Fojba 2000

March 23, 2004 10:30 AM

The fojbas are basins near Trieste and the Adriatic Sea, which served as mass graves during the massacres that followed World War 2. Those accused of collaborating with the fascists, or of opposing the communists, or who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, were killed and then deposed there. In 2000, the Slovenian magazine Mladina, known for its irreverence, put a Tetris-style game called Fojba 2000(flash req'd) on its site. In the game, you drop the bodies of either partizani (partisans) or domobranci (fascist Slovenes) into a pit, while jolly oompah music plays in the background. (More Inside) (Shamelessly ripped verbatim from The Glory of Carniola)
posted by Ufez Jones (5 comments total)

Everything was quiet for a while. Then the Italian government declared February 10 a day to remember the Italian victims of the Second World War. And around the same time, as the Slovenia Times writes:

The Italian Minister for Innovation and Technology, Lucio Stanca, asked the Foreign Ministry to intercede with the Slovenian government to have a game called ‘Fojba 2000’ taken off the website of the Slovenian political magazine Mladina. -snip- Though the game does not involve ethnic Italians, some Italian members of parliament believe that the game offends the memory of those Italian citizens who were killed in the fojbas.

Mladina has not removed the game, nor does the government seem particularly interested in making them do so. You can play the game yourself, to see what the fuss is about, by clicking here.

On the game page, click on the arrow next to the word "Torej" to start. Then choose whether to dump partisans or fascists (or click vse po vrsti for "both") and begin.

The controls: 7 is left, 9 is right, 8 is rotate and the space bar makes them drop.
posted by Ufez Jones at 10:31 AM on March 23, 2004

That's pretty sick. Plus, it moves kind of slow so it's tough to set up four lines in a row. I'm sure I could score pretty high if I had enough time.
posted by vito90 at 10:40 AM on March 23, 2004

I just love the sound of MIDI brass music in the morning.
posted by hoskala at 11:04 AM on March 23, 2004

The Monty Python "Quest for the Holy Grail" CD-ROM had exactly the same game, following the "bring out your dead" plague victim scene. Bodies are thrown into a deep pit, whereupon they seize up into tetris like shapes and you play it in pretty much the same way. One twist was that every now and then one of them would say "I'm not dead" and move around a lot, making it harder to put him in place.
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:02 PM on March 23, 2004

Goodness, I didn't expect this. I feel a bit like the Jerk when he finds his name is in the Yellow Pages. (Or, even better, Patty's ass.)

I can add a few things, though: First, the post-war killings were strictly taboo in Tito's Yugoslavia, so very few people here know much about them, even today. Recently, a mass grave was uncovered during the construction of a highway, and no one was quite sure who was in it.

The most haunting story I heard about the post-war massacres involved the killing of a group of anti-communist Catholics. A group of them were taken into a forest to be shot, and they all spent their last moments praying for the souls of their executioners.

As for Mladina: they seem to actively seek out trouble wherever they can, and oftentimes they're successful. Another project of theirs involved photoshopping famous personalities into pornographic pictures. (Including people like Bush, Berlusconi, Haider and just about every known Slovene. Links are NSFW, obviously.) It caused an uproar here, which is naturally what the editors wanted in the first place.
posted by Ljubljana at 2:13 PM on March 23, 2004