Recommendations for Gaming and Play in Holocaust Memory and Education
The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do.
Foreword
Digital games are becoming increasingly significant within Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies. The so-called Holocaust gaming taboo (Kansteiner 2017) which has burdened both the mainstream gaming industry and small indie studios seems to show signs of lifting. Scholars have pointed out that major FPS (first-person shooter) franchises such as Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have only teetered on representation of this past, often taking liberty with Nazi themes while placing the Holocaust within the margins or completely eliding the persecution of European Jewry altogether (Hayton 2015; Chapman and Linderoth 2015; Marrison 2020; van dan heede 2023). At the other end of the spectrum, game designers working with small-
budget proposals had been “promptly pressured to abandon the project” (Kansteiner 2017, p.111-112) due to the backlash in public discourse, often prompted by professional Holocaust organisations denouncing the very premise of Holocaust
games.
However, the rising prominence of indie studios such as Paintbucket Games responsible for the historical resistance sim Through the Darkest of Times (2020), as well as the recent Forced Abroad (2022) and The Darkest Files (forthcoming), and Prague-based studio Charles Games who have produced Attentat 1942 (2017); Liberation Svoboda 1945 (2021) and Train to Sachsenhausen (2022) mark the significant shift underway. Indeed, professional Holocaust memory institutions such as the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial and the Arolsen Archives are working in collaboration with game designers and developers to produce digital games on the subject. Furthermore, one designer, who faced public backlash for a game project designed as early as 2013, has since released The Light in the Darkness (Voices of the Forgotten, 2023) and is responsible for creating the first Holocaust Museum in Fortnite (Epic Games, 2023). This would not be the first Holocaust museum in a gaming environment, however. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched ‘Witnessing History: Kristallnacht, the 1938 Pogroms’ in Second Life (c. 2008).
The proliferation of interest in the medium’s potential to offer new modes for engaging with the past raises critical questions regarding opportunities for digital Holocaust memory practice, while also bringing into sharp focus issues regarding player/user experience, contextualisation, accessibility, funding and digital obsolescence.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex. The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future. The themes were:
- AI and machine learning
- Digitising material evidence
- Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
- Social media
- Virtual memoryscapes
- Computer games
Download the full report below: