Rosenstrasse

90% Funded & First Stretch Goal Targets Revealed!
about 5 years ago – Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 01:54:31 PM

Hello everyone,

Eleven days into the campaign, and we're now on the edge of our seats at the 90% funded mark! As we are that close, we wanted to share with you what is just over the horizon.

Our first stretch goal, The Rosenstrasse Companion will unlock at $22,500. This companion ebook is a collection of essays and insights from activists, historians, learning theorists and role-playing experts. The companion will be distributed to all backers at the $18 level and above, and will include:

• An essay on the Rosenstrasse protests from world-renowned historian Nathan Stoltzfus 
• An essay on the power dynamics of marriage from ground-breaking game designer Avery Alder 
• An essay on the role of games in activism from life-long non-profit leader Dana Gold 
• An essay on historical games from field-defining game researcher Kurt Squire 
• An essay on "upstander" education from innovative Holocaust educator Jackie Reese 
• An essay on perspective-taking from behavior change expert Geoff Kaufman 
• An essay on the value of retelling stories from trailblazing historical game designer Julia Ellingboe 
• An essay about developing empathy in games from pioneering scholar Karen Schrier 
• An essay on Jewishness and game design from not-so-secret superhero Benjamin Rosenbaum 
• A reprint of the Manifesto for a Ludic Century by designer-provocateur Eric Zimmerman 
• An essay on our research with Rosenstrasse, from the designers and research team 

At $25,000, we'll create a two-player version of the game that runs in two hours or less. We hope this version of the game will be particularly valuable to backers who plan on using the game as an educational tool, and or to players who are planning the game in limited time convention or festival slots. If we reach this goal, the two-player version of the game will be delivered digitally to all backers at the $18 level or above. 

Thanks to all backers for getting us so close to goal - we can taste the finish line from here!

Resistance is possible....

~Mo

A Special Day, A Special Visit
about 5 years ago – Sun, Mar 03, 2019 at 12:12:58 AM

Today is a very special day – the 76th anniversary of the beginning of the Rosenstrasse protests.

In honor of the anniversary, we wanted to tell you a bit more about our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday. It was a private event for museum educators and other staff, including exhibit designers and teacher trainers. We were incredibly grateful to be able to introduce Museum staff to our work and get their feedback.

In the morning, we gave a lecture about our work on Rosenstrasse. We started by explaining the game and how it is situated within a larger landscape of transformational game design, but the meat of our talk was about challenges related to game design and Holocaust education. 

To identify these challenges, we drew together the literature on simulations in Holocaust education with what’s already known about issues in educational game design. We came up with eight different challenges. For each one, we talked about how we addressed it through design, and what evidence we had from our playtesting and research that we’d done so successfully. 

These are the eight challenges we discussed:

1) Historical misconceptions. Players might learn incorrect information about history, or take the wrong lessons away from the game.

2) Over-identification. Players might think that they “really get it” because of their play experience, which is disrespectful to the survivors and victims of the Holocaust.

3) One-dimensionality. Players might stereotype or otherwise flatten the characters, particularly the Jewish characters.

4) Lack of context. Players might fail to situate the experiences of the characters in the larger context of German society, including the roles of bystanders and perpetrators.

5) Blaming the victims. Players might think that they could make better decisions than real people could have, and fail to understand that sometimes there were no good choices.

6) Unrealistic expectations. Players might try to solve in-game problems in ways that are inappropriate for the context or time period.

7) Inappropriate fun. Players might have playful or otherwise light-hearted experiences that could conflict with the seriousness of the topic.

8) Upsetting experience. Players might feel upset while dealing with intensely emotional themes and difficult subject matter, particularly if they have a personal stake in the Holocaust.

To get a sense of how we responded to these challenges as designers, we can look at “inappropriate fun” as an example. Mo and I decided that instead of trying to prevent players from having lighter experiences with the game, we actually wanted to build in moments of laughter, joy, and relief. Dread and tragedy need space to breathe or they don’t have the same emotional impact. Happy moments in the game amplify the game’s overall elegiac, tense feel; by inviting players to include those feelings when we wanted them included, we saw that players were willing to limit those types of fun to the scenes where they were welcome. We were even able to show evidence that players understood that joy and sorrow could live side by side in the same story.  

If you want to know a bit more about our lecture, here’s a link to our slides!

In the afternoon, we ran a demo of the game for museum staffers, with a Q&A session afterward. Our demo follows Max and Annaliese Edelman, who are the game’s romantic young lovers. In this demo run, Annaliese was quiet and nature-loving, while Max was boisterous and risk-taking; they tried to protect each other and care for each other, even in the most difficult of circumstances. It was a lovely interpretation of the characters and I really enjoyed spending time with them.

In the post-game discussion, we talked about the decision-making process involved for the players in individual scenes; how to facilitate post-game discussion effectively (how meta!); what it was like to run a game with observers in the room; why the game experience was different from a theatrical approach; how the game might scale; and more. One particularly interesting conversation was about how to communicate the reasons why people were complicit with the regime. We have some specific ways of addressing that in Rosenstrasse, such as the character arcs for Kurt and Inge Schmidt who are deeply invested in the status quo.

