Slavery & Trade

[Doomdark]

Aaah, flame war or not, I can't keep silent in the face of censorship and social engineering.

uh guy, if this game had slaves i wouldnt buy it..

So you support censorship and obstruction of truth - the very hallmarks of fascism and all authoritarian regimes?

slaves to lollipops, infantry to clowns, cavalry to merry-go-round-horsy-riders and artilery to exploding presents (a la the Smurfs).

ROFL! Exactly. We must always remember to shelter the people from the often disturbing and unfriendly reality. Otherwise, they might get ideas and turn into serial killers, warlords or slave traders.

So, let's all join hands, close our eyes and imagine we are living in a great big castle made out of candy, where everyone is nice and friendly.

Let's be honest the enitre game is morally reprehnsible.

I disagree. The game is just a model of historical reality and as such is beyond morality. The player makes all the moral choices. E.g. declarations of war, slave trade and the destruction of natives.

You're ruling an authoritarian state that uses war as a prima ratio of foreign policy

Well, some nations were more authoritarian than others, but once again it is up to the player to choose whether to play like a warmonger or a peaceful trader.

and if you are playing as Prussia, Poland, Austria or Russia you are holding millions of souls in slavery for all intensive purposes under serfdom.

Agreed, or you could play Spain, Portugal, France or England and kill off a couple of million natives... Then again, you could play as Sweden and fight for all that is just and pure.

I endorse none of the above policies but I look forward to the game.

Same here. And I do hope they keep the slaves in - at least in Scandinavia - where people can handle the truth. (I wonder how the Americans would have reacted to the Swedish roleplaying game Kult...)

/Doomie

 

[Doomdark]

Damesh,

Whether tatical or strategic, those games represented countries that supported slave labor and genocide.

Indeed, but as you say most such games are pure wargames. The Nazi concentration camps and race policies and the Soviet gulags were not actually related to the war effort. Like someone else mentioned their effects were in fact mostly detrimental. So I think it is only appropriate to represent this in a very abstract fashion (in a wargame).

On the other hand, you could do a more ambitious game including the battle of the great ideologies and the ethnical purgings of our century. In such a game you would have to deal with death camps, population relocation and slave labour in a more detailed fashion.

Personally I wouldn't have a problem with that, but I would probably not get much joy out of playing either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

My conclusion is that everything should be modelled as accurately as possible within the game parameters. EU's game parameters include trading; a global game that deals with trade in the period of 1492-1792 should include slaves as well as many other significant goods.

/Doomie

 

[Doomdark]

ROFL, or ROTFL means 'Rolling on the Floor Laughing'.

Here's a useful list of Internet acronyms:

http://www.solscape.com/chat/acronyms.html

/Doomie