A few years ago, I met Brenda Braithwaite at a Cyberlore company picnic, when Cyberlore was working on the Playboy game, and Brenda was pregnant with twins. After we all ate, she told me — in no uncertain terms — that I was going to sit back down and let the men clean everything up. So if I wasn’t already impressed with her contributions to game design, she also encouraged me to sit around while Stick picks up after me. Score!

This article a few months ago in The Escapist, called How a Board Game Can Make You Cry discussed Brathwaite’s shift from computer games to board games, and creating emotional, educational unplugged games. The whole article is worth reading, especially if you’re interested in bringing games into the classroom, and not just as a reward for completing traditional assignments, but one part really stuck out.

The object of [Braithwaite's new game] Train is to get a collection of people from Point A to Point B by placing them in a boxcar and sending them on their merry way. Played among a group of three people, players draw cards from a pile that can impede other players or free them from existing obstacles. The first player to reach the end of the line wins.

The destination? Auschwitz.

Although the pieces are little plastic men in little plastic train cars, this game is creepy in a way that videogames with ever-more realistic gore cannot be.  By having players share their game goal with Nazi officers, this game evokes our own individual connections to the Holocaust.

I love the idea of an interactive educational aid that doesn’t try to cram facts into an existing game format. (Full disclosure: I have done flashcard Memory and Go Fish quite a few times in my classroom, and last year I introduced Vocabulary Survivor. I don’t mean to mock putting together flashcard games or study-question games, of course, but there’s a world of difference between blackboard Jeopardy and Train.)  I love that Train makes emotional points with a history lesson instead of distilling it to a list of dates and names, and it makes me wonder what other concepts would lend themselves to similar lessons.

Train doesn’t seem to have any replay value, except for a history teacher “playing” it with a new class every year, because it’s more of a shock, a gotcha moment when you realize what you’ve done. It is interactive and emotional, but I hesitate to call Train a game. It would be best described as interactive lesson, an experiment.

While I see Train as a classroom aid to give the numbers and dates of World War II a memorable, emotional tie, I’d really like to point out the reaction that Amanda d’Adesky, anothing game dev, posted on her blog. d’Adesky titled the post “The One Who Wept”:

As Brenda described the objective of the game, which was to get all your pieces from Point A to Point B, I became misty-eyed. She explained, “You see, I had made the pieces just a hair too tall to fit through the doors easily. Because of this, some players opened up the end of the boxcars and began “stuffing” the people inside to make them fit better.” That was when the first tears started silently streaming down my face. And when she said, “It wasn’t until someone ‘won’ that the destination was revealed: They had just shipped all those people to Auschwitz,” it was all I could do not to openly sob.

I’ve often written here contesting the idea that violent games cause real-life violence. I believe that angry people choose violent games, not that violent games bring out the crazy in nice boys, but I also think that we cannot ignore that games do cause an emotional reaction. That simulated destruction can be cathartic, a way to blow off steam, not to encourage real violence.

An emotional reaction from a game doesn’t have to be disturbing, of course. Why not use the increasingly realistic Sims to practice other stages of life? We focus on guts and explosions so often, when the same tech also lends itself to building fantasy worlds with believable, engaging relationships.

It’s also worth noting that Braithwaite chose a board game format. A demo showing the games’ simple rules and simple plastic pieces brought d’Adesky to tears. When was the last time a PowerPoint made you cry?

I still think Train is more of a shock than a game, game pieces and rules setting up to an emotional suckerpunch, but it reminds me what can be done with simple mechanics.  It’s disappointing to see so many new computer games becoming shooter clones, hidden object clones, or churned-out sequels of successful games, and it’s so good to be reminded of the possibilities for educational and artistic simulations.

Quoted text via The Escapist : TGC 2009: How a Board Game Can Make You Cry, and Sojourn In A Game Tester’s Headspace

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