(Jewish Group) What happens when you turn the Holocaust into a video game?
For many non-gamers, video games are associated with light entertainment, scoring games and a sense of escapism. French-British video designer Luc Bernard is challenging this notion with “The Light in the Darkness” – which he says is the first video game to portray the Holocaust accurately.
Bernard, 36, is best known for creating the video games “Death Tales,” “Eternity’s Child” and “Mecho Wars,” and charity games like “Kitten Squad” for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He acknowledges that while there are “a lot of preconceptions about video games and the gaming community,” things have changed as the genre has evolved. “First, video games today aren’t just ‘shoot ’em ups’ and don’t necessarily have a goal. Many games are more like an interactive film.”
His long-gestating new video game tells the story of a working-class family of Polish Jews living in France: Moses, his wife Bluma, their son Samuel, non-Jewish neighbor Maria and Bernard, a Sephardi Jew from colonized Algeria. All the characters are playable, and the game goes through scenes from the start of the war in 1939 until the Vélodrome d’Hiver (or “Vél d’Hiv”) Roundup – the largest French deportation of Jews, which took place in Paris on July 16-17, 1942.
“There is no winning,” Bernard says of his game, which is set to debut on X Box and Windows in 2023. “It’s about embodying these characters and the lack of control they as Jews had during that time.”
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