Relooted and Its Predictable Controversies

In early 2026, the South African independent game company, Nyamakop, released "Relooted," a horizontal, side-scrolling heist game with lots of cutscenes. In this Afrofuturist game, players recover looted artifacts from western museums in order to return them to their rightful owners, along the way learning about the meanings of these objects in a variety of different countries and cultures.

 

 

 

In the screenshot above, players are briefed on Djenne terracottas, objects looted from the Djenne-Djenno archaeological site that date from 250 BCE to 900 CE. Gameplay involves making it past defenses, battling drones, and grabbing the artifacts. 

For a relatively modest game released by a heretofore little-known independent game company, Relooted generated a great deal of commentary and playthrough videos on YouTube. Partly because I wanted to try the new "topic analyzer" options on Communalytic, I downloaded 8000 comments from a number of playthrough videos and let Communalytic's algorithm generate clusters of related topics--relatively easy in YouTube since comments and replies can yield rich, linked data. 

 

 

The topic visualizer has an interesting '3D' interface that was less helpful than  a 2D for me. Out of the 107 clusters, I generated some general themes based on cluster. Here are the first 12:

1. Africans can't handle their own artifacts.

2. No one is playing this game.

3. Colonization was a good thing.

4. The game is racist.

5. 'Woke' and DEI issues.

6. Sluggish speed and bad design.

7. Western nations are the real thieves.

8. Developer was South African.

9. The trouble with the 'modern audience'

10. Can't believe this game even came out.

11. Games versus real life.

12. Poor game play and story.

Pretty predictable, really, with people presumably fine with Tomb Raider or GTA outraged by museums being robbed for the artifacts they stole. It is similarly astounding that people will default to 'white man's burden' racism so quickly--really just days after the game's release! Gamers suddenly sounding like E.B. Tylor guarding the collections at the Pitt Rivers! Also interesting--imputations of racism in that characters in the game are African--with African voice actors used.  

Science Fiction’s Emergent Anthropologies. SF Beyond Anthropological Science Fiction

 My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023).

Abtsract:

Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects, each developing according to its own logic, but there have been cross-hatchings where they have met and influenced each other. The late Nineteenth century, for example, saw both an anthropology and a science fiction in service of colonialism and racism through unilinear evolutionary tropes. SF and anthropology in the twentieth century, on the other hand, explored different configurations of cultural relativism as ways of not only understanding culture, but of exploring its future. The twenty-first century has also been generative of crossings between SF and anthropology, a «speculative anthropology» that promises to re-make both