Playing the Holocaust

Whether games can tackle one of history’s most sober subjects

Before there were trigger warnings and safe spaces, before there was even the notion that ideas could be so toxic as to prove dangerous, there was Mrs. Vetrone’s 7th grade English class, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Over a span of months that also featured the announcement of grownup hairs, the first fumblings of chat messenger cool, and a deeply unsatisfied desire to excel at lacrosse, Mrs. Vetrone introduced me — as graciously as any veteran educator could — to the problem of evil.

But enough about me. When did you learn about the Holocaust?

It’s a slippery question. Hitler and the Nazis might have always existed in your mind as an evocative force of evil. If you grew up alongside a Jewish community, as I did, abridged biographies offered additional clues. But cattle trains, crematoria, Arbeit Macht Frei — at some point, an adult sat you down and radically expanded your moral imagination.

Chances are they used literature to do it. While there is no universal syllabus for humanity’s greatest crimes — teaching the Holocaust at all is only mandated in seven U.S. states — most of our Mrs. Vetrones stuck to a tested method, pairing the historical record with the profusion of poetry, memoir and fiction that flowers in the wake of social calamity.

For everyone, but especially adolescents, the need to explore dark chapters through the prism of creative expression is obvious. World War II might be the province of history, but the human condition remains the object of art, and 7th graders across America are coming to grips with it every year.

Could a video game help?

Is it possible to play the Holocaust?

The question is almost offensive on its face; it even seems to fail semantically. The conditions required for play simply don’t exist in that context. You can’t “beat” the Holocaust: there’s no conceivable win situation. Escape? Survival? Any game that dared to give you an objective in a concentration camp wouldn’t just be tone deaf, but farcical.

And though a clear rules-based system governed the deportment and extermination of 11 million Jews, Poles, Slavs, Romani, and other minority groups — a system so fetishized that its very efficiency became the stuff of myth — it doesn’t provoke any kind of meaningful engagement. Just the opposite, really. From ghetto to grave, the fascist state stripped its victims of agency, humanity, mobility, and finally life; it was a system designed, if anything, to nullify engagement, to confiscate from the Jews every tool necessary to engage with the world.

When you add to those conceptual roadblocks the observation that video games are young, commercial, and trigger-happy, a Holocaust adventure title starts to sound like a totally bad idea.

So I was astonished to play one as brilliant as Inside.

Not that Inside claims to be about the Holocaust, or anything else. Its publisher’s description reads, in full, “Hunted and alone, a boy finds himself drawn into the center of a dark project”. It is wordless, textless, and just three hours long.

It’s also a platformer, the venerable game type familiar to most people. As in Super Mario Bros., you control a character — the boy in question — who runs, jumps, and interacts with objects on a two-dimensional plane. The gameplay consists of avoiding capture and solving puzzles to progress ever-rightward, towards an unknown fate.

The world you encounter along the way is detailed but placeless — a dreamlike dystopia that never quite feels anchored in reality. Its bleak color palette and industrial setting evoke a 20th century police state, but there are no explicit markers as to where or when you are, and many of its other elements are fantastical.

And yet the game is indisputably in conversation with the Holocaust from its opening minutes, when you take control of the gaunt, faceless boy at the edge of a forest.

Evading dogs and flashlights, you quickly learn that a single misstep can mean immediate death. Inside kills you so many times, and in so many ways, that it hardly bothers to punish you for it; the boy typically respawns just moments prior. Death starts to feel less like a failure then a setback, a brief frustration on your way to more baroque horrors.

As you leave the trees and cross into farmland you pass trucks and trains carrying unknown cargo. It occurs to you that you’re traveling in the opposite direction than makes sense — why did you leave the cover of forest for wide-open fields? Why do you have to continue forward at all, except that the game demands it?

The limitations of the platformer now seem thematic as well as aesthetic: there is only one possible way to go. There is only one possible way this ends.

That gnawing fear is fed on the outskirts of a city, where you encounter a line of people herding themselves into one of the cargo trucks. This group is unlike the one pursuing you; they are hangdog and lifeless, moving as if controlled by an unseen force, their bodies already requisitioned for some sinister purpose. It’s the first clear allusion that Inside makes to its unspoken source material: humans as cattle, borne to the slaughterhouse. Dead men walking.

You soon discover a means to control these bodies yourself, through the boy, and this ability underpins the game’s most fiendish puzzles. Venturing deeper into the city, you infiltrate a series of factories, and then a dense warren of underground labs. You move through massive theaters where scientists perform experiments on the bodies: drowning them, pulverizing them, marching them to brutal suicides — if they’re even still alive. And at the center of this hell, you locate the beating heart of the “dark project” that awaits you.

Inside’s third act ensures it a permanent place in the annals of gaming by ratcheting up every element to 11, producing a sequence so grotesque you’ll find yourself laughing — and meanwhile posing unanswerable questions about the nature of complicity and control.

But it’s the artistic gamble of the game itself that we should applaud: the audacity to translate the surreally playful language of Super Mario Bros. into a nightmarish allegory about one of the worst evils ever perpetrated. Inside makes you afraid without the artifice of dialogue or drama, without the canisters of Zyklon-B or the cool psychopathy of Ralph Fiennes. That doesn’t make it better, but it does make it interesting, and worthy of our time.

The ascendance of video games and the advent of virtual reality will push these topics into places that make people uncomfortable — but pop culture is already peppered with Holocaust schlock. It won’t be misguided efforts that trivialize history, but a complacency in how history is rendered.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Vetrone assigning Inside to her incoming class.

But I can imagine her playing it.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.