History Lessons In A Video Game

Cristian Diaconescu is a Romanian game developer who created a video game, Black the Fall, inspired by the country’s experience with communism of almost half a century. Although Diaconescu says the game is not intended to be historical, it actually serves that purpose too, since it describes how life was under the regime from his own experience — people living on food rations, everybody being suspicious about everybody else, complete isolation from other countries, especially in the West — and, throughout the game, Ceaușescu’s portrait and footage of his speeches appear.

Moreover, at the end of the game, after Black has torn down a wall (a replacement of the actual revolution that happened in 1989), thus ending his mission, there’s a section of darkness on which “images from Romania's recent history appear in the background: the violent demonstrations of the early 1990s; the Colectiv nightclub fire in 2015 where corruption and negligence led to the deaths of 64 people; and the massive protests — the largest since the fall of communism — that took place in February this year when the government attempted to decriminalize corruption to enable several high-profile politicians to avoid prosecution.”

Although maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves with “the largest protests since the fall of communism”. Today, Romanians took to the streets by the hundreds again, because of the outrageous changes to the judicial system that the Justice Minister wants to make, like leaving the president out of the process of appointing the general prosecutor and the chief anti-corruption prosecutor of the state. This means that the leading Social Democratic Party, that has a huge number of members under investigation by the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), will get the power to decide who’s gonna prosecute them. Demonstrations are expected also in the following days.