The three-year project consortium Mementoes met last week in the Greek city of Heraklion. The project combines museum experts and researchers with programmers and video game development experts. Representatives from eight partner organizations, including the War Childhood Museum, attended the meeting to discuss the progress of developing video games for three European museums.
Together with the team members from the award-winning indie game studio Charles Games from Prague, Jasminko Halilović (founder and CEO of WCM) and Fernanda Flores (WCM collection manager) presented in Heraklion the prototype of the WCM game, tentatively titled “Toys.” It is an exploration educational game based on the testimonies of people who grew up during wartime, preserved in the museum’s archives.
The meeting also featured games intended for the Bois du Cazie Museum in Belgium and the virtual museum of the Czech association Gulag.cz. The first of them, titled “Those from Below” focuses on the horrifying mining accident that occurred in the Belgian city of Marcinelle in 1956, while the second, “Gulag Diaries,” is dedicated to researching the complex of forced labor concentration camps and prisons, considered synonymous with the totalitarian regime of the USSR.
“This project aims to offer new tools and frameworks for future exploration of games as tools for raising historical awareness and empathy, as well as the ability of games to result in attitude change in players,” stated Jasminko Halilović, War Childhood Museum Founder and CEO.
Click here to learn more about the Mementoes project.
