Board Games Have a Colonialism Problem
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I understand English-speaking countries have most experience with colonialism, but there were plenty of other kinds of imperialism and subjugation (and slavery and mass murder). In the end it doesn't matter if the guy enslaving you and killing your family is the same race and lives 500 km from you or a different race and lives 3000 km from you. That was history for thousands of years. Almost all countries started that way.
Slavery is called so because Romans took Slavic people as slaves. Are we supposed not to make games about Roman Empire? And to change the name of a whole linguistic group?
I don't think changing the setting from historic to sci-fi or fantasy suddenly makes exploiting goblins or genociding elves OK. And if Porto Rico is bad then so is Risk and chess (and 99% of all board games that have aggressive war as a core mechanic).
I don't think games have colonialism problem as much as "war is the easiest mechanic to make fun" problem. And I don't think morality has anything to do with this. It's exactly as moral to make a game about killing human race with a deadly virus as a game about colonialism. But I'd prefer if we had more board games where conflict isn't military - simply because it's been done too many times and it's boring.
Exactly focusing exclusively on colonialism is a way to gerrymander history through word games. For example most systems of the Atlantic slave trade were already in place by Ottoman empire and adjacent African warlords. But these were "conquests" not colonies.
If there was an as-successful board game based on conquering Asia and Europe as Genghis Khan, nobody would bat an eye. And yet Genghis Khan was responsible for actions that were arguably worse multiple times over than anything that occurred in Puerto Rico during the colonial period.
> “I think there’s a growing understanding that using historic colonialism in a sanitized fashion—omitting all of its wrongs—has its own problems,” Reuss said. “Even though you’re not depicting torture, rape, massacre, enslavement, and genocide in your game, you’re promoting a false narrative about colonialism, which covers up all of those terrible things.”
All these things occur and have occurred during war and we have hundreds (thousands?) of games about warfare that do not include these topics. Is every single one these games promoting a false narrative as well? I suppose he might agree. Regardless, I think it's infeasible to expect every game that uses colonialism or war as a device to have some sort of comprehensive moral indictment of the things it portrays.
We as a species aveve had colonialism since neolithic times. It's how humanity rolls and always has rolled. ALL peoples are are not in Africa only got to where they are now by primarily killing off one to dozens of prior people, each of whom killed off the priors. And in Africa, there has been far more colonial expansion than even in the rest of the world. Can you say Bantu? Swahili is a "colonial" Bantu language. As is Zulu. Most of the natives of East and South Africa from before their colonization were "eliminated", "cleansed", or "assimulated" (see Xhosas) etc. Bantus originated in West Africa and that's where we'd still find them if it weren't for their colonialism.
I suspect there is a dysphoria and worry that places like America could someday (maybe even sooner than anyone would like) be colonized by other people and everyone currently considering it home would be "whacked" if they aren't the "right kind of people". The Chinese PLA has published books about "North America being proper Han Lebensraum needing to be cleared". Even our "permanence" isn't actually certain or eternal.
The thinking seems to be: "if we eliminate the word, it can't happen!" Yeah, no. That's not how it works.
Spirit Island turns the table on colonialism. While the island gets invaded by the Europeans, the player gets takes the role of supernatural spirits that must defend the island against the colonializers.