Hotel Europe - Game Pieces and Development Process

Abstract

Hotel Europe is an immersive dinner role-playing game that invites participants to engage with the institutional ignorance of EU border violence in a critical and satirical environment. Using elements of Life Action Role Playing (LARP) and crime-dinners, storytelling and food design, the game takes participants from a fire in a hotel lobby to the catastrophic failing of institutions in the fire of the migrant camp Moria.

The guiding question ‘How to unmask the systems that shroud EU border violence in deliberate unknowing?’ was a north-star of the project. We used Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Masque of Red Death as a speculative jumping off point, to explore the many systems and players that detach the violence of the EU border from public consciousness - producing conditions for slow violence. This challenges the notion of inter-generational fairness on the EU level.

Here, the ‘Red Death’ from Poe’s short story serves as a metaphor for broader systemic crises, such as climate collapse and global inequality - consequences of collective ignorance and harm of ‘Western’ countries - not the migrants themselves. Migration is understood here as a symptom of the same harm that risks ‘Western’ countries, too.

To unmask this violence, we designed a dinner role playing game. Drawing inspiration from crime dinner games and LARP, the aim is to nudge participants out of the deliberate unknowing, by letting them play characters that represent the systems that create this unknowing. Players wear masks representing their role. In the first stage of the game the players are not yet aware of the deeper meaning of the game, nor what system their character represents. A crucial moment here is the ‘unmasking’ of players, continuing the game as the institutions themselves. This scalar shift, from the personal to the institutional, aims to assist in the reflection from the abstract to the concrete. Through this the game acts as a vehicle to navigate not only EU and national border violence, but also the borders that people create around and within themselves, as well as institutional and personal ignorance.

Starting the game, the players find themselves implicit in a fire at the Hotel Europe, which is to a large part their workplace, when a redacted report of the fire appears. The characters are different actors in this fire, from the head of security who did not let guests escape, to the Neighbour who did not call the fire department in face of them not liking the hotel. Over the course of the game, the players shift the blame for the fire to each other, trying to avoid accountability. This shifting of responsibility creates unclarity about each person’s involvement, which is to the benefit of all players, no one needing to take the blame, and no fundamental consequences about the deeper structures being drawn. This is where the game reveals the unredacted report that the narrative to be a satirical exploration of the structures that led to the fire in Moria, where the deliberate unknowing of the structural violence in the mass migrant camp led to a catastrophic fire that was blamed on a small group of migrant adolescents.

This process is transported by game-pieces, such as character cards, secret text messages, and reports of the fire. The food is also heavy with historical and metaphorical significance, from using potatoes that were a symbol of hope in Europe that was struck by famine - like in Masque of the Red Death - to the degrees of burning that is included in the dishes, hinting at the selective reading of the situations of the players, in order to avoid responsibility.