On May 12, a developer going by FzzyBzzy released the wildly racist slavery simulation game Plantation Simulator onto Steam.
It’s a top-down sim game in which you play as a Southern plantation owner forcing a number of Black slaves to grow crops under threat of being beaten. That’s it. That was the game.
For the first week or so this game was live, it mostly flew under the radar. No reviews, no players really, according to SteamDB. But around May 20-21, it started picking up.
Reviews began to trickle in, the vast majority of them positive, containing racist commentary, and largely written by people who had played for less than half an hour. For context, the game’s concurrent player peak was 109 individuals last night.
Posted later in the day yesterday, the 1.2 update changed the Black slave characters in the game to white people. A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.”
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment twice now about Plantation Simulator and haven’t heard back, and the game remains on the Steam store at the time this piece was published.
I don’t think I know of the “treat them like shit” bit.
Part of what happens in story mode is that you, as the trainer, ask the racer if she has particular racing goals (eg, win a certain cup) and the both of you work towards that.
Annoyingly, some of them even build unrealistically stupid expectations, like competing in an event they’re not good at…
That said, I’ll admit there have been times I had unreasonable gut reactions to little things in games. I didn’t like in Nier Automata how you had to kill animals for weapon upgrades, given that Earth is a desert planet mostly devoid of organic life as it is.
That was kinda the point of Nier Automata. You weren’t supposed to like the things you did. That’s a Hallmark of that entire series.