Forbidden Games: Worse Than Hitler

Chat about Genocide and Hitler and public education ahead! Bail out now if ya wanna!

There’s a game idea I’ve had kicking around now for about a month, and I keep talking about it and thinking about it in private places, with single people at a time, and never find myself at a satisfactory place with it.

The game is called Worse Than Hitler, and it’s designed to be something like Blackjack, where players are building scores out of atrocities committed in history that are measurable in scale to the things done by Hitler and his regime. While the idea is definitely coming from a comical perspective, where the common hyperoblic phrase ‘worse than Hitler’ is used to kick off the idea, the mechanic behind the game was to try and put the scale of terrible things done by the world’s governments and our historical experiences into some sort of perspective.

Basically every one of us lives on stolen land, and those who don’t are a vanishing minority. There’s enough Australian genocides of whole tribes of Aboriginal people, dating back to the seventies, so, not that long ago, that you could probably make an entire deck of Worse Than Hitler cards based entirely on the things done here. And we have, weirdly, so many vanished genocides, all these terrible things done, across the world’s cultures, that we sort of shuffle away and pretend didn’t happen, because Hitler somehow claimed the Genocide Crown.

But I’m told, when this idea comes up, that this topic is not appropriate to make games about. I’m told that there’s something inherently wrong about making this game. It’s an interesting thought: The topics we shouldn’t make games about.

I make, as it seems, a lot of games about crime. I’ve made games about oppression and about queerness and about gender. I’ve made games that want to try and instil some educational perspective, or help people think about things differently.

And the thing I wanted to do with Worse Than Hitler was decompartmentalise the way we culturally regard Nazism as a problem that happened Over There, and its actions were the one time the human race got really bad. Gaming loves treating Hitler as special and exceptional and a sort of high water mark for terrible evil. In superhero games, inevitably the question of ‘what about the Nazis’ comes up and you wind up with a Nazi super-science goofus space, or something like that.

What makes this stranger is the people I know who have been warning me against making this game are people who I know love games like The Old Blood. That is to say, A game that lets you use the Nazis as fodder for a power fantasy is fine, but a game that contextualises the actions of other governments in comparison to the Nazis makes me uncomfortable.

I’m still not sure I even want to make Worse Than Hitler. I don’t have the art assets or the background in history to really make a good, meaningful and comprehensive list for what is, essentially, a Blackjack Variant.Now, it’s more interesting to me the way people react to the idea of it than react to the game itself.