Close-Playing War Trauma: The Tension Between Agency and Inevitability in My Child Lebensborn and Bury Me, My Love

This study offers a formalist comparative reading of two narrative games about war trauma and displacement, My Child Lebensborn and Bury Me, My Love, arguing that their structural design choices shape how players emotionally and ethically engage with suffering. Drawing on Russian Formalism and a close-playing methodology, the authors contend that form is not incidental to how trauma is conveyed but is central to it. The work situates itself within ongoing debates about whether games can depict war suffering without trivializing it, and it notes a notable reception gap, with My Child Lebensborn earning substantially greater Steam revenue and reviews than its counterpart.

The central analytical lens is the tension between agency and inevitability. In both games, players exercise localized, moment-to-moment influence, whether through caregiving decisions or dialogue selections, while being denied control over the broader trajectory of suffering. My Child Lebensborn achieves this through quantified care mechanics and a fixed narrative arc, and it casts the player as a blank-slate identity that invites self-projection into a historical setting. Bury Me, My Love instead uses constrained dialogue and a mimetic messaging interface, presenting a relational "shell" identity as Majd within a contemporary crisis, a design that fosters empathy through connection rather than projection.

The authors' key distinction lies in where agency resides. My Child Lebensborn provides meaningful local agency in caregiving but ends linearly, whereas Bury Me, My Love offers limited choice within individual conversations yet reveals genuine global agency through branching outcomes that become visible across replays. Both games, the authors conclude, generate a "troubling pleasure" and position players as ethical witnesses to displacement and historical trauma. The analysis acknowledges its limits, particularly the influence of the first author's cultural background on the gameplay interpretations, which are written largely from one player's first-person experience.