Hi all! This is the week three set of my #33in28 reviews! The final post will go up on Sunday of next week. This week I’m covering a lot of self-care and meta type games like Ego and soulQUEST, but don’t worry, there’s still time to get Lost in the Deep. Enjoy!
Hi all! This is the week three set of my #33in28 reviews! The final post will go up on Sunday of next week. This week I’m covering a lot of self-care and meta type games like Ego and soulQUEST, but don’t worry, there’s still time to get Lost in the Deep. Enjoy!
This is the second week’s installment of #33in28, my birthday celebration reviewing 33 solo games in 28 days! Today I’m featuring Bear, Morning Phase, Operation Cat Chat, and more! Check out these awesome games through my reviews and make sure to click through on their itchio links to find out more and buy your favorites! I want to point out with this post that every single one of these games could be priced far more and still be more than worth it, so *please consider tipping if you buy!*
Hi all! This is the second week’s installment of #33in28, my birthday celebration reviewing 33 solo games in 28 days! Today I’m featuring Bear, Morning Phase, Operation Cat Chat, and more! Check out these awesome games through my reviews and make sure to click through on their itchio links to find out more and buy your favorites! I want to point out with this post that every single one of these games could be priced far more and still be more than worth it, so *please consider tipping if you buy!*
Continue reading “#33in28 Week 2 Reviews”Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
By Tim Hutchings
Genre Tags: solo, lonely, dice, journaling, roleplaying game
Replayable? Yes!
Actual Play Available? Examples included
Length: Short or Long, Journaling (At your own pace)
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a multi-award winning game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It uses journaling and dice mechanics to guide the player through a solo roleplaying game about the subject – a Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV). The game has been widely popular, but I have a lot of thoughts to share!
As someone who initially interviewed Tim about the game, I’ve been fascinated with it from the start. I love games about characters who have superpowers like immortality or who are living over centuries, and media like that in general. This game explores that full tilt, including some really challenging topics.
The text includes warnings that you will encounter:
“themes of death, selfishness, and predation. Your character may be injured, victimized, trapped, or killed. Your character will murder and victimize people of all sorts, possibly including children, animals, loved ones, marginalized people, or themselves. You might find yourself exploring themes of imperialism, colonialism, or oppression. Characters might engage in self-harm or drug abuse. Illness, debilitation, and body horror may come into play. Your character may have their memories altered, they will certainly forget important things.
Some of this will emerge from the Prompts, some will emerge from the choices you make as a player.
This is a personal, challenging game for mature adults. Please play hard, but stay aware of yourself and your feelings. Some good thoughts about safety in solo games can be found in Appendix Three.”
– Thousand Year Old Vampire
I love Thousand Year Old Vampire. Right now, I can’t play it.
The book is one of the most beautiful artifacts I’ve ever owned. The hardcover has gold riddling the marbled cover, and the interior is packed with images and a stunning, original layout that draws attention to the nature of this book as a well-used immortal’s journal, complete with the impression of things tucked into pages, taped into place, or scribbled into the margins. I love every time I open it, finding new gorgeous, character-building bits and pieces I missed the first four or five times I looked through. It’s sturdy, and while you can write in the book as you play, it may take some bravery to embellish the pages with your own scribbles of isolation and loneliness.
The mechanics are simple, using a d10 and d6 to select and narrow prompts and affect resolution, and the narrative mechanics of Memories and Experiences – the former the bucket for the latter, where multiple short written Experiences make up an arc of a Memory, of which you only have five total at a time. When you gain new Experiences, you lose Memories if you don’t have a space for them.
This mechanic makes so much sense to me when you consider the sheer number of prompts included to put a character through years of triumph and trauma, love and regret, camaraderie and loneliness. Imagine the number of experiences – real moments of eternal living – that a vampire would have in their endless life, how they might imagine ways of ending waking loneliness and sleeping suffering without their loved ones, regretting their deeds, wishing they could do greater ones! It is something that could be played equally passionately and dispassionately, engaging in the powerful prompts with the keen eye of a monster who only has more lives to take or instead with the weary heart of someone who has lived too long and only has longer to live. The possibilities! They are as endless as the days your vampire will sleep through and as engaging as the nights they hunt through.
