Playable Remembrance: Part Three - Digital Perpetrators

Back to video games this week, where we will be taking the lessons learned from the examination of Holocaust films and looking at a few games that have directly addressed the issue. In my point of view interactive media is the natural candidate for expanding on what has already been made in the name of remembrance. Having any input in a subject, even if just by moving joysticks with your thumbs, naturally makes the experience more personal to the viewer or player.

But instead of making the most of this advantageous position, game developers and publishers have largely steered well away from traumatic real world events, with some notable exceptions, for fear of causing offence, being accused of commoditising state sponsored violence, and these subsequently affecting their profits.

Thankfully, there are developers and publishers willing to take risks and utilise their mature rated games to discuss the crimes of the past: one of these developers is MachineGames, who are responsible for the continuation of the Wolfenstein series. Their two entries into the franchise, The New Order and The New Colossus, are both set in an alternative 1960s where the Nazis won the Second World War and conquered the world. The games also depict a scenario where the Nazis were able to continue their genocidal policies.

The New Order begins with the series protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz waking up in a Polish asylum where he has spent the past 14 years in a coma. What is it that stirs the player character? The sights and sounds of SS troops liquidating the patients as they lay in their beds. This is a direct reference to the Nazis Action T4, the systematic killing of people deemed to be “defective” which occurred in Germany in the 1940s, and serves to show the player exactly what kind of world has been built by the axis victory.

It is not just events like this that take inspiration from reality, but characters and locations too. The main villain of the series, General Deathshead, has been reimagined to become a caricature of Josef Mengele, the sadistic SS “doctor” of Auschwitz who perform horrific medical experiments on the inmates. He engages in extreme levels of cruelty and violence in front of the player on many occasions, which helps the player justify similar levels of violence against the Nazis that they face throughout the game.

Whilst cartoonish depictions of evil are general tolerated, no matter how grotesque, several critics have questioned MachineGames’ judgement on one of the levels in the game: the fictional concentration camp of Belica. Belica is a real town in Croatia, and is close to the very real Jasenovac extermination camp used by the Nazis and Croatian sympathisers to kill Jews and Serbs during the Second World War. The Times of Israel was particularly vocal in its displeasure of this levels inclusion, asking “…was there a meeting at your organization when somebody said, ‘…we’re making a video game set at a concentration camp, this may rub some people the wrong way’?”, with a strong implication that it was insensitive to the memory of those who died in the camps.

There are even those who argued the opposite; that the level within the Belica Camp did not go far enough in its portrayal of the horrors. When Jens Matties, the creative director of Wolfenstein: the New Order defended the team’s decisions regarding the level in question, stating “it's a Wolfenstein game. We are Inglorious Bastards. We're not Schindler's List”, there were some who felt that this attitude was distasteful, specifically Luc Bernard, an independent games developer of Jewish decent, who went so far as to say that MachineGames had taken “what the Nazis represent … and [MachineGames are] making it seem like a toy, a game”.

But despite this, The New Order is critically acclaimed for its intelligent writing and fully acknowledging the civilian cost of war as well as Nazism more than most games that look to the Second World War for inspiration. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus expands on this, by taking the game to America and showing how a bi-racial society under Nazism would collapse: Klansmen walk around town freely in their uniforms, aiding the SS in their race law related duties; predominately black communities like New Orleans are walled off and segregated from the rest of the country as city sized ghettos, succumbing to liquidation when the Nazis have had enough.

In a surprising turn of events, Activision has allowed Sledgehammer Games to take a massive risk in Call of Duty: WWII by having one of the central characters of the game, the Jewish Private Zussmann, get captured by the SS at the Battle of the Bulge. CoD: WWII’s epilogue has the other characters searching every POW, labour, and concentration camp they find looking for their lost comrade, before finally rescuing him from the end of a death march.

The fact that this is in a Call of Duty game is staggering by itself, but the way it is presented is pretty sanitary compared to Wolfenstein’s efforts. The camp the player searches looking for Zussmann is, for want of a better description, tidy. The barracks the prisoners were held in are burning down, the bodies within are covered with blankets, only the odd hand is hanging over the side of the bunks; the few uncovered corpses that are visible simply look dead due to gunshots rather than starvation.

