Ready...  aim... choose:
Game designer Jens Stober presenting 1378 km
(Source for all but last photo: Berliner Morgenpost)

JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY WHO’S tried them derives pleasure from computer games or simulations of one kind or another, and of course we all need to brush up on our recent history, so why not combine the two? That’s what a computer design student in the German town of Karlsruhe thought. But the product of his labours, 1378 km, which was to be unveiled on Sunday to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of German reunification, has elicited nothing but horror and disgust from one end of the country to the other. Why? The game simulates the former inner-German border, and allows players to slip into the role of border guards and blow prospective “republic escapees,” as the communist regime used to call its refugees, to kingdom come.

Farmville it is not. The controversial game's title refers to the heavily fortified 1,378 km-long border that ran between East and West Germany and around the enclave of West Berlin until 1989. Designer Jens Stober (24), a student with a strong pedagogical impulse, apparently wished to make the cruelties and moral complexities of the Wall understandable to a new, computer-focused  generation that is only aware of such things from history books.

 
Players can choose to be either border guards or refugees

Stober's vivid and remarkably well-researched online game takes place in the year 1976 and entails two teams of up to sixteen players. One group represents a set of would-be refugees who wish to cross the inner-German border. The second group consists of East German border guards whose job is to stop them. The game provides for different forms of interaction. The guards can choose to speak to the refugees, arrest them, or even decide to join them in their flight westward. But they can also shoot the unarmed civilians on sight. If they do so, however, they do not receive a reward (they did in real life) but instead face a virtual murder trial set in the year 2000.

 
A game of cat...

A point system takes the political and social ramifications of this bizarre Cold War situation into account. The more people get shot at the wall, the greater the political pressure on the East German regime and the lower the points on the side of the border guard team. A virtual border guard who spares refugees’ lives wins points – in reality, of course, he would have suffered serious personal consequences for letting an escapee through.

So why isn’t anyone applauding? Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, is disgusted by the game, calling it “tasteless” and “inappropriate” as a means of teaching history. “The seriousness of what happened on the border in those days cannot be depicted like this.”

 
...and mouse.

The conservatives in the Bundestag were also quick to denounce the game last week: “The CDU/CSU Bundestag group condemns the development of the computer game 1378 km, which amounts to a virtual hunting down of GDR refugees along the death strip,” a speaker said. “For us, this macabre idea for a game represents an unspeakable mockery of the nearly 1,000 victims along the inner-German border and their survivors.”

For its part, the administration of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design defended the game at first, but finally realized that Stober had struck the wrong nerve. “A number of the press reports and personal letters to the university have shown us that victims of the deathly border and their friends and relatives feel offended by the game,” it said in an official statement. “The management of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design would like to express its regrets for this. … To further the purposes of objective discussion, we are postponing the date of the official release from October 3. We would like to offset this to a later date with an accompanying discussion of these issues. We will provide our student Jens M. Stober with every necessary support in this.”     

 
"Tasteless":
Axel Klausmeier of the Berlin Wall Foundation

Stober had already helped design a computer game called Frontiers concerning illegal immigration to “Fortress Europe.” It has attracted far less attention, even though it also entails the option of shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood.

Computer games have been used to teach history and to impose a certain world view on young people for years. Examples range from the entertaining Age of Empires and to the heavily ideological recruiting tool America's Army, all the way to such phenomena as the game Ethnic Cleansing, the creation of a neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance, in which players run through an inner city, collecting points as they murder minorities. As more and more such "serious games" appear, the debate over their value and appropriateness will continue.

Now I enjoy a good simulation or the occasional digital potshot as much as the next computer drone. But could it be that some games are too serious to be left to the toymakers?

 
Not a game:
East German border guards remove a dead
"republic escapee" from along the Berlin Wall in 1961
(Source: wiki)