You would think that I wouldn’t have to burn electrons explaining why Serious Games Interactive CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen’s Slave Tetris mini-game is dumb, if not outright disrespectful to humanity, but he apparently doesn’t get it — even after he pulled the mini-game from his larger Playing History 2: Slave Trade game.
The intent of this post is to help Egenfeldt-Nielsen understand.
The game is set in 18th century Europe, where you’re a slave stewart serving as a slave ship captain’s eyes and ears, but discover that a family member has been captured for transport.
Through an online post on the Steam gaming site, Egenfeldt-Nielsen says the purpose of the mini-game is to promote humanity by attacking it, and hopefully shocking a person’s otherwise badly-configured moral system to a normal operating mode. The following quote is all his:
[The game] has to be like this to show what was done to load slave ships. 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.
I want Egenfeldt-Nielsen to consider the following example.
Let’s say Egenfeldt-Nielsen and his real-life spouse, Sidsel, were killed in a hit-and-run car accident by a drunken motorist — leaving behind their young children — and I created first-person driver game that reenacts the deadly incident while testing the player’s ability to judge time and space with each glass of alcohol consumed.
This would mean gamers all over the world can see the Egenfeldt-Nielsens’ deaths repeatedly; including the part where Ms. Egenfeldt-Nielsen’s eyeballs crash through the car’s windshield.
Not only that, future generations of Egenfeldt-Nielsens can watch so they can “understand the horrors” of drunk driving. Perhaps the game’s outcomes can range from the couple’s slimy innards spread across the road — making other cars skid to fiery deaths — to just being nicked by the death vehicle and only suffering a few missing limbs.
I hope Mr. Egenfeldt-Nielsen understands now.
You can watch a walkthrough of the entire Playing History 2: Slave Trade game if you have 40 minutes, or you can fast-forward to the 37:45 mark to watch Slave Tetris. I see nothing good about any part of this game.
H/T – EuroGamer.
song currently stuck in my head: “autumn” – the edgar winter group
mentalunrest.com 