Post by sebbernery in Slavery Triangular Trade comments

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Hello !
Sorry for the delay of my answer. Note, I've to say I'm very uncomfortable to talk about those subjects in another language than my native one (I'm french), I'll try but I'm always afraid to write things different than what I think. That's also why I took time to answer.

First of all, a big thank you to you, your comment is very interesting and I was really happy to see a detailed description of you thoughts.

For context, I'm a white men living in France. Colonization was a big part of our history, and still is. We still have territories on each continent (we call those "Outre-mer") and we still have a (very) big influence on our old colonies (The franc CFA for example is a money used in some Africa country but controlled by France, our army is very present in Africa and defend all operations to get raw materials (especially uranium for our nuclear plant), diplomatically or military, we back dictator and from memory, sometimes we participate to overthrow democratically elected government). In France, I guess the general opinion is that Colonization was bad (that's obvious it was) and it's over (I consider it's not because what I said just before), but we have some reactionary people (that are very noisy and have plenty of time to expose their crappy point of view on TV, radio and newspapers) that are nostalgic of the colonization. For example, like 15 years ago, a president wanted to teach in elementary school the "positive aspect of colonization", you know, we built roads and schools (Note, in fact, schools was only for colonists, not for colonized people and roads was built only to export goods to the mainland France).

I made this game few years ago during a game jam, the LudumDare. The theme was "You are the monster". I had this idea of playing someone handling slave trade. Not all heroes wear capes, not all monsters are tall beasts that eat children ;-).
What I like in the game (at least what I tried to do) is you see the distance between what you do and what happens. I mean, you only buy stuff, sell stuff, make some investments. Those concepts are classics and can apply to anything, like an industry of french fries. But as you know history, you know you're organizing violence and pain. That's the concept of banality of evil. Here, you only do what society encourage you to do, and, in a capitalist society (I admit, it's always hard to talk about capitalist society before 1700-1800, but concepts were already here : sacralization of private property, society organized in class, ...) you're encouraged to maximize your profit, no matter what you do for that. It represents in the game the reward you're talking of :-).
Note that it's also a criticism about big management structure and hierarchy, because you have people giving orders (in the game, the player) and people following orders (working in boats, in plantations, ...) but nobody has the big picture and can really understand what happens (and people who can are too far away from what happens to give a shit about it).

It's very interesting you wanted to play game about slavery, I was asking myself how you may have discover the game when I saw I had a comment (almost nobody played on Itch.io, I posted the game on Newgrounds and Kongregate, there were more players).

Note, I don't really like educational games and I don't wanted to be moralist, I mean, I wanted to be "raw", not say player what to think, etc... But what I hope is some people will be curious by playing, ask themselves some questions about what happens in the game and search what is "Triangular Trade" for example, which can lead to good thinking.

That's very awesome you made a very complete and interesting comment about what you felt while playing, thank you again !

I released Slavery Triangular Trade few years ago, now I'm freelance and work on developing indie games with a friend, we are Spirkop, here is our Twitter : https://twitter.com/SpirkopGames/ . We released 2 small games on web platforms (Kongregate, Armorgames), but they don't have any strong politics stuff in them like this game. Of course, we hope we'll able to include strong political content in our next games, but now we focus on being able to live from game development. Our next game will be an electric grid management game. We'll probably add little moral choices, but still nothing strong.
Have a nice day !

subtext5 years ago(+1)(-1)

Wow thanks for this thorough response! I think the context of it being a game made for a "You are the monster" game jam is super important for everyone experiencing this game, along with your analysis on colonization. And I think the mentality of "Not all heroes wear capes, not all monsters are tall beasts that eat children" is true and it is a worthy challenge to use as a basis for a game.

I see that the comments sections on kongregate and newgrounds seem oblivious to this intent (with some noticeable eagerness to shift the blame to African people) - but this is truly territory that games have not yet had many real successes in exploring so I appreciate your attempt, and I am wondering about ways this approach could be tweaked to have players experience this "not all monsters are beasts" theme.

I agree that any approach that comes off as "moralizing" or "educational" will be ineffective, but I'd say that is more a matter of making the experience feel whole rather than contrived.. All games have values and lessons that the player learns intuitively through playing them, although sometimes those values are very simple, like "everyone is out to kill you, and you need speed and quick reactions to survive." To tackle a more nuanced topic like this one requires a different approach.

I suspect one method would be a game where you are involved in intercontinental trade, and you start out with more simple forms of cargo, but are placed in a position where there is a demand for human beings. In such a case, the player would get to feel that point where they have to deal with the fact that the skills they have honed for a simple business purpose, is becoming more intertwined with moral considerations.

Or, like Papers Please, you play a role that is way more administrative - like tracking incoming and outgoing products. What I love about that game is in the act of playing it you get to exercise moral agency, but it's always at some kind of cost. Morality in the construct of larger forces at play, of the watchful eye of a fascist and institution.

What is great about that, is it enables the player to maintain their personal morality, while taking the moral considerations seriously.

This makes me want to take some time and document games that successfully approach morality without a contrived, "moralizing" approach... I'm sure it's a fairly short list.

Thanks for the notes on how France views colonization - particularly the comment on how there have been movements to highlight the "positive aspect of colonization" - that hit me deeply, as even if it goes unspoken, I feel like that mentality is very much alive in America. Being able to effectively break through the defensiveness around racial shame, is the only way to heal it. This is something I hope video games can play a role with.. We'll see if that ever pans out!

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