Scary stuff.  There are (at least) two categories in which people could be offended and hurt by this.

First:  They can be offended by the mere notion of making a game about this.  I think that's got to be about their expectations of what such a game would be like.  If I were a holocaust survivor and I thought people were going to be "killing the Jews and taking their stuff" while cracking Monty Python jokes ... yeah... that'd piss me off.

Second:  They can be offended by the actual game when it is produced.  They can play through it and feel that it gives a message that is hurtful or dismissive or disrespectful or ... whatever.


I think (and, for the sake of people not getting their feelings hurt, I hope) that Matthijs may be shielded from much of the offense he might give if he (say) made this game in Amercia, simply because the expectations of what topics can be respectfully taken on by an RPG are different in his neck of the woods.

Whether people will actually find the end product respectful ... well, I expect that's up to him.  It's quite a challenge.  But then, I didn't think that one could make a game that would treat Vietnam respectfully, but the Vietnam vets (and there have been more than a few) who've played carry apparently speak quite highly of it.  So ... y'know ... I feel like I can be hopeful.

Anyway ... scary project, Matthijs!  Brave of you to take it on.  Now don't screw it up.

Without clear mission statement, it´s without value to talk about it.
Maybe we can get more info and then come back to the issue.

Right now, we have: nothing.

QuoteScary stuff.  There are (at least) two categories in which people could be offended and hurt by this.

That´s a pretty big issue. All of the serious uses of the MoR I know of, are very, very (very) clearly only to be used in supervision of a trained (in the subject at hand) person.
In fact, there´s laws about that stuff regarding it´s use in government agencies and education.
Also, the aims and goals of the particular run of the MoR simulation must be very clear.

The MoR is powerful, as the message can get out of hand quickly.

In short:
"Do not try this at home."

Quote from: TonyLBSecond:  They can be offended by the actual game when it is produced.  They can play through it and feel that it gives a message that is hurtful or dismissive or disrespectful or ... whatever.

I'm honestly grappling with how a game about the Holocaust could be both fun, and not dismissive and disrespectful to the victims. By this I mean actual fun, not "we had an impromptu, untrained, and disturbing therapy session with dice and put the 'Fun!' label on it because 'randomized therapy kit' would never sell and is an awful fucking idea".

I'm open to your thoughts, good sir, but bear in mind my user title up there. I ain't into your emotional spelunking, save as a little in-character drama while gribbly-hunting on the fourth moon, y'know?

Quote from: Christmas ApeI ain't into your emotional spelunking, save as a little in-character drama while gribbly-hunting on the fourth moon, y'know?

Well then, it's probably not your kind of fun, y'know?  Not really my kind of fun either (I'm totally into misery, but not so much into despair).  It might be somebody else's, though.

Quote from: TonyLBWell then, it's probably not your kind of fun, y'know?  Not really my kind of fun either (I'm totally into misery, but not so much into despair).  It might be somebody else's, though.

I can see that. I wouldn't have really high hopes for any game whose primary audience is "people who get off on imagining despair", however, particularly in commercial circles.

It's Schindler's List without that whole "redemption" angle*, you know? Which just makes it some kind of emotional Faces of Death; a Hostel of the soul, if you will.

* Am I assuming here? Sure. But if there's a reliable mechanic for "compassionate German in a position of power", a chance to actually play the odds towards survival? It's not a Holocaust RPG anymore, IMO...it actually goes downhill into "grotesque parody of a Holocaust RPG". "Oooops, sorry, no Oscar for you! Onto the train! :haw:"

Not right, man. Not right at all.

Quote from: Christmas ApeAm I assuming here? Sure. But if there's a reliable mechanic for "compassionate German in a position of power", a chance to actually play the odds towards survival? It's not a Holocaust RPG anymore, IMO

Hrm ... maybe I'm closer to a despair junky than I thought.  My first thought, reading that, is this:  Well, sure you should be able to play a compassionate German in a position of power.  That doesn't mean that you're going to be able to say "No, this has to stop," and make it stick, though.  Maybe all you get to do is choose which hundred people to brutally murder in order to keep yourself in a position to save one.

>shudder<

Okay, no.  Not a despair junky.  Not fun for me.  I can understand the harsh beauty of that from the outside, but my central nervous system rebels at the idea of being part of that, even in imagination.  That coffee's just way too bitter for me.  But some people like their black as sin, so ....

Quote from: TonyLBWell then, it's probably not your kind of fun, y'know?  Not really my kind of fun either (I'm totally into misery, but not so much into despair).  It might be somebody else's, though.

Someone else's fun?

If this isn't trivializing, it's going to be politicized in a questionable way. The fact that this is being written by a norwegian, funded by the norwegian government kind of infuriates me.

Quote from: Abyssal MawWow. How did I ever guess you weren't Jewish yourself?

To be fair (and, in saying that, I realise I'm not being particularly fair at all), this project reminds me very much of the same kind of morbid fascination that people who write and/or play violent post-apocalyptic RPGs -- you know, the kind where society has fallen and barbarism of the most venal kind is explored in depth. T. Willard's Year of the Zombie comes to mind.  These games are written by people who obviously haven't gone through the horrors they're playing with, too.  It's personal entertainment born of someone else's misery, and I think it's a bad idea in any case.

!i!

Quote from: TonyLBHrm ... maybe I'm closer to a despair junky than I thought.  My first thought, reading that, is this:  Well, sure you should be able to play a compassionate German in a position of power.  That doesn't mean that you're going to be able to say "No, this has to stop," and make it stick, though.  Maybe all you get to do is choose which hundred people to brutally murder in order to keep yourself in a position to save one.