I want to play this game so badly! It’s so well-written and executed, and the mechanics make so much sense for this immortal being who lives through hundreds of years of life and loss. But, as someone who struggles with memory loss, and during this time of isolation that has been very hard on me, I elected not to play it – right now. Thousand Year Old Vampire will remain on my to-play list until I get the courage to delve into its stunning pages and pen my own story of immortality, but if you want to dive in right now, don’t miss out!
Thousand Year Old Vampire is a lonely journaling vampire game by Tim Hutchings currently available on itchio and in print at DriveThruRPG. It is one of my favorite games I’m reviewing this month and I hope you’ll check it out soon!
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
This week I have a bundle of reviews for you, my readers! As part of #33in28 for my 33rd birthday I’m reviewing 33 solo games in February, which has 28 days. Each week I’ll post a single review on Monday, then a collection of six reviews on the following Sunday. The remaining three reviews will be peppered in on the big review days or as solo posts! As these are Let’s check out what today has to offer…
*Edited 2/9/2021 to correct a name and fix some formatting.
I’m super excited to share this interview with Sharang Biswas talking about a lot of things, including Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games, which you should check out after reading what Sharang has to say below!
The images for the book are by Janna Heidersdorf (Illustration) and Jen McCleary (Layout). (update 7/37/202)
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I appreciate you taking time for the interview, Sharang! Would you share with me a little about you and your experience? How did you end up in games doing the kind of work that you’re enthusiastic about?
I’m a game designer, interactive artist, and writer currently based in NYC. I started formally learning game design under Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth (though I studied engineering), and then went to ITP at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to get a Masters in Interactive Design. Since then I’ve made numerous games, won an IndieCade, 2 IGDN, and a Golden Cobra Award, exhibited my games at galleries and art museums, mounted interactive theatre productions at various venues, and given a bunch of talks at conferences and universities. I’m also currently on the faculty at both Fordham University and Bard College.
I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about many different kinds of work, so I try and keep myself being by doing different stuff all the time. My major project right now is co-editing Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games with Lucian Kahn. I’ve been into the idea of procedure and process for a while, and about how mundane actions, when placed in a game context, can convey artistic meaning. I explored this in my games Feast & Verdure, and out of that line of inquiry came the thought: “Can games use sex acts as game mechanics, where the acts themselves are not the sole goal of the game?”. From that arose the idea of the book, though Lucian & I expanded the scope to also include games that discuss sex, sexuality, and related topics, without the use of sex acts between players or characters.
Lucian and I were very keen to make this project come to life in a way that uplifts artists and game designers, and so we decided to apply for a grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity. We received two consecutive grants, and are basically using all the money to pay the creators involved!
That’s so fantastic to hear! Honey & Hot Wax sounds really brilliant, and also like a unique challenge. One curiosity I have is how you handled ensuring that the games in the collection use consent and are responsible, considering how sex can be. What was your approach to safety and boundaries?
It is my firm belief that art can and should discuss difficult topics–art is one of the ways people, both as individuals and as societies, make sense of the world. However, such art needs to be practiced with care and sensitivity, and as such, Lucian and I were very concerned about issues of consent and safety in the games included in the anthology. To begin with, when we were soliciting proposals, we took a very broad definition of what sex is, and relied on the Effing Foundation’s definitions of “sex-positivity” and “inclusivity” (which you can read here). This was to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding the goals of our project, and what sorts of depictions of sexuality we would be considering.
Once the finalists were selected, we commissioned Maury Brown for an entirely separate chapter on consent and safety in LARP and TTRPG, to act as a general set of guidelines when playing any of the games in the collection (or indeed, any roleplaying game at all). In the rules for their games, each game designer also included their own sections regarding safety and consent practices, to uniquely address the idiosyncrasies of the experience they were creating.
Additionally, each game was thoroughly vetted by Lucian, myself, Cat Tobin from Pelgrane Press, and Kit Stubbs from the Effing Foundation, a diverse set of eyes to ensure that the games all represented the values we wanted to promote, and that consent language was clear. As director of the Effing Foundation, Kit, in particular, offered valuable insights concerning such matters!
Finally, we were very serious about the playtesting requirement for each of our accepted games; holes and gaps in rules are hard to predict without playtesting. Running my own game with a trusted friend, for example, showed me places where I could clarify language about safety!
Of course, and unfortunately, no safety mechanics can handle every eventuality, or account for bad actors. It is in the nature of participatory, non-linear stories to defy our expectations and predictions, so to all the players of our games, we ask you to exercise judgment and pay attention to your own boundaries!
