Weimar Festival explores history through analog and digital games

The 18th edition of the international festival ‘Weimarer Rendezvous mit der Geschichte’ is featuring a dedicated day for analog and digital games as a method of historical education. The event highlights how games, alongside books and television, influence the transmission of historical knowledge.

Scheduled for October 31, the ‘History Games Lab’ at the Mon Ami Cultural Center will allow participants to test various titles. These include ‘SOKO 1977’, a video game developed for the Federal Agency for Civic Education where players act as police investigators in 1970s Germany, and ‘Bureaukratopoly’, a board game created in 1983 by physicist and civil rights activist Martin Böttger to critique the GDR’s bureaucratic apparatus.

The festival includes over 40 events running until November 1, focusing on themes such as artificial intelligence in research, Holocaust remembrance, and family connections to the Nazi era.