‘This overshadowed the educational goal of the game. On Monday, following wider reactions from users on Steam and social media, the creator removed that mode from both the trailer and the game itself, explaining on Twitter and Steam that “it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people”.
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. Slapping a few cutesy cartoon rodents wearing silly hats on top of a game that involves simulating the actual slave trade as an actual child slave helping an actual slave trader, in between rollicking rounds of Slave Tetris, is not, nor will it ever be an acceptable way of “teaching” anyone anything, anywhere on this planet or beyond.
Other titles in the Serious Games’ “Playing History” series include “Playing History: Vikings” and “Playing History: The Plague”.
An educational game created to teach school children about slavery is drawing criticism for a gameplay segment critics are calling “slave Tetris” – and its creator has responded by blaming the United States for being too sensitive.
‘The goal was to enlighten and educate people – not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15 secs part of the game. One post calls the developers “a$3 disgusting racist POS”, while another says he’s going to demand a refund because the content was cut without notification.
The game was designed by Danish firm Serious Games Interactive, whose CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen wrote his PhD thesis on the ‘educational use of computer games’. “People treated human beings as pieces that just had to fitting into the cargo”. If this is the case, then we have accomplished what we set out to do.
Understanding the horrors of the slave trade through a “fun and humoristic” first-person point-and-click adventure where your 8-to-14-year-olds can play as a child slave assisting the captain of a slave ship while attempting to free his sister and himself from bondage? On the game’s website it notes that Playing History won a BETT Award (not to be confused with a BET Award) for “Best Learning Game” in Europe.
“We just tried to make a game to teach about what we thought was an important topic”, Egenfelfdt-Nielsens said. We did spend a lot time doing it, We did consult with experts.
Frank Noschese, a physics teacher at John Jay High School, who tweeted about the game, said that the biggest problem is that the game exists at all. Twitter response is the social media equivalent to throwing napalm on a grease fire, but I suppose we all have to learn that at our own speed.