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British game designer Luc Bernard is taking heat for creating a video game based on the Holocaust.
In Imagination is the Only Escape, players take on the role of a young boy in German-occupied Eastern Europe who attempts to escape the horrors of the real world though an imaginary one.
At least one Holocaust survivor has spoken vehemently against the still-unreleased game. Jack Kagan, originally from Belarus, says:
The Holocaust is serious for all humanity and I don’t think anyone should make this kind of game. I’m very upset by it [...] This is not educational. Holocaust education should not be done through games of this nature. People can read and watch things about the Holocaust, they do not need these kinds of games.”
Bernard maintains that the adventure-platformer is intended to help educate players about the atrocities inflicted on many children during the Holocaust.
Thoughts?
Filed under: Games | Tagged: Games, Holocaust, Imagination is the Only Escape, Luc Bernard
I think I agree with Kotaku here. Games are already used to help teach children about shapes, colours and geography, to improve math and typing skills - why not put games to work teaching kids about serious, real-world issues?
Children are smarter than we give them credit for; I think this could work.
Has Jack Kagan played this game?
No?
Then his opinion on it is not worth much.
Good books and movies have been made about the holocaust. There have also been books and movies that treat the subject inappropriately - denying it ever happened, for instance. I’d say that denying that the holocaust ever happened is a terrible thing to do. But it doesn’t mean that the holocaust should not be treated in books.
Same thing with films: make a movie denying the holocaust, and you’ve done a deplorable thing. But it doesn’t make Schindler’s List or La Vita e Bella less worthy. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make movies about the holocaust.
I’m frankly getting tired of people objecting on principle to serious subjects being in games. These principles are bogus.
You hear this a lot: “How dare they trivialize super-important issue X in a mere game!”
As a rule, people who say this do not play video games. Would you take seriously a movie critic who hasn’t seen the flick she’s writing about? Or a book review, written by someone who openly admits that books are intrinsically frivolous and pointless?
Obviously not. No one has a right to criticize a cultural artefact without having experienced it.
With respect to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not the message. Maus is a comic book, a graphic novel, a perfect example of an oft-derided medium’s ability to convey a difficult topic with intelligence and refined sensibility.
Games can do the same thing. I’m not saying that Imagination is the Only Escape is a good game, or that it is a good commentary on the Holocaust. All I’m saying is that it’s bogus to say that there can never, and should never, be a game about the holocaust.
Games have a great power to explain and educate. If that power is employed intelligently by a gifted game designer, they can be a resource on all sorts of topics. Even the holocaust.
Kotaku has an important update.
Though the holocaust is socially approachable through art, it seems like the mainstream Jewish lobby is still uncomfortable with the portrayal of the subject in “lighter” media. The key point Kotaku made originally was that to condemn this project is to assume that video games have not yet achieved true artistic worth, and thus do not fall into the range of media formats that the vocal lobby (personified by just one person, here) finds acceptable..
That, of course, is a proposition that I think everyone here can agree is way off base. I don’t believe that very many games qualify as art, but there are a few. On the flip side, most painting, books, music and films are also not fine art; just workmanlike efforts either succeeding or failing in their niches. I posit that video games, at their apex, are art. As a result, this game ought to be given the same chance a book on the subject would.
After Kotaku’s revision, it looks as if the original complaintant agrees.
You want to see a game that works as art? Check this out.