Is this the first game you’ve applied for grants for? It sounds like you’re pretty great at it! What did that process entail and how do you think it’s impacted how the games are designed?
Grants, like most sorts of applications in this world, are partially about luck, so “being great at it” doesn’t mean as much as one might think! But this isn’t the first grant I’ve received to make game-like work, and hopefully won’t be the last!
When Lucian and I sent in our proposal to the Effing Foundation, we were very clear about what the grant-funding would be used for: paying the folks involved in the project a fair amount. This was paramount. All our funding went to the writers and designers involved in the book.
The creation of any kind of art requires time and space. Time and space are luxuries reserved for those with money. Good art is impossible to make (consistently, at least) if an artist is forever worried about where their next rent check is coming from. As such, Lucian and I were hoping to do our small part in supporting and uplifting indie designers. At the very least, we’ve managed to create a space where artists who might otherwise not be able to make games about risque topics, have the ability to do so, and in a way that’s financially viable!
It might be good to note here that in addition to support from the grant, each designer is also receiving royalties, and a portion of sales is also going towards charitable causes that promote sex-positivity and sex-education!
It is great to hear that everyone is being well-paid and that you and Lucian are working to support charitable works! What do you enjoy about working on larger projects like this with lots of collaborators? How does it contrast with how you enjoy working on individual projects, and how that affects your design? (note: please feel free to give examples of your specific projects!)
I really enjoy working on group projects. Most of the work I’m proudest of is in collaboration with others. However, I wouldn’t call this a “group project” per se. Lucian and I were editors and curators of other people’s work. It was their designs…we just helped them. Granted Lucian and I have games in the book as well, but each of those was an individual work (albeit, with help from others). The book wasn’t really a group project in the same was as some of my bigger, interactive theatre pieces, for example.
For example, when Nick O’Leary and I made the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance LARP for the Museum of the Moving Image, it truly was collaborative, both with each other and the museum education department. We went back and forth with each other for ideas, to refine mechanics, to flesh out bits and to write content. None of that really for H&HW.
What are some lessons you’ve learned through design over time that you think your particular path is the only way you would have learned them – as in, if I hadn’t done x, I would never have learned y?
Lol, I feel that’s a weird line of thinking. Who knows what I would or would not have learned under different circumstances or different decisions? Besides, I think looking at other people’s paths is at best an exercise in inspiration. Stories of paths taken ALWAYS leave out some aspect of luck or privilege, and few can ever emulate the advice given in these sorts of tellings.
Maybe the only truth that I can say that has a high probability of working for others is 1) constantly making stuff and pushing yourself to try things you haven’t done before is how you learn and improve; and 2) being kind to people is not only the nice thing to do but more advantageous for you in the long run!
What are some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on in games and what makes them stand out amongst the rest? How were you able to put your unique experiences into play while designing them?
Hmm… this is a fun question because it made me look back on my work, and turns out, I’ve made a fair amount of stuff!
In Honey & Hot Wax, what are some of the specific pieces that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing people talk about and seeing the impact on the design landscape from? Were there any you learned from?
I mean, Clio Davis’ “Pas the Sugar, Please” has already generated conversations, after it got picked up by Intramersive Productions as an interactive theatre piece, so that’s great. Otherwise, I thinkLucian and I curated a decent selection of game, each of which has something new and interesting to offer to the gaming landscape. Lol, obviously, I’d love it if people talk about my game and how (queer) sex can be more normalized in culture!
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Thank you so much Sharang for the interview! Check out Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games and get intimate!
I have an excellent interview today with Oscar Biffi about Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, which is currently doing amazing on Kickstarter (that just means it’s a sure bet!)! It sounds like an amazing collection of larp scenarios – check out what Oscar had to say!
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What is Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, as a project and as your vision?
Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello is the second anthology of chamber larps written by the Italian Chamber Orchestra, the community of roleplaying enthusiasts of Laiv.it. We are doing our best to make it a wonderful book with twelve interesting games, but to us it’s so much more than that. Three years ago we created the first Crescendo Giocoso, thanks to our community and our backers on Kickstarter. It was an incredible experience, kind of similar to Pavarotti & Friends: my games and the games of Italian game designers who I esteem, developed to be accessible to a wider public, from different countries and backgrounds.
