It should go without saying that any place and its people have place in the myriad histories of the world to be told, and an obvious important continuing condition in the life of everyone living there, and with ties there today.
Bermuda, for instance is one such phenomenon. It is currently a British Overseas Territory. That is, one of the 14 territories outside of the immediate UK that remain part of the British state after being colonised. It’s the last remaining part of British North America. It took an independence poll in 1995 that voted against independence. It has a population of about 64,000 people.
Its economy relies on its place as an offshore territory and minimal regulation of financial services and banking. It has a long history of being integrally tied to the sale and forced labour of enslaved Black Africans and Native Americans by the British and other Colonial Empires.
Life there today has developed out of these violent conditions, the abolition of slavery, and how this played out under the governance of the British Empire. And life and joy and love continues and the culture department of the Bermudan government has a great youtube channel where history and life today is frequently discussed.
Here’s a picture of Bermuda from 2006.
And here’s one from 2023 by P. Hughes under a creative commons attribution share-alike license 4.0.
These things I got from Wikipedia, Wikimedia, YouTube. It’s the basics you might want to look into if you were to make some ill-advised art about it, perhaps.
Down In Bermuda (2019, Yak & Co) makes the artistic choice of imagining Bermuda is a blank canvas to draw dated genre fantasies onto.
The game is about a fighter pilot who crash lands on the islands of Bermuda. His plane is a WW2 style fighter/bomber. There he spends many years and becomes old, and when he’s old he decides to leave.
Here’s Bermuda in the 1940s for comparison.
It’s obviously inspired by the conspiracies around the effects of the Bermuda Triangle on navigation, a mythical region that draws in and won’t let go. A black hole on earth…
They all are puzzle box constructions and each one of them carries its own level design tropes.
The islands of Bermuda are mostly filled with plants and abandoned architecture, and uninhabited, except by the odd key anthropomorphised creature. Two ancient tortoises. A talking skeleton pirate. A sentient AI. Two villages, one with some racist caricature rocks, and one with some idk, what you’d describe as ‘little guys’.
On Lava island, the villagers are stones, who wear a stereotyped garb of vine headdress, waist adornment and spear. They are caricatures of indigenous peoples, as imagined by fantasies about colonial adventurers. They say “Oonga Oonga FIRE GOD!” and are ‘comical’ in their savagery.
These are the inhabitants of Bermuda according to the game.
The combination of conspiracy theory construction of global geography and racist tropes going back hundreds of years creates a design ideology that sees real places and real people with real experiences of colonial violence, as erasable. This is in favour of making a comfortable and cute version of reality which can handle the layering on of the first thing you might think about if you’re a designer in a large economy on stolen land, like Australia, reaching to make money from ‘Tropical Island’ the way the British Empire did.
It’s a game that features touching Polaroids about this pilot’s life back in civilization, abstract Relics, architecture modelled on the houses and temples of Ancient Civilizations, the traces of obvious colonial settlement in sheep farms, maps seen from above… orbs…
All you might need for a cozy indie puzzle game that builds on the colonial erasure of people’s realities, the portrayal of the indigenous as magical, as unreal, and the complete silence on the violence of the imperial project, a dominance over history. It is forever ancient. Forever forgotten.
Except, this is choice. The choice of game developers to not engage with ANY sense of responsibility for maybe even perhaps checking if Bermuda is a real place for instance before making what could be called ‘art’ about it. The cozy profit incentive overrides that. This is a game that is craven in its soulless lack of introspection about any of its themes in search of money. It is perhaps, my new least favourite game, because it posits all of this, all of the history of a real place with people, who live and love and are just as real as the developers of the game as not even worth thinking about.
Even the song the title of the game is based on acknowledges that Bermuda is real, because it, for what it’s worth, is ABOUT BERMUDA.
It is precisely the same impulse that allows for the erasure of Palestinians by everyone who has permitted and added to an ongoing genocide. It is the playbook of America’s Imperialism today, in Gaza, in Venezuela, with aspirations in Greenland. The original playbook of the British in bringing enslaved people to Bermuda. It is the complete and total pasting over of any sovereignty or humanity that might exist with total callousness in the name of the comfort of the settler.
So yeah, pretty naff game.
GlitchOut 