Danish studio Serious Games Interactive put out a game a few years ago named Playing History 2: Slave Trade.
As the name implies, it’s an educational game meant to help people learn of the atrocities behind the slave trade during the founding of the American colonies. From the game’s description:
Slave Trade: Travel back in time to the 18th century and witness the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade firsthand. In this episode, you will be working as young slave steward on a ship crossing the Atlantic. You are to serve the captain and be his eyes and ears – reporting any suspicious activities is your duty. But what do you do, when you realize that your own sister has been captured by the slave traders?
However, this past week saw the game receive new recognition, mostly for its Tetris-like mini-game involving fitting as many slaves as you can in a trans-Atlantic slave vessel.
This led to Serious Games removing the mini-game, citing the recent outcry as the reasoning behind the removal of content:
“Slave Tetris has been removed as it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people. This overshadowed the educational goal of the game,” the Denmark-based studio wrote on Steam. “Apologies to people who was offended by us using game mechanics to underline the point of how inhumane slavery was. The goal was to enlighten and educate people—not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15 secs part of the game.”
Despite the company’s decision to remove the controversial mini-game, it seems like Serious Games Interactive founder and CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen is standing by what the game originally stood for, even with its mini-game.
“I definitely agree it is insensitive and gruesome. It has to be like this to show what was done to load slave ships,” he said over on the game’s Steam forum. “People treated human beings as pieces that just had to fitting into the cargo. The reactions people have to this game is something they will never forget, and they will remember just how inhumane slave trade was. If this is the case then we have accomplished what we set out to do. You may not like the way we do it, but I have seen enough school classes use this to know it has the intended effect—a lot people never think of slave trade as something that just happened in the past.”
Egenfeldt-Nielsen wrote another post in which he expressed his surprise behind the outrage behind the game. However, he said that removing Slave Tetris was because “it was clearly such a red [flag] for a lot of people, and it shadowed the rest of the game.” He defended the game over on ThinkProgress, saying it has won educational awards in Europe, pointing to cultural differences between Europe and the United States.
“We just tried to make a game to teach about what we thought was an important topic. We did spend a lot time doing it, We did consult with experts. We didn’t set out to make a racist or inflammatory game. Actually the opposite—a game where you would understand slave trade from the inside by escaping slavery,” he said. “I have reached the conclusion that no matter what we had done it would have been wrong.”
Finally, he said that anyone who feels cheated for buying the game for its Slave Tetris should just ask for a refund, via Steam’s refund system.
