Scribblenauts: No Dildos, But Racial Terms?

ZOMG, controversy surrounding Scribblenauts? I lamented the lack of dildos in the game earlier in the day, but apparently there’s buzz about the word “sambo”:

Via Kotaku:

What happens when you write “sambo”? You get a watermelon.

I’m a naive sheltered white kid who was luckily raised by two very open-minded parents. And as such, I had never heard the term before.

According to Kotaku:

The word “sambo” has been used to demean and degrade Africans and African-Americans alike. “Sambo” was a common slave name in the U.S., and the late 19th century children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo is cited as furthering the word as a slur. While the book was set in southern Indian, it did play on the blackface iconography and African-American intellectuals have been critical of the pickaninny motifs

and:

There was even a New Jersey brand of watermelon called “Sambo brand”

Weird. The Scribblenauts’ creative director Jeremiah Slaczka retorted:

Via Kotaku:

Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fancesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a “figleaf gourd,” or “sambo.” A Google image search of the term “figleaf gourd” produces an image that looks like a watermelon. Slaczka said that it is common to use the same image for multiple words in Scribblenauts and that that is the reason a word meant to depict a figleaf gourd appears to be a watermelon.

Oh boy. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this one for a few days. I don’t really understand how this could have gotten past the Scribblenauts team. Knowing people given the function of this game, the first thing a bunch of intrepid nerds were going to do was…try every single imaginable slur, curse word, and questionable noun. While I had no idea what sambo meant or the negative connotations it carried, it is hard to fathom there wasn’t a group of people or person in charge of preventing something like this from happening.

Someone’s Christmas bonus is going to get significantly lighter!