A Denial?
I think the series of posts on cavalry charges is more or less finished now (although there might be occasional sequels in the future). This is my last post before christmas, and what better way to get everyone in a festive mood than… writing about the Holocaust?
Normally I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole, but I’ve been inspired by a post at the History Lab, and by Wulf Kansteiner’s seminar paper at the IHR which I went to earlier this month. One of his observations was that commercial computer games have generally not explored the possibilities of counter-factual history, such as “what if the confederacy won the American Civil War?”. Other forms and media have done more with such potentially controversial ideas. For example, the backstory of Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland was based on the premise that Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Even the Two Ronnies could subvert gender ideology by imagining a counter-factual England in which gender roles and stereotypes were reversed.
Kansteiner extended this line of argument to the Holocaust: games do not present a Holocaust denier’s view of history. On the surface this is true. As far as I know (and I think we would all know about it if it happened) no commercial game has ever explicitly claimed that the Holocaust did not happen. There are many First Person Shooters based on the Second World War, and they all present the Nazis as the enemy. Although you can play as the Germans in multiplayer modes (probably because challenging multiplayer games would be impossible without human players on both sides), single player campaigns are always played from an Allied (and predominantly American) point of view.
However, I see a potential problem. The in-game Nazis are the enemy, and can be assumed to be evil and inhuman, but the reasons for that assumption are left very vague. The Holocaust is conspicuous by its absence from computer games. There are some obvious reasons for this. One of the biggest is gameplay. Combat between infantry, tanks, or aircraft is easy to turn into a game, but how could you make a convincing and playable action game out of genocide? If you leave aside the moral dimensions for a moment, a 3D FPS based on a death camp would be incredibly boring.
Moving up from a tactical to a strategic level, genocide is a significant logistical problem which requires the input of adequate resources and outstanding organisational skills (which the Nazis and IBM clearly possessed). From that point of view you could make a Holocaust management simulation game which, if you’re into that kind of thing, would be no more boring than any other management sim. I’ve already noted the way that Making History: The Calm and the Storm appears to gloss over the Holocaust (see my post on Games and Simulations). This is a serious omission for a game which makes claims to historical accuracy and is marketed as an educational tool. How can you understand Nazi strategy without taking the Holocaust into account? Even in FPS, there are some missed opportunities to bring the Holocaust in. The final mission in the PC version of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault involves breaking into and blowing up a German poison gas factory (no, really). One of the mission objectives is to rescue prisoners who are being used as slave labour by the Germans. What kind of people would you expect these prisoners to be? If you’re not familiar with the game, or the genre to which it belongs, you might not be expecting captured American soldiers, but that’s what they are. I think genre conventions and marketing departments have an obvious influence here but there are some other obvious reasons for the Holocaust’s absence from games.
Time for the pull back and reveal then: I actually think genocide is a bad thing (damn, I’ll never be neutral and objective). Fortunately most people seem to agree with me. The consensus that the Holocaust is one of the worst things to have ever happened has important implications for the way it’s represented in popular culture. Appearing to trivialise the murder of 6 million people would be a public relations disaster. This means that the Holocaust can’t appear in computer games. First there are the practical difficulties of designing a playable game which represents the Holocaust at all, and designing it in such a way that it doesn’t appear to trivialise the suffering of the victims. This is difficult enough, but could be overcome by a text based roleplaying game similar to Milliways (see my post on the Game at the End of Reality), in which the focus is on creative writing, interaction between characters, and imagining emotional responses (although considering the emotional investment of Milliways players in their characters’ virtual lives, a Holocaust based version might be too disturbing to be playable). However, a more fundamental problem is that computer games are generally perceived as inherently trivial, particularly by non-gamers. If a Holocaust game was discovered by the mainstream media there would almost certainly be outrage and calls for it to be banned (especially from The Daily Maily, which also wants to deport asylum seekers, and can’t tell the difference between gays and paedophiles, but anyway…).
Computer games are a relatively new medium. In time they might gain respectability, as novels and films have done. In the meantime, games will have to keep on ignoring the Holocaust. This is a problem because gaming is an increasingly important part of popular culture, and is a medium which makes history particularly accessible to children. If a whole branch of popular culture doesn’t mention the Holocaust, doesn’t that inadvertently create the impression that it never happened or wasn’t important? Young gamers might be intimately familiar with the 101st Airborne’s operations in Normandy and the Ardennes, but will Dachau mean anything to them?
