Greg Toppo

A social media firestorm ignited earlier this month when the Danish company Serious Games Interactive discounted its educational 2013 video game Playing History 2: Slave Trade on Steam, the online game store. A preview showed a mini-game in which players fit as many slaves as possible inside the hold of a ship — a sort of Tetris with human bodies. The idea that a modern-day child could recreate this historic atrocity struck a nerve.

Novelist Lisa Hendrix, among others, tweeted to Serious Games founder Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen: “Turning slavery into a ‘game’ is what's appalling … Under no circumstances should a child equate slavery with fun.”

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, a game designer and researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, offered a defense: “A game is not necessarily just a medium for fun. It can be used to educate — quite effectively actually.”

Big mistake. Things went downhill fast.

“Your ‘game’ is disgusting and your argument is weak,” one critic wrote. Another threatened his wife in sexually explicit terms.

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Egenfeldt-Nielsen suspended his Twitter account, but the company urged critics: “Please take time to look at the game before forming your opinion.”

So I did. I spent $4.99 on Steam and played Slave Trade.

I’ve written a book about educational video games. I’m a former teacher. And though I’m not the intended audience, I wouldn’t play Slave Trade again or recommend it to teachers.

But Slave Trade isn’t the racist mess its critics assert. Even with the Slave Tetris mini-game removed — Serious Games nixed it on Aug. 31 — the sight of shackled slaves will surely stay with children for years.

I challenged my fellow tweeters to play the game, or at least raise their hands if they had. Radio silence.

If even a few critics had played Slave Trade, the discussion might have unfolded differently. Is it any good? Does it fit into a larger effort that includes books, films and historical documents? That’s a worthy discussion.

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But many critics simply argued that play in this context is offensive, that it’s not up to the task of helping kids digest fraught topics. A few historical moments, they seemed to say, are so horrible and dehumanizing that a game can’t help young people understand them.

That’s just wrong. Play can be serious business.

Play is not just an acceptable way to understand something like slavery — it may be the best way. What parent wouldn’t urge their child to inhabit the role of a slave or slave master in a well-conceived school play?

One line of argument held that Slave Tetris is racist simply because it exists, that no other racial, ethnic or religious group would put up with a game that objectified their suffering. Jews, for instance, wouldn’t tolerate a Holocaust game.

I maintain that they should — and they have.

A few years ago, veteran game designer Brenda Romero debuted an experimental board game called Train. Set atop a pane of broken glass, it tasks players with reading instructions from typewritten cards and loading little yellow pegs onto trains. Players eventually learn that the trains are bound for Auschwitz.

Romero said she wanted players to feel “complicity” as they played. “People blindly follow rules,” she said. “Will they blindly follow rules that come out of a Nazi typewriter?”

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This is not to say that there haven’t been crude, rude or offensive games, or that any history game is automatically a good one. But thoughtful game designers don’t shy away from fraught topics. They’ve created games about war, terrorism, immigration, child abuse and cancer, among others.

In PeaceMaker, by Asi Burak and Eric Brown, players make decisions based on actual events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Burak, a former captain in the Israel Defense Forces, now heads the Games for Change festival in New York. In 2013, he helped create a Facebook game out of the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The 2009 game Darfur is Dying provides “a window into the experience” of the 2.5 million refugees in Sudan’s Darfur region. Players must keep a refugee camp functioning in the face of attacks by Janjaweed militias.

New Jersey social studies teacher Matthew Farber told me his sixth-graders play Darfur is Dying. Often, he said, “fun” in a game like this is not what you think. It’s “about being optimally challenged to achieve a goal that is just within reach.”

I asked Farber, author of the recent book Gamify Your Classroom, about the Slave Tetris affair. “I think there is a misconception about how games are used in the system of a classroom,” he said. “When contextualized by a teacher, games can be really powerful.”

If we reject games simply because they’re games, we run the risk not only of losing a valuable learning tool. We risk bypassing many kids’ best chance at grasping difficult topics.

Or as game designer Raph Koster said: “If we continue to regard games as trivial entertainments, then we will regard games that transgress social norms as obscene.”

Greg Toppo is USA TODAY’s national education writer and the author of the bookThe Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter.

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