THOSE WHO FORGET THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT

29% of Germans were born after the wall fell and have no memory of the injustice and grief it caused — and no way to imagine that it could happen again.

But unfortunately, border walls are coming back:

Half of the world’s border walls have been built after 2000.

The low awareness is a big problem says Klaus Schroeder, Freie Universität:

"The less high school students know about the DDR, the more positive their image of it is".

BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE IN MINECRAFT EARTH

30 years after the Mauerfall, the Berlin DDR Museum let a new generation tear down the wall — now in augmented reality.

We built three iconic segments of the wall in Minecraft Earth, the AR sequel to the massively popular game, so people could witness the wall in its full scale

14 MONTHS, 300+ BUILDING HOURS, AND 2.500 BLOCKS COLLECTED IN MINECRAFT EARTH.

To make the experience immediately accessible inside the game environment, we had to build on the exact same premises as every teenager in Minecraft Earth: By mining the materials inside the globally spanning parallel reality.

And because we needed the wall to be historically and architecturally correct, we had to put in 300+ hours of game time to gather the exact materials needed for a credible reconstruction.

This also gave the team the familiarity with the ins and outs of Minecraft Culture to make the experience resonate with how and why gamers play.

To amplify the work, we crafted two additional elements to the same painstaking level of detail:

MERGING EDUCATION WITH ENTERTAINMENT

We partnered with the DDR Museum to create an exhibition space and developed a comprehensive package of teaching materials in concert with interactive learning specialists. This allowed teachers to not just drum up interest in the historical subject, but expand it into a fully immersive micro-course to drive critical reflection on the rise in political, digital, and physical border walls.