Rosenstrasse
Playtesting and investigating a game about untold history and activism
The Challenge
Rosenstrasse is a tabletop game about Jewish-Aryan marriages during the Holocaust. I led playtesting of the unpublished game for design fixes. More importantly, we wanted to deeply explore how the innovative design elements linked to individual and group play outcomes, such as historical learning and activism (for academic publishing).
The Research
I designed the study and managed undergraduate research assistants. We used observational playtesting methods as well as in-depth group interviews directly after (4-hour-long!) gameplay.
Through a qualitative analysis in Atlas.ti, I linked game design elements to patterns of player experience and behavior.
The Impact
Playtesting identified many design recommendations.
This study contributed to the conferenece paper “Rosenstrasse: Holocaust Education through Roleplay” at Meaningful Play 2018. We are considering working on future papers with these results.