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.
Except that Steam had no way of knowing that this was a troll. This could have been a legitimate racist ass game and it still would have stood and made money all the same because as of this moment nothing is there to say otherwise
Fighting racism is education and science. Silencing racism was a failure that allowed the cancer to grow undetected.
No, not properly punishing the racism and then rebuilding is what allowed the cancer to spread.
The idea that anti-racism won in 1865 and then was too merciful, has something to it.
In the 1960s, the racist regime lost ideological ground to King and Dylan. The regime pushed back with violence. Progressive leaders (incl the brothers Kennedy) were assassinated one after another. After this successful power grab, the regime covered its tracks. By removing modern (post ww2) history from school curriculums. And by claiming that racism was solved. Then they kept a low profile, invented dog whistles, but they didnt give up. Reagan managed to falsely imprison (put to slave labour in private prisons) a significant portion of the black population, and he did it without explicitly talking about racism.
Now the mask is off. Which is energizing Americans to fight back.