A game available for free
“The Light in the Darkness” is currently available for PC (on Xbox later this year) for free on the Epic Games online store.
A will of its French creator. Luc Bernard hopes, with this work of memory, to reach a greater number: “It’s free because I want people who live in rural areas or disadvantaged areas to learn regarding the Holocaust. If you look, we put all of our effort into museums, which are great, but it’s only a small population, a small percentage of the population that can go to museums, or even meet survivors.“
This video game creator has also extensively documented to make this game by consulting the archives, but also by collectingtestimonies of survivors.
Given this harsh reality, the game is limited to over 16s.
Changing mindsets
In 2008, Luc Bernard had already tried to release a video game on the same theme with “Imagination Is The Only Escape”, but this had provoked an outcry judging the world of video games too little serious to address such a theme.
But in a few years, mentalities have changed, believes Bjorn-Olav Dozo, professor of playful video culture at the University of Liège (ULiège): “For a long time, the Shoah was the symbol of the unspeakable, the unrecountable, which might not be conveyed by words, whereas there are a great many texts which speak of the Shoah. Here, it is undoubtedly the first time that a game has tackled this theme in such a frontal manner. Then I don’t know if we can say that we are breaking taboos, but this game is the extension of a change in the status and legitimacy of video games which is now recognized as being able to support this type of discourse.“
And to add that the idea that video games are a medium that pushes to unsociability and a certain form of violence, is over. “Today, the video game has entered the museum, the university. It has become a cultural practice, a sufficiently legitimate cultural object to assume more serious discourses. Especially since “lhe video game is a cultural object fully invested by the youngest, so it is important that it can talk regarding the world and the world in all its complexity.“
