Today I’m so excited to share that I have an interview with Dr. Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington on their game Rosenstrasse, which is currently on Kickstarter! I hope you enjoy hearing what these amazing women have to say about this project – check it out below!
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Tell me a little about Rosenstrasse. What excites you about it?
JH: The Rosenstrasse story is an incredible story of non-violent protest and resistance to unjust authority. The game puts you inside marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans. You play out what I like to call “ten years of marriage in three hours”; then, at the end of the game, the female characters have the chance to protest the roundup of the Jewish men in their lives. The historical protest we’re exploring was spontaneous, women-led, non-violent – and successful. That’s something we want to remember. At the same time, we remember that even these women, who were willing to stand up to the Reich, didn’t do so until their own families were on the line. We can honor their courage and still aspire to do better next time.
MT: A lot of things! Jess has the first thing that comes to mind – it is history that belies the story we’re told about our effective potential to affect oppressive regimes and that makes it an urgently important story to me in our current political climate. But I’ll also pick one that I don’t often mention – that it’s designed to be very procedurally easy to run! Unlike many games that require GM skill sets that experienced gamers take for granted (world building, scene framing, narrative positioning, mechanical management) Rosenstrasse takes care of the lion’s share of that work for you. In this game, the primary GM skill is emotional calibration – listening to a scene until it has reached an emotional place of fulfillment, asking questions to reveal how characters are processing the events in their lives, and checking in to make sure players are coping with the material. Because these are core emotional intelligence skills rather than specialized GM skills, this makes the game accessible to folks who have historically found GMing daunting – and as a result we’re seeing better representation among facilitators.
What inspired you to create the game specifically as a live action experience?
MT: Rosenstrasse is actually a hybrid larp & tabletop game so groups can play it as a live or tabletop experience. Because most of the gameplay involves the emotional negotiation between two people, the delineation between tabletop and larp start to naturally blur anyway; a scene where a husband and wife have a difficult conversation at a kitchen table looks and feels very similar in either game mode. When I run the game, I tend to do so in larp mode because I find that embodied roleplay is a powerful conduit to adopting the headspace and heartspace of the character, especially when there are strong relationship ties. I think that the emotion follows the body and vice versa.
JH: In contrast to Mo, I tend to run Rosenstrasse closer to a tabletop. Players still get to have meaningful in-character conversations where they embody their characters verbally and physically, but adopt a very different relationship to the game materials. For example, players in this mode often describe experiencing the card deck as a ticking clock, counting down to new horrors. This sense of dread is palpable at the table and very powerful for play.
What is the game like in play – what emotions do players normally experience, and what do they physically do?
JH: The game comes with eight pre-generated characters, and more than eighty scenes for them to encounter. In a typical scene, players get the description of a situation – for example, maybe two of the characters are going to work on the morning after Kristallnacht – and then a prompt for role-play. Prompts typically ask the characters to have a conversation, react to the situation being described, or show how their marriage changes.
MT: The game is meant to feel like an elegy – a thoughtful observance of the loss of security, dignity, freedom, and selfhood incurred under an oppressive regime. But it’s also a game about resilience and resistance – players through their characters struggle to hold on – or sometimes to let go. They discover that in an active genocide, that the minutiae of living and thinking and loving are themselves, resistance. The game play is often quiet, somber and serious – one where everyone shares a deep breath before the next scene because the story just keeps on getting harder. But there’s also moments of lightness, bright love, and true courage that also make it bearable.
What kind of research did you need to do to create Rosenstrasse?
MT: Research for historical games about people in marginalized situations can be hard. And it becomes harder still when you try to uncover their stories from a time where oppressive regimes have a stronghold on the narrative in which even documentation of your own story can be prosecuted as a treasonous crime against the state. You can double this down once more in a locus of war (Berlin) where victors literally displace the regime and with it wrest control of the story to broadcast their own victory. Stories get lost, they get distorted, they get overwritten – the stories of victims get defined by their victimhood in service to the vilification of the enemy and the righteousness of the victor.
For Rosenstrasse we got very lucky in that an academic named Nathan Stoltzfus found the thread of the Rosenstrasse protests early enough to locate people who were actually impacted, and to collect their first hand accounts of the events. Those first-hand accounts became the heart of our research and our design. And since that work, many other academics have focused on the story and it has become a locus of debate in Resistance Studies – so for research we situated ourselves in the lives of people who told their story and followed as many threads as we could find outward until we felt we could create a palpable feel of what it was like to live in that time.
JH: While Mo focused on the historical research, I spent a lot of time looking into the challenges of Holocaust education. I have a lot of experience designing and studying educational games – that’s actually part of my day job as a professor at CMU – but Holocaust education has some pretty specific challenges that we needed to understand. For example, Holocaust games can backfire if they make the player feel that they could have done a better job in the circumstances. That can lead them to have contempt, not empathy, for the targets of Nazi persecution. So, we did research to identify these challenges, looked at what’s been done before, and specifically targeted our design to address them. Our research with the game so far, and our observations of playtesting, suggest that we’re succeeding!
How is Rosenstrasse important to you as a creator, and as a person?
JH: I’ve been making transformational games for nearly twenty years, and I’ve rarely seen a game that has this kind of power. It’s humbling and a bit frightening to know that you’ve made a game that deeply impacts players. But, I’ve brought everything that’s in me to the table – my work with transformational games, my commitment to activism, my expertise in psychology and instructional design, my family history, my love of role-playing games – and I think that creates a special kind of alchemy.
I’m particularly grateful that Mo agreed to dedicate the game to my grandmother, Helen Hammer. She survived five different camps, including Auschwitz, and went on to live a life of intellectual commitment, grace, and dignity. I was particularly close to her growing up. She pushed me to read bigger, think bigger, adventure bigger; she wanted me to have a vision of the world as it could be, not just of the world as it was. She died when I was still in college, so I hope this game stands as a testament to her memory.
MT: Rosenstrasse has a harmony that’s critically important to me. Its historical focus, its design, the story it tells, the player experience, the impact of play, my personal goals as a creative activist, and the design relationship Jess and I have built are all aligned with a harmony that’s incredibly satisfying. I will forever be grateful that Jess agreed to do this work with me – it has been a uniquely fulfilling and powerful experience, and I am humbled by her trust and her courage.
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Amazing! Thank you to Jessica and Moyra both for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it, and that you’ll check out Rosenstrasse on Kickstarter today!