Thought the showers at Auschwitz were insensitive? How 'bout a round of Slave Tetris?

I really wonder how some of these ideas get approved.

http://www.pcgamer.com/slave-tetris-cut-from-playing-history-2slave-trade-after-backlash/

A couple of years ago, a studio called Serious Games Interactive released an educational game called Playing History 2—Slave Trade. That's dicey subject matter for any medium, let alone one with no real history of effectively handling sensitive topics, but the game went up and nobody said much about it—until this past weekend, when, as Eurogamer explains, somebody noticed that it contained a mini-game that was essentially Tetris, but with slaves.

Slave Tetris is exactly what it sounds like: You must pack tetromino-like slaves into the hold of your ship, in order to take as many as you possibly can back to England. And as you might guess, depicting that horrific slice of history in a mini-game did not go over well with an awful lot of people, which eventually led the studio to remove it.

"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."

sadly, getting slaves to Europe and the new world was a lot like tetris. We would not pack animals into spaces that tightly today..

But you know, steak>slaves, so its ok.

looks like it was pretty historically accurate to me.

In reply to novaderrik:

Very true. I could say more, but I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "white guilt" flounder.

I was trying very hard to manufacture some mock outrage but I don't have enough give-a-berkeleys left after Cecil turned out not to be the docile pet kitty we were led to believe. Turns out he was a ruthless serial killer.

I'm outraged that there are only black slaves in that screenshot. We enslaved other cultures as well.

they can't be Syrian with this.

I remember Cracked had an article featuring this and other disturbing educational games a few months back, surprised it took this long for the developers to catch any flak for it...

novaderrik wrote: looks like it was pretty historically accurate to me.

On one level, if you make a game where the player takes the role of a slave trader, it should be morally offensive; that's the point.

But this has two problems with the implementation. One, the cartoon slaves look borderline like racist caricatures. Two, this comes across as using a bit too much comedy and trivializing the situation.

That's just a bad idea. I can't believe no one on the development team daw this coming.

Appleseed wrote: That's just a bad idea. I can't believe no one on the development team daw this coming.

i'm pretty sure they probably hoped this would happen... the best publicity is free publicity.. and the best way to get free publicity is to piss off some overly sensitive idiots..

Read up on the "Just For Feet" company that put out an ad during the 1999 Super Bowl.

An ad so offensive the company went bankrupt the same year. I just looked and can't even find it on YouTube.

What really got me about the ad ( besides being WILDLY offensive) was that everyone in the process of making it just went along with it when anyone should have said "nope, bad idea".

------ basically four white guys in a jeep tranquilize a Kenyan runner and "tag" him by putting shoes on his feet. When the runner wakes up he howls "NOOOOOO!!"

MadScientistMatt wrote: One, the cartoon slaves look borderline like racist caricatures.

Does it help that the white guy looks identical to the slaves with whiteface and lamb chop sideburns?

I'm just appalled at my terrible education on the slave trade. I guess it wasn't just evil white guys running the show, apparently the whole flying ship thing(who knew right?) was overseen by a dragon and human sized mouse.

In reply to MrJoshua:

His cowboy hat. Don't forget the mouse's cowboy hat.