cyborg with a little "c" - Assassin's Creed IV and cyborgs

Edward Kenway - Assassin's Creed IV

Today I was playing video games. Specifically, I was playing Assasin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013). I think this game has a number of things to contribute to our ongoing discussion of the cyborg as a tool for social critique and can certainly broaden our understanding of the concept of the cyborg.

Most obviously, the game possesses a very cyborg-y sci-fi premise: you are a computer programmer (in the future, of course) who has a job harvesting memories of dead people. Ostensibly, technology has developed that allows for the exploration of “genetic memories” using tissue samples from dead people of interest. This game focuses on your project to harvest the memories of the long-dead pirate Edward Kenway by playing through sequences of his life on the open seas. It is your understanding in the game that these memories will be used to produce films, virtual reality spectacles, and a whole industry of late 1700’s pirate amusement for consumers. This second life of Edward Kenway is what constitutes 98% of the gameplay and your success is proportional to the thoroughness with which you explore his memories (this is termed synchronization in the game).  In short, the game places us in this sci-fi futuristic environment, outfits our character with certain technological enhancements that allow for him to interact with the world in different and fantastical ways, and we execute his task of what is essentially deskwork at an entertainment production company (playing through the memories).

In one capacity, we can look at this game and see the ways in which it is commenting on the entertainment industry via cyborg-esque proxy. The fact that the entertainment industry in this game is literally harvesting memories from people’s dead bodies to produce consumer goods like movies opens our eyes to the ways in which our modern entertainment industry operates in sometimes unethical and obtuse ways.

In another, one cannot play AC4 and miss the joke being made throughout this game: you’re playing as a computer programmer playing as Edward Kenway. The sequences where you are Kenway are exciting, full of fierce ship battles, sword fighting, and parkour; the sequences where you are the computer programmer are dull and consist of you getting your first-day orientation, operating an elevator, and walking (with none of the flare that Kenway would have) to your cubicle to jack-in to Kenway’s life. In fact, the scenes where you are the computer programmer (your main character, technically) feel tedious and uneventful. You want to hurry to the Kenway action. And considering that only a handful of sequences of the game actually put you in the world of the programmer, its safe to say that Kenway is the intended focus and favorite. There is a comment being made here on the dullness of cubicle life, of modern life, and the dream and splendor that awaits in entertainment. The life of Kenway is exciting to play, but the game doesn’t let you forget that you’re playing a game. In fact, you’re not playing a game – you’re playing someone who’s playing a game. This commentary on escapism and modern entertainment apparatus is effected through a construction of a cyborg type world, where technology has enabled life to exist in a particular way, and in reading that world, we are able to read our own.

Our Computer Programmer's Desk

Certainly these can be understood as instances where the concept of the cyborg as a tool of defamiliarization allows for us to recognize certain ideologies that permeate our social reality and thus engage in a form of social analysis. But I want to move past these types of discussions to understand the concept of the cyborg as something more than just an analytical tool, rather I want to focus on the ways in which we can more broadly understand the cyborg as a way of being. I want to talk about how WE are cyborgs, even though we don’t have prosthetic limbs, plastic surgery, or “surrogates”.

As I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was learning things about pirates. I was engaging with a particular narrative that understood pirates as political activists. This game suggests that piracy, as a means of wealth accumulation by illegal or asymmetrical warfare tactics, emerged in a particular political-economic system where many people were denied access to the massive influx of wealth, goods, and political power brought to the western world in the age of exploration. The experience of “embodying” a pirate in the game enabled me to think differently about pirates, surely, but also think differently about power. I thought of the ways in which protest and political subversion emerge in relations of power and how the dynamics of power produce knowledge in the form of history. Before this game I knew what a pirate was because of a particular education that teaches a certain history that constructs a specific image and role of a pirate. And having played this game, I understand differently.

I experience myself as a subject of particular ideologies, relations and exertions of power, and technologies that at once compete and converge, and ultimately cohere what the world is to me. That I have a history, video game, and culture more generally to tell me what something as specific as a pirate is, demonstrates the extent to which the cyborg typifies my state of being. As the cyborg is a mix of tech and man navigating its way though life by its interaction with these various forces, so too I find myself to be a body who comes to know, understand, and be as a result of the fusion of forces, cultural, technological, geographic, and otherwise.

The cyborg is more than the literal robot humanoid that tells us something about ourselves; it is as Haraway calls it, an ontology. We are the cyborg.