Two alternate history game ideas I’ve come up with are:
Tokyo Trial
In 2006 the anonymous game developer/social critic operating under the username OMpastor adapted the game Ace Attorney in 2006 to recreate the 1946-48 war crimes tribunal in Japan named “The International Military Tribunal for the Far East”looking at the Japanese war crimes of attacking America, rape/torture and starving of civilians, POW’s and nurses, the rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, the human experimentation/torture conducted by unit 731, the Thai Burma railway and the rape camps built in China and Korea.
The mod was noted at the time for its incredibly dark subject matter with many news organisations questioning whether this game experience was the right medium to communicate information of this importance or if it risked trivialising the subject matter and disrespecting the survivors.
In an anonymous interview conducted by The Atlantic OMpastor said their motives for creating the game mod were to:
“Fight the historical revisionism of Japanese society and increase awareness of historical war crimes.”
The Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and minister for culture at the time Bunmei Ibuku criticized the mod for rewriting history and corrupting the minds of the youth.
This mod became a battlefield in this timeline’s incredibly incendiary and toxic online culture war in Japan over how their understanding of the past should be built and how this relates to other countries selective memories of history.
The mod and game however were and continue to be widely praised by legal experts and historians for challenging war crime denial, increasing knowledge and interest in history and challenging standards of what games should and shouldn’t do.
Consequences
In 2016 Ubisoft released the now famous game Consequences. *
Set in Berlin the open world life simulator places the player in the suit of Jana Liekam ** a straight shooting young stock trader as she navigates the city of Berlin (and for short missions/quests in other indoor/office settings in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, London, Paris, New York, Singapore) between 2015 and 2035.
A deliberate choice was made early on to reduce the amount of content discussing nazi’s/nazism was made by the team who during and after a two-month 2012 research/inspiration visit decided to focus more on depicting the city as a multicultural metropolis with unique and interesting cultures and subcultures.
Over the 20-year timespan of the Plot the player as Jana decides what industries to invest money in/what actions to take and to what degree should she throw her hand in at the job. The player is incentivised to be careful and read up as much as possible about the client/company she is dealing with so as to achieve the most beneficial outcome.
Additionally, dialogue options with various characters allow the player to intervene to either save or ruin marriages, business opportunities and more of the 180 NPC’s with this option each correspond to a/multiple physical locations, a radio frequency and other NPC’s.
These choices effect Berlin and the world (as reported on new/over the radio) in a myriad of ways occasionally being beneficial one time jump and catastrophic the next or vice versa. Potentially dangerous effects are well foreshadowed, so the effects don’t seem forced or pointlessly contrarian (for example In the hilarious 2020 boardroom meeting between Jana and the chief of the solar company It is strongly hinted that the CEO x is on cocaine. The revelation in 2030 that he bankrupted the company investing in tide energy generation technology from Mongolia is thus more of a facepalm moment than a unforeseeable nerf.
The butterfly effects of the convergence of Jana’s choices result in various events and status quos. These status quos vary from a Solar-Punk anarchist Utopian Berlin without poverty and violence to a crime-riddled, surveillance heavy, economically lifeless shadow of its former self. Events Influenced/made/unmade by Jana include terrorist attacks, runs on banks, natural disasters, music festivals, weddings, the openings of businesses and public institutions all of which Jana has the opportunity to interact with/ignore when it occurs.
Left on its own the world naturally deteriorates into the third darkest timeline.
The Game ends with Jana a 50-year-old as a person somewhere between a granite hearted soulless profiteer and a Moses figure guiding Berlin into a brighter future.
It came out to mixed reviews due to a multitude of glitches and bugs reducing the profits of the initial release.
The two most horrifying/entertaining of these were:
As a nod to Berlins historical and modern drug culture each time zone had a different form of mental stimulant opening different mini-game. These mini-games ranged from what was termed “a boring Donkey-Kong jumping up stair mini-game” to the highlight as many gamers saw it of the “Giant Robot Machine-Gun spider!”.
Easter eggs hidden in the game were graffiti and a side mission with the Assassins brotherhood and a 3000-word rant complaint about crunch culture/low pay in the game development industry is hidden in the dialogue of the weed grower Lina Bergmann.
While the game had a strong anti-fascist flavour in terms of its depictions of neo-nazis as pathetic try-hard’s and the anarchists who opposed them as cool as ice. Because of the setting many alt-righters began posting screenshots from the game in black and white with nazi slogans and iconography eventually collating this archive into the sub-reddit “janazi”.
Many internet users meme how Jana is the MVP/ is carrying the city of Berlin and how her constant effort to save her city makes her the German Batman. Contrasting her negatively with the citizens of Berlin who they frame as similar to Tamagotchi pets in terms of helplessness/neediness.
