A Video Game About Gulag Archaeology and the Memoirs of Women Prisoners

Video games can be an effective medium for attaining learning goals, going beyond the function of entertainment. They also offer people an opportunity to virtually explore past an present sites of historic importance. With the growing popularity of video games comes the need for developing more inclusive content, embracing the medium's diverse audience, and engaging them in more serious narratives. In this paper, we present the design of a video game with the purpose of memorializing the victims of the the Gulag prison-labor system, particularly, women. Grounded in the principles of human-centered design, we employed collaborative and inclusive tools to facilitate the direct engagement of historians in the game's design. Through a series of co-creation workshops, history experts, video game developers and human-computer interaction designers established a platform for exchanging knowledge and sharing ideas, which led to a collective understanding of the game's historical argument, and the game features elected to convey it. Thus, in this paper, the resulting prototype video game is presented, along with insight into the iterative collaborative process itself, whereby we distill our experience into higher-level takeaways, with hopes of informing similar interdisciplinary game design undertakings.