Slavery: The Game is a Hoax – But Still Worth Discussing
Above is the trailer circulating for a game based on slavery – but it appears that this is fake, despite all the attention it’s been attracting.
As Jessica Conditt explains in her post for Joystiq:
These are lined up at the bottom of the site, right next to the overwhelming sense of relief we felt when we realized neither 360 nor PS3 release AO titles. Further, the ESRB doesn’t list a rating for anything called Slavery the Game and the proposed developer, Javelin Reds Gaming, doesn’t exist. One YouTube version of the trailer credits The Creative Assembly with making Slavery the Game, but it isn’t mentioned anywhere on The Creative Assembly’s site. We’ve contacted The Creative Assembly for clarification.
A lot of people are rightfully horrified at a game predicated on the slave trade from the slave master’s perspective – specifically glorifying the dehumanizing nature of slavery for cheap amusement. However, even though the game is fake, I hesitate to fully condemn the premise, probably because of one of my other favorite games: Age of Empires: The Conquerers.
A game can do anything we program it to do – and AoE:TC allowed me to rewrite history, by allowing the people of Tenochtitlan to defeat the Conquistadors.
AoE:TC is a civilization based game, one that bases the action on real historical events and allows players to recreate key battles in play. Along the way, you also essentially create a civilization from scratch and learn to defend your base. Now, in the wrong hands, it’s very easy for these games to revert to a standard colonialist/racist/imperialist view of history, as the fake slavery game did. The presentation of history there was very one sided – the game proposed no premise to question what was happening historically. The competition was solely from slavemaster to slavemaster, and the playability was set to revolve around violence toward enslaved people. And, to me as a player, totally boring. It’s the expected narrative story line – slave master rules pliable and silent masses of enslaved people. We’ve heard that narrative before, ad nauseam.
All the fun is in the subversion.
In AOE: TC, each civilization has it’s strong points and weak points. Depending on region and practice, some places have calvary units and some do not. Some have gunpowder technology, some do not. Some have advanced naval capabilities, some do not. So quite a bit of the fun in the game is figuring out in what circumstances your civilization would be successful at resisting invasion or conquering other nations. It was also a valuable lesson into history. For me, the fun of playing both the Spanish campaign and the Tenochtitlan campaign was hearing about the history and the need from both sides. When you play the Spanish campaign, the Conquistadors explain their goals, why they are doing it, and who they need to kill to get this done. You help them grow their army – and in some ways, watch history play out in a series of betrayals, accidents, and strategic alliances. (Or, as Jared Diamond called it, Guns, Germs, and Steel.) Then, you can flip the narrative – you play as the Tenochtitlan, and realize the vital need to resist invasion, to outsmart the Spanish, to understand their new technology and defeat it. Now, it’s been years since I’ve played – I can’t recall how historically accurate the campaigns actually are, and I can’t remember if there were other problematic elements in the game play. But, playing multiple sides of the same historical conflict gives you a tremendous amount of perspective – and I daresay, much more perspective than the average historical textbook.
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