Devlog Ten
Chatbot
This devlog will be a quick summary of my experience engaging with one of my colleague’s projects, a chatbot called Herr Obermeier by Sabrina Schoch. Her devlogs can be found on her site.
The chatbot itself appears to be a hybrid between a classic chatbot and a choose-your-own-adventure game. Instead of entering your own input and letting the bot attempt to identify it, you are presented several choices which you can choose to progress the bot’s ‘plot’. I’ve never seen a chatbot like this before - I’d been expecting to have to spend most of my time trying to enter input the bot would understand.
The experience itself is relatively quick, lasting only about 5 minutes. Despite its brevity, it does a good job attempting its rather morally ambitious goals: that is, to investigate the horrors that took place within 20th-century Nazi Germany, particularly focusing on women’s concentration camps. You play the role of a woman sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on charges of asocial behavior/lesbianism. Initially, you can only question why you’ve been sent to the camp, but soon you are given the choice of whether or not to attempt to escape. In the event you do not attempt to escape, you are informed that you had a 50⁄50 chance of surviving the Holocaust - if you do attempt to escape, you are caught, and are offered to choose your own punishment. The options are execution, medical experimentation, and selecting another inmate to suffer - the latter of which has you executed for cowardice.
The game ends with a brief expository explanation of the shaky existence of lesbian women in Nazi Germany, since by law only male homsexuality was officially punished - female homosexuality was often punished under the guise of asocial behavior. It then calls for increased representation of lesbian women who had suffered during the Holocaust.
Overall, the experience - while grim - did inform me much of how lesbianism was treated in Nazi Germany. I had always assumed lesbianism had simply been lumped under the umbrella of homosexual behavior, and had no idea there were specific camps intended for women. The bot has fulfilled its educational purpose, and despite the grim setting, I think an interactive chatbot is a very effective way to engage users with these underanalyzed past histories.