Museum-inspired Video Games as a Symbolic Transitional Justice Policy: Overview, Concepts and Research Directions

Abstract

Video games are maturing as a medium to tell stories inspired by historical struggles and real-life experiences. In this regard, they could work as a mechanism in Transitional Justice pursuit. In this paper, we argue that games can become agents for promoting education, reconciliation and healing. We hence identify means by which museums and video games create empathy, reported in recent literature, and draw inceptive parallels between museum space design philosophies and design choices in modern video game experiences. Finally, we identify in the literature that there is a lack of a framework bringing together experts in memory and heritage studies with game developers, to derive guidelines for developing empathy-inducing games around sensitive topics. Thus, we propose a methodological approach on the creation of such a framework. This framework would instrument a collaborative effort to apply domain adaptation of the strategies and design philosophies for memory and Transitional Justice museum exhibitions to video game storytelling frameworks and mechanics.