It turned out to be the show of confidence our community needed in order to focus on our own way of designing games. With a format that worked for us as a starting base, we were able to start organising conventions not only to play games, but to write them together. Our player friends became authors and the same Italian Chamber Orchestra that was born as a joke became real, going from nine authors to almost thirty. Bigger communities of Italian larpers started to get interested in chamber larp and people from all around the world got to know our way of playing.
So in a way Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello as a book is the end point of a journey (we like to say “a grand tour”) made of writing workshops, online chats, conventions, sleepless nights on graphics and texts. In another way, we hope it could be a new starting point for our community, a demonstration that there’s people out there willing to hear our voices as game designers and that “anyone can cook” as in Pixar’s Ratatouille.
What are some of the themes players will see in the different larps in Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello?
In terms of settings, players are spoiled for choice: from the Bronze Age to the Italian Years of Lead passing through XVIII° century Venice and fantasy worlds. Alzh & Imer is about a love story between tow elderly people, one of them afflicted by Alzheimer’s, and Pantheon Club is about social pressure: each player is invited to anonymously put into play a personal “silence” (something you don’t speak about with everyone, because you’re afraid to be judged) and someone else is going to play a Greek Deity who shares or hates this same silence. The truth is we put emphasis on game mechanics above all, so players will pull colored strings to create an imaginary village or scotch tape to build a prison without actual walls, they will play in complete darkness or utter silence, they will play in the same room or in different ones, they will create scene in reverse chronological order or play the same character in different moments of life. There’s only one fixed point: everyone in the gaming group is going to play and have fun. We’ve got nothing against game masters, I’ve been one for my entire life, but my days of watching one of my larps from outside, maybe to step in and just tell the epilogue in the end, are over: I want to play with my friends and as an author I’m not going to ask someone else to just stare at the others as they play. Sharing all this experiences and putting so many heads together has been a great way to explore very different ideas and everyone can find a complete list of previews for all the scenarios on our Laiv.it website here.
The concept of the Italian Chamber Orchestra and coming together to write each of the scenarios is really brilliant and feels very collaborative. How do you work together and address disagreements, conflicts, or even just overrunning enthusiasm in such an environment?
To me the keys are transparence and dialogue. We try to create the ideal environment from the very beginning: even if a hotel with all the comforts would be awesome, we prefer to rent a house and take care of things ourselves, as a group. Maria is in charge of the logistics, but everyone brings something to eat and there are no assigned rooms. Everyone knows that we put authors first in every convention: we ask players which game they’d prefer to play of course, but we also make sure to tell them that is only a preference and they could end up in another game instead. A game is written by a person who deserves space and respect, as well as a player has the right to know what they are going to play. So, when we invited our players to become authors, we found a very sensible and open-minded audience. In order to share this way of doing things with newcomers, in our writing workshops we split up people who already know each other or who have similar experiences in order to create more diverse bands.
The starting points for every collective game in LarpJam is the Crescendo Giocoso model, so we don’t have to discuss which kind of game we’re going to create, and a theme chosen by the director of the band. The director has no special creative control outside of it, they are just a veteran author with the task of coordinating work after the workshop, in order to make sure the draft is ready before the deadline of the next playtesting convention. Everyone can get involved as much or as little as they want: do you want to join in LarpJam to share ideas and then not write a single line of text in the next months? No problem, just tell it to your band. Writing a game, as well as publishing Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, is a way of giving voice to our creativity and the feeling of being heard is essential. We do our best to create a free space where people can be honest without being judged and where conflict is an healthy part of the process.
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Thank you so much Oscar for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello on Kickstarter today!
A note: Thoughty always welcomes Italian interviewees, even as my interview style will be changing soon, and interviewees from all around the world – of all races! Even if we need to find a translator, I’m interested in helping you tell your stories. <3
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I bring you an interview with the excellent Ken Davidson about #FlirtSquad, which is part of Zine Quest 2 on Kickstarter! Check out the interview below!
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What is #FlirtSquad, both as a product and as your vision?
Hello Beau, thank you for taking the time out to interview me, I really appreciate it. Okay, background first. My memory of events may not be exactly accurate, but about two years ago, Darcy Ross posted on Twitter because she had a hard time trying to flirt and she asked for advice. This was picked up by a lot of people on Twitter and spawned the hashtag #FlirtSquad. From there, you could post a picture or short clip of yourself trying to look flirty and you were guaranteed to have at least some people respond and tell you how amazing you were doing.
