Some friends and I were recently discussing a new board game about the Roman Empire. One aspect of this game includes players using "servant" pawns that represent slaves to get work done. The game provides the following blurb:
Hadrian’s Wall is a historical game based in an era where slavery was present. The purple ‘servant’ worker in the game represents this aspect. During this time period, it was estimated that 30% of the Roman Empire were slaves. Obviously, we in no way condone these practices, but not including this group within the game would have been whitewashing their role from history
My initial reaction was that this was a clumsy attempt to be virtuous - that simply saying "it'd be disrespectful to pretend that slavery wasn't how shit got done in Roman times" doesn't absolve you when making a game where utilizing slaves helps you accomplish your goals.
I also think it's important to not get bogged down in the minutia of this specific game, because a lot of board games have historical themes. Some use slaves but try to whitewash it by calling them something like "colonists." Some reskin that element and remove it. Some games simply just change their entire theme to avoid the topic. Rarely are these games about slavery, but they acknowledge and represent slavery.
The more we discussed it, I started to feel like "well, what would be the most sensitive way to discuss this? How can we address the reality of slavery productively?" The answer could very simply be "don't make it a game."
I'm curious to know the thoughts of actual historians, who have likely turned similar questions over in their heads.
This is a complicated question with a lot of different answers! The shortest version is "it depends on the genre and goals of the game" but that's not super helpful.
In a story-driven game, it's incredibly uncomfortable to have the protagonist be a slaver, even if the culture they are a part of makes it plausible to likely that they would have owned enslaved people. Slavery becomes isolated to the bad guys, justifying the (usually) violence that will be inflicted on them. This is simultaneously reasonable and also weird, as the experiences of enslaved people are turned from an innately degrading suffering into, at best, a setpiece for the player to be the hero and do cool stuff. We see this narrative frequently in film and television too, so it's not like games are unique in the centering of the protagonist (often from a hegemonic culture) in narratives about enslavement.
Instead, in narrative-heavy media, I would propose that there is opportunity to discuss various historical slaveries in such a way that highlights the voices and experiences of the enslaved as a way to approach history in games in a bottom-up way.
In a strategy game or a board game, there's a lot less room for storytelling that highlights the moment-to-moment existence of enslaved peoples. However, there's a lot more ability to show the larger systems that were built on slavery and the flaws in those systems. Rob Houghton and, to a lesser extent, Jeremiah McCall are scholars who are very big on the idea of mechanics as a way to model historical systems, and I think their research is helpful here. Dr. Houghton primarily works with the Investiture Crisis, and models the motivations of individual actors there in board game objectives that his students can play.
Porting the idea of asymmetric motivations over to a game that acknowledges slavery, two thoughts emerge:
Slavery should never be the only viable strategy. It might be the short-term easiest, but players should not be forced to use slaves. If you want it to be a "game about history", this asks players to think about why Roman elites, say, turned to slavery as the primary economic bedrock, and what alternatives were actually feasible.
the representations of enslaved people must be given agency in the game space. Slaves were people, and engaged in the full complexity of human experience as resistance to their enslavement. So, represent that! A simple example might be that there is a random chance of a slave revolt starting, and the player suddenly has to devote resources to deal with that in some way or another.
The unifying thread here is that the owning of human beings is very difficult to make into background dressing - this is why lots of games make the fair choice of simply not portraying slavery. If slavery is included, doing it ethically means centering the historical voices of enslaved people, making sure they are not obedient, mindless, disposable pawns, and making it clear that it was never "the only way to do things".