I’d play the hell out of that game.

Now what about a game that involves making the best bloody marys anywhere, ever? :)

When I was a young lad in school, we were given the standard “slavery is bad” spiel, but it was accompanied by an assertion that “back then, they thought black people were like animals.” It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how wrong that was — that whites fully understood that blacks were people like them, they just genuinely believed them to be lesser people. Yet a lot of those people weren’t bad, per se. Things are more complicated than that. And I think games would be a great way to explore and express that complexity.

I’m intrigued by the hypothetical game you propose — would would you see as a mission for the peaceful groups? I worry that there’d be the typical game problem that we make “bad” behavior much more fun than “good” behavior. That’s why I think going back pre-Civil War would be good, since the “good” behavior was pretty adventurey.

More interesting to me is the fallout from the abolition of slavery, and the way it affected the social and political lives of people of both races in the South, leading up the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s.

I remember being shocked visiting the MLK Jr museum in Atlanta during college – it was the first time I actually realized just how recently all that went down. I’d spent my entire life in the south and never really made the connection that my parents were kids, and my grandparents were adults, when marches, sit-ins, lynchings, and firehoses were on the evening news.

Maybe games could help us today connect with those struggles in a way that text books and black history month can’t.

I imagine an open-world game set in a fictitious small southern town, a faux Selma, Alabama in the mid 60s. Allow players to create a middle-school aged character from different races and classes and build a narrative about the interplay between morals, race, and fear.

Let the player choose which groups to back through standard GTA-style missions – since the player character is just a boy, you’re not asking him to actually join white or black militant or peace movements, but can construct scenarios in which the player aids these groups and sees the effects in carefully constructed scenes.

Basically “Do the Right Thing” meets “Malcolm X” crossed with “Bully” – the videogame.

I’ll concede that TF2 was a bad example. The cartoon style also helps with that symbolic disconnect, and it’s so purely competitive (with so few long-term consequences) that it’s hard to have any kind of emotional response.

I’m honestly curious as to how it would feel to try and turn off the BBD™ in a story about slavery. The holocaust is another potential setting, but there would be far fewer player handles for how to interact with it at a direct level.

On an entirely different note, and a more ancillary one: I’m not sure there’s much of a bad behavior detector, turned off or otherwise, at play while playing TF2. That game (as with most games of its genre) doesn’t really have a consistent enough fiction to make any sort of moral judgments. Surely it has character and characterization, but the game does not ask players to interact with a fiction more detailed than the fiction of space and reasonably-Newtonian-like physics, and I would posit that that’s not enough to build a moral system out of. The characters in the game are themselves instruments of the players, seeming more like a tool we use to compete with each other than characters in a social context.

That’s my long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. However, people regularly do deactivate that bad behavior detector in RPGs and the like all the time, and I agree that that would be a lot harder in a game set in the un-emancipated south.