of a game called "Civilization" being solely about a race to settling cities and building roads.
If you only wish to engage with games as escapist entertainment, that’s fine. You can watchBand of Brothers just for the fight scenes. But I can’t just consume media without considering the consequences anymore.