War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play 9781501351150, 9781501351181, 9781501351174

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Studying War and Games Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch
2 Reality Check: Videogames as Propaganda for Inauthentic War Philip Hammond 17
2 Reality Check: Videogames as Propaganda for Inauthentic War Philip Hammond
3 Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure Kevin McSorley
4 The Political Economy of Wargames: The Production of History and Memory in Military Video Games Emil Lundedal Hammar and Jamie Woodcock
5 Understanding War Game Experiences: Applying Multiple Player Perspectives to Game Analysis Kristine Jørgensen
6 Playing the Historical Fantastic: Zombies, Mecha-Nazis and Making Meaning about the Past through Metaphor Adam Chapman 91
6 Playing the Historical Fantastic: Zombies, Mecha-Nazis and Making Meaning about the Past through Metaphor Adam Chapman
7 Machine(s) of Narrative Security: Mnemonic Hegemony and Polish Games about Violent Conflicts Piotr Sterczewski
8 National Memories and the First World War: The Many Sides of Battlefield 1 Chris Kempshall
9 Let’s Play War: Cultural Memory, Celebrities and Appropriations of the Past Stephanie de Smale
10 The Wargame Legacy: How Wargames Shaped the Roleplaying Experience from Tabletop to Digital Games Dimitra Nikolaidou 179
10 The Wargame Legacy: How Wargames Shaped the Roleplaying Experience from Tabletop to Digital Games Dimitra Nikolaidou
11 Critical War Game Development: Lessons Learned from Attentat 1942 Vít Šisler
12 Simulating War Dynamics: A Case Study of the Game-Based Learning Exercise Mission Z: One Last Chance Joakim Arnøy
13 Positioning Players as Political Subjects: Forms of Estrangement and the Presentation of War in This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line Holger Pötzsch
14 Afterword: War/Game Matthew Thomas Payne
Index

Citation preview

War Games

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War Games Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play Edited by Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © spartakas/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hammond, Phil, 1964- editor. | Pötzsch, Holger, editor. Title: War games : memory, militarism, and the subject of play / edited by Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch. Other titles: Memory, militarism, and the subject of play Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Investigates the changing relations between videogames, militarism, war, cultural memory, and history.”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025892 (print) | LCCN 2019025893 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501351150 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501351167 (epub) | ISBN 9781501351174 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Computer war games–Social aspects. | Video games–Social aspects | War–Computer simulation–Social aspects. | Video games industry. Classification: LCC U310.2 .W37 2019 (print) | LCC U310.2 (ebook) | DDC 793.9/2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025892 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025893 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5115-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5117-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-5116-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures  vii Notes on Contributors  ix Acknowledgements  xii

1 Introduction: Studying War and Games  Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch 1

PART I: Militarism and the Gaming Subject 2 Reality Check: Videogames as Propaganda for Inauthentic War  Philip Hammond  17 3 Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure  Kevin McSorley  37 4 The Political Economy of Wargames: The Production of History and Memory in Military Video Games  Emil Lundedal Hammar and Jamie Woodcock  53 5 Understanding War Game Experiences: Applying Multiple Player Perspectives to Game Analysis  Kristine Jørgensen  73

PART II: Playing War, History and Memory 6 Playing the Historical Fantastic: Zombies, MechaNazis and Making Meaning about the Past through Metaphor  Adam Chapman  91 7 Machine(s) of Narrative Security: Mnemonic Hegemony and Polish Games about Violent Conflicts  Piotr Sterczewski  111

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8 National Memories and the First World War: The Many Sides of Battlefield 1  Chris Kempshall  135 9 Let’s Play War: Cultural Memory, Celebrities and Appropriations of the Past  Stephanie de Smale  155

PART III: Wargames/Peacegames 10 The Wargame Legacy: How Wargames Shaped the Roleplaying Experience from Tabletop to Digital Games  Dimitra Nikolaidou  179 11 Critical War Game Development: Lessons Learned from Attentat 1942  Vít Šisler  201 12 Simulating War Dynamics: A Case Study of the GameBased Learning Exercise Mission Z: One Last Chance Joakim Arnøy  223 13 Positioning Players as Political Subjects: Forms of Estrangement and the Presentation of War in This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line  Holger Pötzsch  241 14 Afterword: War/Game  Matthew Thomas Payne  259 Index  263

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 DARPA’s, Squad X project  31 7.1 Part of the board of the game First to Fight: division into regions and Axis domination tracks visible. Picture taken by the author, 2018  122 7.2 The game Outcast Heroes (Bohaterowie Wyklęci): battle card, character cards and the card ‘Execution’ visible. Picture taken by the author, 2018 126 7.3 The game Revolution 1905 (Rewolucja 1905). Faction cards (below) and character cards (middle). Picture taken by the author, 2018 129 9.1 A Let’s Player performing with the game This War of Mine (jacksepticeye, 2015)  156 9.2a Image of burning parliament building, Sarajevo: Mikhail Evstafiev, 1992 (CCBY- SA 2.5)  164 9.2b Screenshot of burning parliament building in This War of Mine  164 9.2c Screenshot of Sniper Junction’s location description  165 9.2d Image of stoves used during the Siege of Sarajevo taken from the permanent exhibition of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2018. Author’s own image  165 9.2e Screenshot of homemade stoves used by civilians in the game  166

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9.3 A Let’s Player’s character witnessing ‘The Girl in Peril’ scenario unfolding  167 9.4 Screenshot of a personalized closing shot of a YouTube video on TWoM  170 11.1 Interview with a game character in Attentat 1942 204 11.2 Interactive comics in Attentat 1942 205 11.3 Waterfall (above) and agile (below) models of the videogame development process  206 11.4 Team structure in the initial (above) and agile (below) development phases 211 12.1 The Mission Z central map, two rounds in, with a number of territory pieces played. Image taken by the author during a training event in Israel, June 2016 226 12.2 One of the group’s tables at the start. Image taken by the author at Narvik War Museum, October 2018  228 12.3 One possible set-up of the room, with physical obstacles here and there. Image taken by the author during a training event in Portugal, October 2016  228

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Joakim Arnøy works as a trainer and educator at the Narvik War and Peace Centre in Norway. A big part of his work is to facilitate non-formal learning exercises about remembrance, human rights and peace education for various target groups, though mostly focused on young people or other educators. Adam Chapman is Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on historical games, i.e. those games that in some way represent, or relate to discourses about, the past. He is the author of Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (2016), alongside a number of other publications on the topic of historical games. He is also the founder of the Historical Game Studies Network. Stephanie de Smale is a humanities/computer science PhD candidate at Utrecht University. Her research is in the area of digital media and conflict studies and focuses on the translation and circulation of transnational memory in digital culture communities. Her empirical research, using qualitative and digital methods, offers an in-depth case study analysis of everyday practices of remembrance within digital popular culture, read in relation to peace building and post-war reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stephanie has a background in communication and digital media studies, specializing in digital methods, cultural politics, critical conflict and security studies, and human rights. Emil Lundedal Hammar is a PhD candidate at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. His research interests include game studies, memory studies, critical race theory, the political economy of communication, anti-imperialism, critical and materialist approaches to media, and postcolonialism. Emil’s PhD research focuses on the intersection between digital games, cultural memory and hegemony, with particular attention to race and the political economy of historical games. Philip Hammond is Professor of Media and Communications at London South Bank University. He is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity (2007) and Framing Post-Cold War Conflicts (2007), the editor of Screens

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of Terror (2011), and co-editor with Edward S. Herman of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (2000). His website is http: //philhammond.info. Kristine Jørgensen is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of Gameworld Interfaces (2013) and A Comprehensive Study of Sound in Computer Games (2009), and the co-editor of Transgression in Games and Play (2018). She is the director and primary investigator for the research project Games and Transgressive Aesthetics, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Chris Kempshall is a historian focusing on the First World War and popular representations of warfare. He is the author of The First World War in Computer Games (2015) and British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (2018). He is currently working on History and Politics in the Star Wars Universe, due to be published in 2021. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board for the Imperial War Museum’s digital centenary projects, and acted as a consultant to the BBC during the planning of their First World War centenary output. Kevin McSorley is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He is the editor of War and the Body (2013). His research explores war, violence and militarism through the lens of embodied, emotional and sensory experiences. His work has explored the lived experiences of war and  the afterlives of conflict, militarism and physical culture, drone warfare and torture, and the martial transformation of the sensorium. He is currently working on the monograph Sensing War. Dimitra Nikolaidou is a PhD candidate in the English School of Language, American Sector, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She has presented her work at the Fairytale Vanguard conference at the University of Ghent, the Worlds of Play workshop at the University of Cologne, the Fantastic Now GFF 2016 at the University of Münster, the Realities and World Building GFF 2017 at the University of Vienna, and the Space and the Humanities HELAAS conference in Thessaloniki. Her paper ‘Player Choices in Tabletop RPGs’ was published in the WyrdCon Companion 2015, and her ‘The Evolution of Role-Playing Storyworlds’ was published in the Excentric Narratives journal. Matthew Thomas Payne is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (2016), and is a co-editor of the anthologies How to Play Video Games (2019), Flow TV: Television in

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the Age of Media Convergence (2011) and Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (2010). Holger Pötzsch is Associate Professor in Media and Documentation Studies at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. He has published critical studies on war films and games and on the politics of digital networks. Holger has coordinated the international WAR/GAME network since 2014. Vít Šisler is Assistant Professor of New Media Studies at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in Prague. His research addresses critical approaches to the intersection of culture and digital media: namely, the internet, social media, videogames and the networked public sphere. He has published extensively on issues related to media, communications and digital culture, including in Communication Yearbook, New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society and Computers & Education. Vít was a lead game designer on the award-winning videogame Attentat 1942, which revisits the civilian trauma of war. Piotr Sterczewski is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and a collaborator of the Games Research Centre in Kraków and the [j]Games Lab at Leipzig University. His research focuses on political aspects of conflict in games. Jamie Woodcock is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Working the Phones (2017) and Marx at the Arcade (2019). His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance and videogames. Jamie is a member of the editorial boards of Historical Materialism and Notes from Below.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the outcome of a research network on war and videogames that has been active since 2014. We would like to thank everyone who has participated in our various workshops and meetings, particularly Tilo Hartmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Christine Smith-Simonsen (UiT Tromsø), Tomasz Majkowski and Mateusz Felczak (Jagiellonian University Kraków), Kristýna Hněvsová (Charles University Prague), Jonathan Ferguson (Royal Armouries Museum), Chris Sharpe and Tara Sutin (Imperial War Museum), Tomas Rawlings (Auroch Digital), James Carroll (Evil Twin Artworks), Chris Birch (Modiphius Entertainment), Tamas Kiss (Slitherine Ltd./Matrix Games), Siobhán Thomas and Simon Parkin. The editors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Research Networking Grant AH/ P013449/1), Charles University Prague, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway and the Centre for Research in Digital Storymaking at London South Bank University. We are also grateful to the organizers of the 2018 Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference for hosting our one-day workshop on Ludic Expressions of Violent Conflict.

1 Introduction: Studying War and Games Philip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch This volume engages with the nexus between war, games and play from various disciplinary standpoints, bringing together perspectives from game studies, media studies, memory studies, history, sociology, political science, literary theory and more. The chapters assembled here are inspired by work presented in earlier collections that have addressed similar themes and that still stand as seminal publications in the field – Nina Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne’s Joystick Soldiers (2010), Gerald Voorhees, Joshua Call and Katie Whitlock’s Guns, Grenades and Grunts (2012), and Pat Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Zones of Control (2016). To build on these important contributions, our anthology pays particular attention to areas of inquiry that, so far, have not been sufficiently explored. We focus on both digital and analogue games; critically assess the interplay and contingent relations between the military, militarism, players and politics; investigate the potential of war games as media of history and cultural memory; and look at predominantly European titles and themes. Our inquiries are underpinned by the conviction that games and play matter – that how we represent and playfully re-enact past and present wars has implications for how we see these wars, how we perceive our own role in them, how we remember them – and how we might react to future military engagements. We subscribe to Matthew Thomas Payne’s (2016: 11, 4) view that ‘the act of gaming is always inextricably connected to extant material forces’, and that a ‘complex but co-evolving dialectic’ connects the physical world and virtual realm of play. The chapters in this volume adopt three distinct but interrelated vantage points. Firstly, attention is directed to connections between militarism and a subject of play who actively negotiates and selectively submits to

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what Payne (2016: 14) has termed a ‘ludic war experience’. Secondly, we move on to studies investigating implications of war games for collective commemoration and memory politics. As Adam Chapman, Anna Foka and Jonathan Westin (2017: 360) explain in their introduction to historical game studies as an academic field, it is widely accepted today that games ‘can indeed be, or relate to, history’. Finally, the chapters in the third part of the book interrogate game form from designer- as well as ‘text’-centric perspectives, pointing to formal frames that predispose experiences and practices of play in either hegemonic or critical directions.

Games, War and the Military There are many compelling reasons to study the relationship between war and games, not the least of which is the military’s own extensive use of videogame technologies as a tool for everything from recruitment, through strategizing, planning and training for combat, to the treatment of injured and traumatized veterans. According to Patrick Crogan (2011: 2–18), current entertainment games are the by-product of military research and development carried out in the US in the early 1960s. Yet of course the military’s interest in games stretches back much further, beyond the nineteenth-century Kriegsspiel to the ancient world – extending, as scholars have noted, ‘from Sun Tzu to Xbox’ (Halter 2006), or ‘from gladiators to gigabytes’ (van Creveld 2013). Since the late twentieth century, as videogames have grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, eclipsing even Hollywood box office revenue, the military’s use of games has been virtually synonymous with its use of electronic games and related digital technologies. As Corey Mead (2013: 5–6) observes, the contemporary military is deploying videogames on ‘a broad, institution-wide scale … using them at every organizational level for a broad array of purposes’. In this context it is hardly surprising that, for example, when the European arms manufacturer MBDA introduced a new land combat missile system in 2018, one selling-point was that its controls were ‘designed to look and feel like video game controllers, which makes it easy for young soldiers who have grown up playing video games to learn how to use the system and employ it effectively in combat’ (Judson 2018). Similarly, the US military’s new Synthetic Training Environment (STE), planned to be operational by 2025, is envisaged as being ‘like a multiplayer online game’, in which ‘teams of soldiers with goggles and special gloves carry out missions in megacities stretching for miles, filled with thousands of opponents and non-combatants’ (Hambling 2018), and indeed Army planners announced at the outset that they would ‘use the commercial gaming industry to accelerate the development of STE’ (Hames and Roth 2019).

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A symbiotic relationship between the armed forces and the games industry has been consolidated since the 1990s. Commercial games and technologies have been taken up and repurposed by the military (Marine Doom is a famous early example),1 or promoted to the military by games companies (as, for instance, Microsoft did with its Kinect device: see Cavalli 2012). Equally, the military, particularly in the US, has invested heavily in applied games technology research, and in purpose-made game development. The establishment, at the turn of the twenty-first century, of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, with a $45 million grant from the US Army (renewed to the tune of $100 million in 2004), stands as the most visible institutional embodiment of this close cooperation; while the online recruitment game America’s Army, development of which began at around the same time, is the emblematic example of how officially funded military projects have both drawn on and fed into popular gaming culture (Allen 2017: 122–5). Robertson Allen argues convincingly that the ‘corporatization of the military and the militarization of corporations’ are the ‘underlying engines’ driving a ‘pervasive mobilization of the culture industry and the cognitive capacities of its laborers as vehicles of war’ (2017: 161). From this perspective, today’s videogame-based ‘militainment’ (Stahl 2010) is just the latest manifestation of what Herbert Schiller was already referring to in the late 1960s as the ‘military-industrial-communications complex’ (Schiller 1969: 54)2 – and what later scholars have dubbed the ‘militaryentertainment complex’ (Leonard 2004, Andersen 2006), the ‘media-military complex’ (Andersen and Mirrlees 2014), or the ‘military-industrial-mediaentertainment network’ (Der Derian 2001). Yet it seems likely that another key driver is the changing character of war itself. The close cooperation between the military and the games industry since the 1990s coincided with a marked change in how Western militaries waged war: beginning from the ‘smart missiles’ and ‘precision munitions’ of the 1990–1 Gulf War, through to the ‘surgical’ drone-strike years of President Barack Obama’s tenure, commentators have repeatedly been struck by the resemblance between actual war (at least as it is represented in the media) and its simulation in electronic games (Knightley 2000: 483, Cole et al. 2010, Grayson 2014). Many attempts to capture what is new about contemporary conflict – variously describing it as ‘mediatized’ (Cottle 2006), ‘diffused’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010) or ‘digital’ (Merrin 2019) – give an important place to the media, alongside the military’s own increasingly sophisticated technologies. Much less consideration, however, tends to be given to the political changes that have formed the context in which these wars are waged. James Der Derian, for example, despite the suggestive potential of his concept of ‘virtuous war’ to account for  the high-tech spectacle of 1990s ‘humanitarian military intervention’, puts technology, rather than politics, at the heart of his analysis, maintaining

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that ‘a revolution in networked forms of digital media has transformed the way advanced societies conduct war’, and insisting that information technology is not ‘a neutral tool of human agency’, but rather ‘determines our way of being’ (Der Derian 2003: 447, 449). Such techno-fetishism, and indeed media-centrism, seems too limiting, given the seismic shifts in both international relations and domestic politics since the end of the Cold War. Socio-political, economic and cultural contexts have a decisive influence on how particular technologies (including digital entertainment technologies), develop, and which of their affordances and potentials are realized at any given moment in time. The extensive use of advanced simulation technologies to create hyper-realist, and at the same time highly ‘selective’ (Pötzsch 2017), representations of battlefields as arenas for heroic competition between equally equipped combatants without unintended consequences appears unsurprising at the current moment in history. In the post-Cold War era, Western elites have found it difficult to construct the sorts of overarching political frameworks through which, in the past, they were able to offer their societies some sense of purpose and direction, and to make sense of war as a meaningful undertaking (Hammond 2007). Sanitized wars fought in the clean and orderly virtual spaces of digital games appear well suited to a moment when Western societies no longer see entirely clearly what they are fighting for or against, but can at least believe in a technological virtuosity, and therefore ethical superiority, which ensures that an ‘undeserved’ death will almost never appear on screen.

Militarism and the Gaming Subject Many of these themes are taken up in part one of this volume, which focuses on the gaming subject – understood here both in terms of actual players and in terms of the subject-positions offered by game mechanics and narratives. Given the long-standing relationships between the industry and the military indicated above, it is entirely plausible to view military-themed videogames as serving some sort of propaganda function in contemporary popular culture. Yet this does not necessarily mean that they are ideologically effective or straightforward: such games offer a more complex mode of address, and elicit more varied player responses, than the term ‘propaganda’ might be assumed to imply. Philip Hammond’s chapter, which considers the ideological meanings of military-themed videogames and their relationship to real-world militarism, suggests that there is a discrepancy between the idea that games are encouraging a militaristic outlook, and the evident uncertainty and disorientation of Western militaries in the post-Cold War era. One clear indication of this, Hammond

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notes, is the reaction to Islamic State’s propaganda, widely understood as uniquely powerful because it appropriated and repurposed Western popular cultural artefacts, including games such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward 2003) and Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games 1997). The nervous reaction, and the difficulties that the US and European governments had in constructing a convincing counter-narrative in response, are indicative of an ideological weakness that is only accentuated by the perceived similarities between war and videogames. While war-themed games are often marketed on the basis of their ‘authentic’ resemblance to actual war, since the 1990s the latter has – as noted above – often been compared to a videogame. In this context, the relationship may help to sell games as authentic and realistic, but it simultaneously highlights the sense that contemporary warfare is in some sense inauthentic. Hammond observes that arguments about the ideological influence of videogames are underpinned by an assumption, partly inherited from earlier debates about media effects, of players’ vulnerability to persuasive propaganda messages. This assumption also informs many critical, anti-war games that purposely disempower the player in various ways, in deliberate contrast to the satisfying fantasy of power and control that war-themed games are thought to offer. Such assumptions not only underestimate player agency, they also tend to misread the sorts of appeal that many contemporary war games are making. As Kevin McSorley argues in his chapter, the cultural and political resonance of war games is not well understood if seen as a straightforward top-down promotion of militaristic values. Rather, McSorley contends, the videogame is the ‘signature medium’ of our present era because it addresses and positions players as resilient neoliberal subjects. Taking as his starting point Jesper Juul’s (2013: 28) characterization of videogames as ‘the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure’, McSorley draws out the connections between this understanding of the medium’s specificity and the current reconfiguration of political subjectivity in terms of ‘resilience’. As a central principle of contemporary governance, resiliencethinking rejects modernist ideas about the human subject and the world in which s/he acts: rather than being amenable to human intervention and control, a complex world presents continuous dangers, demanding resilient subjects who are able to adapt to risk, rather than resisting or seeking to exert control over their circumstances (see further Chandler 2014). Engaging with recent work on affective design and the embodied phenomenology of gameplay, McSorley examines the ‘mutually reinforcing resonances’ between wargames and ‘resilient’ subjectivity, across the dimensions of political affect, political agency and the political imaginary. A different perspective on the relationship between games and politics is offered in the chapter by Emil Lundedal Hammar and Jamie Woodcock. Their contribution examines the political economy of videogames production, and the effect that this has in setting the parameters of how

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military-themed games invite consumers to interact with them. Drawing on Berthold Molden’s (2016) concept of ‘mnemonic hegemony’, Hammar and Woodcock trace the structural factors shaping how war and history are represented in, and remembered through videogames. These factors include the relationships of exploitation that underpin the global games industry, the recruitment patterns and labour conditions that shape and discipline its workforce, and the demands of profitability that inform development choices – as well as the close connections between the industry and the military–industrial complex alluded to above. These influences sometimes operate in subtle and perhaps unexpected ways: for instance through companies working with military consultants in designing games and paying arms manufactures for rights to depict weapons; or through what Hammar and Woodcock call the ‘baked-in ideological assumptions of videogames technologies’, which mean, for example, that graphics software toolsets have been developed in ways that are designed to be useful for representing gunmetal textures. As they argue, the capitalist logic materially structuring the games industry also extends to those outside it, such as academics designing industry-oriented university courses in game design. As Hammar and Woodcock acknowledge, though, while mainstream games can invite hegemonic understandings of war, actual player responses cannot be assumed. Games, like other media texts, they argue (following Stuart Hall 1981: 239), are better understood as arenas for potential resistance as well as the manufacturing of consent. This is made apparent in Kristine Jørgensen’s contribution, which is one of three chapters in this volume analyzing the unusual war-themed game This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014). Unlike more conventional games about conflict, This War of Mine puts the player in control of a group of civilians trying to survive in a warzone, and enforces a number of difficult ethical choices. Indeed, it is generally understood as an anti-war game, yet as Jørgensen shows, this does not necessarily mean that players welcome or engage with its perceived message. Her chapter also contributes to wider debates about methodology in games studies, arguing for the importance of incorporating multiple player perspectives rather than relying on the perceptions of a single-player/researcher. Reporting the results from part of her larger research project on Games and Transgressive Aesthetics, Jørgensen shows how recruiting even a small number of players as ‘co-researchers’ can add significant breadth and complexity to our understanding of the game. Variations in individual play-styles and preferences meant that, while players were certainly aware of how This War of Mine was intended to work, and perceived the ideas about conflict that it was attempting to communicate, they reacted in quite different ways. An appreciation of the game as engaging and rewarding could sit alongside feelings of discomfort, and these could lead to players feeling manipulated. Others rejected the game as ‘ineffective’ in communicating an anti-war message, for instance

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because it was seen as ‘trying too hard’ or even as becoming ‘unintentionally funny’. In sum, players appear as not slavishly bound by game texts and procedures, but actively negotiate and potentially subvert the meanings intended by designers and production companies.

Playing War, History and Memory Many of today’s most commercially successful war-themed games play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by historical events. Consequently, the role of games in mediating history and cultural memory has become a well-established research area in the discipline of game studies (see for example Chapman 2016, Chapman, Foka and Westin 2017, Hammar 2017, Kempshall 2015, Kapell and Elliott 2013, Whalen and Taylor 2008). This is a theme that runs throughout the present volume, but it is a particular focus in part two of the book. Given our subject matter of war, this also involves examining how games deal with difficult and sensitive aspects of history, where there is always a risk of being seen as trivializing or inappropriate. This is broached directly in Adam Chapman’s contribution, which examines how fantasy elements in games can, perhaps counter-intuitively, enable them to tackle serious and contentious historical events. While many games have a Second World War setting, they usually shy away from depicting the Holocaust, effectively supressing this crucial aspect of the war (Chapman and Linderoth 2015). Games in the war-themed fantasy series Wolfenstein (MachineGames 2014, 2015, 2017), however – one of Chapman’s two case studies – explicitly invoke the Holocaust through their themes and imagery, and are able to do so precisely because of the distancing that their status as fantasy entails. Chapman makes an argument about historiography – seeing it as always inherently ‘fictive’, since facts do not speak for themselves, and history has to be told – and about the fantasy genre, which, he contends, should be taken seriously as a site of meaning-making about history. His other case study, of the Nazi zombie mode in the Call of Duty series (Treyarch 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018), exemplifies this. As Chapman argues, the figure of the Nazi zombie, which proliferates and overwhelms the player, expresses contemporary anxieties about the historical process: a sense that it is beyond human agency or control. Indeed, Chapman shows that games are particularly well suited to exploring ideas about historical change, since they concern the interplay between structure, agency and contingency (no doubt a key reason why military strategizing has long involved gaming). Somewhat similarly, Piotr Sterczewski’s chapter on Polish historical tabletop games argues that games can be understood as ‘memory devices’

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that can work to model, maintain and modify popular understandings of the past. This is a particularly contentious topic in contemporary Poland, where what Sterczewski identifies as a ‘new wave’ of history-themed games is part of a national ‘memory boom’. Historical memory, particularly of the Second World War and the Cold War era, has become highly politicized in recent years, and the (currently ruling) conservative Law and Justice Party has an official commitment to engaging with the ‘politics of history’. Sterczewski returns to Molden’s (2016) concept of mnemonic hegemony discussed in Hammar and Woodcock’s chapter, and supplements it with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s work on theorizing hegemony and discourse, in order to examine in detail how historical discourses are stabilized, negotiated and contested through games. He does this through comparative case studies of three games. First to Fight (Kwapiński and Sieńko 2014) positions a unified and heroic Polish nation as part of the Western war effort – and omits the country’s significant involvement in fighting on the Eastern Front alongside the Soviet Union. Similarly, Outcast Heroes (Kwapiński and Sieńko 2013) recuperates the cultural memory of post-war Polish anti-communist guerrilla groups, the history of which had been neglected during the Cold War era. In contrast, Revolution 1905 (Lipski and Radojičić 2016) deals with the Polish experience of workers’ revolt against imperial Russian rule, offering a counter perspective on Polish history that is usually ignored in the genre. The example shows the potential of games to contest hegemonic versions of the national past and their mobilization in current political debates. The ways in which historical war-themed games can filter or distort popular understanding of the past is also the focus of Chris Kempshall’s chapter, which is concerned with the depiction of the First World War in videogames, paying particular attention to Battlefield 1 (EA DICE 2016). There is a hierarchy of ‘principal nations’ in First World War games, and tacit conventions about which nations can be represented and how. Kempshall explores the various factors that lead to this, including how game developers understand the preferences of their target markets: in Battlefield 1 the US appears to play a far more central role in the conflict than France, for example. In other instances, it is an orientation toward national history that seems to shape the version of the past that is offered, as in the BBC’s educational game for schools, Trench Warfare (BBC 2001), which portrays the war as having been essentially between the British and the Germans. A preference for national history means, he argues, that representations of the war often tend to downplay or ignore the importance of the conflict’s transnational character, involving alliances rather than single nations. Kempshall also draws out how later history determines the representation of earlier events, and in particular shows how the Second World War casts a shadow over understandings of the earlier conflict, so that the Germany of the First World War, in particular, is often seen through the filter of the later Nazi era.

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The tensions in war-themed games between history and contemporary demands of commercial success and entertainment value is approached from a different angle in Stephanie de Smale’s chapter, which looks at the phenomenon of Let’s Players. These ‘micro-celebrities’ can attract a huge following (and attendant income) on YouTube and other platforms for their walkthroughs of and commentaries on videogames. But in order to maximize their chances of achieving such success, Let’s Players typically have to attend to the platform’s market logic, creating a distinctive personal ‘brand’ within which gameplay content can be performed and framed in ways that increase its chances of attracting and retaining a following. Complementing the discussion in Jørgensen’s chapter, de Smale analyses the ways that Let’s Players mediate This War of Mine, and, in turn, the cultural memory of the Bosnian War from which the game draws inspiration. She argues that while games can be significant carriers of cultural memory, the circulation of memory about historical conflicts within the commercialized networks of digital popular culture can produce some incongruous results. In the case of This War of Mine, the game has many references to the events and iconography of the Bosnian conflict, but Let’s Players not only often miss them, they effectively destabilize or disrupt the intended design of the game since they are appropriating it for the purposes of online performance.

Wargames/Peacegames As we have indicated, several chapters raise questions about how warthemed games work, about the ways that an antagonistic (as opposed to agonistic) mode of thinking about conflict is designed in and enacted in gameplay, and about how things might be done differently. These issues are the main focus of part three, which opens with Dimitra Nikolaidou’s chapter on the historical development of roleplaying games (RPGs) from templates derived from early war simulation games. Tracing the emergence of RPGs, from the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in the mid-1970s through to today’s Massive Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games, she examines narratives, rules and artwork to show how RPGs continue a legacy of military wargaming in the importance they assign to combat and violent struggle. Strikingly, this is so despite the stated intentions and values of the games’ creators, particularly in the case of tabletop RPGs. Gary Gygax, for instance, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, was interested in wargaming as a hobby but was avowedly anti-war; and other influential RPGs – World of Darkness and GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) – were intended not to prioritize combat. As Nikolaidou observes, World of Darkness was explicitly offered as an alternative to the combatcentric gameplay of Dungeons and Dragons, while GURPS was a ‘universal’

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system precisely because it was able to work for any game setting. Digital RPGs, in turn, have often tended to reprise themes and narratives from earlier tabletop games, so that combat has become the ‘lynchpin of digital roleplaying narratives’ – particularly in those that have achieved commercial success. The following two chapters explore the relationships between games and war from a practice-based perspective. Vít Šisler’s chapter reflects his experience not only as a games scholar, but also as lead designer of the award-winning game Attentat 1942 (Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences 2017).3 The game puts the player in the role of the grandchild (in the present) of the main character (in the past) in a story about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking Nazi and Gestapo chief who played a key role in the Holocaust and also governed the occupied Czech territories. The game progresses through dialogue trees that reveal the often contradictory stories of fictionalized witnesses, thereby preventing the emergence of a univocal master narrative and sensitizing players to the contingency of the past. This indirect approach allows for a complex and serious game that interrogates the nature of historical memory by connecting personal stories with larger historical narratives about a contested and controversial episode in the Czech national past. In fact, these historical debates were an important aspect of the process of game development, since the team included historians with different views about what events should be represented and how (see further Šisler 2016). Šisler explains the process through which the developers sought to negotiate such controversies, and to work with the constraints and affordances of the videogame medium, formulating a number of overall design principles to enable them to construct an engaging multi-perspectival narrative game grounded in historical research. While Attentat 1942 challenges the conventions of mainstream war-themed games in many ways, Joakim Arnøy’s chapter describes a ‘game-based learning exercise’, Mission Z: One Last Chance, that exploits participants’ expectations of conventional combat-centric games in order to provoke critical reflection on the modes of thinking that typically characterize real-world conflict situations. Mission Z divides participants into teams representing the vanguard of their nations, sent to settle on a new planet. Each team has a separate mission, not known to the others, but although all missions can be collaboratively achieved and there are no instructions to compete, experience has shown that teams invariably do engage in competition and interpret the scenario as a zero-sum game. They are prompted to do so by various mechanisms, such as time limits, information overload and music, within an overall design that deliberately encourages a ludic attitude. Arnøy writes, like Šisler, from the experience of developing a game in an educational context – in this case, the non-formal education approach of European youth work. The objective with Mission Z

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is to encourage participants to reflect critically on common ways of thinking about conflict, and about the various influences – including games – that might shape their thought and behaviour in real life, even to the extent of pressuring them to act against their own values. The critical negotiation of wargame conventions is also at the centre of Holger Pötzsch’s chapter, which examines two war-themed titles that set out to challenge our expectations of the genre. Pötzsch returns to This War of Mine (including the game’s 2016 expansion pack The Little Ones (11  bit studios 2016), which features children as non-playable characters); and also examines Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development 2012), a title from a German developer, that gradually reverses the roles of hero and villain and disrupts immersion by directly addressing players as political subjects. He investigates and explains how formal game features systematically invite particular understandings and play practices – including critical ones. Drawing on Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie, Bertolt Brecht’s V-effect and Augusto Boal’s notion of the spect-actor, all of which aim to theorize the uses of estrangement and distancing in works of art, Pötzsch shows that each of their frameworks foregrounds different concerns before applying them to game analysis. While Shklovsky’s term stays within the compass of formalist aesthetics and explains how the games under scrutiny de-familiarize the genre’s habitualized ways of seeing war, Brecht’s concept enables an understanding of what happens when game form directly addresses players as not only ludic but also political subjects, and tries to foster engagement and reflection beyond the act of play. Finally, Boal’s approach is used to understand how games can reverse authorial dynamics by providing players with an active role, and can enable interventions not only through potentially subversive acts of play and counter-play, but also through code-based practices such as  modding or hacking. Cautioning against using such theories to simply re-instate the traditional opposition between high art and low culture, Pötzsch argues that we should instead draw a more careful distinction between the hegemonic and counterhegemonic meaning potentials of games – potentials that do not determine players but always depend on specific contexts of reception and play to be either actualized or subverted. Finally, the volume concludes with an afterword by Matthew Thomas Payne. Payne’s work has been a key source of inspiration for us as coordinators of the War/Game research network from which this book has emerged, and he has been a ‘critical friend’ of the project, so we are delighted to be able to include him as a contributor. Taking its cue from William S. Burroughs’s characterization of contemporary reality as a ‘war universe’, Payne’s chapter interrogates possible implications of the war/ game nexus, offering some thoughtful reflections and provocations on the experience of ‘militarized play’ and the challenge of imagining something different.

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Notes 1 The game was a mod of Doom II (id Software 1994). See further Riddell 1997. 2 Schiller was alluding to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech from 1961, in which he coined the term ‘military–industrial complex’ and warned against the ‘acquisition of unwarranted influence’ by this conglomerate of ‘misplaced power’. The full speech is available at: www. eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/farewell_address.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). 3 Attentat 1942 was Czech Game of the Year 2017, and in 2018 won Most Amazing Game at the A MAZE festival in Germany, Best Learning Game at Games for Change in the US and the UK Independent Game Developers’ Association’s Educational Game award, as well as being nominated for Excellence in Narrative the Independent Games Festival in the US and achieving second place at the Game Development World Championship in Finland in the same year.

References Allen, R. (2017) America’s Digital Army: Games at Work and War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Andersen, A. (2006) A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Andersen, R. and T. Mirrlees (2014) Introduction: Media, Technology, and the Culture of Militarism: Watching, Playing and Resisting the War Society, Democratic Communiqué, 26(2): 1–21. Cavalli, E. (2012) Microsoft Promotes Kinect as a Tool for the Military, Digital Trends, 18 December, www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/microsoft-promoteskinect-as-a-tool-for-the-military/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Chandler, D. (2014) Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. London: Routledge. Chapman, A. (2016) Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapman, A., A. Foka and J. Westin (2017) Introduction: What Is Historical Game Studies? Rethinking History, 21(3): 358–71. Chapman, A. and J. Linderoth (2015) Exploring the Limits of Play: A Case Study of Representations of Nazism in Games, in T. E. Mortensen, J. Linderoth and A. M. L. Brown (eds) The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments. London: Routledge. Cole, C., M. Dobbing and A. Hailwood (2010) Convenient Killing: Armed Drones and the ‘Playstation’ Mentality. Oxford: Fellowship of Reconciliation, https:// dronewarsuk.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/conv-killing-final.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Cottle, S. (2006) Mediatized Conflict. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

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Crogan, P. (2011) Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation and Technoculture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, J. (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Der Derian, J. (2003) The Question of Information Technology in International Relations, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32(3); 441–56. Grayson, K. (2014) Drones and Video Games, E-International Relations, 25 February, www.e-ir.info/2014/02/25/drones-and-video-games/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Hall, S. (1981) Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’, in R. Samuel (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Halter, E. (2006) From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Hambling, D. (2018) Frontline Tech: Military Simulators – Expensive Video Games or the Future of Training? Forces Network, 11 December, www.forces.net/news/ frontline-tech-military-simulators-expensive-video-games-or-future-training (accessed 21 March 2019). Hames, J. M. and M. C. Roth (2019) Virtual Battlefield Represents Future of Training, US Army, 14 January, www.army.mil/article/216068/training_for_the_ future (accessed 21 March 2019). Hammar, E. L. (2017) Counter-Hegemonic Commemorative Play: Marginalized Pasts and the Politics of Memory in the Digital Game Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, Rethinking History, 21(3): 372–95. Hammond, P. (2007) Media, War and Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Harrigan, P. and M. G. Kirschenbaum, eds. (2016) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huntemann, N. B. and M. T. Payne, eds (2010) Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. London: Routledge. Hoskins, A. And B. O’Loughlin (2010) War And Media: The Emergence Of Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity. Judson, J. (2018) MBDA Pitches New Land Combat Missile System to Middle East Customers, Defense News, 10 May, www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ sofex/2018/05/10/mbda-pitches-new-land-combat-missile-system-to-middleeast-customers/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Juul, J. (2013) The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kapell, M. W. and A. B. R. Elliott, eds (2013) Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. London: Bloomsbury. Kempshall, C. (2015) The First World War in Computer Games. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Knightley, P. (2000) The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and MythMaker from the Crimea to Kosovo (revised edition). London: Prion Books. Leonard, D. (2004) Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace, SIMILE: Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, 4(4), DOI: 10.3138/sim.4.4.004. Mead, C. (2013) War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Merrin, W. (2019) Digital War: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

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Molden, B. (2016) Resistant Pasts Versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations of Collective Memory, Memory Studies, 9(2): 125–42. Payne, M. T. (2016) Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York, NY: New York University Press. Pötzsch, H. (2017) Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters, Games & Culture, 12(2): 156–78. Riddell, R. (1997) Doom Goes to War, Wired, 1 April, www.wired.com/1997/04/ ff-doom/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Schiller, H. I. (1969) Mass Communication and American Empire. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Šisler, V. (2016) Contested Memories of War in Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination: Designing a Serious Game on Contemporary History, Game Studies, 16(2), http:// gamestudies.org/1602/articles/sisler (accessed 21 March 2019). Stahl, R. (2010) Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. van Creveld, M. (2013) Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voorhees, G. A., J. Call and K. Whitlock, eds (2012) Guns, Grenades and Grunts: First- Person Shooter Games. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Whalen, Z. and L. N. Taylor, eds (2008) Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Ludography 11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine. 11 bit studios. 11 bit studios (2016) This War of Mine: The Little Ones. 11 bit studios. BBC (2001) Trench Warfare. British Broadcasting Corporation. Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences (2017) Attentat 1942. Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences. EA DICE (2016) Battlefield 1. Electronic Arts. id Software (1994) Doom II. GT Interactive. Infinity Ward (2003) Call of Duty. Activision. Kwapiński, A. and M. Sieńko (2013) Bohaterowie Wyklęci (Outcast Heroes). Fundacja Niepodległości. Kwapiński, A. and M. Sieńko (2014) First to Fight. Wydawnictwo Fabryka Gier Historycznych, Fundacja Niepodległości. Lipski, P and V. Radojičić (2016) Rewolucja 1905 (Revolution 1905). Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. MachineGames (2014) Wolfenstein: The New Order. Bethesda Softworks. MachineGames (2015) Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Bethesda Softworks. MachineGames (2017) Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Bethesda Softworks. Rockstar Games (1997) Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games. Treyarch (2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018) Call of Duty Zombies Mode [series]. Activision. US Army (2002) America’s Army. US Army. Yager Development (2012) Spec Ops: The Line. 2K Games.

PART I

Militarism and the Gaming Subject

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2 Reality Check: Videogames as Propaganda for Inauthentic War Philip Hammond This chapter addresses the ideological meanings of military-themed videogames and discusses their relationship to real-world militarism. Marketing materials often highlight the realism and authenticity of war games – whether in terms of the representational accuracy of weapons and other equipment, the design of gameplay settings drawn from history or extrapolated from current headlines, or the involvement of the military in game development – suggesting that this is an important selling-point for players. As Frédérick Gagnon (2010: §8) notes, ‘the realism and authenticity of digital war games have become vital to their economic success’. This authenticity also establishes a relationship between war games and realworld militarism. As Gagnon (2010: §3) further suggests: ‘digital war games contain images and narratives that elicit consent for the US military, militarism, and the wars the US and its allies wage abroad’. This idea of military games as a form of indirect but persuasive political communication in favour of actual militarism is a common one, both in academic analyses and in more popular journalistic accounts. Commentaries on and critiques of war-themed games generally construe them as ideologically powerful; as potent propaganda for a militaristic political culture. This seems logical, even common-sensical, given the time, money and other resources invested in war games by the military themselves – particularly the online game America’s Army (US Army 2002) – and their sustained interest in games as a recruiting tool (see Hammar and Woodcock, Chapter 4 in this volume). And yet there is something not quite right about this picture. For one thing, there seems to be a tendency to keep ‘rediscovering’ the ideological effects of war games, often while insisting that this has previously been ignored. Aaron Delwiche maintained in 2007, for example, that ‘researchers have remained strategically silent about the ways in which games transform

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those who play them’, and urged games scholars to ‘acknowledge the potential effects of video games’, to ‘scrutinize their more questionable uses’ and to ‘take moral and political responsibility for the medium’ (Delwiche 2007: 104). As a case in point, he argued that ‘there are many reasons to believe that games such as America’s Army have an effect on audiences’ (2007: 105). Yet in 2004 Alexander Galloway had already observed that ‘thus far the discourse on realism in gaming has been limited mainly to talk of screen violence and its supposed deleterious effects on gamers’. Similarly, in a 2013 survey Marcus Schulzke noted that there had been a ‘clear trend’ across studies stretching back more than a decade whereby ‘military gaming is described as something that is potentially harmful’ (Schulzke 2013: 60). With regard to America’s Army in particular – also the focus of Schulzke’s paper – David Nieborg had discussed how the game was ‘influencing attitudes and behavior’ and ‘reach[ing] the hearts and minds of a global youth culture’, for instance (Nieborg 2006: 10, 12). Delwiche’s suggestion that he was breaking a silence on the effects of war-themed videogames would appear to make little sense. Yet the point continues to be made as if it were a fresh discovery: Margot Susca (2014), for example, urges that ‘the academic community … must start taking greater notice’ of ‘war ideologies’ in ‘violent video games’, as if no one had spotted this before. Furthermore, there seems to be a mismatch between, on the one hand, the idea that popular, commercially successful games are encouraging a militaristic outlook, and on the other, the palpable feeling of disorientation that Western militaries have experienced in the post-Cold War era. Often expressed in terms of worries over ‘feminization’ or ‘political correctness’, persistent concerns emerged in the 1990s about the erosion of traditional soldierly values and cultures, and a sense of uncertainty about the underlying ethos, cohesion and even the purpose of the military (Gutmann 2001, Moskos 2001, Moskos et al. 2000). Some hoped (and others feared) that the 9/11 attacks and ensuing War on Terror would resolve such doubts, yet they did not go away. In the 2003 Iraq War, for example, the UK government instructed journalists to avoid taking pictures of British soldiers carrying guns or depicting them as ‘fighters’, and ordered the troops themselves not to fly the British flag (Hammond 2014: 177). Imagery that might once have been thought of as reinforcing national martial pride now seems to be seen as a potential source of embarrassment. It may be true that many games ‘glorify military power’ (Gagnon 2010: §23), but in the real world the Western military has found such glorification difficult to articulate and sustain.1 For these reasons, the notion that videogames are powerful pro-war propaganda, inculcating a militaristic ideology, does not ring true, and this chapter seeks to question it. First, it interrogates the way that the ideological effects of games are understood, comparing more recent ideas about videogames with earlier discussions of screen violence. Second, it looks

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at how some of today’s assumptions about ideological effects have been incorporated into alternative, anti-war games, and into proposals to give war games a humanitarian dimension. Third, it examines Western responses to the appropriation of game-themed propaganda by Islamic State (ISIS). The very fact that ISIS apparently found it useful to reference Call of Duty in itself suggests that such games may not work as ideological props for Western militarism in the way that is often assumed, but even more revealing is the evident difficulty that the West has had in constructing a coherent ‘counter-narrative’. The chapter concludes that while there is indeed a relationship between videogame war and real war, it is one that has few obvious propaganda benefits for the US or other Western states. Indeed, the proximity or resemblance, in recent years, between real war and videogame war seems to work against the authenticity of actual military activity: insofar as war is ‘like a videogame’, it is not ‘proper’ war. If the relationship makes games appear more realistic, it seems equally to accentuate a sense of contemporary warfare’s unreality or inauthenticity. The perception that contemporary war lacks authenticity is often associated with Jean Baudrillard’s (1995) declaration that the 1991 Gulf War ‘did not take place’. Critics have interpreted this critique of war’s ‘unreality’ in terms of the misleading and sanitized media representation of contemporary conflicts (Keeble 1997) – an argument that could readily be extended to understand the ideological role of videogames as reinforcing the idea that military intervention offers a quick, clean and easy hightech solution to problems. Military games ‘authentically’ resemble a particular form of contemporary warfare, or at least its manufactured image. However, Baudrillard’s argument was not simply about media representation or high-tech weaponry. It was fundamentally a political proposition: that war lacks ‘reality’ in the sense that for Western societies it is no longer politically meaningful. Without a framework of meaning to make sense of it, war cannot inspire belief or enthusiasm, but becomes empty; a mere simulation. This ideological problem is only exacerbated by war’s resemblance to a videogame.

Ideology and Effects: Orthodoxy and Critique The recurrent critique of the alleged ideological effects of war games is partly driven by a desire to adopt an anti-war position. When critics assert that videogames are ‘linked to a rising militarism in the United States’, and that they ‘shape our understanding of the world’, ensuring that ‘young people are primed for perpetual war’ (Wager 2013: 1, 5), we should perhaps interpret such statements as signalling the writer’s opposition to what is perceived as a highly militaristic culture, rather than as necessarily revealing

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anything about the observable effects of particular videogames on actual players. While such political self-positioning statements are no doubt motivated by a sincere anti-militarism, claims about the alleged ideological influence of games are not in themselves inherently radical or critical. It is striking that a very similar position on ideological effects can also be adopted from a pro-war position. Although certainly less common, the basic thesis that videogames are a potentially powerful vehicle for propaganda and militaristic values has been identified by some as a positive advantage. Writing for Salon a year after the 9/11 attacks, Wagner James Au enthused that games were ‘teaching today’s teenagers how to wage, and win, the war against terror’. Au understood this pedagogic benefit not so much in practical terms – although he did suggest that gaming could provide ‘useful experience’ for ‘real-world combat’ – but primarily in terms of culture and ideology. Military-themed videogames might not be ‘explicitly doctrinaire in an ideological sense’, but nonetheless, by ‘showing the very young how we fight, applying the moral application of lethal force on behalf of liberal values’, he argued, ‘these games create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now’ (Au 2002). Hoping that titles such as America’s Army (then recently released) might ‘inspire the best gamers to consider a career of military service’, Au found this a cause for optimism. Later critics have viewed its use as a military recruiting tool negatively, rather than as a cultural benefit, but they have largely agreed that the game exercises a potent ideological influence. As Nieborg (2010: 63) argues, for instance, by ‘showing a worldwide audience why and how the US Army fights’ the game has become a ‘powerful vessel for disseminating US Army ideology and foreign policy to a global game culture’. Where Au and Nieborg differ is on the politics of contemporary US militarism, rather than on the ideological effects of videogames. While Au would like to believe in the propaganda value of videogames as helping to develop a necessary ‘wartime culture’, many more critics have insistently rediscovered the ideological power of war games as a rationale for critiquing them. The fact that claims about effects are often a matter of political positiontaking also helps to explain why those claims tend to be ambivalent: crude models of direct behavioural effects are generally repudiated (as something of a straw man), while the importance of ideological effects is repeatedly insisted on (often as if this is a departure from a consensus). In the UK context at least, media scholarship has long had an ambiguous attitude to questions of effects. On the one hand, it has tended to be highly critical of media effects research linking fictional on-screen violence to real-world behaviour, a tradition which is compromised not only by its methodological flaws (see, for example, Gauntlett 1998) but also by its association with culturally conservative moral panics about the ill effects of popular entertainments. Yet on the other hand, many scholars have simultaneously tended to argue that the media do have effects of a less direct sort, understood in terms of ideologies,

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values and beliefs. The distinction is not always clear-cut, though, since values and beliefs may also be thought to shape how people act. Moreover, although it was established early on that the nature of audience ‘decoding’ could not simply be assumed from an analysis of textual ‘encoding’ (S. Hall 1980), the fact that ‘active audience’ approaches diminished the importance of textual ideology-critique led to something of a backlash. The ensuing debate became polarized between those who foregrounded the ability of audiences to contest dominant meanings (for instance, Fiske 1987) and those who emphasized the ideological influence of the media. One revealing moment in this debate occurred when a contribution by Glasgow Media Group researchers David Miller and Greg Philo was dropped from an edited collection critiquing the claims of effects studies. The editors thought they were challenging the orthodoxy of media effects research (Barker and Petley 1997), while the Glasgow researchers thought that they were the ones challenging orthodoxy by insisting on the influence of the media (Miller and Philo 1996). Miller and Philo emphasized cultural and ideological effects, rather than behavioural stimulus/response effects, but extended their ideology-critique to include the issue of on-screen violence (Philo 1997). Back then, both positions claimed to represent the radical challenge to an orthodoxy, but over time it has been the second view  – that people are vulnerable to potent ideological media messages – which has won out as the new, ‘radical’ orthodoxy. There appears to be a similar ambivalence in the discussion of the ideological effects of military games, whereby a pervasive critique of the ideological influence of videogames sits alongside an equally common repudiation of direct behavioural effects, sometimes even in the work of the same author. Hence, for example, at the end of an article about how games in the Call of Duty series ‘put the player in contact with the ideology of militarism’, and ‘oblige players to conform to a violent vision of the warrior ethos and to (virtually) perform the (often) brutal and gruesome acts concomitant with such a vision’, Gagnon is at pains to distance himself from any notion of direct effects: he cites research scorning the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media effects, and acknowledges that ‘it would be going too far to argue that those who play Call of Duty will automatically embrace militarism and the values embedded in the games’ (2010: §21, 29). Similarly, Susca (2014) concedes that it would be ‘too easy and without methodological merit to say that playing violent video games makes people violent or more prone to military service’, but by conceptualizing effects in term of ‘consciousness cultivation’ she can nonetheless also maintain that games have ‘links to real war’ and are ‘used to legitimize foreign policy’ for a vulnerable ‘youth audience that is not yet equipped to process the vast and troubling consequences’. As in earlier debates about film and television violence, claims about the ideological effects of games are intended as a political critique but nearly always carry an assumption of audience vulnerability.

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Some critics have shown that there is a better way. Nina Huntemann (2010: 231–2), for example, readily agrees with critics who ‘allege that military-themed games advance a worldview that military intervention and the use of force are the only viable responses to global conflict’, but nevertheless says that she is ‘not convinced that these games inhibit critical engagement’. Similarly, Schulzke’s (2013) article on America’s Army and Robertson Allen’s (2009) study of the related ‘Virtual Army Experience’ (VAE) demonstrate that it is possible to critique games as propaganda while refusing to ‘position the military gamer as a passive subject that uncritically accepts the array of messages in military-themed games’ (Allen 2009). Unfortunately, the idea of player vulnerability has also been imported into the design of alternative, ‘values-conscious’ games, to which we turn next. These games could be understood as a form of ideology-critique, responding to a conservative and militaristic mainstream by creating alternatives that are politically challenging and anti-war. Yet such games, like many academic critiques of war games, also position the player as a ‘passive subject’.

Disempowerment through ‘Anti-War’ Games In the article mentioned above, Miller and Philo cite Rosalind Coward’s argument that in children’s TV programming ‘violence and owning weapons is seen as a vital part of masculine identity’: Films and TV programmes currently directed at boys teach about power. Power in these fantasies is to be different from girls; power is the possibility of annihilating opposition and frustration; the means to that power is through guns and the military. (quoted in Miller and Philo 1996) If war games offer a fantasy experience of power (America’s Army invites you to ‘Empower yourself’), alternative anti-war games tend to emphasize disempowerment. In Unmanned: A Day in the Life of a Drone Pilot (Molleindustria 2012), for example, you play through mundane tasks like shaving, commuting or smoking, and hop sheep over a fence as your character lies awake in bed: levels which all underline the similar banality and bathos of the one part of the game when you are piloting a drone. The contrast with heroic images of warfare is emphasized in a level in which you play and discuss military videogames with your son. Several anti-war games place the player in scenarios that are designed to problematize or question agency in various ways. Action produces no result or is counter-productive, for example: in Madrid (NewsGaming 2004) the ‘action’ of clicking to illuminate candles memorializing the victims of terror attacks is endlessly incomplete;

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in September 12 (NewsGaming 2003), firing missiles just produces more of the terrorists you are shooting at. Or the player is given a character who is conspicuously vulnerable: a woman or child foraging for water and attempting to evade capture by the militia in Darfur is Dying (Take Action Games 2006); a mother who has to quieten her crying baby to avoid attracting the attention of a death squad in Hush (Antonisse 2008). Or the game constructs a scenario in which action is obviously futile from the beginning, as in Giant Tank (deserthat 2008), which ‘depicts a battle between a soldier with a rifle and a tank’ and warns from the outset: ‘You are not the tank’. Notably, these games do not present a different version of empowerment, a positive alternative to understandings based on a militaristic fantasy. Rather, the subject position they offer does two things: firstly, it invites the player to enact the view that critics (and evidently some critical games designers too) have of gamers as vulnerable and passive; and secondly, it implicitly validates the disempowered subject as preferable to the fantasy of power that mainstream games are thought typically to offer. In this respect, these games accord with today’s prevailing intellectual wisdom about the Enlightenment humanist subject, which is widely rejected as too hubristic, masculinist and anthropocentric. This now dominant theoretical trend can be understood as a product of the post-1968 Left’s anti-humanism (Braidotti 2013: 26), but although it is usually presented as a critique of the individualist bourgeois subject, it also entails a rejection of former left-wing thinking about the collective historical subject and is a product of political defeat (Heartfield 2002). Today, it is difficult to find many defenders of a liberal humanist conception of the subject, which rather begs the question of just how radical, or indeed relevant, it is to keep on challenging it. It is also debatable how far war games really do offer a satisfying fantasy of power. Allen (2009) describes how players in the US military’s VAE simulation invariably shoot at civilians even when instructed not to (persistent offenders are asked to leave). This might seem like an appalling confirmation of how the logic of the game can turn players into callous killers primed for the War on Terror. But not according to Allen (himself one of those attempting to mow down civilians and medics), who argues that ‘shooting at civilians was the most powerful and common mode of speaking back to authority’. Disobeying instructions and flouting the rules was a way to ‘test the limits of believability in this virtual environment, to push back against and reappropriate the scripted narrative that is thoroughly entrenched at the VAE’. Allen’s argument may sound counterintuitive, but it is not so surprising: where games impose structure and limits, gaming subjects are apt to try to break them, not sitting back and revelling in a satisfying experience of empowerment but actively testing how far they are able to exercise choice and agency against the constraints of the game. Indeed, many games accommodate to this sort of behaviour, setting up different scenarios and outcomes for conformist or delinquent

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player choices – for example in the inFamous series (Sucker Punch 2009). In military games, this can also involve allowing players to choose which side to be on, although as Nieborg (2006: 9) observes: ‘Whereas you can choose to be a German, British, American or Russian soldier in almost every World War Two shooter, you can not play a terrorist in America’s Army’. It is to be expected that the US Army would not invite the world to play at being its enemies, but the conclusion that Nieborg draws – that this indicates the game’s power in inculcating an identification with US militarism – seems doubtful. More plausibly, it suggests more or less the opposite: that the Army knows that given half a chance gamers would be bound to play as insurgents, just as they are inclined to take pot shots at the virtual civilians they are ordered to protect. Several critics have noted the striking extent to which commercially successful military games use a Second World War or Cold War setting – notably the Medal of Honor (DreamWorks Interactive 1999), Battlefield (EA DICE 2002) and Call of Duty (Infinity Ward 2003) series. It is not difficult to see why that might be the case: playing it safe in this way avoids the risk of alienating potential customers with more controversial choices. As Ian Bogost (2011: 54–5) suggests, authenticity in game design entails both visual authenticity (it looks right) and what are thought to be socially appropriate values (it feels right). The Cold War or the Second World War are more likely to feel right because they present an uncontroversial, black-and-white morality. Perhaps we can detect something of a pattern in what feels right in anti-war games too. Bosnia (alluded to in This War of Mine, 11 bit studios 2014), Rwanda (Hush) and Darfur (Darfur is Dying) were very different conflicts, but there were nevertheless some marked similarities in their international media presentation at the time when they were in the news. All tended to be understood in highly moralized, good-versus-evil terms as conflicts where the dividing lines between villains and victims were clear-cut, and all became rallying points for advocates of tougher humanitarian military intervention. Critics have challenged such simplistic and moralizing representations of Bosnia (Hume 2000), Rwanda (Collins 2014) and Darfur (de Waal 2005), not only as inaccurate and misleading but also as perpetuating what Alex de Waal calls a ‘salvation fairy tale’, a humanitarian ‘melodrama’ in which ‘we – meaning the US and its close ally Britain – are the upholders of good in a world of evil’. In other words, these anti-war games are designed around realworld scenarios and settings that have typically been mobilized to support pro-war – or at least, pro-armed humanitarian intervention – arguments. Some humanitarian organizations have argued that war-themed videogames ought to incorporate international laws on humanitarianism and human rights. A 2009 study by two Swiss NGOs, for example, sought to raise awareness of ‘virtually committed crimes in computer and videogames’, and recommended that developers should ‘avoid creating scenarios that easily lead to violations’ of international humanitarian law (Castillo

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2009: 3, 43). The International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent initiated a similar awareness-raising discussion in 2011, hoping to ‘see rules governing the use of force integrated into video games’ (Clarke et al. 2012: 736). This was prompted by concerns that military games had a ‘potential undermining effect on perceptions of, and respect for, the fundamental rules’ of international humanitarian law by promoting ideas such as: war is a law-free zone; the ends justify the means; the means and methods of warfare are not limited; anything living on a battlefield is to be shot at without distinction; identity discs are trophies; and medical staff and facilities can be attacked. (Clarke et al. 2012: 727–8) Such initiatives do not attempt to contest the propaganda function of war games, and indeed are premised on the assumption that games exercise a powerful normative influence on players. Instead, the aim is to inculcate a better war ideology, one that respects international conventions on human rights and humanitarianism. In intention, this suggestion is not so far removed from Au’s vision for how videogames could contribute to the War on Terror: You can see [today’s teenage gamers] in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all – heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture, defended on all fronts by the best of the digital generation. (Au 2002) In hindsight, of course, this sounds at best hopelessly naïve, in view of the appalling carnage of the 2003 Iraq War and its bloody aftermath. Yet throughout the 1990s, hopes about the positive role of ‘heat-packing humanitarians’ informed the official foreign policies of the US, the UK and other Western states, who undertook ‘humanitarian military interventions’ in Somalia, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Kosovo in the name of upholding international human rights norms. Such norms continue to feature prominently in Western foreign-policy rhetoric, but devising games in which players are ‘rewarded when they respect the law and sanctioned if they violate it’ (Clarke et al. 2012: 737) seems about as likely to have a positive influence on real-life militarism as Au’s fantasy vision of gamers liberating the Arab world while sparing the innocent. In either scenario, the ideological power of games is overestimated.

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Call of Jihad Perhaps the most striking recent challenge to the idea that, for good or ill, games and other popular cultural products provide compelling ideological support for Western militarism is the online propaganda produced by ISIS, which made use of Western popular culture – specifically, the visual language of war films and videogames such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Call of Duty (Saber and Webber 2017, Semati and Szpunar 2018). In the texts themselves, and in the Western reaction to them, the relationship between real-life violence and its aestheticized on-screen representation was a key focus – both for ISIS’s claims to authenticity and meaning, and for anxious Western reactions. Islamic State’s act of cultural appropriation raised some questions that have proven hard to answer. If, as some have suggested, Western pop culture can be used as a ‘recruiting tool’ for a nihilistic antiWestern outlook, what does that imply about the meaning of Western cultural artefacts? And why does the West apparently find it so difficult to construct an appealing alternative? Western commentators attributed tremendous power to ISIS propaganda. The International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism (2016) said that the ‘emotionally evocative images’ used by ISIS were ‘hypnotic … potentially bypassing rational thought’. According to researcher Javier Lesaca (2015), ISIS had ushered in a ‘new kind of terrorism, using marketing and digital communication tools … for making terror popular, desirable, and imitable’. The organization had, he says, ‘an unprecedented and sophisticated audiovisual strategy’, remarkable because it used ‘images that are highly salient and resonant in the culture of their targeted audiences’. This propaganda power was explained in different ways. Sometimes it was understood in terms of direct media effects, as in the Daily Mail’s view that ISIS’s use of GTA and other games was a way to ‘recruit children and radicalise the vulnerable’ (Thornhill 2014, J. Hall 2015). Just as often, however, commentators noted that there is little evidence that playing violent videogames leads to violent behaviour. Instead of direct behavioural effects, the power of ISIS videos was explained in more cultural terms, as offering ‘male role models’ and ‘masculine stereotypes’ for young gamers to identify with. According to games journalist Simon Parkin, writing in The Guardian, ISIS’s videogame-themed propaganda aimed to ‘inspire in young men not religious fervour, but rather a lust for power and control’. And, he added, ‘it works: in June 2014, one ISIS fighter told the BBC that his new life was “better than that game Call of Duty”’ (Parkin 2016).2 Several observers also emphasized that ISIS’s use of videogames was similar to the US military’s use of the online game America’s Army, and sometimes suggested a moral equivalence between the two. As Matthew Hall, assistant director for Syria at the Atlantic Council, pointed out, for example: ‘modern warfare, like “Modern Warfare”, is already a video

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game … the Pentagon’s own video game, “America’s Army”, [is] a tool for public relations and recruitment’ (M. Hall 2014). Similarly, Parkin (2016) noted that ‘ISIS is not the only militarised outfit to co-opt entertainment for recruitment. America’s Army … doubles as a military enlistment tool …. In both instances, the outcomes can be devastating’. ‘Islamic State recruiting through a “video game”?’ asked Mike Diver, videogames editor for Vice, ‘Whatever, America already does that’. Where the conservative Daily Mail blustered that ISIS videos would ‘radicalise the vulnerable’, the hipsters at Vice discovered the same process closer to home, arguing that America’s Army has ‘made young men sign up to ship themselves overseas to fight for rights they don’t always fully understand’ (Diver 2014). Yet if ‘our’ games already worked as propaganda for Western militarism, then how could they be appropriated by ISIS? And if they were appropriated, why would this be a cause for concern? After all, the US has vastly greater resources at its disposal: ISIS might have imitated the style of AAA videogames and Hollywood films, but the West has the real thing. Commentators were disconcerted by the fact that ISIS was comfortable using the cultural language of the West; the fact that ‘the main recruiting tool isn’t religion, it’s Western pop culture’ (Khan 2015). The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang (2014) noted that ISIS’s ‘broad, pop-culture-laden campaign’ was ‘turning what once might have been a radical religious message into something more worldly’, and Lauren Markoe, writing for the US- based Religion News Service, pointed out that ‘The images … glorify the Islamic State and its fighters but show no mosques, Qurans, imams or people at prayer’. Instead, the imagery seemed to appeal ‘not to piety but to a thirst for adventure, or a longing to identify with something bigger than oneself’ (Markoe 2016). It is this desire for a bigger cause to identify with that is key to understanding why commentators were rattled by ISIS’s use of Western pop culture. One of the most revealing comments in this respect was made by Michael Muhammed Knight, an American convert to Islam who, after studying at a mosque in Pakistan, once considered taking up arms in Chechnya. Writing in The Washington Post, he recalled that: It wasn’t a verse I’d read in our Quran study circles that made me want to fight, but rather my American values …. I assumed that individuals had the right – and the duty – to intervene anywhere on the planet where they perceived threats to freedom, justice and equality …. My imagined scenario of liberating Chechnya and turning it into an Islamic state was a purely American fantasy, grounded in American ideals and values. (Knight 2014) Knight harked back to the Reagan era, when joining the Mujahideen coincided with US values and Cold War Realpolitik. Yet since the end of the Cold War things are not so simple. Western governments have espoused

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the global interventionism that appealed to Knight, but have found it consistently difficult to offer the sort of inspiring cause that would make such intervention meaningful. As the British diplomat Robert Cooper (2004: 51) has observed, in today’s post-ideological consumer societies, ‘Army recruitment becomes difficult – consumerism is the one cause for which it makes no sense to die – though fortunately technology means that fewer recruits are required’. The difficulty of articulating a coherent sense of purpose and mission has led Western leaders to try to make war more like a videogame: more high-tech, more distanced, more risk-averse. This style of warfare does not make Western militarism any less lethal – high-altitude bombing and drone strikes are just as deadly – but it does tend to expose the lack of conviction. It is this deficit of political meaning that has been highlighted in the repeated comparisons that have been drawn since the early 1990s between contemporary war and videogames. In the absence of a grand vision and an inspiring cause, Western wars and interventions seem phony and hypocritical: bold in their rhetoric but hesitant and cautious in practice, looking for an ‘exit strategy’ from the outset. ISIS’s provocation consisted in saying that while the West produced the safe spectacle of fantasy violence, they were willing to ‘do it for real’; that where the West’s lack of conviction made it risk-averse, the jihadis could say ‘we love death as you love life’. Yet this was not a sign of strength. Rather, like al-Qaeda before it, ISIS’s ‘strength’ was a product of the West’s weakness. As Faisal Devji has argued: the evolution of militant symbolism seems to proceed in two directions simultaneously: on the one hand, the conventionally political language of the state and, on the other, a social rhetoric of popular culture and crime …. [V]iolence [is] exercised in ways that do not distinguish between the social and the political, between the everyday and the exceptional, and, indeed, refuses to lend the political any autonomy at all. (Devji 2015) Whereas al-Qaeda was global and stateless, ISIS claimed statehood and sovereignty. Where al-Qaeda used grainy videos of bearded mullahs monologuing in a cave, ISIS produced slick digital imagery with ironic pop-culture references. Yet ultimately ISIS was no more successful than al-Qaeda in offering a meaningful political vision – possibly the reason why the everyday criminal violence of Grand Theft Auto seemed like a plausible propaganda vehicle. A few commentators have accurately identified the problem: the West found it difficult to call ISIS’s bluff because its own hand was so weak. Alberto M. Fernandez, formerly coordinator for strategic counter-terrorism communications at the US State Department, for example, points out that the West lacks a ‘counter-narrative’: ‘It could be many things …. But you

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have to have something … you have to stand for something’ (quoted in Markoe 2016). Yet knowing the question is not the same as coming up with an answer. ‘How do you construct a counter-narrative that counts?’ asked the BBC, reporting a 2014 meeting between EU leaders and tech firms to develop ‘a strategy balancing “counter-narratives” and “take-downs”’ (Casciani 2014). Attempts to do so were far from impressive. The State Department’s ‘Think Again Turn Away’ campaign, for example, which aimed to win the hearts and minds of potential ISIS recruits on social media, was described as ‘embarrassing’, ‘ineffective’ and ‘distressing’ by intelligence specialist Rita Katz (2014) writing in Time magazine. Similarly, the FBI’s online ‘Don’t Be a Puppet’ campaign includes a game – The Slippery Slope – which is supposed to inoculate impressionable teens against online radicalization. Reviewers have described it as ‘very confusing’ (McCormick 2016), ‘absurd’ (Trendacosta 2016), or said simply, ‘it sucks’ (Klepek 2016). Despite the wealth of talent and creative energy that fuels Hollywood and the global videogames industry, the West appears unable to come up with anything better because the underlying political conviction and self-belief is simply not there. It is this underlying weakness that made ISIS propaganda seem impressive by comparison.

Conclusion The problem of constructing a convincing and credible ‘counter-narrative’ suggests that claims about the propaganda power of military-themed games should be treated cautiously. Such games can be enjoyed while players, like those interviewed by Huntemann (2010: 232), retain ‘their skepticism about current military actions, questioning the motives, strategies, purported goals, and likely success of US foreign policy and military intervention’. They can be enjoyed by players deliberately disobeying the instructions of supervising army recruiters, like those observed by Allen (2009). Indeed, if the professions of ISIS recruits are anything to go by, they can also be enjoyed by players implacably opposed to the West and all it stands for. Perhaps part of what critics find politically objectionable about military videogames is that their militarism is generally rather old-fashioned: too gung-ho, too nationalistic, too macho to feel right. But objecting to these things is ineffective as a critique of contemporary militarism. Contemporary militarism is not really like that: it foregrounds humanitarian suffering and human rights abuse, and is justified in terms of cosmopolitan ‘values’ more than national interests. Back in the 1990s, when such ideas were first emerging, many analysts thought that this new form of humanitarian militarism would be a positive

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replacement for the demise of the old variety, filling the void of political meaning opened up by the end of the Cold War (Laïdi 1998). This feeling of meaninglessness is well expressed in the observation that contemporary war is ‘like a videogame’ – a view first heard in the 1991 Gulf War (Knightley 2000: 483). The comparison of war with a videogame is a pop-culture version of Baudrillard’s (1995) argument that war had lost its political meaning, its visceral ability to engage and inspire. Instead, it felt inauthentic and somehow fake: more like a simulation of war than the real thing. As it turned out, similar problems affected humanitarian intervention, which attempted to give war meaning through a language of ethics and values. At the highpoint of humanitarian militarism – the Kosovo conflict – even its supporters could not help echoing Baudrillard’s scepticism: The Guardian’s Isabel Hilton (1999) complained that ‘we are in a war that has no storyline we can believe in’; the Independent asked, ‘was it a “war” at all?’ (editorial, 10 June 1999); and Michael Ignatieff (2000) disappointedly described it as only a ‘virtual war’. For the NGO advocates of humanitarian war games, the military’s involvement in game design and use of games for recruitment and training are seen as evidence of a kind of ultra-realism, whereby ‘the line between the virtual and real experience becomes blurred’ (Castillo 2009:  4), and games are ‘so realistic that it is difficult to distinguish real war footage from fantasy’ (Clarke et al. 2012: 714). The desired integration of international humanitarian law into war-themed videogames is argued for on the grounds that it would make them even more ‘realistic’ (Castillo 2009: 3; Clarke et al. 2012: 723). Yet focusing on how links with real war enhance the realism and authenticity of videogames tends to obscure the more significant fact that this relationship increasingly accentuates war’s ‘unreal’, game-like qualities. Real World, for example, a simulation developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could be understood as an ultra-realistic game. Dan Kaufman, who oversaw its development, comes from the games industry and describes it as ‘creating the illusion of reality’ (DARPA 2009). Yet what it actually seems to be aiming at is turning warfare into a game, using the military’s intelligence and surveillance data to allow troops to rehearse missions in virtual space before undertaking them. Another DARPA project, Squad X, envisages the future of the military in terms strikingly reminiscent of Au’s (2002) idea of digital soldiers ‘merged into an information network’. It proposes turning the battlefield into an augmented reality space, in which a ‘digitized, integrated system of systems’ enables troops to ‘collect, synthesize and share data about their fellow members, their environment and potential threats’. The graphic illustrating the vision for the project closely resembles a screen grab from a first-person shooter (Figure 2.1; see further DARPA 2014). The games industry has been seen as a source of inspiration, not only for technological innovation but even for strategic thinking. Dave Anthony,

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FIGURE 2.1  DARPA’s, Squad X project.

director and co-writer of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops  II (Treyarch 2010, 2012), for example, joined the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security in 2014, to work on the Atlantic Council’s ‘Art of Future War’ project. He was asked to ‘use his unique skillset to lay out a vision of the threats for which we must prepare … [and to] provide solutions to how global powers might mitigate the issues they face’ (Atlantic Council 2014). Foreign policy strategists, it would seem, imagine war as a videogame at the same time as military researchers aim to make it feel more like one. The idea that war has become ‘like a videogame’ may not be the most comprehensive critique of contemporary militarism, but it does at least capture an important truth about the emptiness of all the values-talk, and points up the hollowness and estrangement of contemporary Western political life. The complaint that military videogames are like real-world war, on the other hand, simply misses the target.

Notes 1 In late 2017 the British Army expressed concerns that its long-standing ‘Be the Best’ recruitment slogan sounded ‘dated, elitist and non-inclusive’, and in early 2018 came up with the new, more inclusive ‘Belonging’ campaign (New Army Recruitment Adverts ‘Won’t Appeal to New Soldiers’, BBC, 10 January 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42629529: accessed 21 March 2019). As Frank Furedi (2018) noted, the new campaign expressed obvious discomfort with the military’s traditional ‘warrior ethos’. Despite the failure of this campaign to meet recruitment targets, in 2019 the Army went ‘even further down the road of presenting itself as a cuddly, non-challenging, soppy institution’ (Furedi

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2019), with a new series of adverts targeting ‘snowflakes, binge gamers and me, me, me millennials’ (Telegraph, 3 January 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2019/01/03/army-targets-snowflakes-binge-gamers-millennials-newrecruitment/: accessed 21 March 2019). 2 A similar parallel has reportedly also been drawn by Western forces, such as the US troops who likened their experience of combat in Iraq to playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Kavaloski 2018: 100).

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Huntemann, N. B. (2010) Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in MilitaryThemed Video Games, in N. B. Huntemann and M. T. Payne (eds) Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. London: Routledge. Ignatieff, M. (2000) Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism (2016) The Hypnotic Power of ISIS Imagery in Recruiting Western Youth, 22 April, www.icsve.org/ brief-reports/the-hypnotic-power-of-isis-imagery-in-recruiting-western-youth-2/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Kang, J. C. (2014) ISIS’s Call of Duty, New Yorker, 18 September, www.newyorker. com/tech/elements/isis-video-game (accessed 21 March 2019). Katz, R. (2014) The State Department’s Twitter War with ISIS Is Embarrassing, Time, 16 September, http://time.com/3387065/isis-twitter-war-state-department/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Kavaloski, L. (2018) Security Games: The Coded Logics of the Playable War on ISIS, Critical Studies on Security, 6(1): 100–17. Keeble, R. (1997) Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Luton: John Libbey. Khan, N. (2015) ISIL Videos Imitate Hollywood and Video Games to Win Converts, Quartz, 22 December, https://qz.com/578052/this-is-how-isis-inspiresits-followers/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Klepek, P. (2016) The FBI Made a Video Game and It Sucks, Kotaku, 9 February, http://kotaku.com/the-fbi-made-a-video-game-and-it-sucks-1758105036 (accessed 21 March 2019). Knight, M. M. (2014) I Understand Why Westerners Are Joining Jihadi Movements Like ISIS. I Was Almost One of Them, Washington Post, 3 September, www. washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/03/i-understand-whywesterners-are-joining-the-islamic-state-i-was-almost-one-of-them (accessed 21 March 2019). Knightley, P. (2000) The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and MythMaker from the Crimea to Kosovo (revised edition). London: Prion Books. Laïdi, Z. (1998) A World without Meaning. London: Routledge. Lesaca, J. (2015) On Social Media, ISIS Uses Modern Cultural Images to Spread Anti-Modern Values, The Brookings Institution, 24 September, www.brookings. edu/blog/techtank/2015/09/24/on-social-media-isis-uses-modern-culturalimages-to-spread-anti-modern-values/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Markoe, L. (2016) ISIS Lures with Video Game Themes, Religion News Service, 13 March, http://religionnews.com/2016/03/13/islamic-state-video-gameterrorist/ (accessed 21 March 2019). McCormick, R. (2016) The FBI Made a Very Confusing Game about Preventing Terrorism, The Verge, 12 February, www.theverge.com/2016/2/12/10976914/ fbi-anti-extremist-video-game-slippery-slope (accessed 21 March 2019). Miller, D. and G. Philo (1996) Against Orthodoxy: The Media DO Influence Us, Sight and Sound, 6(12), December. Moskos, C. C. (2001) What Ails the All-Volunteer Force: An Institutional Perspective, Parameters, summer, http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/ Articles/01summer/moskos.htm (accessed 21 March 2019).

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Moskos, C. C., J. A. Williams and D. R. Segal (2000) Armed Forces after the Cold War, in C. C. Moskos, J. A. Williams and D. R. Segal (eds) The Postmodern Military. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nieborg, D. B. (2006) ‘We Want the Whole World to Know How Great the US Army Is!’ – Computer Games and Propaganda, in M. Santorineos (ed.) Gaming Realities: A Challenge for Digital Culture. Athens: Fournos Center for Digital Culture. Nieborg, D. B. (2010) Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power of Military Games, in N. B. Huntemann and M. T. Payne (eds) Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. London: Routledge. Parkin, S. (2016) How Isis Hijacked Pop Culture, from Hollywood to Video Games, The Guardian, 29 January, http:\\www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ jan/29/how-isis-hijacked-pop-culture-from-hollywood-to-video-games. Philo, G. (1997) Children and Film/Video/TV Violence. Glasgow: Glasgow University Media Group. Saber, D. and N. Webber (2017) ‘This Is Our Call of Duty’: Hegemony, History and Resistant Videogames in the Middle East, Media, Culture & Society, 39(1): 77–93. Semati, M. and P. M. Szpunar (2018) ISIS beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, Terrorism, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35(1): 1–7. Schulzke, M. (2013) Rethinking Military Gaming: America’s Army and Its Critics, Games and Culture, 8(2): 59–76. Susca, M. (2014) Violent Virtual Games and the Consequences for Real War, E-International Relations, 24 September, www.e-ir.info/2014/09/24/violentvirtual-games-and-the-consequences-for-real-war/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Thornhill, T. (2014) Isis Use Top Video Game Grand Theft Auto 5 to Recruit Children and Radicalise the Vulnerable, Daily Mail, 22 September, www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2765414/Isis-use-video-game-Grand-Theft-Auto-5recruit-children-radicalise-vulnerable.html (accessed 21 March 2019). Trendacosta, K. (2016) This Absurd FBI Site Teaches Teens to Spot Violent Extremists, Gizmodo, 8 February, https://gizmodo.com/your-tax-dollars-paidfor-this-awful-fbi-site-that-teac-1757914340 (accessed 21 March 2019). Wager, J. (2013) Anti-War Games: Intersections of Militarism, Gaming and Cinema, Avanca Cinema 2013. Avanca: Ediçoes Cine-Club de Avanca.

Ludography 11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine. 11 bit studios. Antonisse, Jamie (2008) Hush. jamieantonisse.com. deserthat (2008) Giant Tank. Scratch. DreamWorks Interactive (1999) Medal of Honor. Electronic Arts. EA DICE (2002) Battlefield 1942. Electronic Arts. Infinity Ward (2003) Call of Duty. Activision. Molleindustria (2012) Unmanned: A Day in the Life of a Drone Pilot. Molleindustria.

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NewsGaming (2003) September 12. NewsGaming. NewsGaming (2004) Madrid. NewsGaming. Rockstar Games (1997) Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games. Rockstar North (2002) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Rockstar Games. Sucker Punch (2009) infamous. Sony. Take Action Games (2006) Darfur Is Dying. Take Action Games. Treyarch (2010) Call of Duty: Black Ops. Activision. Treyarch (2012) Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Activision. US Army (2002) America’s Army. US Army.

3 Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure Kevin McSorley Much critical commentary on video wargames reads their importance in terms of being the latest progeny of a military–industrial–entertainment complex, the slicker and more sophisticated modern cousins of traditional propaganda, whose ultimate significance lies in the seductive and immersive cultural conscription, or even military pre-training, that they offer to various contemporary youth corps in line with their bellicose patrilineage. As such, analysis of video wargames has often focused on exploring how specific understandings and discourses of militarism, war, heroism, enmity, geopolitics and so on may be reproduced and inculcated through the representations, narratives, procedural logics and attendant cultures of such games (see inter alia Huntemann and Payne (eds) 2010, Payne 2016, Robinson 2012, Shaw 2010, Stahl 2010, Voorhees, Call and Whitlock (eds) 2012). This dominant mode of critique has of course been complicated on numerous grounds — for example by the abilities of heterogeneous audiences to contest militarist discourses and invest games-playing activities with plural meanings (Allen 2009) or by the fact that certain critical wargames may themselves deliberately undercut the generic expectations, identifications and moral certainties typical of traditional wargaming (see Jørgensen 2016, and Pötzsch Chapter 13 in this volume). Nonetheless, much critical scholarship remains within this overall problem-space of the relationship of wargames to the militarization of everyday life. This chapter moves beyond these hegemonic debates in order to try to re-think the critical questions that are typically asked of wargames. In what other ways might wargames be conceptualized as a broad cultural force?

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What else, beyond militarism, might wargames be teaching us politically? To explore these questions, this chapter will proceed in three parts, putting arguments and resources from across a number of different domains into dialogue with each other. The first section will explore the very distinctive significance of failure for videogame-play. The second section explores the resonance of contemporary political discourses of resilience for gameplay. Finally, I explore scholarship that engages more specifically with affective design and the embodied phenomenology of playing wargames. The overall argument that is developed through these engagements is that the cultural and political significance of contemporary video wargames may not be restricted to the ways in which they might function as an idiom of militarization. Rather, the importance of video wargaming additionally lies in the player’s necessary development of various, delimited forms of resilient subjectivity through continual exposure to contingency and inevitable failure. As such, I suggest that wargames are ultimately a key cultural form for the exploration and entrainment of how to bear the disaster of living in the end times.

Playing with Failure In this first section I want to go right back to think about the distinctiveness of videogames as a cultural form. What happens when we play videogames, or when videogames play us? In The Art of Failure: The Pain of Playing Video Games, the games scholar Jesper Juul (2013) notes that playing videogames is a fundamentally emotional pursuit. Players are emotionally affected by videogames and they often choose particular games to play on the basis of their mood-managing effects, that they might match or modulate a desired or current mood. These central emotional dimensions of gameplay can at times be neglected in scholarship that reads videogames primarily as a form of political communication analysable in terms of the various ideologies and understandings that are shaped through their representations, narratives and procedures. Furthermore, Juul suggests that, far from being an activity concerned predominantly with pleasure and positive emotions, the question of failure lies at the heart of much videogaming. Negotiating the frustration and the emotional threat of failure is often central to what gaming means to players. Juul notes that many videogames are fundamentally designed to make the player fail, at least initially. There is never a completely smooth unfurling of gameplay experience, else the experience would not be a game. As such, a crucial part of gameplay is that the player has to learn to deal with the consequences and the inevitable emotional experience of failure. Juul (2013: 15) argues that ‘since failure will likely result in a worse mood than success … to play a game is thus to take an emotional gamble’. This

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emotional gamble, and the associated feeling traps that may result from taking it, are likely recognizable to anyone who has ever played a videogame and found themselves becoming increasingly tense, serious, angry or frustrated rather than relaxed or playful. Straightforward fun or pleasure is not the correct way to describe the common and often addictive experience of much games-playing. This is Juul’s description of his own experience of playing the videogame Super Real Tennis: Having already become frustrated by the game, frustration was the basic mood that I hoped to escape by finally completing the game. I knew that the more time I sank into the game, the higher the likelihood that I would complete it, but conversely I would also experience more frustration for having spent too much time on futile attempts at the game. The greater my frustration, the larger was my motivation to escape that frustration – by playing more, which merely increased my frustration. (Juul 2013: 36) Videogames thus typically evoke far from simple positive emotions. Rather, they are often complex and paradoxical emotional experiences, centrally defined as much by precarious and unpleasant feelings that players might reasonably wish to avoid as they are by joyous feelings; by emotional pains and discomforts as much as pleasures (see inter alia Anable 2018, Jørgensen 2016, Jørgensen and Karlsen (eds) 2019, Mortensen, Linderoth and Brown (eds) 2015). This duality of emotional experience is ultimately central to games-playing. Juul terms this the paradox of failure – that in playing videogames, players are deliberately seeking something out that they fully expect is going to be partially experienced as unpleasant and possibly deeply frustrating, and furthermore that such inevitable failures can only really be understood and attributed as their own personal failings rather than being the result of something entirely beyond their control. Players know that videogames are designed to make them fail, and it is these anticipated unpleasant feelings of anger and frustration that bind them to games-playing as much as any ultimate feelings of enjoyment, achievement or relief. This then is the fraught and complex emotional gamble that underpins a player’s decision whether or not to enter into what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004) call the magic circle of the gameworld. Players know that the gaming situation will likely appear absolutely impossible and impossibly frustrating at times, but are also aware that the typical gameworld is one where solutions and emotional releases do eventually appear. Successful game designs must ultimately allow some hope of repairing the felt inadequacies that they engender, but such hopes will only appear so long as the player commits to playing and emotionally gambling more. This relationship between player and game designer, between emotional investment and the provision of opportunity and relief, is a fundamental social contract of the

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gameworld (Isbister 2017). It is one that players commonly express in their hopes that game designs will be ‘fair’ or ‘balanced’, as opposed to being either too hard or too easy and hence outside the moral and emotional economy and indeed the very definition of a game. For Juul (2013: 34) then, the very ‘conventions of games are philosophies of the meaning of failure’. A fundamental dimension of videogaming then is that failure must be experienced to some extent, its emotional consequences must be borne, in order to learn what (not) to do to succeed and to eventually escape its feeling trap. The gameworld is thus typically a space where the player is constantly forced to reckon with and negotiate these paradoxes and uncertain affective challenges, a veritable laboratory of precarious and contradictory emotions that accompany the constant engendering of failure (Anable 2018). Players’ understandings of, and emotional responses to, failure will be heterogeneous, involving a complex mixture of denial, blame, anger and avoidance. Their responses may likewise range from directing emotional frustrations at the hardware itself through to seeking out spectacular in-game failure as a way of temporarily repurposing the meaning of the game. However, pathways of learning and progression typically open up for the player by embracing individual responsibility for failure and by attempting to develop particular required skills and responses, investing time and emotional labour within the gameworld. The distinctiveness of videogaming for Juul is thus that it is ‘the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure’ (2013: 28). This emotional experimentation is only enhanced by the structuring idea that is understood to define the liminal space of the gameworld, that ‘it’s only a game’. While this common refrain may seem to downplay the significance of gaming, it is explicitly and paradoxically because of a felt separation from real-world consequentiality that games may become so emotionally invested with significant meanings and feelings beyond the everyday; may be thought and felt to be particularly important activities for their players. As Juul notes, a related argument is commonly made for the value of art being specifically linked to its lack of mundane use value or exchange value, but games are less commonly understood or valued in a similar way. However, as with other artforms, it is this very idea of autonomy and separation from real-world use value that may itself facilitate emotional investment and meaning-creation by the player, permitting the actual emotional struggles of gaming and the fears and frustrations of failure to be staged and felt. And although many other art forms have historically been concerned with making the viewer a witness to the emotional experiences of failure and tragedy, Juul argues that in requiring the player to be emotionally complicit with failure in order to play, ‘games are the strongest art form for the exploration of responsibility. Games give us nowhere to hide’ (2013: 128). Juul’s thesis is clearly pitched at the general level of the cultural form or medium. Videogames require that the player, or the ‘operator’ in Alexander

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Galloway’s (2006) terms, works through complex emotional gambles and learns to deal with the inevitable frustrations of failure. In the following section, I argue that this particular configuring of the user is itself highly resonant with a wider reconfiguring of political subjectivity that has occurred across numerous other domains in recent decades – the political constitution of the resilient subject.

Resilience and Political Agency Resilience generally refers to the ability to bounce back from, adapt to, even grow through adversity and crisis. It has become a highly significant political motif over recent decades, with the cultivation of resilience increasingly seen to be central to addressing an ever-growing range of policy issues from disaster response and sustainable development through to food security and urban planning. A genealogy of discourses and practices of political resilience is beyond the scope of this paper (see inter alia Chandler 2014, Chandler and Reid 2016, Evans and Reid 2014, Zebrowski 2015). Nonetheless, Julian Reid (2016: 286) argues that overall we are currently witnessing an ‘ongoing shift in discourses of governance and subjection from security to resilience’. While the promotion of security has historically functioned as a major legitimation for practices of liberal governance, Reid suggests that: Today the whole game of politics has undergone a paradigm shift. We no longer understand politics as a practice for making the world safer, but as a practice which is merely geared for survival. It is about being able to sustain the way we live for as long as possible in the context of the supposed reality that the world has actually entered a period of catastrophic decay. (Reid 2016: 288) While modern political institutions such as the state were fundamentally based on promises of progress and the possibility of achieving security, this new political imaginary suggests that at an underlying level the generative instability of a catastrophic world system cannot be changed or resisted. This necessitates a new type of politics and understanding of the possibilities for human action and subjectivity, one circumscribed by acceptance of the fundamental fact that life cannot be lived entirely free from danger. Contemporary political imaginaries thus often presuppose a life of continuous risk and permanent exposure to endemic threats, fears and dangers – notably including ecological catastrophe, as expressed in the key notion of the epochal shift to the Anthropocene; endless conflict,

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as articulated in the Manichean project of the global War on Terror; and technological Armageddon, as instantiated in the liminal development of nuclear weaponry. The event horizons of ecological decay, civilizational conflict and nuclear ruin thus exert an important influence on our contemporary understandings and imaginings of politics and the human condition. Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2014: 3) argue that ‘the dream of lasting security’ has increasingly been replaced by a catastrophic imaginary where ‘we have become increasingly attuned to living in complex and dynamic systems which offer no prospect of control’. Associated discourses of resilience further suggest that, given this situation, life itself can now only be sustained through accepting, and attempting to adapt to, this underlying condition. Indeed, not accepting this situation is understood as endangering the very capacity to go on living. In resilience discourses, life can now only survive through attempting to learn from the crises that will inevitably occur, embracing exposure to continual dangers and threats as a way to experience ‘post-traumatic growth’ and develop the necessary resilience to carry on surviving. Exposure to danger is thus re-conceptualized in increasingly positive terms, as a necessary condition for life to flourish; as constitutive of the possibility for the development of resilient subjectivities. Life must expose itself to danger, for this is increasingly understood as necessary for its adaptive development.1 With modern institutions increasingly understood as being unable to provide security from the continual dangers of an intrinsically volatile world, indeed unwilling to protect populations for their own good, the burden increasingly falls on vulnerable populations and individuals to develop resilience themselves. This becomes a central goal and an individual obligation in neoliberal biopolitics, with dependency on others pathologized and any unwillingness to adapt understood as learned helplessness. For Reid (2013: 355), this ‘account of the world … concerned with building resilient subjects is one that presupposes the disastrousness of the world and likewise one which interpellates a subject that is permanently called on to bear the disaster’. Indeed, subjects’ willingness to bear the disaster increasingly becomes a moral duty and condition of any dwindling social contract under contemporary neoliberalism. Life must submit itself to the neoliberal injunction to embrace risk in order to go on living.2 For Reid then, discourses of resilience further extend and radicalize the individual responsibilization of neoliberalism. The fundamental ontology here is one of vulnerability rather than oppression, depoliticizing and naturalizing disaster as an inevitable occurrence rather than a contingent product of the political and economic order. As such, resilience discourses primarily task the subject with simply adapting to their social conditions rather than resisting them or trying to further understand the reasons why they may be faced with such dangers. Reid suggests that the key claim of this contemporary regime of truth is that ‘the human subject is conceived

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as resilient in so far as it adapts to rather than resists the conditions of its suffering in the world’ (2013: 363–4). This is a highly circumscribed political imaginary, ‘the limits of which are defined by survivability’ (Reid 2018: 30), and one where danger and failure are inevitable.3 I suggest that a particular resonance can be clearly seen between these increasingly important political discourses of resilience – that emphasize a catastrophic world of continuous and emergent threats, the necessity of permanent exposure to danger and individual adaptation in order to survive, and an understanding of the inevitability of failure – and the dominant cultural form and structuring of gameplay in contemporary mainstream videogames. Of course, at the level of thematic content, Hobbesian and post-apocalyptic narratives and catastrophic and survivalist political imaginaries are currently a mainstay of many of the most successful commercial videogames. Moreover, in terms of the structure and form of videogames, there is no way for the player to fundamentally resist or challenge the underlying rules, the coded protocols, of the gameworld. As Ian Bogost (2007: 37) notes, videogames ‘do not allow the user to mount procedural objections through configurations of the system itself’.4 The typical form of the videogame is rather that of an algorithmic machine that disciplines the player into developing a very specific skillset in order to flourish (Crogan 2011). As such, and as explored in the previous section, players must fundamentally accept, and indeed learn to embrace, the emotional frustrations of inevitable failure in order to try to negotiate and survive the gameworld. This subject position explicitly resonates with the model of resilient subjectivity, of embracing limited adaptive survivability, that is increasingly at the heart of contemporary politics. Videogames may thus be considered a signature medium of late modernity not because of any particular aesthetic dimensions, but because the player occupies a very specific subject position that exemplifies and resonates with this wider political dispositif of resilience. How might we attempt to further explore the connections between these positions of the contemporary videogamer and the resilient subject? How can we further think through the nature of any homology or resonance? In the following, final section of the chapter I will offer one further way to explore this by drawing on another strand of recent critical games scholarship that has focused predominantly on issues of affective design and the embodied phenomenology of gameplay. Unlike Juul’s more general thesis, this work is less concerned with outlining the overarching structure of feeling, the broad emotional canvas, that defines gaming in terms of having to experience and negotiate inevitable failures and frustrations. Rather, it focuses on how specific videogames work to inculcate and modulate more granular and particular embodied and visceral experiences, from itchy trigger-fingers and palpitations, through adrenaline rushes and thrills, to states of nervous anticipation (see, for example, Ash 2012, 2013); and tries to theorize the wider political significance of these more specific fabrications of embodied experience.

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Wargames and Political Affect As previously mentioned, critical scholarship on commercial wargames, when it has considered the question of the political significance of gaming experiences, has predominantly problematized the issue in terms of how playing certain video wargames may constitute a form of cultural militarism, a seductive ‘militainment’, the pleasures of which are ultimately felt at the expense of developing any other critical capacities to engage with war and matters of military might (Stahl 2010). Ongoing critical work thus commonly focuses on exploring those mechanisms through which elements of ‘ludic war culture’ may be established (Payne 2016, Pötzsch and Hammond 2016).5 However, in order to theorize the political significance of embodied gaming experiences beyond this specific idea of militarization, I will draw here in particular on the work of the media theorist Pasi Väliaho, and his analysis of the AAA first-person shooter (FPS) wargame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Infinity Ward 2011) in his 2014 book, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power and the Neoliberal Brain. Väliaho is concerned to theorize ‘the political nature of video games imagery at the current historical moment’, with ‘political’ here understood specifically to refer to ‘the shaping and reshaping of corporeal capacities and textures of experience’ (2014: 118). Väliaho contends that videogames are ‘first and foremost, an actionbased medium; it is human actions that breathe life into them … more crucial than the game’s story are the hectic rhythms that its players incorporate in patterns of movement, affectivity and arousal’ (2014: 118–19). Videogames thus fundamentally evoke, and depend on, levels of bodily arousal and associated bodily movements in order to be brought to life. Unlike, say, films, videogames are literally brought into being, enacted and materialized, through this ‘investment of kinetic vitality’.6 He additionally argues that the constant and capricious stream of intense sensations in FPSs – explosions, sounds of gunfire, flickers of movement etc. – targets the primitive arousal system that underpins a general anticipatory responsivity to the environment, orienting attention, initiating movements and so on. The experience of playing FPS games is thus one of constant fluctuations in the intensity of arousal and feelings of vitality, a modulation that is partly prenoetic, operating below conscious recognition: In the pace of the video game, constantly changing visual stimuli modulate amplitudes of arousal and related affect states, which shift, in a split second, from creeping anxiety and sometimes even outright fear to the explosive pleasure of killing an enemy. Much of gameplay happens on levels that words cannot reach. When we play Modern Warfare 3, embodiment primarily takes place on the level of our bodies’ intense dynamics, beyond self-awareness. The video game images seek to frame

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us as basically affective and aroused beings who are constantly reacting to shifting,contingent screen events. And in this type of affective capture lie the thrill and power of the game. (Väliaho 2014: 124) For Väliaho then, such videogame imagery inculcates a fundamental sense of aliveness, arousal, possibility and affective immediacy: ‘Gameplay, one could argue, is filled with the coming and going, surging and fading, of intense experiences of vitality’ (2014: 123). He further argues that this particular fashioning of experience in videogames, the granular modulation of fundamental levels of arousal and affect, resonates with a very specific understanding of subjectivity that is prevalent in contemporary biopolitics. This is the idea that the human subject can ultimately be understood as a ‘cerebral subject’, or in terms of their ‘brainhood’: a neurobiological plasticity and adaptability that emerges in continuous creative interaction with a generative and contingent environment.7 For Väliaho, there is an affinity between the shaping of experience in FPS wargames and this contemporary biopolitical imaginary and neuroscientific episteme: The action-oriented images of these kinds of games can be considered epigenetic and developmental, functioning as environmental conditions in response to which the brain adjusts and modifies itself. In other words, while neurosciences provide conceptual ground for the adaptive and plastic individual, first-person shooter imagery seems to frame a similar model of the subject in embodied adjustments. (Väliaho 2014: 130–1) Väliaho thus ultimately proposes that ‘games like Modern Warfare 3 promote a process of individuation that serves contemporary biopolitics with its imaginary of emergent, material and self-organizing living beings struggling for existence in an utterly contingent world of survival, threat and risks’ (2014: 129). As such, he theorizes video wargaming not in terms of militarization but as emblematic of, and underwriting, a wider biopolitical mode of subjectification that is attuned to a world increasingly understood and experienced in terms of permanent looming catastrophe and contingency. For Väliaho, the first-person shooter gestures towards a wider situation in which contemporary biopolitical subjects are becoming pre-reflectively entrained as individuated hunter agents, perpetually switched on to a state of anticipatory nervousness, in thrall to a future that promises only the continual playing of the game or death. Such gameplay thus ultimately ‘binds the players in the sensory fabric of the neoliberal present … [into] engagement with contingency, randomness, (in)security, and crisis’ (2014: 129).

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Väliaho’s analysis does not concentrate on particular emotions such as anger or frustration, but rather points to a resonance between this continuous anticipatory modulation of fundamental levels of arousal, of the pre-reflective pre-emotional orienting of attention, and the contemporary model of what he terms the cerebral subject, of subjectivity increasingly understood primarily in neurobiological terms.8 I argue that, being pitched predominantly at this particular level of the shaping of arousal and base political affect, this type of inquiry further supplements the analysis that has been presented in the opening sections of this chapter. Indeed, I suggest that there are a number of mutually reinforcing resonances between video wargames and the resilient political subject that can now be mapped out. Firstly, as Väliaho’s work explores and exemplifies, many video wargames work at the primary level of the modulation of anticipatory arousal, of base political affect, attuning the player at this fundamental level to a capricious environment of permanent contingency and catastrophe. Secondly, as discussed in the earlier sections of this chapter, at a more overarching level of the broader structures of feeling and emotional investments of gameplay, the rules of the gameworld fundamentally shape and delimit the player’s practices and sense of political agency towards expressions of resilience and emotional coping. With no possibility of resisting or challenging the hard-coded rules of the game, opportunities become increasingly narrowly experienced and understood in terms of the ability to adapt to the failures, and particularly to emotionally deal with the associated frustrations, that will inevitably occur in the gameworld. Agency is thus predominantly defined in terms of the cultivation of resilience and the limited expression of survivability. Finally, it is important to again point to the level of thematic content or the paradigmatic political imaginary that is staged in many mainstream AAA wargames. This has not been a focus of any sustained analytic attention in this chapter but, suffice to say, the settings of many hugely popular wargames such as the Call of Duty series are often dystopian, post-apocalyptic and catastrophic gameworlds and warscapes. The crucible of wargaming is thus circumscribed by a fundamentally survivalist political imaginary. I suggest that these three dimensions of political affect, political agency and the political imaginary offer a sensitizing analytic framework for further investigation of the ways in which the subject of play in video wargames is increasingly constituted in terms of resilient political subjectivity. While the characteristics and intensities of these three dimensions will of course vary in the specific designs and gameplay of diverse and complex wargames, and indeed they may even be disjunctive in certain games, I suggest that the contemporary moment of mainstream AAA video wargaming is typically marked by articulation, resonance and reinforcement across these various dimensions.

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Concluding Thoughts To conclude, I have argued in this chapter that the significance of contemporary video wargaming can be productively thought beyond debates around militarization, a conceptual problem-space within which the majority of critical commentary and analysis of wargames has been located to date. Through exploring and putting into dialogue work on the centrality of emotions and failure to videogaming experience, political discourses of resilience and associated survivalist imaginaries, and the affective and anticipatory phenomenology of playing wargames, I have suggested another way to conceptualize the cultural resonance and political significance of video wargames. I argue that video wargames are a signature cultural form, crucial vectors of our contemporary technocultural becoming (Crogan 2011), through which the embodiment and entrainment of various dimensions of resilient subjectivity occur via permanent exposure to arousal, contingency and failure. The video wargamer is thus a subject who is ultimately entrained to understand and experience themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor. Whilst permanent anticipatory arousal and inevitable failure may make the player feel continuously enlivened and indeed deeply frustrated at times, this vitality and anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the coded rules of the game cannot be changed. Wargaming may be thus understood and critiqued not simply in terms of militarist inculcation or pre-training for war, but as an activity in which various dimensions, experiences and practices of resilience are increasingly articulated and made manifest. Wargames offer an intense space for playing through and with continual emergency, where the subject of play is one who experiments imaginatively and emotionally with bearing the disaster of living in the end times. Even if the wargamer eventually overcomes a certain level of inevitable failure to reach the end of one discrete level or gameworld, video wargaming as a contemporary cultural flow constantly regenerates, respawns and reboots, breeding sequelae and sequels, further maps and mutations, continuously captivating fresh bodily attention and circulating capital. What are the prospects for gameworlds that might work to trouble resilience and the wider biopolitical assumptions and resonances of survivalist neoliberalism? Might wargames be experienced and designed in ways that play us and teach us politically how to live, and die, differently? These are some of the issues that deserve further elaboration and investigation in an analytic agenda that seeks to understand the subject of play in video wargames beyond cultures of militarization.

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Notes 1 Drawing on analyses of liberal biopolitics by Foucault and Esposito, Reid argues that the fundamental conception of human life in the liberal tradition of thought is in terms of its biological properties and capacities. Liberal governance has thus been biopoliticized from its very beginnings, with humans ultimately conceptualized in the reductive terms of their capacities to survive and reproduce. Most recently, particular influential accounts of emergence and development in the life sciences, including molecular biology and ecological systems thinking, have increasingly come to shape contemporary political imaginaries. These suggest that it is not just that living systems can never be free from, or secured from, all dangers and threats but that their very capacity to repeatedly adapt, evolve and go on living actually fundamentally depends on their exposure to danger. 2 As Reid notes, discourses of resilience tie neoliberal economic policies and attitudes towards risk, including embracing market-based forms of governance, to contemporary strategies of crisis management. For example, in much United Nations discourse, volatile situations and disasters are being fundamentally re-conceptualized as windows of opportunity where people may transform their economic institutions in line with neoliberal doctrines of self-reliance to develop practices of resilience: ‘it is crucial for people to understand that they have a responsibility towards their own survival and not simply to wait for governments to find and provide solutions’ (UN cited in Evans and Reid 2014: 80). 3 David Chandler relatedly notes that modernist comprehensions of causality, and associated understandings of failure, have been transformed across numerous domains of governance in recent decades. A heightened emphasis on causal complexity and contingency has been accompanied by a rejection of politics that suppose a possible avoidance or transcendence of failure. Rather, Chandler (2016: 20) argues that there has been a new enfolding of failure as ontological necessity into contemporary discourses of power: ‘failure’s integration into governing practices can hardly be disputed and has been reflected in the rapid rise of resilience approaches, which increasingly emphasize the inevitability of failure in all areas of policy concern’. For Chandler, the danger is that ‘the posthuman world of contingency sets no “normative horizon” beyond obedience to the external appearances of the world: the necessity of continuous adaptation to the world in its emergence’ (ibid.). 4 Notwithstanding that various traditions and communities of participatory games modding and immaterial labour may complicate such an understanding of the system (see for example Hong 2013, Unger 2012). 5 A related thesis explores how aspects of gameplay may even resonate with elements of military training in terms of the inculcation of specific embodied skillsets – perceptions of enmity, decision-making under stress, targeting abilities etc. – that might ultimately translate to the demands of particular real-world military objectives and scenarios, particularly those types of military labour that depend on specific screen-based mediations. Of course, many

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contemporary forms of military training do themselves involve extensive virtual simulations, the engines of which have in certain cases been developed from popular entertainment titles such as Doom (id Software 1993). These symbiotic interdependencies and flows of expertise between military simulations and commercial wargames are explored in, inter alia, Der Derian (2001) and Mead (2013). However, the fact that playing commercial video wargames such as firstperson shooters is a highly popular pastime for soldiers themselves may also speak to a form of disjuncture, rather than resonance, between the embodied experiences and thrills available via such leisure-time pursuits and those that are required for what are often increasingly bureaucratized, surveillant, monotonous and mundane modes of military working, a disjuncture that is specifically parodied in the Molleindustria title Unmanned (2012), which explores the everyday life of a military drone operator. 6 Väliaho (2014: 120–1) argues that the images that populate gaming experiences can be understood as fundamentally visuomotor enactments or performances, ‘perceptions [that] cannot be separated from moving about, probing, and interacting’. Unlike a movie, which may play out regardless, videogame images will not exist without bodily investment, ‘they come into being only when players enact them: their becoming visible and apprehensible rests on our bodily performance rather than our gaze’ (2014: 118). 7 Vidal (2009: 6) defines brainhood as ‘the property or quality of being, rather than simply having, a brain’. For Väliaho, the effective framing of selfhood as brainhood that takes place in videogames, almost the neurobiologization of the gaming self, is an extension of wider liberal biopolitics whereby political subjectivity and agency are conceived in terms of ‘individuals who are, and fundamentally and essentially only exist, biologically bound to the materiality within which they live’ (Foucault 2007: 21). 8 Väliaho’s analytic technique is essentially one of montage, placing various accounts alongside each other, including analyses of neurobiological theory and descriptions of the immersive rhythms of arousal and affective grammars of gameplay, in order to point to homologies and resonances that he suggests constitute a wider dispositif. Rather than explicitly theorize connections or causality in any deterministic or linear manner, or attempt to trace a particular genealogy of the ‘cerebral subject’, he suggests that it emerges as a diagram of contemporary subjectivity across these multiple heterogeneous sites and entanglements.

References Allen, R. (2009) The Army Rolls through Indianapolis: Fieldwork at the Virtual Army Experience, Transformative Works and Cultures, 2, http://journal. transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/80/97 (accessed 21 March 2019). Anable, A. (2018) Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Ash, J. (2012) Attention, Videogames and the Retentional Economies of Affective Amplification, Theory, Culture and Society, 29(6): 3–26. Ash, J. (2013) Technologies of Captivation: Videogames and the Attunement of Affect, Body and Society, 19(1): 27–51. Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chandler, D. (2014) Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. London: Routledge. Chandler, D. (2016) How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality, Millennium, 44(3): 391–410. Chandler, D. and J. Reid (2016) The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Crogan, P. (2011) Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation and Technoculture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, J. (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Evans, B. and J. Reid (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Galloway, A. R. (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hong, R. (2013) Game Modding, Prosumerism and Neoliberal Labor Practices, International Journal of Communication, 7: 984–1002 Huntemann, N. B. and M. T. Payne, eds (2010) Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Videogames. London: Routledge. Isbister, K. (2017) How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Juul, J. (2013) The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jørgensen, K. (2016) The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops: The Line, Game Studies, 16 (2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/jorgensenkristine (accessed 21 March 2019). Jørgensen, K. and F. Karlsen, eds (2019) Transgression in Games and Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mead, C. (2013) War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Mortensen, T. E., J. Linderoth and A. Brown, eds (2015) The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments. London: Routledge. Payne, M. T. (2016) Playing War: Military Videogames after 9/11. New York, NY: New York University Press. Pötzsch, H. and P. Hammond (2016) Approaching the War/Game Nexus, Game Studies, 16 (2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/potzschhammond (accessed 21 March 2019). Reid, J. (2013) Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the SustainableDevelopment- Resilience Nexus, International Political Sociology, 7: 353–68. Reid, J. (2016) The (Human) Subject of Security: Beyond the Biopolitics of Resilience, in S. Nelson and N. Soguk (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics. London: Routledge.

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Reid, J. (2018) Securing the Imagination: The Politics of the Resilient Self, in J. Bohland, S. Davoudi and J. Lawrence (eds) The Resilience Machine. London: Routledge. Robinson, N. (2012) Videogames, Persuasion and the War on Terror: Escaping or Embedding the Military-Entertainment Complex? Political Studies, 60(3): 504–22. Salen, K. and E. Zimmerman (2004) Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaw, I. (2010) Playing War, Social and Cultural Geography, 11(8): 789–803. Stahl, R. (2010) Militainment Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Unger, A. (2012) Modding as Part of Game Culture, in J. Fromme and A. Unger (eds) Computer Games and New Media Cultures: A Handbook of Digital Games Studies. London: Springer. Väliaho, P. (2014) Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power and the Neoliberal Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vidal, F. (2009) Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity, History of the Human Sciences, 22(1): 5–36. Voorhees, G., J. Call and K. Whitlock, eds (2012) Guns, Grenades and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Zebrowski, C. (2015) The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.

Ludography id Software (1993) Doom. GT Interactive. Infinity Ward (2011) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Activision. Molleindustria (2012) Unmanned: A Day in the Life of a Drone Pilot. Molleindustria.

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4 The Political Economy of Wargames: The Production of History and Memory in Military Video Games Emil Lundedal Hammar and Jamie Woodcock On Armistice Day 2018, the social media account of the popular Halo series (Bungie 2001) tweeted out: ‘To those who have served or continue to serve in our armed forces – thank you. #VeteransDay’, with an image of the iconic Master Chief character saluting a military airplane fly-over.1 An otherwise uncontroversial social media account focused solely on advertising Halo products, it is curious that such brand management would apparently view support of the military as apolitical and uncontroversial. Meanwhile, the last 20 years of US sales data show that the blockbuster military franchise Call of Duty (Infinity Ward 2003, Treyarch 2005) has dominated the sales charts over the last decade.2 These two examples speak to the militaristic ideology that videogames are steeped in. Both as representations of war and as commemorative gestures, war games form part of how societies and collectives understand past conflicts – they are one of the ways that we formulate ideas and understandings about history and the past (Chapman 2016a). Commercially successful military videogames such as Call of Duty and the Battlefield series (EA DICE 2002) allow consumers with access to digital technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, computers and consoles to play within virtual historical scenarios of war and conflict,

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for instance the First World War (Chapman 2016b), the Second World War (Ramsay 2015), the Haitian Revolution (Hammar 2017a), the Cold War (Pötzsch and Šisler 2016), or contemporary military occupations of the Middle East (Saber and Webber 2017). As Adam Chapman (2016b) has argued, ‘many historical video games are amongst the most successful contemporary popular historical products’. This is particularly important given ‘the unpopularity of school history’, and that ‘young people choose to use their free time playing video games set in the past’ (O’Neill and Feenstra 2016). Just as ‘Hollywood History’ (Loshitzky 1997) has been criticized for its construction of the past through the lens of imperialist and capitalist propaganda (Der Derian 2009, Stahl 2010), so war games propound similar ideologies, perspectives and representations of conflict (Allen 2011, Huntemann and Payne 2010, Payne 2016, Schut 2007). Although no quantitative study has been published on the dominant forms of meaning-making in war games, much research has explored the ways that commercial titles unreflectively convey hegemonic views of war and memory. For example, Andrew Salvati and Jonathan Bullinger (2013) argue that war games apply a selective form of authenticity, while the actual multidimensionality of the depicted conflict in question is usually reduced or removed (Pötzsch 2017). Most war games are generally played from the viewpoint of Western male soldiers with little to no inclusion of other perspectives, such as those of civilians. These disconcerting aspects of war games can, we argue, be traced back to the context in which they are produced. Structural factors, such as labour conditions, that shape the games industry find ultimate expression in what Berthold Molden terms a ‘mnemonic hegemony’, whereby dominant discursive framings privilege certain ways of remembering the past. As he writes, ‘Access to and control over the means of communication and diffusion of historical narratives are of utmost importance for the establishment and maintenance of mnemonic hegemony’ (Molden 2016: 134). When the material and social relations of production affect what is possible in media, this means that our understanding of war is constrained by these very same material and social relations, and thereby inadvertently reproduced by virtue of these relations. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1932) argued, ‘if you proceed from production, you necessarily concern yourself with the real conditions of production and with the productive activity of men’. When operating within a power structure, workers at videogame production companies are managed to produce particular outcomes (Woodcock 2016, 2019). While the individuals within a studio may hold different views on war, the collective project is often bound by structural requirements and is thus beyond the control of workers within the overall labour process, as we argue in this chapter.

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Rather than limiting our analysis to how war games privilege dominant ways of remembering conflict on the level of text, we instead turn towards a political-economy approach to account for their contribution to contemporary mnemonic hegemony. Investigating digital games production as a framing structure draws out the ideological and hegemonic ideas within the industry, which are then reinforced and reproduced in the games themselves, simultaneously closing down the transformative capacities they might hold.

The Political Economy of the Games Industry We now turn to discuss the political economy that underpins the games that are produced. We start here because, as game designer and professor Paolo Pedercini states, the games industry serves as ‘a laboratory for crucial tendencies of capitalism’ (in Partin 2017). Similarly, Aphra Kerr writes: the commodification of games and play is an example of how capitalism expands into all areas of everyday life and changes things that we do and use into things which we exchange for money. Since the early 1970s the video games industry has explored ways to commodify children’s game and play time, and is increasingly a part of adult leisure too. (Kerr 2017: 29) Like many other media and cultural forms, videogames are produced within and are enabled by a historical and material global network dependent on the imperialist capitalist system across the world (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, Kirkpatrick 2013: 108). It is through the neo-colonial access to slave labour extracting cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Sinclair 2015, 2016, 2017, Valentine 2018), the state-run capitalist superexploitation in countries such as China (Fuchs 2018, Qiu 2017), the freetrade regulations of the centres of economic power, the precarious working conditions of software developers in North America (Consalvo 2008, O’Donnell 2014, Williams 2013) and in cheaply outsourced countries like Malaysia and Vietnam (Flecker 2016, Thomsen 2018), the exploitation of passion via ‘playbour’ by multibillion-dollar software companies (Bulut 2018, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009) and the disposal of e-waste back into the exploited countries (Maxwell et al. 2015, Nguyen 2017) that digital games are able to flourish as a cultural and economic force for those consumers with access to them (Huntemann and Aslinger 2013).

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The consolidation of power by software and hardware platforms also indicates the ‘platformisation of culture’ (Nieborg and Poell 2018), whereby markets are structured in the interests of a single dominant platform holder, such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Sony, Microsoft or Valve. As both Daniel Joseph’s (2018) and Mark Graham and Jamie Woodcock’s (2018) research confirms, the consolidated power of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016) disassembles workers’ rights and their collective organizations, and commodifies their activities online through platformization. While the games industry has been at the forefront of many of these changes, its contemporary form is predicated on twenty-first century imperialism (Smith 2016) and its products are symptoms of the historical and materialist systems from which they derive. The games industry follows monopoly capitalist production networks that super-exploit (Smith 2018) workers and the environment in the imperial periphery, while circulating surplus profits towards the core (Cope 2015). From the centre of power located within this global network, ‘a one-way flow of culture and information from center to periphery’ (Mosco 2009: 73) is enacted. Hence, as Joseph (2017) argues: ‘if you look at video games, capitalism stares back at you. They idealise experiences of individual freedom (through code or play), while exploiting uneven global development.’ In exercising power over the production of war games, most major companies operate from the US, Canada and Western European countries, with China also playing an increasingly important role (Kerr 2017). In addition to operating in geographical centres of power, the individuals who are employed to code and produce war games are homogenous across race, gender, age and sexuality (Edwards et al. 2014, Mateos-Garcia et al. 2014, Ramanan 2017, Weststar et al. 2018, Weststar and Legault 2015). The demographics of the games industry in North America and Europe show that the prevailing identity of the game developer is largely that of a white, heterosexual man in his late twenties or early thirties. This homogenous composition of the workforce enforces a habitus that ignores or overlooks the experiences of others. Research on the misogyny and patriarchy in the games industry (Johnson 2013, 2014) affirms this observation, as do numerous statements by women and feminist organizations (Ochsner 2017). In addition, racial hierarchies within game studios and their culture-industrial logic ensures the reproduction of white supremacy (Srauy 2017). This structuration of production then affects decisions on how wars should be represented, which usually results in mnemonic hegemony (Hammar 2017b). While workers from the margins do exist within these companies, they are rarely in positions of power (Woodcock 2016, 2019). A structural and normative form of ‘gatekeeping’ ensures that only certain people, with certain hegemonic beliefs and conformities, are employed in the games industry and are likely to traverse the power hierarchies of games production. This disparity is

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seen in the gender salary gap in the branch: surveys have shown that on average women earn $0.86 for every $1 that men make (Miller 2013, Graft 2014). The exploitation of game developers also means that games development is a ‘young man’s game’ (Legault et al. 2017). Social life outside of work is demolished by long workhours, maternity and/or paternity leave is impossible (Consalvo 2008), and deteriorating health resulting from so-called ‘crunch periods’ is tolerable only for younger and more naïve workers (Campbell 2016). Over 75 per cent of respondents in an International Game Developers Association survey (Legault et al. 2017) stated that they suffer from these crunch periods, which are extended periods of time where worker rights or expectations are suspended in favour of finishing the product (Takashi 2017, Williams 2015). As Kerr writes, ‘there is a high turnover of staff, a high degree of burnout and many leave the industry in their mid- to late thirties’ (Kerr 2017: 16). The overall experience of the games industry is therefore one of poor working conditions, deep precarity, lack of diversity and lack of accumulated experience due to a high burnout rate. While the labour involved is similar to that in other areas of software development and production (O’Donnell 2009), the games industry explicitly markets the work as playful and ‘fun’ in order more easily to exploit workers (Dyer-Witheford 1999, Fizek 2016, Woodcock and Johnson 2018). The hiring practices of US tech companies have also been criticized for a structural unwillingness to hire recently graduated and qualified people of colour (Bui and Miller 2016, Vara 2016).3 Thus, as Janine Fron et al. argue, the power structures in the games industry and culture reproduce assumptions about audiences and creators that reinforce the hegemony: This hegemonic elite determines which technologies will be deployed, and which will not; which games will be made, and by which designers; which players are important to design for, and which play styles will be supported. The hegemony operates on both monetary and cultural levels. (Fron et al. 2007: 1) In maintaining this hegemony of play, capital works in tandem with white supremacy and patriarchy to ‘divide and conquer’, suppressing the wages of the digital labour aristocracy in the imperial core while relying on the social-chauvinistic structure between this labour aristocracy and the superexploited in the periphery (Cope 2015: 151–2, Du Bois 1935). In sum, the picture of the global games industry shows an exploited labour aristocracy in the imperial core structured along white, masculine, heteronormative lines, while the super-exploited hardware assemblers and outsourced developers in the peripheries provide extra surplus value. However, this connection to imperialism not only flows along supply chains: it is also deeply connected to the military–industrial complex, which is the other side of twenty-first century imperialism. It is to this that we turn next.

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The Military–Industrial Complex and Games There is a long history of connections between the military–industrial complex and games (Huntemann and Payne 2010, Payne 2016). However, these connections are often only explored in terms of the explicit use of the military and armed conflict as the subject of games, rather than unpicking other relationships that bring the end product into being. This is particularly important, because, as we have argued above, the work that goes into making videogames provides an important avenue for understanding the meaning potentials of the final product (Woodcock 2016), and how people engaged in the work shape it in varying ways. The connection between the military and videogames was present at the birth of the medium. As Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009: 7) have explained, all of the ‘contenders for the title “inventor of the video game” … were employees of the US military-industrial complex’. In part, this can be traced to the military being key to the development of the computer hardware on which games could be developed. For example, while programmers were employed by the military to devise computer simulations, such activities ‘could also be a diversion from working on mass death’, particularly work related to nuclear weapons, and ‘enjoyed for their technical “sweetness” and oddity without instrumental purpose, transformed into play’ (ibid.: 8). This is an example of ‘gamification-frombelow’ (Woodcock and Johnson 2018): finding a way to subvert technology at work for a different purpose. Games did not remain a subversive pursuit of programmers within the military, however. Once these early games had been developed, the nonprogrammers in the military were quick to see the potential for videogames to train soldiers for actual combat. From the 1980s onwards, various games were used for wargaming. This ranged from a reskinned version of Doom II (id Software 1994) to specially designed games like Virtual Battlespace 2 (Bohemia Interactive Simulations 2007) (Dobson 2007). In the process, a connection was formed between ‘game developers and war planners’ who had ‘overlapping interests in multimedia simulation and virtual experience’, which resulted in formalized links, collaborations and even subsidies for the production of new games (Kline et al. 2003: 99). So, while videogames were born accidentally within the military–industrial complex, they have been subjected to attempts to capture and subsume them into the organization of war. The tensions present now were also present at the start: while ‘games tend to a reactionary imperial content, as militarized, marketized, entertainment commodities, they also tend to a radical, multitudinous form, as collaborative, constructive, experimental digital productions’ (DyerWitheford and de Peuter 2009: 228). The most militarized forms have been the games published by the US Army, including the America’s Army (US Army 2002) series and Full Spectrum

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Warrior (Pandemic Studios 2004). The former was developed specifically as a recruitment tool that could be targeted at the next generation of potential soldiers, while the latter was used for training (Payne 2016:  6). These are different from the forms of ‘militainment’ that Roger Stahl (2010:  6) describes, which involve ‘state violence’ being ‘translated into an object of pleasurable consumption’. Such forms are also found in film and other media, with much longer histories. While the military benefits from this indirect normalization, there are also relationships at play that go further than just the US Army publishing its own games. This is the most overt example, but many others rely on military consultants, drawing elements of the military into their workforce for the game, while also not having ‘to submit their design choices to the scrutiny of the government’s exacting review processes’ (Payne 2016: 6). The employment of military consultants represents an important development in the relationship between the military–industrial complex and videogames. The success of games has made many members of the military keen to participate, as Sledgehammer Games, the development studio of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014), found: ‘we’ve been fortunate that the series has a lot of fans across military organisations, and within the entertainment industry’, meaning that, ‘this draws a lot of interest, and a great deal of desire to help Call of Duty’ (quoted in Stuart 2014). Much like the Western film industry, the drive – and competition – for surface realism (Pötzsch 2017) has meant that many developers engage with consultants as part of the development process. Thus, rather than engaging directly with the military, developers are able to form connections with companies like Strike Fighter Consulting Inc., which purports to offer expertise ranging ‘from fighter pilots, bomber pilots, and test pilots to mission commanders, intelligence specialists and special operation forces’. In its publicity, the company explains that ‘military consultants’ can help developers ‘create lifelike combat scenarios that’ – they claim – ‘will ultimately lead to more immersive gameplay and higher sales’.4 Beyond consultancy, there is also the existence of specific kinds of product placement within videogames.5 Although most consumers are probably unaware of this, many developers pay gun manufacturers to include their products in games. Simon Parkin (2013) notes the long history of companies marketing ‘imitation adult products to children’, for example with candy cigarettes. Now, ‘licensed weapons are commonplace in video games, but the deals between game makers and gun-manufacturer are shrouded’, he observes, making it difficult to uncover exactly what is taking place. However, Parkin was able to discuss the details with Barrett, the company that manufactures the M82 sniper rifle that features in many games. The company explained that ‘video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners’. This is slightly odd, given the product is a .50 calibre rifle rather than a more generic commodity that

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might be advertised in film or television. In addition to the exposure, the gun company would also expect a royalty fee for its product featuring in a game – this could be either a single payment or sales percentage, perhaps as high as 5–10 per cent of the retail price. The negotiation with developers also extends to how it is used in a game. For example, with Barrett, this means knowing ‘explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light … such as the “good guys” using the rifle’ (Parkin 2013). By purchasing videogames, ‘consumers have, for the past few years, unwittingly funded arms companies that often have their own military agendas’ (ibid.). This blurs the distinction between the game and reality, as money changes hands with a company that creates guns that actually kill people. These connections between the military–industrial complex and the videogames industry go back to the formation of the industry. In some instances, this involves the direct involvement of the military in the production of games. In other cases, this is a more subtle indirect engagement, which may nevertheless involve payment between the military–industrial complex and the games industry. The relationships between the two shape the way the work of videogames is carried out. For example, designing models of guns can involve developers spending time with the actual guns and military consultants. While this has the potential to increase the ‘realism’ of the game, it also involves a collaboration between two very different kinds of workers. This process of interaction has the potential to inscribe the game with the processes, motivations and beliefs of those employed in the military– industrial complex. As a recent example has shown, the US Army has also seen the potential of esports in games such as Fortnite (Epic Games 2017), FIFA (Extended Play Productions 1994), Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016) and League of Legends (Riot Games 2009), by launching its own team ‘to help young people see soldiers in a different light’ and ‘help the Army address the growing disconnect with society’ (Sinclair 2018). Across these examples, the influence may happen in obvious and direct ways or in a more subtle manner by shutting down alternative potentialities of games by advising that they are ‘unrealistic’.

The Games Industry as Culture Industry Being embedded in capitalism means that commercial games companies have to earn a profit from the investment put into the production of digital games. This fundamental condition activates assumptions about market preferences, potential buyers, and what experiences and feelings the product should foster. In order to make a convincing pitch to potential investors, for example, a financial case for expected profits has to be established. This means that investors in, and publishers of war games rely on data

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and assumptions about what their target consumers would be interested in paying for. These assumptions about audiences are usually in support of the status quo, where the games industry’s mental construction of a ‘gamer’ entails assuming certain hegemonic preferences and dislikes (Shaw 2012). Any deviation from norms or expectations in terms of genre, mechanics, characters, or themes only introduces more uncertainty and therefore more financial risk. Capital to fund the production is the essential and primary concern. In one of the authors’ interviews with the directors and executives of smaller game companies, a recurring claim was that the finances need to be in order before anything else can be attempted (Hammar forthcoming) – an illustration of what Stephanie de Smale et al. (2017: 6) refer to as the ‘tension between creativity and sustainability’. The logic of capitalism in the games industry means that what is produced has to have been confirmed as having been financially successful in the past. This latter point holds true for so-called market research, where focus-group testing, consumer behaviour data and playtests attempt to pinpoint and predict the profitability and expected amount of sales based on what type of game this is. Such market research by the industry makes various assumptions about the preferences of players, such as what type of identity they would want to experience (Yee 2017b), what genre they are interested in (Nofziger 2014, Yee 2017a) and presumably the viewpoint from which they would like to experience politics. Simply put, video games rise out of the capitalist mode of production and this mode influences their form and content.

The Politics of Tools and Education Not only do capitalism and professional relations to the military predispose what gets produced in the games industry, but also the ideology and history of the industry are baked into the actual toolsets that developers use to produce games. Similar to Matthew Fuller’s (2003: 25) concept of ‘social software’ – that programming is ‘determined by a submissive relation to the standards set by Microsoft’ – the engines, graphics toolsets, tactile interfaces and algorithmic conditions are inscribed with ideological traces. For instance, game developer and academic Robert Yang tweeted that physical-based-rendering ‘exists mostly to make gunmetal look cooler’.6 A similar point could be made about the variety and complexity of gunmetal textures in graphics software toolsets, such as 3DS Studio Max and its asset stores. Here, the industry’s need for state-of-the-art graphical representation of guns to entice consumers demands that the software tools prioritize the visual representation of guns in the most advanced form possible. Meanwhile, the often-utilized Unreal Engine has a built-in development framework to easily produce first-person perspectives and so-called shooter

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mechanics. The lighting technology employed in state-of-the-art game engines where certain skin tones are less developed under different lighting conditions is a similar example of an ideological imposition by the technology used in the production of games. As David D’Angelo writes, ‘the darker spectrum of color is very underrepresented [in the Nintendo Entertainment System], and there aren’t many shades that work for displaying a character with a darker skin tone’ (cited in Cole and DePass 2017). Already baked into the technological tools themselves, if not the algorithmic condition of the computer (Galloway 2006), the ‘software as culture’ (Fuller 2003) imposes itself on the workers who produce war games. Beyond the baked-in ideological assumptions of videogames technologies, the universities and other institutions that educate those who produce and analyse games also maintain a hegemony in line with the imperialist, capitalist status quo. While this may not primarily be the fault of individual educators and researchers, institutional priorities largely focus on skills directly related to toolsets and craftsmanship. Instead of educating future workers in broader societal considerations, the emphasis is on the acquisition of practical skills for developing videogames. This is due to the industry’s demand for premium skillsets in order for students to gain wage-labour in the industry. Consequently, games education providers are required to address this need, as demanded by either the neoliberal state or privatelyfunded students, if they want to remain functional institutions. Kerr writes: Now people with degrees have to take unpaid internships to demonstrate their suitability to work in the industry, or set up their own company upon graduation. … Yet there are many more people studying games than will be able to obtain jobs in the games industry and there is a premium set on experience. This mixture of oversupply of young educated workers, a drain from the industry of experienced workers and unstable working conditions is affecting the demographic profile of those who work in the industry. (Kerr 2017: 17) The end-result of what scholars term the neoliberalization of universities and educational institutions is that they remove any irrelevant topics that are not profitable for the industry and thereby capital (Ergül and Coşar 2017). Games courses in universities become factories to provide exploitable labour for the games industry – and education serves the interest of capital. This means that subjects that are difficult to reduce to economic utility under neoliberal ideology, such as cultural studies, sociology, feminism, or critical theory, have to be de-prioritized, if not removed altogether, while practical courses on how to quickly produce 3D models or to work collaboratively on a team project are crucial for the curriculum. Thus, the various institutions that provide education in game studies reproduce workers who are concerned

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with how quickly they can use their skillsets to produce content for their employers. When working with war games, their own precarious position and lack of awareness of the overall project can motivate such employees to reproduce hegemonic mnemonic war games. Bourgeois academia thus exists in the service of capitalism and all educational ideals are measured against its demands, thereby reproducing a complacent workforce that is ripe for exploitation and open to the cultural reproduction of imperialist, militarist goals. As many have argued before (Consalvo 2012, Leonard 2006, Shaw 2018, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, Russworm 2018, among others), there is a responsibility for scholars to engage with and dismantle hierarchies of race, gender and class via their own scholarship and in the institutions in which they are embedded. The question for scholars and educators within game studies, therefore, is to ask themselves what they hope to achieve with the praxis they do every day. Confronted with repeated crises of capitalism, persistent imperialism and other global disasters, scholars within game studies should reflect on their own political potential and their complicity with present structures of oppression and an increasingly apocalyptic future.