Whilst a valiant effort for such a major title, I still feel Wolfenstein has addressed the Holocaust better. The presentation is not sanitary: the inmates’ barracks are shown as overcrowded and dirty, with the sound of flies heard everywhere; there are emaciated bodies strewn across the playable area, and even striped uniforms; and a two-legged forklift is used to murder a prisoner in the courtyard. Even through the lens of an alternate history, there is no doubt in the players mind that this camp is exactly the same as the camps in reality. CoD: WWII’s cleaner depiction leaves room for suspicion, with the player feeling that this has only been included for dramatic effect. This is unfortunate as this situation is based on the real-life ordeal that Jewish American soldiers endured in the Berga labour camp, and the air of suspicion is uncomfortably close to how the US Army treated these men after the war, deciding that they were fantasists and liars.

There is one other game that attempted to deal with Holocaust directly, but ultimately failed. The aforementioned Luc Bernard’s own game, Imagination is the Only Escape, was due to be set in 1940s France during the Vel' d'Hiv mass arrests of Jews in Paris, with the player assuming the role of a young boy in search of his mother, whom he lost in the chaos. The pitch received critical praise for the premise alone, with PureXBox reporting that “the medium as a whole needs games like these to materialize if it’s ever going to achieve any sort of respect when compared to other forms of creativity, such as movies, books, or even art in general”. There was also reportedly positive feedback from German and Jewish audiences.

Despite all this praise, we are still yet to see Imagination is the Only Escape aside from a few screenshots and pieces of concept art. So where is it? Unfortunately, Bernard has been unable to find either a publisher or publish the game himself, with several failed crowd funding campaigns over the past few years. I suspect this is because Bernard is attempting to use the game and its cartoon aesthetic in order to engage with younger audiences. This is a noble idea, but utterly terrifying to publishers and marketing teams, and ultimately drove the money away.

Thankfully we have games willing to explore other traumatic events that hold less of a taboo status. With the centenary of the First World War, there have been several games in recent years looking to explore the soldier’s experience in the trenches. Games like Verdun, Tannenberg, and Battlefield 1 seek to educate the player through gameplay experience: M2H and Blackmill Games sought to create a realistic damage model for Verdun and the Tannenberg expansion and focused the gameplay around close quarter’s infantry combat; Battlefield 1 chose an arcade-style experience which empowered the player, but included elements such as poison gas grenades, flamethrowers, and tanks to provide gameplay elements that were oppressive and terrifying. The depth of the sound design also goes a long way to enhance this, with soldiers screaming as they are burnt to death, choking on the gas, or cut down by machine guns.

It’s not just historical settings that receive this treatment, but games with contemporary also take this learning through experience route. Without a historical context, developers have been able to place the player in the shoes of the ones committing war crimes. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous “No Russian” level is the clear example of this, with the player engaging in a mass shooting in a Moscow airport. The generic conventions of the first person shooter imply the player needs to pull the trigger, and the narrative attempts to coerce the player into doing so too, but actually the player can go through, more or less, the whole level without firing a shot.

In this sense then, the game attempts to punish the player for compromising their morality, and indeed does so when the player character is killed by the other terrorists at the end of the level. The player can reflect on what they just engaged in, recalling the visuals of civilians running for cover, screaming and bleeding out as the crawl away from the terrorist mob. Previous iterations of this level were said to have been even more traumatic, but cut due to fears it would be seen as melodramatic.

Due to the threat of backlash, Infinity Ward made the entire level optional for those who wished to skip “disturbing content”, but there are some who felt that this was a cop-out. An example of a game that truly forces the player to commit atrocities is, of course, Spec Ops: the Line. With its direct emphasis on the 2003 Iraq War, there are several segments that are derived from actual events and war crimes committed during the invasion.

The most infamous of the atrocities the game forces players to commit is the “White Phosphorous” sequence. Inspired by American forces using of white phosphorus shells, a type of explosive shell containing a chemical that ignites on contact with oxygen and is banned from being used against combatants by the Geneva Convention, as an offensive weapon against insurgents in Fallujah and in areas where civilians were still present.

In Spec Ops, this reformed into a section where the player and their team must use White Phosphorous against rogue US troops in order to advance. Directed by a spotting drone, the player’s last Phosphorous shell is aimed at a large tent. After walking through the area they’ve just shelled, the player learns that the tent was full of civilian refugees. Despite being forced into this situation, the game chastises the player through its narrative: “They have turned us into fucking killers!” shouts one of your team; a loading screen then tells the player “The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn’t real, so why should you care?”

But this is just a look at learning through gameplay experience. Where I think traumatic events need to be discussed is not behind the barrels of virtual guns, but through the use of educational games and intrinsic systems of learning. This is what we’ll be looking at next week, from games to museums to multi-media art projects. See you then!