The big problem with the Holocaust is that we have to be careful to avoid trivialising it, but we also have to avoid denying it. If you concentrate too much on one, you risk falling into the other. The safest option is to never mention it, but never mentioning it creates more space for the deniers. Therefore we have to talk about it in order to avoid creating a false impression that it didn’t happen or wasn’t significant. But talking about the Holocaust is dangerous because you risk saying something which trivialises it, or something which inadvertently provides ammunition for the deniers. We can’t all be experts on the Holocaust, not least because the weight of evidence that it did happen is too vast for any one person to master. Nobody can know everything, and every historian makes mistakes. In most cases this doesn’t matter too much. So what if Frank Jones thinks early-modern cavalry charges were “equine battering rams”? That kind of misunderstanding isn’t going to lead to racist violence or totalitarian government. Things are very different when it comes to Holocaust denial, where there is a dangerous ulterior motive at work. Deniers will latch onto any minor inaccuracy in order to strengthen their case. If they can undermine one small piece of evidence they insist that it logically follows that the whole idea of the Holocaust is false.
It hasn’t helped that Holocaust denial became a political football during the theory wars. Extremists on one side claimed that “postmodernism” allowed Holocaust denial by making “all points of view equally valid”, while extremists on the other side blamed traditional historians for creating the “truth effect” which was exploited by deniers. This kind of petty sniping was really pointless. Surely all academic historians can agree that Holocaust deniers are evil lying neo-nazi scum. I’ve spent (wasted?) enough time arguing with BNP members on the internet to know that neo-nazis will cynically exploit anything in order to further their racist agenda. For example, when Nick Griffin was on trial for inciting racial hatred last year, the BNP started a petition in favour free speech, which was aimed at seducing secular liberals by claiming to be working against religious fundamentalists. At the same time, the BNP website clearly showed that the party supported the Christian Voice campaign to ban Jerry Springer The Opera. Free speech for Nick Griffin but not for Stewart Lee. Opposition to Islamic fundamentalists, but support for Christian fundamentalists. Holocaust deniers are no different. They will exploit any historical methodology to gain a temporary advantage and seduce people into supporting them, but their own methods don’t meet any academic standards, whether empirical, postmodernist, or anything else.
Will fear of being labelled a denier or of inadvertently helping deniers remove the Holocaust from academic history in the same way that fear of being seen as trivialising the Holocaust removes it from games? If it does, the only people to blame are the deniers themselves. If they hadn’t started telling lies in order to further their hidden (and in some cases not very well hidden) anti-semitic agenda, then we would have much more freedom to debate the details and significance of the Holocaust.
Anyway, now that I have a GeForce7600GS and a copy of Brothers In Arms: The Road To Hill 30, I’m off to shoot some virtual Nazis. I’ll let you know if I see any concentrations camps, but I have a feeling there won’t be any.
Comment by Rob MacD — 9:53 pm, 22 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
Great post. Have you seen G. Rosenfeld’s book THE WORLD HITLER NEVER MADE? It’s a study of alternate histories involving the Nazis and while it has nothing (as far as I remember) to say about computer games, it’s otherwise exhaustive (and a little exhausting). I recommend it for thoughtful treatments of all of these issues: history and memory, the place of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in particular in postwar popular culture, and the process by which the Holocaust gets “normalized,” or doesn’t, as “just another historical event.”
Comment by Brett — 12:56 pm, 23 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
There are a few alternate history based computer games that I can think of … Enigma: Rising Tide, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, a 1985 battleset for Harpoon … but not many. It’s interesting, because AH scenarios are actually fairly common in board wargames. There are a number of Operation Sealion boardgames, but no computer ones I can think of. (One of my favourite board wargames is Tomorrow the World, a cheerful game about WWIII between Germany and Japan in the late 1940s …) Probably has a lot to do with economics, computer games being more expensive to develop and so maybe AH games are too risky or of interest to too few computer wargamers (who are also going to be less grognardy than board wargamers, on the whole).