Conclusion: Hegemonic Articulations of Mnemonic–Hegemonic War Games Overall, the political economy of war games is characterized by three key aspects: first, its imbrication in the systems of twenty-first century imperialist capitalism; second, its symbiotic relationship with the military– industrial complex; and third, the ideologies embedded in software tools and educational programmes that constrain and inoculate software workers with hegemonic ideas related to militarism and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009). These contexts of production and their material conditions mean that as long as society is structured along contemporary capitalist lines, so too will the majority of war games conform to hegemonic values pertaining to conflict resolution, memory politics, how we see ourselves and others, and so forth. Yet, just as with other forms of media such as the novel, film and more, there is a potential to tell other stories or subvert the dominant ideologies of society. Given these perhaps apparent oppressive structures in which workers in the ‘war game industry’ navigate their daily lives, the questions readers of this anthology should ask themselves are: What can be done to oppose and dismantle the militaristic and capitalist structures in which we all live? How does our everyday practice address these fundamental conditions of the domain in which we work?

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Throughout the chapter, we have discussed the influence of different games, ways of making games and the relationships involved in producing wargames. While we have focused on how games are made, it is fitting to reflect on their play to conclude. As Marcus Schulzke writes in his nuancing of critical analysis: military video games are complex texts that are best analyzed with attention to the diverse understandings of war they reveal, especially the insight they offer into violent organizations’ values and media strategies. (Schulzke 2017: 610) In the majority of wargames, the subject matter is historical, representing a war that has already taken place; building a representation of an historical event that happened before a player’s birth. The importance of this kind of memory is indicated by Matthew Thomas Payne (2016: 7), drawing on Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism and ‘imagined communities’. The way we make, tell and experience these events shapes the project of nationalism. Games are clearly a key part of this process (Sterczewski 2016). So where does that leave critical accounts of videogames? The first step is to make visible the relationships of production that are hidden from the consumer’s point of view – tracing the overt and obscured connections between the military and the industry, drawing attention to the licensing of guns in videogames, highlighting the role of games in recruiting and training armies, or exploring the roles of education and tools in shaping the final product. All of these are important, but so too is remembering the point made by Stuart Hall (1981: 239): ‘popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle’. Games, due to the peculiarities of their form, are a powerful ‘arena of consent and resistance’ (ibid.) and this needs to be celebrated and highlighted in opposition to the dominance of militarism. The emerging wave of unionization in the games industry could also reshape this in novel ways, and is an important avenue for future research.

Notes 1 Halo Twitter Account, 11 November 2018, available at: https://twitter.com/ Halo/status/1061637421995937793 (accessed 12 November 2018). 2 See the data tweeted by industry analyst Mat Piscatella at https://twitter.com/ MatPiscatella/status/1060212182607118336, 7 November 2018 (accessed 13 November 2018).

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3 Yet the solution is not simply to ‘Add Minorities and Stir’ (Shaw 2015, 2017) – i.e. to add more excluded groups to the exploited workforce – because such solutions move the responsibility away from current power-holders. Simply hiring more marginalized workers puts the tasks of representation on their shoulders; and they, in turn, do not all hold the same beliefs and might even reproduce the dominant hegemony themselves. 4 See: How Military Consulting Leads to the Video Game of the Year, Strike Fighter Consulting, 26 October, http://strikefighterconsultinginc.com/blog/how-militaryconsulting-leads-to-the-video-game-of-the-year/(accessed 15 November 2018). 5 For example, following the increased militarization of US society after 9/11, the US Army brought two armoured vehicles and a helicopter to a games industry trade show in 2003 as part of its promotional strategy. See: E3 2003 SwankWorld Takes a Look Back, www.swankworld.com/Features/e32003/ e32003.htm (accessed 12 December 2018). 6 See Yang’s 14 August 2014 tweet at https://twitter.com/radiatoryang/status/ 499963513029558274 (accessed 4 September 2017).

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Ludography Blizzard Entertainment (2016) Overwatch. Activision. Bohemia Interactive Simulations (2007) Virtual Battlespace 2. Bohemia Interactive. Bungie (2001) Halo. Microsoft. EA DICE (2002) Battlefield 1942. Electronic Arts. Epic Games (2017) Fortnite. Epic Games. Extended Play Productions (1994) FIFA. EA Sports. Infinity Ward (2003) Call of Duty. Activision. Riot Games (2009) League of Legends. Riot Games. Sledgehammer Games (2014) Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision. Treyarch (2005) Call of Duty 3. Activision. US Army (2002) America’s Army. US Army.

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5 Understanding War Game Experiences: Applying Multiple Player Perspectives to Game Analysis Kristine Jørgensen When we play videogames, we go through many of the same cognitive processes as when we read a novel or watch a film. On the basis of the material that is presented to us, and our own literacy, we interpret and create meaning out of the text. But while films and literature are static structures that do not change between one traversal and the next, a videogame may present very different realizations of itself in each traversal. This means that to analyse a videogame, we need to adjust the methods of analysis that we have previously used for literature and film. This chapter argues for what I call a multiple player perspective in game analysis. This is a qualitative approach to game analysis that stresses the experiences and insights of more players than the researcher analyzing a particular game. While the argument for taking into consideration multiple user perspectives may also have its benefits in traditional media, this perspective is particularly relevant for games because a game will respond differently to different player actions, play-styles and player skill levels. In order to illustrate the benefit of using multiple player perspectives, I focus here on the war-themed game This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014) as a case study. While the term wargame traditionally refers to games that simulate or represent a military operation and are used for military training (Frank 2014: 5, Zagal 2017: 4), it has also been used as a term for commercial videogames that stage war conflicts. In this chapter I follow Jose Zagal’s broad definition of a wargame as ‘any game that includes direct or

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indirect representations of war where “war” is a state or period of open and armed hostility between organized groups’ (2017: 4). This description is appropriate for This War of Mine, which distinguishes itself from most commercial war-themed games in several ways. First, rather than telling the hero-story in which the player takes the role of a brave soldier who fights evil forces, This War of Mine provides the player with a civilian perspective. Second, rather than putting the player in a position of empowerment where they become instrumental in resolving the conflict, the player’s main challenge is simply to survive, using the meagre means available to him/her in a derelict city under siege. With a Metacritic score of 90/100 for the iOS version (Metacritic n.d.a) and 83/100 for the PC version (Metacritic n.d.b), the game was critically acclaimed for taking a different perspective on war. However, the game was also criticized for not being entertaining, for making the player feel bad, for its high use of pathos, and for being another management game with a novel theme. What the differences in responses tell us is that a multiple player perspective is likely to give a different and fuller analysis compared to a single-researcher analysis. What we will see below is that there can be huge differences in how the game is received based on playstyle. While players who play the game as a roleplaying game may be emotionally affected, players who play it as a management game may find the attempt to attach particular kinds of value messages to the game mechanics to be problematic. The method described in this chapter is sensitive towards how differences in gameplay-style, as well as individual interpretations, can affect the experiences of a game. More importantly, the method is able to provide alternative perspectives that the single-player analysis would risk not being able to grasp at all due to limitations connected to the researcher’s own play-style or game literacy. Adding a multiple player perspective enables the analyst to gain insight into options and alternative pathways that they did not even know were there.

Gameplay as a Research Strategy Following traditional text analytical approaches, a common way to analyse games is to play the game and subsequently analyse its representational and/ or game mechanical elements. Different frameworks and methodologies have been suggested (for example, Konzack 2002, Consalvo and Dutton 2006, Klevjer 2008, Fernandez-Vara 2014, van Vught and Glas 2017), and there is a high level of agreement in game studies today that scholars need to play games as part of the analytical process in order to understand them.

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In the influential paper ‘Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis’, Espen Aarseth argues that there are three ways of gaining knowledge about a game: Firstly, we can study the design, rules and mechanics of the game, insofar as these are available to us, e.g. by talking to the developers of the game. Secondly, we can observe others play, or read their reports and reviews, and hope that their knowledge is representative and their play competent. Thirdly, we can play the game ourselves. (Aarseth 2003) Of these alternatives, he argues, the last one is to be preferred. Postulating that a researcher must experience the game personally to avoid misunderstandings, Aarseth stresses that simply watching a game would not put one in the same position as a film audience, because what we see on screen is only partly representative of the player’s experience. The more important part concerns the interpretation and exploration of the rules and affordances, which are not accessible for the observer (Aarseth 2003). In discussing play as a research method, Jasper van Vught and René Glas agree with Aarseth that play is an important analytical strategy. They argue that there are many play strategies that can be employed, and that a researcher who is also a seasoned player will have a very high level of game literacy, which may be beneficial when using play as a research method. One of the strategies they suggest that a playing researcher can employ is an ‘exhaustive playing strategy’ where s/he attempts ‘to perform all the different actions that a game makes available’, since such a broad approach that includes an exhaustive number of perspectives would make an argument stronger (van Vught and Glas 2017: 6). An alternative is that the researcher approaches the game from the perspective of Aarseth’s implied player (2007): this indicates that the researcher tries to follow what appears to be the intended design of the game, or that they take an approach in which they are cooperative to the game’s rules and design (van Vught and Glas 2017: 6–7). A researcher may also adopt the strategy of the rational player (Smith 2006), who acts in accordance with the ideals of mathematical game theory. However, a primary challenge connected to restricting the analysis to one’s own gameplay is that a playing researcher will – intentionally or not – add a research-oriented perspective to gameplay. A researcher will never be able to completely set aside his or her academic curiosity and analytical way of thinking when playing. Furthermore, attempting to take on the role of a rational or implied player is to put oneself in an impossible, ideal position that no actual player can achieve. The idea that one can take on the role of an implied player also assumes that the game clearly communicates what the optimal gameplay would be, and that the most interesting gameplay is what the designer intended. Also, to assume that one researcher, or even a group

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of researchers, should be able to employ an exhaustive playing strategy is naïve: while it could in theory be possible for certain kinds of narrativeoriented games, it would be virtually impossible for open-world games and multiplayer games with emergent gameplay, due to their complexity and the number of factors involved.

Towards a Multiple Player Perspective The main common idea in the above discussion concerns the fact that a game is not a static text, but requires the player’s input to be realized. Thus, since games are processes and activities as much as they are objects, it is not possible to study games without also taking into account players and how they interact with the game (van Vught and Glas 2017: 4, 8). It is important to see this argument in connection with how meaning-making happens in the context of gameplay. According to Torill Mortensen, the meaning-making process that takes place between the player and the game happens through play, and she argues that this activity is closer to a performance than to reading (Mortensen 2002). Expanding Aarseth’s (2003) idea of real-time hermeneutics, which is a game-oriented ‘analysis practiced as performance, with direct feedback from the system’, Jonne Arjoranta (2015: 59) argues that the hermeneutic process that players engage in when interacting with games goes beyond the sorts of interpretation that we know from noninteractive media. Rather, when playing games, the hermeneutic process is ‘concerned with the processes of interpretation that are active when the player plays’. In this sense, the meaning-making process in games is characterized by the fact that players may change their gameplay-style and course of action during play based on how their understanding of the game changes over time as they play. The idea of real-time hermeneutics allows us to understand the complex interplay between interpretation and gameplay and subsequently, between the player and the game. While real-time hermeneutics is a phenomenon that is at work in each instance of gameplay, it implies that the interpretative process that takes place when I play will be different from the process at work when you play. However, this is not delimited to the interpretative process that takes place in my head; it also concerns the way the game is played and how the game text is realized for each player. With this in mind, there is reason to believe that an analysis based on the researcher’s individual gameplay will offer a very limited and necessarily subjective account that may not always resonate with the experiences of other players. Following this line of thought, I argue that games are better understood through multiple player perspectives. This means that including other players’ perspectives in addition to the researcher’s own is important for conducting well-rounded analyses of games. From this perspective, while

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I believe it is fruitful and absolutely necessary for game analysis that the researcher play the game, this method should not operate alone. Rather, I argue that combining one’s own gameplay with other players’ perspectives is not just an option but is mandatory for any serious investigation of games. So what does this mean in practice? In my own research I have argued for including players as experts when analyzing games (Jørgensen 2011) by interviewing them and discussing the meaning potential of aspects of specific games. I have in several studies carried out observations in order to understand players’ distinct play-styles and to acquire specific cases of gameplay to focus on in the discussion. Also, in the study discussed below I asked players to record their thoughts and emotions using gameplay journals. Inspired by the interpretative phenomenological analysis approach of qualitative psychology (Smith, Flower and Larkin 2009), my approach has been to focus on players’ own experiences and allow them to share how they subjectively interpret a specific game. However, it is important to bear in mind that employing multiple player perspectives does not mean that game analysis always has to be accompanied by full-scale empirical player studies. It could instead include references to existing research, to popular media accounts such as reviews and walkthroughs, or to other publicly available material that would broaden the researcher’s singular perspective. By including multiple player perspectives, research is moving from triangulating data to triangulating sources; or more precisely, a triangulation of interpretations. The player-oriented game analysis methodology described above allows the researcher to study a game simultaneously as a process and as an object, rather than focusing on one at the expense of the other. The method allows researchers to understand how other players interpret the game both by way of its representational aspects and its game mechanics, and to understand the actions and behaviours of empirical players other than themselves. Unless the observed players are instructed not to engage in such, including other players’ gameplay in research makes it possible to study subversive strategies such as cheating, griefing and the use of exploits as part of ordinary gameplay (Aarseth 2007). Further, it allows the researcher to discover and explore contexts and practices that they may not be intimately familiar with, and the method takes into consideration that there may exist play-styles that the playing researcher has not thought about or does not have the literacy or skill to perform. This is a particular benefit in games with emergent gameplay.

Understanding War-Themed Games In a 2017 paper, Zagal presents a framework for analyzing war-themed videogames using a critical-ethical perspective. Offering a perspective from which we can analyse ethical issues in videogames that represent war, the

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framework is based in traditional war ethics relating to ideas of morally justified warfare. Zagal’s (2017: 5) framework is sensitive to the perspective offered to the player, the scale and scope of the war presented in the game, how central war is in the game, what type of military forces are represented and the authenticity of the war representations. However, the framework is intended as a traditional toolbox for analysis carried out by a single researcher, and as such his framework is delimited to the singular perspective of a critical researcher, who may hardly be seen as a typical player. This chapter complements Zagal’s approach by describing a holistic methodology for understanding the player experiences of such games that embraces the interaction between the representational aspects of games and gameplay. The methodology is thus sensitive to the fact that war representations are experienced in a gameplay context, and retains awareness that the meaningmaking process takes place in the interplay between interpretations of said representations and interactions structured through game mechanics. A challenge of war-themed commercial videogames, or ‘militainment’ (Payne 2014), is that they are often the product of a close relationship between the entertainment industry and militaristic interests (Keogh 2013, Nieborg 2006). This has contributed to war-themed games often featuring romantic stories of the good war hero who fights against evil forces. These kinds of games have also been criticized for presenting war in a sanitized way (Pötzsch 2017) that does not problematize the darker sides of war. For example, military shooters tend to avoid showing dead civilians or slaughtered US soldiers because of possible negative reactions (Payne 2014: 279, Pötzsch 2017: 160). While this may not be surprising in the light of commercial interests and the wish to market games to a broader audience, there is also the question of how such sanitized games are received by players. While a playing researcher may indeed present insightful critical analyses of such games based on their own gameplay as well as earlier knowledge about the variations in how audiences decode representations (Hall 1980), this will only give limited insight into how different play-styles, skill levels and choices of actions affect the gameplay experience. Take the infamous ‘No Russian’ chapter of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009) as an example. The chapter directly implicates the player in a terrorist attack at an airport security checkpoint in which civilians are killed. While critics argued that allowing players actively to take part in such actions was inappropriate (Horiuchi 2009, Orry 2009), the game’s defenders argued that the transgression was mitigated because the playercharacter works undercover in this scenario, and that it is possible to traverse the whole chapter without firing a single shot or killing anybody. However, others criticized the game for not taking the series’ most profound scene seriously by allowing players to skip the chapter altogether (Gillen 2009). While using one’s individual gameplay as the only source for analysis may indeed provide arguments for and against such game content, the variations

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in responses presented above are necessarily lost for the single researcher. Further, subjective accounts relating to whether or not uncomfortable game content is experienced as something that breaks or enhances the gameplay experience is also lost (for an approach focusing on responses by Let’s Players to This War of Mine, see de Smale Chapter 9 in this volume; for a formal analysis of the game, see Chapter 13 by Pötzsch).

Case Study: This War of Mine In order to provide specific examples from a war-themed game about what a multiple player perspective may add to a self-play analysis, I will now discuss data from a qualitative study in which players of This War of Mine were asked to complete a gameplay log and also to participate in a followup interview. Developed by the Polish company 11 bit studios and released first on Steam and later on iOS and Xbox 360, This War of Mine can be characterized as a management simulator set among civilians in a warridden fictional setting strongly inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. The game received critical acclaim for taking the perspective of civilians rather than soldiers in war (Grayson 2014). In Zagal’s terms, the player controls a group of civilians trying to survive in a derelict building until a ceasefire, and must keep them alive by reinforcing the shelter and scavenging resources such as food, medicine, fuel and equipment for making repairs. The scope of the war is limited to the shelter during day, and to various scavenging locations throughout the city during the night. Based on the characters’ special abilities, the player will assign them to various missions – the fastest runner may be allocated to scavenging, while the best cook creates the meals. In their scavenging sorties, players must choose whether to try to avoid danger and find less valuable goods, or to take greater risks for higher rewards. Ethical issues arise as scavenging often means intruding into other civilians’ homes and stealing their belongings, and sometimes even risking getting drawn into combat. Hostile encounters with other survivors also take their toll on the player characters, which may become injured and also suffer from psychological trauma – both of which hinder them from contributing to the survival of the group. The role of the military in the game is small. As a general rule, the player only interacts with other civilians, although there is a military outpost that can be scavenged for those willing to take the risk. The game is in many ways a downward spiral: when things start going badly, they are difficult to change. When your expert scavenger is injured, for example, another less proficient character must be assigned. The less proficient scavenger brings home fewer resources, which affects the psychological state of all

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characters. Depressed characters do not work well, or in severe cases do not work at all; and in a situation where one of the characters dies – from injury, sickness or suicide – the mood becomes even lower. Looking at Zagal’s idea of how central war is to a game experience, war pervades the experience of This War of Mine – players are victims of a siege that affects all the actions available to them. In a recent auto-ethnographical study and subsequent analysis of the game, game scholar and folklorist Kristian A. Bjørkelo (2019) gives a deep and personal analysis of the game, reflecting on how the combination of game mechanics and a social realist fictional setting had an emotional impact on him. While the game models the war situation in a simple way that does not have the level of detail to be called a simulation, and that is hard to call authentic or realistic in a classical sense, Bjørkelo argues that the situations and the ethical dilemmas that players find themselves in appear authentic. As part of the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project funded by the Research Council of Norway, I carried out a study following the idea of the multiple player perspective in game analysis. The project studied player experiences with games through a journal study, in which players played a selected game at home and responded to a limited number of open-ended questions after each play session. The reason for choosing a journal study was to get as close as possible to the gameplay experiences while allowing players to play the game at their own pace in the familiar setting of their own homes. While no method would allow us to observe actual experiences, with journal studies players write down their actions in the game and how they felt about them immediately after ending a session. Participants volunteered for the study by responding to posts in online media and on physical bulletin boards at Norwegian educational institutions, and for games where more than five players signed up participants were selected based on a motivational screening. We aimed to have at least one participant of each gender playing each game. The participants played for as long as they wanted, and were subject to a follow-up interview once they had completed the study, for the sake of clarifying what they had written in the gameplay logs but also for the purpose of allowing them to reflect analytically on the gameplay events in retrospect. Of a total of thirty players across six games, five participants withdrew from the study after making, at most, only one journal entry. Four of the participants played This War of Mine, and all who signed up for this game completed the study. These four players were: ●●

‘Leon’ (39), a photographer from Lithuania. His favourite genre is strategy games, but he also plays action games. His journal consisted of five entries between 9 September and 2 October 2016, and he was subject to a follow-up interview on 13 October 2016. He played through the campaign mission once successfully.

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‘Stan’ (27), a student from Poland. He prefers roleplaying games, both of the digital and analogue kind, and strategy games. His journal consisted of seven entries between 11 September and 8 October 2016, and his follow-up interview was on 14 October 2016. His first two attempts at the campaign ended with the death of all characters. He quit his third attempt after the game became glitchy. ‘Jane’ (38), an IT support worker from Poland. She prefers adventure and roleplaying games and casual games. Her journal consisted of five entries between 5 and 23 October 2016. She was interviewed on 29 October 2016. She played the campaign unsuccessfully once, then started two custom campaigns, the second of which was successful. She also started a third before she got bored and stopped. ‘Fred’ (38), a researcher from the Netherlands. He prefers actionadventure games and first-person shooters with roleplaying elements. His journal consisted of four entries between 23 September and 26 October 2016, and he was subject to a follow-up interview on 9 November 2016. He restarted the campaign after having learned the initial game mechanics, but quit the game after his favourite character died.

