Popular culture is deeply disconcerted by the history of slavery, and a game already facing criticism for being offensive would likely raise far more criticism for letting players “play at” the slave trade. As Trevor said previously, we are not begrudging the developers for this omission. Sid Meier’s Colonization has very little slavery in itĬivilization IV: Colonization (Civ IV: Col) does not include the triangular trade, one of the most important and offensive series of events in the history of the Atlantic. After all, a game about colonization should be offensive, and its assets and code are going to reflect that. What we did not expect was for game developers to interpret our analysis of games and code as a form of attack and perhaps we should have explicitly stated that we do not blame game developers for the offensive nature of the game. We explored key issues of representation and player agency in previous posts about how Natives are defined in the game’s code and represented in the game’s art and mechanics. Trevor’s initial post discussed the fervor with which bloggers reacted to the game’s release, and he argued that games about colonization should be offensive if they are meant to represent a colonialist ideology. When Trevor and I started writing a series based on the 2008 version of Sid Meier’s Colonization, we knew that the issues we wanted to discuss were already controversial.
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