* Replacing OTL’s Watch Dogs
** I really enjoyed the German tv show Bad Banks
Tokyo Trial
In 2006 the anonymous game developer/social critic operating under the username OMpastor adapted the game Ace Attorney in 2006 to recreate the 1946-48 war crimes tribunal in Japan named “The International Military Tribunal for the Far East”looking at the Japanese war crimes of attacking America, rape/torture and starving of civilians, POW’s and nurses, the rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, the human experimentation/torture conducted by unit 731, the Thai Burma railway and the rape camps built in China and Korea.
The mod was noted at the time for its incredibly dark subject matter with many news organisations questioning whether this game experience was the right medium to communicate information of this importance or if it risked trivialising the subject matter and disrespecting the survivors.
In an anonymous interview conducted by The Atlantic OMpastor said their motives for creating the game mod were to:
“Fight the historical revisionism of Japanese society and increase awareness of historical war crimes.”
The Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and minister for culture at the time Bunmei Ibuku criticized the mod for rewriting history and corrupting the minds of the youth.
This mod became a battlefield in this timeline’s incredibly incendiary and toxic online culture war in Japan over how their understanding of the past should be built and how this relates to other countries selective memories of history.
The mod and game however were and continue to be widely praised by legal experts and historians for challenging war crime denial, increasing knowledge and interest in history and challenging standards of what games should and shouldn’t do.
Consequences
In 2016 Ubisoft released the now famous game Consequences. *
Set in Berlin the open world life simulator places the player in the suit of Jana Liekam ** a straight shooting young stock trader as she navigates the city of Berlin (and for short missions/quests in other indoor/office settings in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, London, Paris, New York, Singapore) between 2015 and 2035.
A deliberate choice was made early on to reduce the amount of content discussing nazi’s/nazism was made by the team who during and after a two-month 2012 research/inspiration visit decided to focus more on depicting the city as a multicultural metropolis with unique and interesting cultures and subcultures.
Over the 20-year timespan of the Plot the player as Jana decides what industries to invest money in/what actions to take and to what degree should she throw her hand in at the job. The player is incentivised to be careful and read up as much as possible about the client/company she is dealing with so as to achieve the most beneficial outcome.
Additionally, dialogue options with various characters allow the player to intervene to either save or ruin marriages, business opportunities and more of the 180 NPC’s with this option each correspond to a/multiple physical locations, a radio frequency and other NPC’s.
These choices effect Berlin and the world (as reported on new/over the radio) in a myriad of ways occasionally being beneficial one time jump and catastrophic the next or vice versa. Potentially dangerous effects are well foreshadowed, so the effects don’t seem forced or pointlessly contrarian (for example In the hilarious 2020 boardroom meeting between Jana and the chief of the solar company It is strongly hinted that the CEO x is on cocaine. The revelation in 2030 that he bankrupted the company investing in tide energy generation technology from Mongolia is thus more of a facepalm moment than a unforeseeable nerf.
The butterfly effects of the convergence of Jana’s choices result in various events and status quos. These status quos vary from a Solar-Punk anarchist Utopian Berlin without poverty and violence to a crime-riddled, surveillance heavy, economically lifeless shadow of its former self. Events Influenced/made/unmade by Jana include terrorist attacks, runs on banks, natural disasters, music festivals, weddings, the openings of businesses and public institutions all of which Jana has the opportunity to interact with/ignore when it occurs.
Left on its own the world naturally deteriorates into the third darkest timeline.
The Game ends with Jana a 50-year-old as a person somewhere between a granite hearted soulless profiteer and a Moses figure guiding Berlin into a brighter future.
It came out to mixed reviews due to a multitude of glitches and bugs reducing the profits of the initial release.
The two most horrifying/entertaining of these were:
- The audio file of an erotic moan (originally from a brothel) being released from Jana’s mentor figure when she interacts with him
- People, objects, newspapers, calendars and radio broadcasts from mismatched years/timelines coexisting in the same map (prompting theories of Jana suffering from mental illnesses, the time-stream being damaged, magic or her being trapped in Hell/purgatory).
As a nod to Berlins historical and modern drug culture each time zone had a different form of mental stimulant opening different mini-game. These mini-games ranged from what was termed “a boring Donkey-Kong jumping up stair mini-game” to the highlight as many gamers saw it of the “Giant Robot Machine-Gun spider!”.
Easter eggs hidden in the game were graffiti and a side mission with the Assassins brotherhood and a 3000-word rant complaint about crunch culture/low pay in the game development industry is hidden in the dialogue of the weed grower Lina Bergmann.
While the game had a strong anti-fascist flavour in terms of its depictions of neo-nazis as pathetic try-hard’s and the anarchists who opposed them as cool as ice. Because of the setting many alt-righters began posting screenshots from the game in black and white with nazi slogans and iconography eventually collating this archive into the sub-reddit “janazi”.
Many internet users meme how Jana is the MVP/ is carrying the city of Berlin and how her constant effort to save her city makes her the German Batman. Contrasting her negatively with the citizens of Berlin who they frame as similar to Tamagotchi pets in terms of helplessness/neediness.
* Replacing OTL’s Watch Dogs
** I really enjoyed the German tv show Bad Banks
