[douche]

They do sort of cover this in game, with the indentured servant class of colonist, as well as the convicts - which fits for the early stages of North American colonization, particularly the British angle that Colonization is mostly playing to. Not to mention the "converted" natives that you could obtain, for instance, by sacking their villages...

I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without making it a cliche. Slave colonists are twice as skilled at picking cotton, but can never produce liberty bells? That would go over real well.

[ekianjo]

> with the indentured servant class of colonist

Actually this has nothing to do with slavery. Indentured servants were a real thing back in the days, with poor people accepting to work for x years to pay for their passage to the New World, and after that they were usually granted their freedom (not 100% always the case, I know). Slaves were, for the most part, never able to gain their Freedom back, and were slaves for generations.

So indentured servants were really under a limited term contract, while slaves were slaves forever.

[douche]

Oh, I'm well aware - my family tree traces back to an indentured servant that bailed on his master before his term was up and ran away from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to live in the wilds of Vermont.

And some of the first Africans were brought to the colonies under terms of indentured servitude, and became free the same as the poor whites after some years.

[ekianjo]

Yup. And there are cases of indentured servants who were abused into slavery because of their illiteracy too.

[eropple]

> They do sort of cover this in game, with the indentured servant class of colonist, as well as the convicts - which fits for the early stages of North American colonization, particularly the British angle that Colonization is mostly playing to.

For the British, sure. But the Spanish practiced human slavery pretty much from the jump. The Taino of Hispaniola, the various Mesoamerican tribes--this was a thing, and eliding it is, in my view, at best unethical. I fully understand why it would be done from a commercial standpoint, and I am not unsympathetic to the problems that involves. But sympathy for a game developer must be placed on the scales against empathy for the people that the game erases from its presentation of history.

> I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without making it a cliche.

Neither am I, as it happens. Religion and Revolution treats both African and native slaves similar to petty criminal units, which is unsatisfying too--but at least it acknowledges that they exist.

Don't get me wrong--Colonization is in my top ten games of all time. I've bought the game at least five times, for myself and other people, and Civ4Col was a day-one purchase for me (which was a mistake, at least until TAC and RoR came out). I wouldn't give them money if I thought this was an insurmountable ethical problem. But it is problematic (turns out that it's possible to really like a work and still feel this way!), and I think it's also important to acknowledge that and figure out how to be better.

And there's a core ethical question here: if something so fundamental to the problem cannot be fairly addressed because of the perception of market realities, is it better to make something that casts the marginalized people of history in not just a bad light but one that attests that they don't exist at all, than to not make it? Reasonable people can argue both sides of that dilemma; I'm honestly not sure where I stand. But it is always and emphatically worth thinking about how one treats people worse off than you.