Categories
Gender

What we play: Chatting about History, Gender, and Videogames

Videogames offer us the possibility to create spaces to enjoy and engage with in ways that approach the past visually and interactively. We can play with history, and we can play to do history. But playing and history are also gendered. Playing with history and gender can open possibilities for events that happened in a moment in human history […]

Categories
Education

Gestapo (1976) and Rosenstrasse (2022): Challenges and lessons for Holocaust-themed TRPGs

The discourse surrounding Holocaust-based simulation exercises and games underscores pedagogical and moral possibilities and limitations for educators or designers. Holocaust simulations are viewed as an outlet for participants to emotionally and psychologically engage with the past. Holocaust-themed exercises invite participants to experience victimhood, complicity, lack of agency, and loss. From Ron Jones’ Third Wave experiment […]