Confronting Hatred in the Social Media Age

Confronting Hatred in the Social Media Age

Gamification Ideas for US Holocaust Museum

George Santayana

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

Opportunity

• For many young people around the world, World War II and the Holocaust are events, which happened “like a century ago” and are often taught through mere black and white photographs or textbook facts about “bad guys” vs “good guys”

• Current international conflicts and civilian deaths are often presented by the media as “yet another 10 people killed in conflict X” compared to domestic deaths and tragedies

• Online discussions are full of misguided propaganda, which are hard to distinguish from factual information

Follow the clues

• Create several fictional Twitter accounts with real people who lived during the Holocaust. Tweet out their diary entries and other trip notes before and after they were taken to concentration camps (or oversaw them as guards). These could be partially fictional if we don’t know the information. Over time, this can be expanded to other conflicts in the 20th and 21st century.

• Challenge players around the world to identify and explore where these people came from and what happened to them based on clues in the tweets. Tweets don’t have to be in chronological order to make it challenging.

• The goal is to help people understand survivors and victims of conflicts have their own human stories. And so do the “bad guys”.

Selfie from a Future Past• Publish photos online of civilian locations during World War II and

ask people to find the real-world location today and take a picture there. People receive points when they add a photo and a special bonus points every time an administrator or other users approve the photo. Over time, the players can unlock special badges for finding locations, which weren’t known even to the owner of the photograph.

• People can also socialize and join into teams to work together on finding the locations. Some photos might only be unlocked if several other photos in the area are unlocked. This would encourage more people to work together and find more. Online leaderboards could help you compare with your friends on Facebook.

• This activity can even be done in the opposite order by publishing photos of current conflict locations and challenging people around the world to find pre-conflict pictures to show the impact conflicts have on regular citizens.

Papers from the sky

• Divide people into groups (ideally in-person) and give them newspaper cutouts or snippets of text. Tell them they are reading anti-Semitic or anti-German propaganda dropped from planes. They will need to identify which were written during WWII and which were written in the 21st century (these could be anti-US sentiments in current day Iraq with the word “USA” replaced with “Germany” or something similar) The purpose is to show that propaganda still exists today.

• Every correct answer will give the players a point. The teams can use their mobile phones to discover who wrote the text and for whom. The team receiving the most points in 15 minutes wins. Rules can of course be modified to fit the situation.

The Rigged Deck

• Design a custom card game where one player plays for an oppressive government and the other for an oppresed minority. This could be Nazi Germany vs Holocaust victims but could also be applied to other past and present goverments (US or USSR during the Cold War)

• The government cards and special powers will be rigged and will be able to overpower the other cards without much effort

• After playing several times, the players will review what happened and work together to design a more balanced deck. In the process they might learn about designing more balanced state.

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