See, I'm 90% sure that Temple, over on rpg.net, was involved in a playtest for the first of these, and it was a three-player diceless 'talky' RPG with three roles per scene....Jew, Nazi officer, bystander or something similar. It was all very tightly set up, as with most mini-games, and all about shitty things happening to you. So my "mechanic for compassionate German" was more talking about a "do YOU get saved by someone?" thing. Which would be repellent and parodic at best, IMO.

The idea of letting you play that role? Urrrrgh. I'm okay with the occasional lose-lose scenario in play, but when both options are that fucking bad? It's like the worst of Vampire's ST advice all rolled up in evil shit, like the worst pig in a blanket ever.

I don’t think it’s meant to be fun. Engaging, educational and emotionally involving, yes. “Fun”, no.

Taking classes, seeing or reading a documentary, going to a museum or art gallery, visiting the cemetery, working out, all these (admittedly very varied) things are done as “leisure activities", in the sense that you do them in your spare time, and you don’t have to.

They’re not necessarily done for amusement, but they can be involving, emotionally engaging, educational, mind-expanding, healthy, etc. “Fun” doesn’t have to be the sole aim of the stuff we do in our spare time.

The blog (http://weallhadnames.wordpress.com/) isn’t very difficult to get your head around. Segments are posted in reverse chronological order (last post shows first), in addition to being sorted thematically. What it does lack, however, is a good FAQ, an expanded version of the “About this blog”-part or some other condensed presentation of the project.

I think that would be useful when presenting it in places like this, as others have mentioned above.

(I’m a friend of the author. I have so far not playtested the game. There are some playtest reports/reflections in the blog. Yes, Temple took part in one of them, in February.)

It seems some of you haven't had a look at his design blog, linked in his original post. The game's not meant to be fun, plainly. It's an exploration of these things. Some examples...

   After talking to a friend, I’ve picked up the idea of having a debrief after all. However, the questions must be very open-ended.

Things like:

    * How was this experience for you?
    * What did it feel like playing the different characters?
    * Were there things that happened in the game, or that you did, that made a particular impression on you?
    * Did you relate personally to any of the events in the game? Which ones, and why?

These questions say, implicitly: You should be affected by this experience, it should leave an impression on you, and there are things here that you need to relate personally to. By asking these questions, I’m not saying how people should be affected - but I’m saying they should be affected somehow.
And earlier I think he comes closest to the truth of the matter,

   Reading the start of this paper. It’s about Schindler’s List. Strongly critical. “Spielberg evades representing the reality of the Holocaust altogether by creating a story viewers can easily accept and interpret”.

Thinking: How can I represent the Holocaust? I know how. It’s easy, it goes like this.

The participants are given character descriptions, one each. Read them, understand them, become them.

The first scene is short. The participants can speak and act in character whenever they choose to do so. The characters are searched, all their possessions removed. They’re marched into the gas chamber. The gas is turned on and they die.

The participants are given new character descriptions, one each. Read them, understand them, become them.

 The second scene is short. The participants can speak and act in character whenever they choose to do so. The characters are searched, all their possessions removed. They’re marched into the gas chamber. The gas is turned on and they die.

The participants are given new character descriptions, one each. Read them, understand them, become them.

The third scene is short.

The fourth scene is short.

They’re all short. There’s just so many of them.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I think it’s because it’s true.
Essentially this is roleplaying as... well, not quite "group therapy", but something close. The cynical part of me says that it's middle-classed kids who've led such comfortable lives they've never had any strong emotions. No great happiness, no great fear or anger. And so they seek vicarious experiences which they can conveniently turn on or off. It's the same reason they take drugs, or bonk madly - they're desperately seeking actual strong emotion.

I remember once on rpg.net there was an article about a LARP where they went into a fallout shelter and locked themselves in for the weekend. "Oh, everything has been nuked... what now? Explore how you feel." Juhana someone wrote it, can't recall his name. Anyway, it was the same kind of thing. Vicarious, superficial, in the guise of profundity. And extremely depressing.

I mean, the guy's obviously not a fuckwit. It's not like you'll be roleplaying SS guards, and whoever throws the most babies on the electric fence gets extra XP. It's an attempt to explore this horrible experience of others.

I wouldn't call it a "roleplaying game", though. I don't know what it is, except as I said, a person with a too-comfortable life in desperate search of a deep experience. But of course it's actually extremely superficial. And depressing.

Quote from: Matthijs Holter- The games are meant to help us learn/understand some of the events surrounding the Kristallnacht, the problems of the Judenräte, and the many reasons people didn't interfere with or stop the events as they unfolded.

Some of the discussion in this thread seems to miss the point that this project is supposed to be educational rather than pure entertainment, much like, say, the Europa LARP about political refugees hoping for asylum: we are not talking about an adventure game for "a fun night with the guys" here. It's not inherently any more offensive than a stage play about the Holocaust.

Quote from: GrimGentIt's not inherently any more offensive than a stage play about the Holocaust.

Correct.

Quote from: GrimGentSome of the discussion in this thread seems to miss the point that this project is supposed to be educational rather than pure entertainment, much like, say, the Europa LARP about political refugees hoping for asylum: we are not talking about an adventure game for "a fun night with the guys" here. It's not inherently any more offensive than a stage play about the Holocaust.

It's "educational art", which is a whole different category, really... We're not talking about facts here, but emotionally understanding it. By the _participants_ , which is quite different from a stage play or movie which is primarily centered on a passive audience.

On the other hand, reading the design notes it might be actually done like a play, rather scripted. So it's education through method acting...