Limmud discussion: can it ever be appropriate for a video game to depict elements of the Holocaust?

Avid gamers might recognise this scene – it comes from Call of Duty World War II, the latest instalment of the popular first person shooter franchise, released last year.

The scene was one of a number discussed during a Limmud talk on “Videogame depictions of the Holocaust”.

As described in the event notes; “Jewish history’s darkest chapter has been covered in music, art, drama, songwriting, literature and film – but not videogames… mostly.

“The session considers the few games that have taken the controversial step of including Holocaust elements. We dare to ask if videogames can ever be an appropriate way for depicting the Shoah – and if so, how?”

As described by Max Donen, the session convenor, who led the discussion with a great deal of sensitivity and empathy, the Call of Duty scene was the result of a great deal of argument between the games developers and publishers.

 “Sledgehammer and Activision [the games publishers] had a big argument about this one. Apparently Activision said ‘don’t do it’ and Sledgehammer said ‘we’re doing it anyway.’

“Then Activision said ‘ok, but do a Labour camp [not a concentration camp]'. So Sledgehammer said ‘can we show the dead bodies?’ And they said ‘with limitations on technology – you can’t mess up here. A slight drop in frame-rate, a slight drop in resolution, anything that makes it look cartoony, and you’re done for, were done for, our reputation is going to be toast.’

“This was the compromise that resulted and is one of the reasons why you don’t actually see dead bodies."

Most members of the audience appeared to agree that the presentation of an element of the Holocaust in Call of Duty had been done with sensitivity. A number felt very differently about another scene, from the 2013 game Wolfenstein: New Order.

Set in a 1960s future in which the Nazis were victorious, one scene depicts an agent infiltrating a concentration camp as an inmate. As people are forced into cattle trucks, a female Nazi guard holds a screaming baby by one leg, while swinging her truncheon viciously with her other hand. Once in the camp, we see new arrivals being forcibly tattooed, while guards brutally beat inmates. Piles of bodies lie unattended.

One audience member described it as “pornography of the Holocaust… I almost couldn’t watch it. It hurt me, physically, it was really inappropriate.”

There were other examples of Holocaust depictions. Witness Auschwitz, for example, is not a game, but an educational tool currently in development, which will allow users to explore the most infamous of the Nazi death camps.

The audience was only shown the opening sequence, at the entrance to Birkenau, but even without any faces visible, the camp slowly moving closer, with the barking of dogs interspersed with the howling of sirens, was disturbing. It is unclear how the finished programme will look - audience members indicated that they would potentially find any computerised depiction of the gas chambers extremely troublesome, even in an educational context.

A fourth programme, a game called My Memory of Us, does not mention the Holocaust directly, but the plot centres on two young friends, one of whom, as a “red person”, is hunted by an extremely Nazi-looking robot army.

Perhaps suitable for a younger audience, the game describes the exclusion against a specific group in a way that the others do not. As explained by Mr Donen, rather than this game being a “shoot-em-up” game in the style of Call of Duty or Wolfenstein, My Memory of Us is an “avoid-em-up”, where the characters are weak, and attempt to overcome almost insurmountable odds to escape a powerful foe, in a world which is more like the one Anne Frank might have lived in while in hiding, rather than a concentration camp.

Opinions differed among the audience as to the acceptability of Holocaust depictions in video games.

“It’s the same thing as The Man in the High Castle (a TV series based on a book in which the Nazis win World War Two) and other things like that,” one said, with regards to the Wolfenstein depiction.

“I don’t have an issue with the way it’s being depicted – who knows, maybe that’s what it would have been like in the 1960s if the Nazis won.”

Another member of the audience interjected, saying: “but this is a gaming environment”, to which the first person responded, “what’s the difference between a game and a TV show? They’re doing similar things.”

Addressing the rest of the audience, Mr Donen said; “for everyone else, welcome to a debate that’s been going on for about five years.”