The game, titled Playing History: Slave Trade, is a video game created and released by Copenhagen (Denmark) based company, Serious Games Interactive back in 2013. The premise of the game allegedly was intended by its developers to be used as an educational tool for children between the ages of 11-14 about the treacherousness of the Slave Trade, although the content of the game appears to be less-than-sensitive toward people of the African Diaspora, let alone “educational”.

As you can see in the featured image of this story, there appears to be an animated/ digitized image of African captives being dumped into a slave ship in large quantities and forced to all fit into the ship at once, which is eerily similar to the objective of the 1980’s puzzle-themed video game titled: Tetris. The founder of the Slave Trade game, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, used Twitter to justify his reasoning(s) for creating the demeaning game, only to later delete his account earlier this month.

Here is another screenshot from the game below.

Although the trailer for the video game was edited in order to leave out the slave ship scene, it remains a segment of the game. Games such as these are a vivid reminder that there is a need for us to create our own video games among other things.

B. Clark