Sam Butin on his Documentary Video Game

Your Fellows project will be a hybrid video game and documentary, Normandie, about the final voyage of the S.S. Normandie in 1939. Can you share the origins of the project?

Normandie began when I read my great-grandfather Max Dreifuss’s diary from his trip aboard the S.S. Normandie to visit the World’s Fair in New York. As I read, I was struck by what he wrote—and even more by what he left out. That led me to seek out additional sources to fill in the gaps, including the ship’s manifest. That’s when I discovered he had a quota visa for immigration, he wasn’t just traveling for leisure. From there, I started to peel back the layers of my ancestor’s stories, piece by piece.

Why did you choose to tell this story through a game? Did you consider any other mediums?

Researching the project felt very literary and staccato. The experience of discovery and contradiction started to blend threads together in a very dynamic way for me. It made me think about how being a refugee means existing in liminal spaces, bending the rules of an unjust system, and how memory is one of the few things we control, which we assert through selective recollection and interpretation.

Video games let you wrestle with ideas in real time, not unlike a documentary. That’s why I’ve planted a flag calling this a “Documentary Video Game.” The goal is for players to engage with it in a way that feels both native to games and intentionally dissonant.

What audience are you hoping to reach with Normandie?

I want to reach a broad audience. What is challenging is it’s an opportunity to be some players’ first exposure to the Holocaust and the 1930s refugee crisis. One of our core goals is for Normandie to be a learning resource, but it’s not a learning game. To reach a large audience, you really want to keep players engaged.

If you can build a passionate community, you can direct that engagement toward meaningful action. I’m interested in pushing the boundaries of how a game and its audience interact and how this player base can be mobilized in a symbiotic way.

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