Holocaust Games

Not everyone shares my objection to Holocaust used as a subject in fictional films, but the concept of a Holocaust game draws near universal confusion and condemnation. This is simple enough to explain: most people understand "game" to mean "toy", "play", or "fun", something they don't think should be associated with the Holocaust. (Yet a film being "entertainment" doesn't bother them, go figure.)

To explain this more fully, consider the objective of a player in such a game. You don't want them to play a victim who dies or is tortured, because, even as an educational tool, that is too intense. You don't want them to play a victim who easily survives, because that is not the lesson of the Holocaust. That's just a revenge fantasy. You don't want them to play a Nazi, for hopefully obvious reasons; and anyway, most fictional portrayals of Nazis complete bury the point of how mundanely clean and rational they behaved. And playing as a gun-shooting liberator, such as an American or Russian, barely conveys anything real about the Holocaust.

That does not exhaust all options, thankfully. You can make question and answer games about the Holocaust; a game based solely on questions probably won't be too much fun (or worse, will be too much fun). You can make small, limited games that, through exploration, teach people about specific events of the Holocaust in passing, such as the deportation of a single town. This allows you to keep the game light enough while lightly educating and, perhaps, stimulating a desire to learn more (supplemental reading material, or links, should be bundled with the game, ideally).

Here are a few games that have tackled the Holocaust. I don't include major franchises that touch on the subject within broader WWII fighting games, such as Call of Duty and Wolfenstein. I don't include games where you take on the role of Nazis. I also don't include games that are designed but not yet published, such as Light in the Darkness.

• Attentat 1942: This walkthrough game intersperses interviews, animation, footage, and stories by survivors with simple gameplay elements. For example, the survivor might describe how she had to hide paper before the Gestapo arrived, and then you are given the choice of where to hide the papers in the room. You job is to be a historical researcher and learn what happened to your grandfather.
  
• Through the Darkest Times: This walkthrough of animated scenes depicts Berlin around the time that Hitler is voted into power until the end of WWII. It's narrative presents how his rise to power included the support of the population. You do various small tasks of resistance, although, of course, the end is the same.
• My Memory of Us: A video game with a fantasy version of WWII, where two kids who are best friends are separated when an evil king (with robots) comes to power. They impose harsh restrictions on one of the kids (the girl) forcing them to wear certain clothing, mocking them, and creating dangerous situations. They only want to play together, and only by working together can the kids reveal their true power.  The game uses cute graphics against black and white dystopian steampunk backdrops of ghettos, garbage, and barbed wire. The story is narrated by Patrick Stewart.
• The Journey: A children's based story app from the UK's National Holocaust Centre, about a boy who must navigate Nazi rule in the early 1930s until he gets to Kindertransport. Discover hidden objects and fulfill minor objectives.
• Witness: Auschwitz: An interactive VR experience about the Holocaust, not actually a game as far as I can tell.
• Rosenstrasse: A tabletop RPG about the only mass public protest by Germans during the Holocaust: non-Jewish women protested loudly and long enough about their Jewish husbands and successfully obtained the release of these 1,300 men.
  memoiAR, a CMU research team, created an augmented reality version of the game called We Choose Each Other.
• Train: Brenda Romero's fascinating and controversial thought experiment, which is more of an interactive art piece that can be "played". You have to squish little yellow figures into trains until, at some point, a reveal is made to indicate that you are trying to send Jews to a death camp. At this point, the reactions of participants vary: some keep playing, some quit, some try to subvert the game's goals. While this game has been criticized for whitewashing the complicity of the perpetrators of the Holocaust (who knew what they were doing and volunteered to do it), I think the criticism misses the point about people blinding doing things until they receive a moral wake up call. It's a thought piece, in any case.
• Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah: A supplement for White Wolf's Wrath of Oblivion/World of Darkness RPG. A prime example of what you should not do for a Holocaust game. The book gets some points for seriously describing some of the history and suffering of the Holocaust to people who might otherwise never learn about it. It loses all of these points by weaving in fantasy game elements, statistics for NPCs and campaign settings, and essentially (not intentionally, I'm sure) giving neo-Nazis a platform to roleplay the murder of Jews and other undesirables. Not well thought through.

Cardboard Genocide is a research paper from Poland with some other thoughts on the topic.