On the missing Holocaust — I’m reminded of an old Sid Meier game, Colonization (1994) which simulated European colonisation of North America, but left out slavery and fudged the treatment of native Americans. It copped a fair bit of flak at the time on both these counts, so it is a little odd that game developers haven’t tried to be more sensitive about such things. On the other hand, I think at the level of abstraction of most strategic wargames, it’s easy to justify leaving the Holocaust out — just fudge a few factors here and there and the player doesn’t need to think about it.
Finally, I’ve got a newish 7600gs too but it’s on the fritz :(
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 1:44 pm, 23 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
Another interesting thing I’ve discovered since I wrote this post: this comment at Savage Minds mentions that one of the earliest mainframe computer games was a text-based torture simulator!
Rob: I haven’t read that. It might well find it’s way onto my increasingly unmanageable list of things I want to read.
Brett: Have board wargames ever attracted much hostile attention from the mainstream media? I can remember some sensational rubbish about fantasy roleplaying (one tabloid blamed the Hungerford massacre on a play by mail RPG, although I don’t think there was any evidence that Michael Ryan had ever played it!) but not much about historical wargamers. Maybe they’re seen as harmless weirdos rather than dangerous weirdos?
I tend to think that the absence of the Holocaust gets more glaring at the strategic level. At the tactical level you can justify it because there really weren’t any concentration camps near the Normandy beaches, but if a game puts you in charge of the whole German war effort then 6 million people “disappearing” has to have an economic impact (plus the resources required to get rid of them). In terms of The Calm and the Storm it’s going to cost you a good few MPUs. If you don’t get to make a decision about genocide, or even hear about it, that kind of reinforces the denial myth that Hitler didn’t know about it or didn’t really want to do it.
You’re right that it can easily be glossed over with a few fudges, but those fudges are very suspect if you examine them closely. It leaves us with a strange dichotomy in which the Second World War is a heroic crusade against the evil fascists, but the most evil thing those fascists did is kept separate and isn’t talked about. But as I said, talking about it too much (or in the wrong way, or in the wrong context) can be as counterproductive as not talking about it enough. Sometimes you just can’t win.
Comment by Brett — 2:57 am, 24 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
No, I can’t recall anything like the moral panics over RPGs. In my teens I was both a wargamer and a roleplayer, and my parents nearly banned me from roleplaying after one media beatup, but never had a problem with my wargaming! Reasons why there was no such moral panic might include demographics (wargamers tend to be adults rather than teens) and religious/social (pretending to blow things up worries people less than pretending to worship pagan gods …). But ultimately I think it’s as you say, wargamers are seen as harmless weirdos. (There was an episode of New Tricks on here recently which featured miniature wargamers, and they were portrayed as somewhat obsessive big boys playing with toy soldiers.)
I’m still not sure that the Holocaust had such a big economic impact that not explicitly treating it is questionable. Take a European theatre WWII strategy game. The production that the German player gets is going to predominantly come from German workers, at least early on. But the Jewish population of Germany in 1933 was about half a million, or a bit under 1% of Germany’s population, so to a first approximation the Jewish contribution to German production would be less than 1%. (By 1939 it would be even less, due to emigration and economic persecution.) I don’t know of any wargames which could claim to model the German economy to within an accuracy of 1%! Or even 10%. So I don’t think the economic effects of the Holocaust are going to be noticeable enough to show up in a typical wargame. Foreign slave labour might be another matter though, as well as the troops used to guard the slaves (as wargames tend to have more accurate OOBs than economic models).
But having said all that, I can’t recall anybody justifying (or challenging) leaving out the Holocaust. Moral issues don’t figure into wargames much. At least Sid Meier (or at least Microprose) had to explain why there was no slavery in Colonization!
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:45 pm, 24 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
I think what I’ve done there is confused games in general with one game in particular: The Calm and the Storm. I don’t have the demo installed at the moment, but maybe if I’m bored one day I’ll try and work out the potential economic impact within the context of that game (which obviously won’t necessarily have much to do with reality). I’d like to know more about the logistics of the Holocaust and its economic impact. I don’t how much has been written about that. It’s the sort of thing that some people might think was in bad taste.
You’re also right that moral lessons are a separate issue from practical lessons, and would need to be taught in different ways. TCATS is about strategy and needs to be approached without subjective value judgements in order to get anything useful out of it (and I don’t like the idea of schools teaching any kind of moral lessons anyway — ideological hegemony, repressive structures, live under your own law etc.).