I was one of the first to reply and shameless about tagging people in that I thought could contribute (IIRC you were just such a person). There were so many people sharing so many things, and I read a lot of great advice on how to take better pictures, what was considered too far for people, how to communicate expectations etc. I was like “wow, this is really something.” However, when things really clicked for me was a couple of weeks in, when people who normally don’t try to be flirty online, people who don’t share a lot of pictures of themselves, people that have low self esteem, things like that started to post. They told me either in private or in their tweets that they had always been afraid to post pictures of themselves or to share selfies. Either thinking they weren’t cute, or people would make fun of them, or people would be creepy.
I knew we had something special at THAT point, I was also knew it was Twitter, therefore it was ephemeral, it wouldn’t last forever so I’m like “alright, how can I capture these moments? How can I share this with more people who either didn’t see the tag, or aren’t on Twitter, or aren’t in our small indie RPG bubble? What can I do?” The answer I had for that was “write a LARP!” So, here we are, this is my attempt to give people a safe place, where they can explore their flirty selves and build their confidence with like minded folks, and I think I’ve done it.
That’s a whimsical answer, sorry. So, the game is a LARP that is a series of workshops under the guise that the #FlirtSquad is a real group you can join, we’re going to train you so you can build your skills, then we will choose who gets to join at the end. I have compiled an amazing team and we will be releasing it as a zine as part of #ZineQuest2. This is my first physical product that I will ever release, and depending on how this goes, either the first of many or the last.
This is so awesome! What is the structure of the larp, if any, and what are the guidelines under which players interact?
Thank you I also think it’s awesome! The structure of the LARP basically starts with warm-up exercises, followed by safety discussions, then we assign short roles which are different types of flirters, then an intro, then a series of workshops that I call phases. In each phase we’re teaching a skill related to Flirt which you can use in real life. For example, how to ask for consent, how to say no, how to do different flirty looks, things like that. I don’t want to spoil too much but some of the phases are REALLY fun.
I ran the game at Big Bad 19 and there’s a phases I call speed flirting and OMG Beau it was SO MUCH FUN TO WATCH. I was giggling the whole time, that may have been my favorite thing that happened at Big Bad, the only problem was that it wasn’t long enough, which I am fixing as we speak! As far as guidelines for interaction I am teaching consent through various methods during the game as well as setting some hard rules in the beginning, safety was my biggest concern with this game and I think we’ve done it. Plus, I have a stretch goal, which was of writing we have not reached yet, to bring in Adira Slattery. Adira is going to add a phase which will deal with boundary settings in a more explicit manner, but still cute and fun.
How do you support players to ensure they’re able to commit to the #FlirtSquad theme safely and enthusiastically?
You have to be very frank and up front about what this game is. I frontload the Play principles and advise to explicitly say what they are when you run this game. They are: goofy, fun, inclusive and encouraging. If people are not there for those four things and want to be creepy or whatever they can GTFO. As far as getting people enthusiastic about the game you have to be the model when you run this game.
The facilitator has a character in this game, they are the experienced Flirtsquad member who is going to run the recruits through the workshops and it is imperative that they model the behaviors they expect from the players. I ramble and mentioned safety in the last question but going back to it we use Okay check in and Open Door but we also actually have the facilitators not only model good behavior but also model bad behavior and have the crowd call it out.
Again, I don’t want to spoil too much, but Jess Meier and I ran the game and we had “shame” yelled at us a couple of times, it builds a camaraderie between the players which is built in the game and I hope extends to the world. I think that’s all I got, thank you so much again for taking the time out to interview me I really appreciate it!
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Thanks so much to Ken for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out #FlirtSquad on Kickstarter today! Happy Valentine’s Day!
My products are temporarily on reverse sale to gear up for tax time I’ve increased the prices by a very nice percentage – hopefully to help me get through this year’s taxes! Buy all of the products for a cool nice $69 – yes, that’s more expensive. Just like taxes!
My goal for the sale is $420. I will not use it for blazing it, just to give a boost to my funds to pay taxes owed. It runs until 4/1/19!
Thank you for any and all support!
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!
My game Beep which I made after being inspired by the #sadmechjam, the loss of Opportunity, and my own disability is now live!
Check it out here at briebeau.itch.io/beep or back my Patreon.com/Thoughty to get it for free!