During our lunch break, we also got to tour the museum. I’ve been to a number of Holocaust museums and memorials, including Auschwitz and Yad Vashem; the main exhibit here included artifacts from Tarnów, where my grandmother grew up. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about the experience. It’s hard seeing your family’s history on display, even when it’s beautifully done.

Overall, it was a fantastic day and a very meaningful experience. We’re so grateful to the USHMM for hosting us, and we’re looking forward to continued conversations!

Resistance is possible,

Jess

Rosenstrasse at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum!
about 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 09:57:26 AM

Here’s our big news: we spent today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum!

We got to share our work on Rosenstrasse with some of the foremost Holocaust educators and researchers in the world. We also ran a demo and took a tour of the museum; we’ll have more details to share on Wednesday.

Before then, I wanted to tell you a bit about why today’s visit was important to me, over and above the impact of visiting the Smithsonian with our game. 

Rosenstrasse is dedicated to my grandmother, Helen Gartner Hammer. She survived five camps, including Auschwitz, and in part I created the game to honor her memory as a Holocaust survivor. But surviving isn’t the only reason I wanted to honor my grandmother with this game. She was an exceptionally brilliant, exceptionally compassionate woman who gave me a model for how to be both deeply Jewish and wisely engaged with the secular world. As I grow older, I see more and more how much I owe to her.

When I was growing up, I would get to visit her all by myself – no siblings allowed – for one week every summer. She would make me her special scrambled eggs and we’d watch Jeopardy together. (She knew all the right questions, but she’d let me guess first.) She showed me math tricks and hosted Seders and let me try on her perfume. She took me to the library and let me take out as many books as I could carry at a time. She handed me Plato’s Republic and talked me through the arguments in her thick accent, again and again until I understood. She taught me to imagine better worlds, and to ask how I could put them into practice in the smallest of actions today.

I miss her terribly, and I am so very glad to be able to dedicate this game to her memory. I’d like to think she would have been very proud of me today.

Fondly,

Jess

Farewell to Dreamation
about 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 09:57:18 AM

We're on our way out of Dreamation, and we were glad to see so many of you there!

Thursday night, we had the launch party for Rosenstrasse. While the subject matter of the game is solemn, we're happy and proud that we've been able to bring it to so many people. We were honored to celebrate with friends and fans. 

We also had four runs of the game, and were pleased to talk to players about the powerful experiences that they had. Even though the eight characters are the same in every game, there are differences in player interpretation, in the choices the characters make, and in the meaning that the group makes from it afterward.

I even got to tell the Rosenstrasse story to someone who'd never heard it before - a personal favorite experience! 

Tomorrow, Mo and I are going on an incredibly exciting adventure related to the game. We can't wait to share the news with you!

Until then, 

Jess

What is playing Rosenstrasse like?
about 5 years ago – Sat, Feb 23, 2019 at 02:46:42 PM

Hello everyone!

57 hours into the campaign and we are already 72% funded! We are very excited to be getting closer to our funding goal and are so thankful to those of you who have backed us and are helping make our dream come true. 

For our first exploratory update, we thought we should shine a light on the play experience of Rosenstrasse. When we were guests at IndieCade 10 and Meaningful Play, we found that while many people were sold on the idea that games are an excellent medium to explore and teach serious subject matter, they were often surprised to find out that Rosenstrasse wasn't a video game or a board game. At roleplaying game conventions we often find the opposite: people who understand how tabletop or live action roleplaying games work but often blink when they find out that we are using the medium to explore subject matter as serious as the Holocaust. So we knew that people would want to know more about what it was like to play.

So, what does the game look like when it is playing? This can vary from one run to another because it is set up to be played either as a live action game (also known as a "chamber larp" where players physically move and interact as if they were the characters) or as a  tabletop game (where players stay seated through the game, narrate any actions that their character might be taking, but speak as if they were the character). In the video below, you can see some actual scenes being played and see what those different play modes look like.  

What happens in the game? Early on, the characters start to develop relationships. They get a chance to see each other as people before the shadow of the Third Reich came to Berlin, they flirt, fall in love, come to know each other, they making connections, they plan for the future. As they do, players start to get more and more expressive when playing them. You can see the investment in their character's identity develop and how their reactions to what is happening become genuinely held. We like to say its feels like living 10 years of a marriage in 4 hours.

And what is the tone of the game? Over time, the emotional tension continues to relentlessly increase. As the Reich becomes more oppressive, the act of reaching for a new scene card takes on a sense of foreboding. It's not uncommon for players to hold their breath while waiting for a scene to be introduced, to let out a sigh of relief when the scene concludes, or even tear up like one might while watching a movie. When leaning on each other to cope with the increasing pressures, character relations deepen - and with them player relationships do too. At the end of the game, it's not unusual for players to express deep gratitude to one another, or even share a hug.

And after it's over, how do players describe their experience? Players describe the game as being full of intense emotions such as fear, love, despair, hope, terror and pride. They have described the experience as "like living through a novel" or as if they "felt like a character in a heartbreaking movie". Many people have contacted us months, or even years later to tell us that they still think of the game - and of the characters in Berlin they once spent some time being.

I hope that this helps you understand a little more of what Rosenstrasse is like to play!

We'll be revealing our stretch goal targets very soon. We really hope that they will be realized as we think they will add a lot to the game overall. Please share the link to the campaign to help us get the word out!

Best,

~Moyra