🌺

The self-care sisters

Plantation Simulator was, I am sorry to tell you, exactly what it sounded like when it launched. 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. The game had an actual mature content description appended to it from launch until roughly midday yesterday that read, verbatim: “In this game, you will be whipping black people to keep your farm productive. If you whip your black person too much, they will die.”

...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.” Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped, with a cascade of negative reviews complaining now about a lack of diversity and a deceptive product. Again, most of these reviews have an hour or less playtime, and basically all of them include racist remarks.

....What’s really baffling here, though, isn’t that some troll is making racist games to both attract and then troll racist people. No, what’s throwing me is: where is Valve in any of this?