How not to learn about the slave trade

PAXsims researcher Christian Palmer spotted this particular gem: Playing History 2: Slave Trade, an apparently serious game by the Danish company Serious Games Interactive. In it you get to play the exciting role of a black cabin boy on a European slave ship. Fun, fun, fun!

The video trailer is truly cringeworthy.

Among the amusing game puzzles is a sort of “slave Tetris” where you try to pack slaves into the cargo hold.

You’ll find a video play-through on YouTube here (slave Tetris at around the 29:00 mark).

I would like to think this is all some cunning piece of performance art akin to Train, meant to satirize both trivializing atrocity and the idiotic fringe of the educational game market—but apparently not. Indeed, it is for sale at the moment in the Steam store:

Travel back in time and witness the horrors of slave trade firsthand. You will be working as young slave steward on a ship crossing the Atlantic. You are to serve the captain and be his eyes and ears. What do you do, when you realize that your own sister has been captured by the slave traders?

As an article in Takepart notes, the game has provoked quite a bit of understandable outrage. The developers have removed the “slave Tetris” part of the game, but otherwise continue to market it. I look forward to their cutesy game of the Holocaust, or some similar mass atrocity.