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.  

Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games

I published this review with "TheGeekAnthropologist" - such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety. Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games

Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. After taking a beating from video games, table-top games have made a startling come-back over the last twenty years, buoyed by a strong growth of Eurogames, imaginative indie titles and by a gaming world looking for variety. In academics, table-top games studies has also experienced sharp growth – albeit with a time lag. Like tabletop games themselves, the academic explosion of interest in tabletop gaming builds (at least partly) on the institutionalization of digital game studies in the academy (Booth 2021; Woods 2012). And, like their digital counterparts, indie games have received considerable academic attention focused on cultural significance, design, writing and narrative, and educational possibilities. There are international associations (The International Board Game Studies Association), journals (Board Games Studies Journal), meetings, colloquia, and college classes. Yet much of this scholarly attention has focused on new games. But what about the previous games that are points of departure – or outright rejection – for many of the indie games today? If many indie titles are critiques of the heteronormativity, capitalism and colonialism at the heart of older board games, then what about those earlier games themselves?