Open AccessDesigning Role-Playing Games that Address the Holocaust
Author(s) -
Jessica Hammer,
Moyra Turkington
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of designs for learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2159-449X
DOI - 10.14434/ijdl.v12i1.31265
Subject(s) - the holocaust , blame , set (abstract data type) , game design , face (sociological concept) , game mechanics , computer science , judaism , metagaming , sociology , social psychology , psychology , multimedia , political science , non cooperative game , law , history , simultaneous game , social science , game theory , archaeology , microeconomics , economics , programming language
Role-playing games offer powerful opportunities for players to engage with history, such as allowing players to fictionally situate themselves in a historical period. When it comes to the Holocaust, however, games face serious issues such as the potential trivialization of the Holocaust or players learning to blame the victims. In this design case, we show one way that these issues can be addressed through game design techniques. We bring together the literature on games and Holocaust education to define a set of design challenges for Holocaust-related historical role-playing games; we describe Rosenstrasse, a role-playing game in which players adopt the roles of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans in mixed marriages in Berlin between 1933 and 1943; and we illustrate specific game design decisions within Rosenstrasse that address the challenges identified in this paper. This work aims to help other designers address the same set of challenges in their own game design process.