From conflict zones to coal mines and jail camps, a brand new era of video video games helps museums deliver historical past to life and attain audiences far past their partitions.
What does conflict appear to be by the eyes of a kid? For these far faraway from battle, it may be exhausting to think about. A brand new narrative journey sport, We Grew Up in Conflict, units out to reply that query by the tales of Mak, Anna, Valerie and Melisa.
Co-developed by Prague-based studio Charles Video games and the Conflict Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the sport attracts on actual testimonies from youngsters who grew up in battle.
The museum, based within the aftermath of Bosnia’s 1992–95 conflict, is constructing one of many world’s largest archives on wartime childhood. The establishment is a part of Websites of Conscience, a worldwide community of organisations that confront tough pasts to foster dialogue.
The sport displays that work, providing a document of occasions, but additionally a window into how conflict feels from a toddler’s perspective.
We Grew Up in Conflict just isn’t a traditional sport: there isn’t any scoring, advancing or profitable. It attracts on the actual experiences of youngsters rising up in battle zones, with a concentrate on Bosnia and Ukraine, utilizing immersive wartime sketches to deliver their tales to life and foster empathy and consciousness amongst gamers.
This method is a part of a broader EU-funded analysis effort referred to as MEMENTOES, the place museums, historians and sport builders discover how video video games can inform tough tales from the previous and attain audiences past conventional exhibitions.
They use digital actuality and different immersive strategies to make painful histories extra tangible for gamers.
“The sport just isn’t solely about struggling or portraying survivors as victims,” mentioned Jasminko Halilović, founder and director of the Sarajevo museum, which focuses on childhood experiences in wartime. “Additionally it is about household life, friendships, training, and having goals and hopes.”
A brand new strategy to inform outdated tales
Museums have lengthy grappled with the best way to talk complicated and sometimes traumatic histories. By way of the MEMENTOES collaboration, researchers from Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Greece, Eire and the Netherlands got down to take a look at whether or not video video games may present a brand new means of reaching a wider – and youthful – viewers.
We Grew Up in Conflict is considered one of a number of titles developed by the MEMENTOES group, which introduced collectively curators, researchers and sport designers.
Mission coordinator Nikolaos Dimitriou, a senior researcher on the Centre for Analysis & Expertise Hellas (CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece, was a bit sceptical at first, however intrigued by the thought of interactive storytelling.
“After I was youthful, I performed video video games only for enjoyable,” he mentioned. “In some unspecified time in the future I believed I used to be spending an excessive amount of time on them. However that is totally different. It’s like taking a historical past class, however in a extra partaking means.”
Getting into the previous
Alongside We Grew Up in Conflict, the MEMENTOES group produced two different very totally different sport experiences. One in all them, These From Under, makes use of digital actuality to revisit the 1956 mining catastrophe in Marcinelle, Belgium.
Developed with Causa Creations, alongside enter from the Le Bois du Cazier museum in Marcinelle, one other Web site of Conscience within the community, and family of the victims, it locations gamers contained in the coal mine, confronting them with the tough realities confronted by the miners.
One other sport, Gulag Diaries, takes gamers to Soviet-era pressured labour camps in Siberia.
It was developed by researchers on the Institute of Pc Science of the Basis for Analysis & Expertise – Hellas (ICS-FORTH), in collaboration with Gulag.cz, a Czech-based analysis and academic initiative that paperwork the historical past of the labour camps (gulags) by expeditions, survivor testimonies and digital reconstructions.
Based mostly on a real-life expedition and historic knowledge from Gulag.cz, the sport follows a researcher on a visit into the Siberian wilderness to discover the stays of a fictional Gulag, connecting gamers with the experiences of victims.
“The participant finds objects left behind by the prisoners,” mentioned Stavroula Ntoa, who led the scientific work of the undertaking. “Every merchandise reveals a private story, serving to gamers perceive what life was like in these camps.”
Strolling a skinny line
Utilizing video games to discover delicate historic matters comes with its personal challenges. In contrast to conventional displays, video games are interactive, and that raises questions on tone, accuracy and respect. It may be a really superb line to tread.
“What we attempt to do within the sport is identical as in our exhibitions: present how complicated these experiences are,” mentioned Halilović. However putting the precise steadiness just isn’t at all times straightforward.
“One of many challenges was to not ‘gamify’ the expertise an excessive amount of,” Ntoa mentioned. “The purpose wasn’t to make it enjoyable. It was to make it partaking and a worthwhile studying expertise.”
Reaching that steadiness required shut collaboration between builders, historians and the individuals whose tales impressed the video games.
“Whenever you use actual testimonies, they’re distinctive and may change into identifiable,” Halilović defined. “We labored carefully with contributors to make sure they have been comfy with how their tales have been offered.”
Extra than simply data
The video games have interaction guests and convey historic injustices into focus. “Video games are an incredible software to make cultural heritage tangible, accessible and memorable to the general public,” mentioned Dimitriou.
However their actual energy might lie in constructing empathy – by placing gamers in another person’s footwear and letting them expertise occasions from the within.
“If gamers can perceive the layered penalties of conflict for kids, we additionally hope that it helps them recognize the significance of peace,” Halilović mentioned.
Early findings counsel that this method can have an actual impression. In some circumstances, researchers discovered that partaking secondary faculty college students in We Grew Up in Conflict may change their attitudes in the direction of refugees.
And the teachings discovered will not be confined to the previous.
“These points will not be simply historic,” Dimitriou mentioned. “Youngsters are nonetheless rising up in conflict zones in the present day. Serving to individuals relate to these experiences is essential.”
Past the museum go to
Though the analysis collaboration behind these video games wrapped up in 2025, the work is way from over. We Grew Up in Conflict is ready for wider launch, together with an academic version and a business model on the Steam online game platform.
For Halilović, the potential goes nicely past a single undertaking.
“Due to the sport, individuals anyplace on the planet can now have interaction with our assortment,” he mentioned. “That was not attainable earlier than.”
As museums search for new methods to attach with audiences, digital instruments have gotten more and more necessary, in keeping with efforts throughout Europe to digitise cultural heritage and make it extra broadly accessible.
Video games are beginning to play a key position in that shift, particularly once they draw on immersive applied sciences and wealthy digital archives to hold the museums’ messages into gamers’ properties and lecture rooms.
“They permit us to increase our tales past museum partitions,” Halilović mentioned. “And to succeed in individuals who would possibly by no means in any other case stroll by our doorways.”
This text was initially revealed in Horizon, the EU Analysis and Innovation Journal.
