Drama in the Delta: Digitally Reenacting Civil Rights Performances at Arkansas' Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans

FAIN: HD-50626-09

Regents of the University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA 92093-0013)
Emily Roxworthy (Project Director: October 2008 to December 2010)

The development of a role-playing game focused on Japanese-American internment in Arkansas during World War II.

DRAMA IN THE DELTA will produce an interactive 3D model of key historic sites from the WWII Arkansas Delta in order to digitally simulate the systems of racial segregation that governed home-front life when black-white Jim Crow laws intersected with the policies of two local internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent. Rohwer and Jerome each imprisoned a peak wartime population of 8,500; these were the only War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps in the American South and the only to house Hawaiians of Japanese descent. The wartime internment in general has not entered most Americans' consciousness. The popularity of interactive role-playing games (RPGs) presents an effective pedagogical medium to capture public interest: by creating a historically accurate RPG reenacting 1944 Arkansas, DRAMA IN THE DELTA will engage the problem-solving behaviors of "gamers," and use this active learning environment to teach about civil liberties--struggles that were eventually triumphant.