Okiday I’ve not read every word on this thread, but Brattyjedi seems to have mostly said what I would’ve done.
Colonialism is racism. There’s no getting around that. Cry Havoc is racist, even though it uses “Alien Trogs”, “IP Friendly Protoss”, and “Robots” (I’ve overused the quotation marks there).
PR is racist because it actively encourages you to enact a fictional form of slavery. If you decide to not use slaves, you’re deciding not to play the game. That is about as racist as you can get in a board game. (Unless you decide to put that white people are actively better than every other race in the back of your Pax Pamir manual or something…)
Again, I think Bj said this before; but if you are going to include themes about oppression, not addressing three effects of those is an act of oppression. If you are going to pretend the effects of that oppression took place (three industrial revolution, or ‘finding the new world’ for example) without addressing it, that is whitewashing, which is an act of oppression.
I haven’t played Race, only Roll, but the fact that you can choose to conquer people or win via economy doesn’t sound like it fixes the problem. The former had obvious consequences that have been discussed, but ‘economic victory’ sounds -to me- comparable to more modern firms of colonialism. Have such a strong domestic economy that other [countries/worlds/whatever] are unable to compete and have to essentially bend to your superior will. It’s force of a different kind.
I think a lot of people might take FCM at face value too. Arguably our form of capitalism is shaped by the slave trade and in fact promotes modern slavery. See Gary Haugen’s The Locust Effect about violence’s place in wealth iniquities and how that leads to slavery currently in the world.
This is why I prefer the cubes being brown in PR. Makes it a lot harder to pretend that you’re not playing the game as someone gaining massive wealth in the back of slavery which is what you are doing in the historical setting. The question is though how much does the game glorify that?
Beforehand, I completely agree that using the term Colonists (or Colonialists) was found hilarious by all of us as it was trying to hide the fact that this “workers” did not have a choice in the matter.
But I can abstract myself from that fact. In the same way that I can play a war game and not think of the barbaric act that war is in itself. Of the lost young soldiers, their families, war crimes, and so on… But like on chess, you can change that into a gentle game with pieces that don’t feel or suffer.
So inherently, both things (war and slavery) are wrong. But these are games. If we start this way, we can take out of the way more than half the war games and probably a third of the rest of board games out there, for representing violence, injustice, expansionism or tyranny. Not to talk about things like video games…
But thanks for the educational debate. I like how themes like these make me question what I do, and grow.
I play historical wargames, and that means sometimes I play the bad guys. I think that the only way to do that sensibly is with an awareness of why they were the bad guys.
(Alas, I’ve met plenty of wargamers who are Nazi fanboys - “yeah sure they did bad things, but look at the cool toys!”)
FCM is smart because it twists things in a way that is interesting and potentially thought-provoking. Yes, you exploit your staff, but the real victims are the consumers fuelling your empire, and they buy exactly what you tell them to buy in a neat parody of advertising where you also have to supply exactly what they demand.
Any wargame explicitly tries to model a conflict to some extent, and explicitly puts you in the role of one of the factions in the conflict, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You know when a decision you make results in large numbers of people dying, because that’s the game. You can play the aggressors and might gain some understanding of the tactical layer of the conflict - it’s all well defined in scope and intent.
PR is a traditional Euro engine builder in a historical setting that cannot not involve slavery, but fails to address this in any way. You aren’t asked to consider your role as a slave owner. If you know nothing of the setting you wouldn’t even be aware you are playing a slave owner. There’s no apparent reason for the use of the setting, and therefore it smacks of systemic racism.
This is the most compelling argument, for me. The game is being accused of being an inadequate simulation. Simulate better, even the unpleasant bits, and you’re OK. Maybe.
What was that game that changed slaves to fakirs? Obviously, better “simulation” is not an option for such a game, and I’m not sure I like the solution, but neither was there any particular need to have slaves (or fakirs!) as one of the currencies.
Five Tribes. It’s another one like Puerto Rico where the theme barely matters. Unless the movement of the pieces is meant to simulate some kind of crucial aspect of the culture they’re purportedly representing that I’m unaware of?
I honestly don’t know a way of representing colonialisation without racism. I’ve seen people say Colonists avoids the pitfalls since there’s no one else around at all, but to me ignoring a difficult subject by pretending no one lives there and the land is free & up for grabs is exactly the mindset of colonists and how they treated indigenous populations. If you are in a far off place with fertile ground, there’s more than likely going to be others already there. At least Archipelago is aware of what it is! Games inevitably have to deal with the racist elements in some way, or whitewash over it. Neither way is perfect.
Even games that mean well can be skewed. Spirit Island phrases it’s statement against colonialism by indulging in a fantasy land where people’s god’s can physically save them. I understand the sentiment, but it feels quite blunt and almost derogatory in a way.
I don’t think representing colonialism in a game is an inherently bad thing, but awareness of how it is being represented is important.
So on the one hand you argue that pointing out the racism and other forms of bigotry in a game somehow means we should ban it or something? “If we start this way, we can take out of the way more than half the war games and probably a third of the rest of board games out there, for representing violence, injustice, expansionism or tyranny.”
I’m not sure whether or not we should advocate for a ban on games, as they are inherently here to represent things. If they weren’t; why have theme at all?
But on the other hand, should these games be taken out of print? Absolutely. If you can’t make money without exploiting the suffering of others then you’re a bigot. That’s the absolute baseline for not being a bigot; don’t profit from other people’s suffering.
If your game can accurately portray horrific things from the past without ignorance of the negative effects of it, or -forbid- without glorifying it, then you’ve got yourself a good game. Address the issues head on. Be straightforward about it. If you don’t want to; then don’t make your game about exploitation or oppression.
I’m not going to say I have the last word on what is and isn’t racist, but as somebody who has been (and continues to be) a victim of oppression, a type of which is currently in the gaming news because of a certain triple A title, I can at the very least relay just how damaging a game can be when its creators decide to go down that route.
To refer back to this specific example of Here I Stand; the Smallpox card seen here can only be played by people who actively went out and committed a genocide by infecting a whole populous with Smallpox. It doesn’t pretend that anybody could’ve done this. It takes a point in history and represents it within its game. This one card is significantly better at addressing colonialism and white people committing horrific acts against other races than anything Puerto Rico attempts to do.
I think I never mentioned the word ban. I am just saying, conflict and injustice runs deep in history, and whenever you set a game in historical times, it is not easy to sidestep those minefields. Would I rather have the workers meeples being called Slaves in Puerto Rico? Probably not. Probably workers or workforce is the best neutral term. We all know how the plantations functioned in the 1600 to 1800 hundreds. In the same way that we know how expansionism is unfair.
In my head, I can be building a great empire playing a expansionist territorial war game where I am really nice to my guys, but sadly that is not what happened. By playing a war game, I am not being pro-violence, colonialism etc… And I don’t think the creators of games like Raiders of the North Sea are for the rape and pillage that went on during the Viking Era. I am playing a game that lets me play in historical settings. Over a board, with friends, with meeples, coins and cardboard. And when my soldiers won a battle in cold Kamchatka on a game of Risk, they were moved for a sunny holiday to Brazil. And that’s fun.
You realise that the argument here isn’t “If you play these games, you are racist”, right? You don’t need to be defensive about your love of conflict game or whatever. You can enjoy problematic art. Nobody is saying you can’t.
For myself, about as un-oppressed as you get, what I want from games is awareness. If the game has me doing horrible things, I should be aware that they are horrible, that “send workers to do X” has a real human cost behind it. I don’t want a game just to tell me “you are a pirate, have fun on the high seas”.
