There were slippery slopes, faulty analogies, straw men galore and the gleeful identifying of said fallacies that is endemic to any message board flame war.
#THE COLONISTS GAME PIECES FREE#
There were frequent invocations of censorship and the First Amendment, and rejoinders that the First Amendment applies only to government actors and this was simply the free market in action. There were rhetorical appeals and quotes - many cited thinkers like George Bernard Shaw, Robert Heinlein and Heinrich Heine, accurately or not. Some arguments were on topic and persuasive.
“People deciding for you what historical topics you can and cannot play,” another countered. “The Scramble for Africa, as a historic episode, was marked by exploitation, chattel slavery, and brutalization of a racial group that their oppressors often considered lesser humans.” “The Holocaust could be a topic for a resource management game, but most people would rightly see that as reprehensible,” one BoardGameGeek user wrote. Soon after the game’s announcement in February, debate played out across thousands of posts on BoardGameGeek, the hub of board gaming on the internet. Random events include “penalties for atrocities” and rewards for ending slavery. The players must put down rebellions, and can slow their opponents by inciting native revolts. In his game, the savagery that was part and parcel of that exploration seems to be dealt with in minor and trivializing ways. Joe Chacon, the designer of Scramble for Africa, was accused of not treating this situation with appropriate seriousness. The Belgian colonizers were unusually barbaric, but the rule of the other European countries that carved up Africa differed only in scale, not in kind, across a wide swath of the continent. (“The list of specific massacres on record goes on and on,” Adam Hochschild writes in “King Leopold’s Ghost.” “The territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally.”)
It is largely recognized as one of history’s most bloodthirsty occupations. Under Belgium’s King Leopold II, between 18 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, historians estimate that anywhere between a few million and 10 million people died because of starvation, disease, murder and a falling birthrate.
The real life scramble for Africa was the pillaging of much of the African continent for its resources and its people. Watching “Schindler’s List” or reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” are different experiences than plotting like a Nazi in a board game. While all great art is deeply engaging, the audience for those media are mostly bystanders. In it, the player would “take the role of one of six European powers with an eye toward exploring the unknown interior of Africa, discovering land and natural resources,” as the game’s description put it.Īnd with that, Scramble for Africa became board gaming’s entree into the very particular, sometimes confusing and very of-the-moment culture wars of 2019.Īs a creative medium, board games are fundamentally different than film, theater or literature. Scramble for Africa was a new strategy game - what is called a “eurogame,” to contrast the genre with war games and more confrontational luck-based American board games.
Most games in this genre are accompanied by extensive reading lists and explanations players often treat them as a way to learn that is more engaging than just reading a book. They are generally created and played by people deeply interested in history. Some of these games confront the victims of the Holocaust and enslaved people head on most don’t, though of course they’re right there if players choose to look.īut even poorly designed games with war themes often get the benefit of the doubt. There are American Civil War games in which players take the role of the Confederacy. In the continuing explosion of tabletop board gaming, there are numerous World War II games in which players get to be Nazis.
0 kommentar(er)
