Read on Twitter
ATTENTION DESIGNERS AND PUBLISHERS! Especially ones with games that raise issues of colonization and slavery. If you want to treat these realities with more accuracy and respect, I would like to like to present a different set of choices. /thread
In your game, you may no longer present a slave as individual commodity, whether as a card or game piece. You may not offer participation in the slave trade as merely another victory path. Your game should present slavery with more historical grounding, or not at all. 2/11
Your game needs to include three aspects - 1) respectful, intentional depiction of slaves, 2) their resistance and struggle for liberation, 3) societal efforts to repress rebellion. Your game should include ALL three of these, or none of them. 3/11
1) Respectful depiction. You may not use caricatures, such as the Black man in chains meekly accepting his fate. They often bore marks of violence, like brands of ownership or scars from punishment. Show that, or don’t show anything. 4/11
If your slaves are “workers”, represented by cubes or chits, do NOT make them brown or black. Do I really have to say this? Present them in as abstract a way as possible, while also including the other mechanisms I mention. Or don’t present it at all. 5/11
2) Struggle to be free. If slavery has always been with us, “par for the course” for most of the sweep of human history, then so has rebellion. One of the oldest stories of the Western world, Exodus, is a slave rebellion. Your game should include this history, or no history. 6/11
Game pieces that depict slaves should be painful for the player to maintain. They should not just represent negative points. They should have a chance, for example, to escape, or destroy your other stuff. Slaves in your game should have agency, or they should not be there. 7/11
3) Societal repression. Slavery was never, ever one and done, never the “natural” right of the conqueror. Ongoing systems of violence - laws, surveillance, police - are the other side of the slavery coin. Your game needs both sides of this coin, or neither. 8/11
Are you comfortable gameifying repression? Can you represent state violence as a separate track - the higher the track, the more the slaves behave? Will you let players spend gold, shares, or other goods on police to help enforce the game state? If not... well, you know ;). 9/11
I want to be clear - I do not want to “cancel” any game. I want MORE games, not less. I just want to make manifest, for everyone, what I see in historical games as an amateur historian and as a POC. A game that even glances at history and culture is never “just a game”. 10/11
If you can take up the challenges I have presented, great! Make your game! If you can’t, your game does not need to exist. Find another theme. History is full of radically interesting themes. Whatever you make, please respect oppressed peoples and honor their aspirations. 11/11
