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I rented Pikmin 2 yesterday and managed to play it for a bit last night. I really enjoyed the first game, and with the new dynamic of being able to separate your Pikmin into two squads with Capt. Olimar or Louie in command, it adds a bit of strategy to the game.

However, as I was just sitting here thinking about the game, I can’t shake the feeling that Pikmin is sort of a slavery simulator. You land on this planet and find these little creatures. You spend the entire game bossing them around, doing your bidding without any reward for them; the Pikmin are in no way compensated for their efforts. You throw them into battle against creatures you won’t/can’t fight, killing many of them in the process of meeting your goals.

The parallels are eerie, aren’t they? Much like in this country when slavery still existed, the “slaves” vastly outnumber their masters (since you can have up to 100 Pikmin under your control at once, a 50:1 ratio is fairly common). And if we’ve learned nothing from the Happy Tree Friends (link at right), it’s that just slapping a cute face on something doesn’t make it any less inappropriate.

I’m only a few days in (game time), and the Pikmin continue to do my bidding. But is it unreasonable to expect them to cast off their shackles and rise up against Olimar and Louie? If they do, the revolution will indeed be televised.

Or maybe they’re just really friendly and I’m reading too much into this.

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Speaking of slavery, I was reading an article about Francis Scott Key (the guy who wrote the Star Spangled Banner) in Smithsonian magazine the other day and found out that while he campaigned against slavery, he was a slaveholder himself, and had argued in court about the rights of a person to hold human property. He was also a member of the American Colonization Society, a group formed to send free blacks back to Africa. I just found that to be interesting.