I used to play this game in 9th grade art class. I sat at a table with Gabe and Jake, unlikely pals, and we wouldn’t actually make all that much art (the teacher was a bit loopy). We would mostly talk and tell stories. I was reading Homestuck at the time, so the idea of creating my own Choose Your Own Adventure was at the forefront of my mind. So that was the game we’d play. It was an art class improv! One of the stories we told was of a great undersea war between dolphins and sharks and orcas and all that. Gabe was a dolphin rider bent on justice and war.
Another of our creations was cruder, but I stand by my 9th grader sensibilities. Basically, you play as Hitler. The story started something like this:
You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?
No, we didn’t immediately start rounding up brown shirts and slandering the jews. We were 9th graders bored out of our minds in art class, not Wehrmacht idolaters. We needed to blow off some steam, and we did that by killing Hitler, a lot.
I’d be the storyteller of course, and my friends would be the players, giving Hitler commands and such. Depending on what they told Hitler to do, I changed the story. If they weren’t extremely precise in the commands they gave, however, there would be dire consequences. Telling Hitler to walk around, for example, would probably get him run over by a car. A passing woman might mistake Hitler for a lunatic and shoot his brain out with her pocket pistol. Hitler might accidentally kick a little baby out of a stroller and wind up in a police chase Grand Theft Auto style. Like some hellish ouroborous, old Hitler wouldn’t be dead two second before the game started again:
You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?
Adolf had just written Mein Kampf, of course. In this game, the tome was not all that useful for reading or convincing, but it was a very effective bludgeon. If I remember correctly, we used the slab of paper to beat the brains out of a cop once and crush a baby. The memories are hazy, but ultra violence was in vogue at the time. Our adorable little Hitler would devour babies, get into shootouts, and generally cause widespread chaos wherever his adventures took him. In that way, he’s not all that different from the real Hitler.
Killing Nazis is a lot of fun. Movies like Inglorious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan succeed entirely on the concept. These stories are told from an outside perspective, however. Has any story tried to BE Hitler? That idea has some obvious problems, namely because most of the people that would want to role play Hitler are also the kind of people dreaming of the next Holocaust. A written story of this kind wouldn’t work because you inherently need to make the bastard sympathetic (BORING). That is where a game shines. Cyclic loops, no need for character development, killing Hitler in a thousand different ways is fun, etc. You are Hitler, and you die a lot.
Should the player be allowed to actually recruit some brown shirts and start shit up? Sure, let the Nazi role players have a little fun, but the second you stand up to the podium to give a rousing antisemitic speech, the thing explodes.