Europa was a Dogma 99 LARP run by the Scandinavian LARP group Weltschmerz in 2001, at a camp at Vestby, Norway, some kilometers south of Oslo. It took place in an alternate universe in which Scandinavia became something like the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia -- with hyper-nationalist governments, oppression of minorities, ethnic cleansing, and outright war. The camp became a refugee center in the peaceful, prosperous, and imaginary country of Orsinia, located somewhere in the Balkans, where the players had all fled, seeking asylum.
It should be noted that the actual players of the game were of mixed ethnicity -- many Norwegians, but also many Swedes (a bus from Stockholm was provided for Swedish players), and a sprinkling of Danes and Finns as well. Part of the process of character creation involved helping the players to imagine the atrocities perpetrated against their own ethnicity by the evil oppressors of the others, and giving them concrete reasons for their characters to hate those from other countries.
Some of the players (including, one assumes, many of the larpwrights) took the role of Orsinian refugee center employees, interviewing asylum seekers and applying their own bureaucratic rules. As is typical of all countries, the Orsinians were not eager to admit a bunch of destitute refugees, many of them traumatized by their experiences in the Nordic conflicts, and sought to deny refugee status to as many as feasible, sending them back to life in the wartorn Scandinavian countries. For greater similitude, the Orsinians themselves spoke mainly in "Orsinian, a Slavic language related to Russian" (that is, in Russian).
Players were expected to keep in character for the full four-day duration of the LARP. In keeping with Dogma 99's precepts, no game systems were used to simulate anything; violence was discouraged, but everything else must be acted out. The only constraints on this "hard core" roleplay were akin to bdsm safewords -- "off-game stop" being an emergency stop, and "off-game relax" being the equivalent of an "amber safeword," an injunction that limits are being neared and that care must be taken.
The materials available -- the player sourcebook and instructors' handbook -- are interesting, and could be used as the basis for a reimplementation -- but only hint at what the experience must have been like. A player's post mortem is helpful, but while it suggests that the event must have been emotionally impactful, and thought-provoking on the subjects of the treatment of refugees, the ease of inculcating hatred, and the inhumanity of bureaucracy, it again only hints rather than showing.
Of course, if you were to try to stage Europa again, you would have to modify it extensively, unless you are Scandinavian; you'd need to focus on a different set of differences, and a different backstory. It shouldn't be hard to find something reasonably equivalent anywhere, of course. Race is the obvious one for the US.
Reading through something like the Europa documents makes me despair of "games for change" types who want to explore issues like this and meaningfully impact peoples' attitudes with, say, Flash applications. Games can do this; games can be powerful. But not with a platformer, for God's sake. This is how it's done.
Communicating the
I think I know the kind of computer games Costik is alluding to.
Communicating the ramifications of conflict between members of distinct cultural entities, about resources and genetic propagation, manifesting via a wide range of verbal and physical interaction, with potential results including traumatic personal experiences and death, implemented on a medium limiting to interactivity and bad at reproducing even a single conscious entity, not a diverse cast of such -- no wonder it does not compute.
Most definitely no singleplayer computer game territory.
Yes, LARP and tabletop RPG as a medium can do it. Online social/community games can(could) also do it, and a rudimentary "Us vs. Them" aspect of it is present in MMORPGs featuring clans/guilds/factions, but purely revenue-driven mediums are targetting the lowest common denominator at what impulses and personal experiences they want to trigger in the players and will not attempt to communicate such lofty messages as the LARP game "Europa" supposedly did.
The terminology should be clarified, though -- while "Racism" is a good catchword/hook for attracting attention to a subject or article, in this case "xenophobia" would be a more accurate term, given that the conflict simulated in "Europa" is between different ethnic groups from the same continent and same major racial group.
Games for change
While I enjoyed learning about this game and the people who play it, I have trouble meeting you at your conclusion.
It seems to me that "Europa" might have about as many people playing it as a typical mountain will have people climbing it; it appeals only to a highly self-selecting group of individuals who are interested in grueling challenges, and have the resources to pursue them.
When you say "this is how it's done", referring to games that change public perception, how do you get around the fact that a game like this will have a very limited audience, whose experiences will be entirely subjective (and apparently go unrecorded)?
jmac: Your argument seems to
jmac: Your argument seems to be along the lines of "theater is not relevant because television reaches a bigger audience." Which strikes me as silly.
I wouldn't dismiss his
I wouldn't dismiss his argument, he's just asking about the other dimension. Depth vs. breadth. Something like this impacts dozens of people very deeply. Where's the design form that can work in Flash and impact millions of people in a non-trivial way, while admittedly not hitting home as deeply as this or say, Train?
"Race is the obvious one"
Actually I feel like immigration is more obvious and topical right now. In terms of reaching a broad audience... don't you think a large-scale game with a plotline in which a community degenerates into fascism in the name of preventing illegal immigration would generate a lot of press? Somebody needs to get on this ASAP. I'm sure something like this could give pause even to the likes of Roger Ebert before they assert that games can't be art, or even important.
Immigration
Yes, you are absolutely right. Race has longer and deeply uncomfortable roots in the American psyche, but the rednecks are going totally nuts over brown people without green cards right now, so immigration is the issue. Not that race doesn't play a role in that, of course.
I was less thinking of
I was less thinking of theater and more thinking of a group of ascetics meditating in isolation. "Europa", because of what it asks of its players, is played by very, very few people, apparently without either spectators or recorders. So when you point at it as a good example of games that can change peoples' thinking, I wonder which people you're talking about, exactly.
Do you mean the handful of super-hardcore LARPers who actively seek out (and even invent) games like this? I'm not sure that these folks have much need of a boost of social consciousness. Are you, rather, imagining that "Europa" might be played by other sorts of people, perhaps on a corporate retreat? I ask non-rhetorically; while I doubt it would work in a setting like that, I would be delighted to learn of a case where it did.
Further, if you allow that the ruleset itself, and knowledge about the game's existence (per articles like this one) are enough to get people thinking, then that's something else again.
Theater
Agreed, a one-time LARP reaches only a handful of people. But I don't see any reason we can't move to a theater-LARP hybrid with repeated performances and perhaps reach a larger number... This strikes me as a more sensible way to approach the problem than reskinning jejune arcade games with political "themes" that have no relevance to actual gameplay, which is what most political games seem to be.