Playable Remembrance: Part One – Introduction

Video games over the past 20 or so years have loved a good war story. From history to modernity, science fiction to fantasy, players have been witnessing virtual worlds through the lens of conflict more or less since Spacewar!, the very first video game to ever exist.

And it is not too difficult to see why: conflict is a very easy way to empower the player, and can immediately place them in the shoes of the “good guys” defending their homes or attacking their evil sworn enemies. This explains why the Second World War has been the setting for over 250 games – the player is fighting to protect freedom and democracy in the face of tyranny and oppression.

Except, that oppression is hardly ever directly addressed in video games.

The Holocaust is an incredibly difficult topic to address in any form of expression. The amount of sensitivity that a book, a film, and even a video game must approach the events of 1933-1945 are immense and many struggle to talk about the greatest evil of modern times in a way that respectfully handles the crimes committed against the Jewish people, the Poles, and other minorities throughout Europe.

As the world moves ever onwards from those dark days there is a fear that the Holocaust will not receive the recognition that it deserves, disregarded as an insanity that happened in the distant past; a mere blip in humanity’s progress through the 20th century and only really remembered by cultures and peoples that directly experienced it.

But, as suggested by George Lipsitz in his book Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, the onset of the digital age and electronic mass communication places humanity is in a better place to share a sense of a common heritage with people they have never seen; they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or ethnic connection.

In order to ensure the remembrance of the Holocaust continues, can newer mediums such as video games and interactive media engage with people in a meaningful way? Is it even possible to do so without causing offence? Over the next month I will argue that interactive media can, and indeed has dealt with similar topics before, and that those previous representations can lay the groundwork for future endeavours.

However, to do this we must look to prior means of portrayal and representation. Next week’s article will be dedicated to the efforts of the film industry to immortalise the Holocaust throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, and will also be identifying the core methods of delivery. Whilst print media like Spiegelman’s Maus have been instrumental in changing the public's perception of what comics could be, the main focus of these essays will be new media and the similarities between film, television, and video games.

In the second essay, those methods of delivery will be cross referenced with several existing video games that deal with similar themes of atrocity to demonstrate that this medium is capable of dealing with such a heavily loaded, sensitive topic. To add a sense of balance, we will also look to some examples of video games that deal directly with atrocity that were cancelled due to their subject matter and looking into what they did wrong.

The final installment of this essay series will be concerned with taking the successes and failures of these games, and looking at how they can be applied to future projects. The chapter will largely focus not on whether it is possible to make a feel-good piece of entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20^th century, but rather on the creation of games for educational purposes and interactive experiences that could be used to augment a space, adding a more personal touch to remembrance, whether or not an individual has a direct connection to the Holocaust.

This is a subject that has interested me for a while now: in fact, I wrote my university dissertation on this exact subject. Whilst I have no direct connection to the Holocaust, I believe that it is important that we do not forget the horrors of the past, and that it’s exclusion from nearly all games set in the Second World War is nearing on historical revisionism. However, I want to make a few things clear right now:

• These articles will contain descriptions of events that may disturb
• These articles do not, and are not intended to, call for a representation in which the player contributes to the Holocaust
• My aim is not offend those who have been directly affected, but to discuss how we as a society can continue to remember what happened nearly 80 years ago as our world, our technology, and our methods of consuming information continues to evolve

I do hope you’ll join me in this endeavour.