Although the four participants were all experienced players and participated in the study because they were interested in playing a game that had received critical acclaim, and that was supposed to take a different perspective on war compared to mainstream AAA games, their experiences were varied. While Stan and Fred find the game to have the high emotional impact that critics have identified and developers reportedly intended, Jane and Leon are not convinced by what they find to be a simplistic modelling of the conditions of civilians in war. How they respond to their experiences with the game also varies. Stan’s response appears closest to what the developers intended. He states that he loves the game, and describes it as a ‘heavy’ game that makes him think, making the game experience what we can call a positive negative experience (Montola 2010): uncomfortable, yet rewarding. In his journal, he writes that he is emotionally distraught over the actions that the game motivates him to take, and becomes particularly moved by the ethical challenges relating to a situation where he finds himself stealing from an elderly couple. In the interview, he elaborates: [I]n this game we can attack anybody, even elderly people. As soon as I  discovered this option, I felt destroyed inside, my heart was melting. Why did they programme such an option? I would never, never attack

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them. I could see the option, I could attack, kill the elderly people, it’s because of the social reaction that elderly people are known as defenceless people. More! I saw their reactions. They begged me, ‘Don’t kill me, don’t kill my wife’. (Interview, 14 October 2016) Stan has mixed feelings about the game. He finds himself engaged by its fictional aspects. He is put in a situation where he is distraught by feeling forced into taking actions that make him feel bad, but where there are also rewarding moments that make him happy and motivate him to keep playing. His first playthrough ends with two of his characters being killed and the third committing suicide, something Stan describes as ‘brutal’. However, he still starts a new playthrough in which he uses knowledge from the first to play more successfully. This results in taking actions that he describes as problematic. For instance, in the second entry he describes how he changes tactics to focus on survival, first through stealing. When the game gets harder, he starts killing for items, but finds that non-playable characters become depressed. The playthrough ends with two characters running away, while the third commits suicide. While also experiencing that the game makes him feel bad, Fred’s response to this is in stark contrast to what Stan describes. In the interview he says that he ‘hated the game’; not because it was a bad game, but because it manipulated his emotions and made him feel uncomfortable. For Fred a good game experience is an action-filled experience where he knows what to expect. He explains: [I]t is a good game, but it is not a good game for me. And that’s the big difference. I think it’s a well done in terms of atmosphere, it’s well done in terms of ludological game mechanics, it’s very well done in terms of narratology, it really gives you the impression that you have to face the everyday moral problems, moral dilemmas that every war time survivor has to take every day. I think it’s done brilliantly. But at the same time it is not a brilliant game for me, because I usually like a different kind of games. I don’t like micromanagement games, I don’t like god games, and especially I don’t like games in which I cannot kill everything that stands in my way. (Interview, 9 November 2016) Fred finds the game successful in simulating realities for civilians in war, and as a scholar he finds the game interesting and powerful. But this intellectual understanding of the game comes into conflict with the gamer in him who prefers shooter games, in which there is no doubt that gameplay concerns pulling the trigger button to progress. This game, on the other hand, makes him feel bad. Later in the interview he specifies that what

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makes him feel bad is the atmosphere that suggests that something bad is coming, combined with the actions that he is doing that constantly push him towards doing something increasingly unethical out of desperation. While Stan and Fred both find that This War of Mine has an emotional impact on them, Jane and Leon do not have the same experience. Leon describes the game as a nice experience that makes him think, but believes that the game tries too hard to be serious, which sometimes results in situations becoming unintentionally funny. He finds that the game has surprisingly many mechanics that are at odds with what he would expect from an antiwar game, such as encouraging violent gameplay. For Leon, the crudeness of the game mechanics weakens the profound potential of the game: Sometimes when you play a game, you open your head. But when you realize what the mechanics behind the narrative is, and … When you understand the role played, I think this game reminds a little of The Sims. (Interview, 13 October 2016) For Leon, the game is just another resource management game. He elaborates that as he learned the game mechanics, the experience also changed. At the beginning, he played according to what he expected to be meaningful given the situation of civilians in wartime, but once he learned the game mechanics he also started acting accordingly. At a point, he mentions that according to the game’s logic, the key to survival is to start producing moonshine and sell it to other civilians. In the end, Leon questions whether games are the best medium to use if one wants to communicate what it is like being a civilian in wartime. Jane is also critical of the game’s instrumental approach to being a civilian in war, but her criticism is harsher than Leon’s. She finds the game to be speculative in promoting itself as an anti-war game when in reality it is a management game that makes war fun. In the interview, she states: We kind of need a game – we need a message, a pop culture message – that [states that] war is not fun. Because most of our messages and our stories are about how glorious war is. Because we have passed some time from the Second World War, and all we got now are the heroic stories. While, in the modern world, there is a war somewhere, and the people are in real problems, and we just don’t feel that. So, we do need a message that [says] this is difficult, that this is important. And this game promised that, kind of, and then it just gave us a puzzle game. And it’s just one more way to make war fun, and this is disturbing. (Interview, 29 October 2016) In her gameplay journal, Jane expresses a general unhappiness with the interface and controllers, as well as with the game mechanics. She finds

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that the system does not respond to her the way she would expect. She is disappointed in the game, which she thinks promises to treat a serious issue in a profound way, but where the game mechanics draw attention to themselves and thus get in the way of communicating an important message. With regard to the treatment of the topic itself, she is critical of the fact that ethical dilemmas are handled as they would be in a resource management game. This lowers her interest in the fictional aspects of the game and pushes her into gamer mode (Frank 2014), that is, a mode of play in which utilizing the game mechanics become more important than engaging with the fictional world of the game. Gamer mode taps into what psychologists call a telic metamotivational state (Svebak and Apter 1987). This is a goaloriented mindset that comes into being in situations that demand strategic thinking and long-term planning. In games, it concerns situations where the player is instrumentally oriented towards how to use strategy in a calculated manner in order to reach the game’s goals (Stenros 2015: 66). Jane plays through the game twice and starts a third playthrough before repetitiveness becomes an issue. In the interview she states that what made her continue so long was the fact that she was playing for research, but she also wanted to see whether there was something more to the game. In the end, she also decided to go for the last missing achievement, emphasizing her interest in the ludic elements over the fictional.

What Does This Mean for the Multiple Player Perspective? Following Stuart Hall (1980), a reading – or decoding – of a media text can broadly speaking fall into three categories. It can be dominant/hegemonic in that it follows the encoded message that is ascribed into the text. Alternatively, the reading can be oppositional in the sense that it rejects the message presented. Thirdly, the reading can be negotiated, thus partly accepting the encoded message. If we compare the four viewpoints on This War of Mine above, we witness four widely different experiences with the same game. Spanning from the dominant reading of Stan, who is sympathetic to the encoded antiwar rhetoric of the game, to the highly oppositional reading of Jane, who does not accept the rhetorical message presented in the game, and including the negotiated readings of Fred and Leon, we see from a small sample the diversity in readings that a single-player perspective would not be able to grasp. If we were to incorporate these into an analysis of This War of Mine, we would get a much fuller picture than one based on the gameplay of a

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single researcher. Such an analysis would go beyond the dominant reading that Holger Pötzsch directs attention to (Chapter 13 in this volume) and that Bjørkelo (2019) presents from his auto-ethnographic account of This War of Mine, which follows the intentions of the developers (Preston 2015). Thus, referring to Jane’s and Fred’s experiences, we would be able to show that the procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007) that emerges from the specific combination of game mechanics and fiction may be experienced as forced, or even as speculative. Although there is little data to support an argument that the respondents traversed the game in radically different ways, the four respondents above do have different play-styles. Leon describes how he first approaches the game as an explorer (Bartle 1996, Bartle 2004: 130–2). He approaches the game with a naïve perspective in which he does not know much about the game but tests out his gameplay options in a way that makes sense according to the fictional setting. In his second playthrough his style moves into that of the achiever, as he takes a more strategic approach where he enters gamer mode and plays to win. Stan, on the other hand, is not able to let the fictional reality go. Accordingly, his interpretation and thus experience of the game becomes less cynical and more involved. Also, if we look at Fred’s perspective, we see that there can be a complex interplay between an oppositional and a dominant reading. He has no problem recognizing the encoded meaning, but cannot accept it because of his general game preferences. Not least, just like Stan, he finds that This War of Mine affects him emotionally, but he just does not like games that make him feel uncomfortable. Similarly, Jane also understands what message the game developers are trying to communicate, but finds the mechanics are unable to fulfil their intentions. Her response is to almost feel provoked by the attempt to promote a serious message through crude game mechanics. In combination, these viewpoints and experiences can expand a game analysis and make it more nuanced. Multiple player perspectives do not only invite researchers to include viewpoints that are at odds with their own, but also to include alternative interpretations that would expand their own analysis. By engaging with the viewpoints of Jane, Stan, Fred and Leon, we can present an analysis that puts weight not only on how This War of Mine formally presents civilian war experiences, but that also interrogates whether and in what situations the techniques actually work, and with what effects. However, for researchers interested in adopting multiple player perspectives, it is important to state that this approach does not make a systematic collection of empirical data mandatory. Other options are to use the perspectives of other researchers, to look at how people discuss the game in online fora, or to include the viewpoints of journalists and game reviewers.

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Conclusion This chapter has argued for using multiple player perspectives when analyzing games and has applied it to a case study of This War of Mine. The multiple player perspective methodology implies using the experiences of a variety of players when carrying out game analyses. I have argued that since games are dynamic and emergent media where style, proficiency and choices differ from player to player, we need to take multiple perspectives into consideration when conducting serious, scholarly analyses of a game. While the chapter is a critique of game analyses carried out from an individual vantage point, my goal here is not to disqualify all such analyses. Rather, the aim is to acknowledge the weaknesses involved in adapting methods from the analysis of non-interactive media, and to suggest a fruitful alternative method.

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heavy-this-war-of-mine-is-a-war-game-about-civilians/(accessed 15 November 2018). Hall, S. (1980) Encoding/Decoding, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchison. Horiuchi, V. (2009) Oh My Tech: ‘Call of Duty’ has troubling scene, The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 November, http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/technology/ ci_13799461 (accessed 15 November 2018). Jørgensen, K. (2011) Players as Co-researchers: Expert Player Perspective as an Aid to Understanding Games, Simulation & Gaming 43(3): 374–90. Keogh, B. (2013) Spec Ops: The Line’s Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter, Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies, www.digra. org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_55.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Klevjer, R. (2008) Dataspillanalyse: Reisen og kartet, in P. Larsen (ed.) Medievitenskap. Medier – tekstteori og tekstanalyse. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Konzack, L. (2002) Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis, in F. Mäyrä (ed.) CGDC Conference Proceedings. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Metacritic (no date a) This War of Mine: iOS, Metacritic.com, www.metacritic. com/game/ios/this-war-of-mine (accessed 15 November 2018). Metacritic (no date b) This War of Mine: PC, Metacritic.com, www.metacritic.com/ game/pc/this-war-of-mine (accessed 15 November 2018). Montola, M. (2010) Positive Negative Experiences in Extreme Role-Playing, DiGRA Nordic 2010, www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-positivenegative-experience-in-extreme-role-playing/(accessed 21 March 2019). Mortensen, T. E. (2002) Playing with Players. Potential Methodologies for MUDs, Game Studies 2(1), www.gamestudies.org/0102/mortensen/(accessed 21 March 2019). Nieborg, D. B. (2006) Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay! The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the US Military, Fibreculture Journal, 8, http://eight.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-051-mods-nay-tournaments-yay-theappropriation-of-contemporary-game-culture-by-the-u-s-military/(accessed 21 March 2019). Orry, J. (2009) BBC Reporter ‘Saddened’ but Not ‘Shocked’ by MW2, Videogamer. com, 10 November, www.videogamer.com/news/bbc-reporter-saddened-but-notshocked-by-mw2 (accessed 15 November 2018). Payne, M. T. (2014) War Bytes: The Critique of Militainment in Spec Ops: The Line, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 31(4): 265–82. Pötzsch, H. (2017) Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters, Games and Culture, 12(2): 156–78. Preston, D. (2015) Interview: Pawel Miechowski of This War of Mine & 11 bit studios, Outermode.com, 11 February, http://outermode.com/interview-pawelmiechowski-this-war-of-mine-11-bit-studios (accessed 15 November 2018). Smith, J. H. (2006) Plans and Purposes: How Videogame Goals Shape Player Behaviour. PhD diss., Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen. Smith, J. A., P. Flowers and M. Larkin (2009) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London: Sage. Stenros, J. (2015) Playfulness, Play, and Games. A Constructionist Ludology Approach. PhD diss., Tampere: University of Tampere.

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Svebak, S. and M. J. Apter (1987) Laughter: An Empirical Test of Some Reversal Theory Hypotheses, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 28(3): 189–98. Van Vught, J. and R. Glas (2017) Considering Play: From Method to Analysis, Proceedings of DiGRA 2017, http://digra2017.com/static/Full%20Papers/56_ DIGRA2017_FP_Vught_Considering_Play.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Zagal, J. P. (2017) War Ethics: A Framework for Analyzing Videogames, Proceedings of DiGRA 2017, http://digra2017.com/static/Full%20Papers/69_ DIGRA2017_FP_Zagal_War_Ethics.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019).

Ludography 11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine. 11 bit studios. Infinity Ward (2009) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Activision.

PART II

Playing War, History and Memory

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6 Playing the Historical Fantastic: Zombies, Mecha-Nazis and Making Meaning about the Past through Metaphor Adam Chapman [H]istorical fictions of all kinds … do work that needs to be understood and studied in more depth than hitherto. Their conjunctions of honesty and perversity should be analyzed and interrogated. (de Groot 2015: 2) Jerome de Groot’s assessment of the treatment of historical fiction may also apply to the nascent field of historical game studies.1 Work on historical games continues apace, yet generally remains focused on those games with the most obvious connections to history when considering the form’s capacity for making meaning about the past – overlooking the pseudo, the alternate, the fictional and the fantastic. Yet these semi-historical games relate to particular historical events, settings, characters and imagery, and thus are still doing ideological and epistemological work. As I have argued elsewhere (Chapman 2012), this is not to say that we should fall back onto considering the content of individual games under the tiresome tyranny of measuring historical accuracy (for which a formal focus remains a necessary remedy). My intent here is to argue precisely the opposite to this type of analysis, whilst still advocating for the consideration of content, particularly in some overlooked and yet meaningful cases. Might we therefore expand our interpretative consideration to a more radical extent, considering the role of fiction and, particularly, fantasy in

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historical videogames? Though such elements preclude depictions of past material realities, they can be used, for example, to represent the mentalités of past cultures (e.g. the fusion of history and myth into one diegetic world in games representing the classical past). However, the argument will be made here that, even beyond this, fantasy has an important metaphorical utility in making meaning about the past. This chapter therefore aims to add further weight to the idea hinted at elsewhere (Koski 2017, November 2013) that we must be as wide reaching as possible in our definition of historical games. Whatever our reservations about fiction or fantasy in historical games, there are a plethora of such titles doing historical work of some sort out in the world. They are therefore worthy of investigation. In order to make this argument, relevant theoretical issues (such as the relationship between history and metaphor) will be discussed before looking at two examples that highlight the exchange between fantasy and historical meaning making in videogames. Firstly, the presence of zombies in historical games and the anxieties about the historical process that seem to underpin these characters will be examined, using Treyarch’s zombie mode in FPS war game series Call of Duty (Treyarch 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018) as an example. Secondly, the chapter considers the utility that the alternate historical fantasy world (featuring monstrous Nazi experiments, robots and dark occult science) of MachineGames’ recent entries into the Wolfenstein series (MachineGames 2014, 2015, 2017) offers to making meaning about that most difficult aspect of Second World War history, the Holocaust. Alongside advocating this more inclusive approach, the chapter aims to use this analysis to add to our understanding of the videogame form – seeking to find, as Robert Rosenstone (2006: 161) attempts with film, its ‘rules of engagement’ for historical representation (see further Chapman 2016b) – and to engage broader considerations about the representation of difficult collective memories or anxieties in games.

Theoretical Considerations: Fiction, Fantasy, Metaphor and History The notion that the relationship between fiction and history is important is hardly new. De Groot (2015), for example, provides a cogent and comprehensive account of the cultural and societal functions that explicitly fictional texts that are yet still grounded in ‘tropes of pastness’ (2015:  3) serve in contemporary media landscapes and discourses. Even more tellingly, the role of fiction in historical writing has been widely discussed in recent decades. Concentrating not only on what we say about the past but also on how this is determined by the means through which we say these things (particularly narrative), postmodernist theorists have pointed

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to the inherently subjective and thus fictive (part fiction, part fact) nature of history. In essence, the argument goes that as narrative form and figurative language are generally our only means of approaching a past that we can never directly know, it is important to constantly acknowledge the rhetorical, ideological and tropical nature of historical representation (see, for example, White 1973, 1978, 1990, Munslow 2007, 1997, Jenkins 1991). This is not a rejection of the existence of facts about the past but an acknowledgement that these facts cannot speak for themselves, and that historical representation therefore involves arranging these facts to create and decide on meaning – making all history at least partly ‘fictioned’. Facts are therefore ‘necessary (but not sufficient), for our understanding of the past’ (Rosenstone 2007: 592). Accordingly, though history is undoubtedly referential, it remains a fictive narrative construction created in part by formal and ideological pressures and subjective ethical and aesthetic choices (Munslow 1997, 2007). Perhaps most famously, Hayden White (1973, 2010) has long argued for the inherently narrative nature of history and therefore its tendency towards the subjective and fictive.2 If we accept these arguments, the difference between conventional history and the kind of historical videogames that this chapter is concerned with may well be one of extreme degree and purpose but hardly one of kind. Both the academic history text and these historical games make use of recognizable elements of the past (allowing us to understand their historical settings) and combine this in some way with fictionalized elements in order to produce meaning. Yet of course we treat these texts differently. So how best to isolate this difference without simplistic divisions between pure fiction and pure fact? One answer seems to lie in viewing these games as historical fantasy rather than fiction. Expanding beyond Tzvetan Todorov’s (1973) narrower definition, contemporary literary studies embraces a widened perspective on fantasy. Lucie Armitt (2005: 1), for example, argues that fantasy includes ‘Utopia, allegory, fable, myth, science fiction, the ghost story, space opera, travelogue, the Gothic, cyberpunk, magic realism’. Such a definition would seem to encompass games such as Wolfenstein and the zombie modes of Call of Duty. More precisely, however, what do we mean by fantasy? One oft-cited definition can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’. Tolkien (1966: 69) saw fantasy as the construction of secondary worlds imbued with the fantastic: ‘images of things that are not only “not actually present”, but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there’. In essence then, fantasy is about ‘the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds’ (ibid.: 64). The ‘othered’ nature of these worlds is important. For Tolkien, fantasy combines the older sense of the word as ‘an equivalent of Imagination [with] the derived notions of “unreality” (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed “fact”, in short of the fantastic’ (ibid.: 69), and

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a ‘quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image’ (ibid.: 68). Contemporary definitions often reject the transcendence of fantasy argued by Tolkien, instead emphasizing these worlds as grounded in our own. But they tend to similarly emphasize strangeness and otherness as central to fantasy. Rosemary Jackson, for example, writes that: Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, recombining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different. (Jackson 2003: 8) Importantly, such fantasy worlds are strange due to their inversion, disruption and recombination of existing elements in new arrangements. This aptly describes the workings of historical fantasies such as Wolfenstein and the figure of the historical zombie. Historical fantasy purposely combines the real (widely accepted) past with myth, folklore, the Gothic, science fiction etc., with meaning and appeal produced by the inversion that this strange tension implies. This is exacerbated by the fact that history is not only a literary genre but an intellectual form with an overt (and frequently authoritarian) epistemological dimension. These perceived claims to truth/ reality stand in stark contrast to the fantastic, asserting a distance from the realm of myth, folklore and fiction, and thus exacerbating the sense of strangeness produced by their meeting. Thus, such games exemplify the inversion and disruption through which fantasy functions. Fantasies have ‘refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with chronology, three-dimensionality and with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death’ (Jackson 2003: 1–2). This strength of the mode – its capacity to make meaning in myriad ways, unrestrained by the demands of realism – is central to my argument here. However, the creation of fantasy is not entirely freeform: such worlds must still display some level of internal diegetic logic, ‘giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality’ (Tolkien 1966: 68). Furthermore, the fantastic is always to some degree subservient to its sociohistorical context (Jackson 2003: 3). It is partly this that makes historical fantasy worthy of investigation. Both aspects cannot but offer some kind of (un)real reflection of contemporary discourses, values and anxieties, and utilize new expressions in combination to do so. Furthermore, whilst fantasy elements may appear to stand apart from the historical aspects of such texts, the ‘introduction of the “unreal” is set against the category of the “real” – a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference’ (Jackson 2003: 4). Erving Goffman (1986: 560) takes this notion further by arguing that the real is often a distance between categories rather than a status – ‘When

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we decide that something is unreal, the reality it isn’t need not itself be very real’ – a useful guard, in this case, against seeing history as unproblematic pure reality. It would appear then that fantasy offers types of meaningmaking potentially useful to historical discourse. Immediately apparent, for example, is the playful liminality of tensions between the undeniably historical and the plainly fantastic, offering an ironic and irreverent queering of the perceived seriousness of history, something very much evident in the marketing surrounding Wolfenstein or, in a cinematic example, Nazis-onthe-moon science-fiction film Iron Sky (2012). Fictive variations in conventional history tend to involve forms of competing interpretative argumentation and ethical and ideological decision-making based in a desire for credibility. By comparison, historical fantasies combine credible elements with elements that purposely move beyond the natural world in order to play with this tension. However, given that both types of text are inherently fictive, reference the real past, and draw meaning from this interplay, dividing on the premise of fictionality seems insufficient. The concept of fantasy offers a way out of this bind by offering a sounder differentiation between conventional history and the kind of games discussed here. Despite their fantasy elements, historical fantasies remain partly grounded in conceptions of the past we take to be real. Such texts can even still function through appealing to notions such as ‘authenticity’. This may be particularly the case with videogames. As Serrano Lozano (forthcoming) argues, such appeals are ‘completely logical’ within the ‘mediatic logic’ of videogames: ‘the predominant tools of authenticity (aesthetic, visuality, space) are remarkable works, so they build a sense of “realism” which can cope with any other (science) fictional or fantastic layer’. Marketing material for the Assassin’s Creed series (Ubisoft Montreal et al. 2007, 2009–15, 2017–18) for example, consistently emphasizes the series’ historical authenticity despite its science-fiction framing narrative. Similarly, Wolfenstein offers a world of Nazi robots and paranormal science but remains grounded in history (and, typically, displays preoccupation with authentic modelling of historical material culture). Furthermore, the game is grounded in contemporary discourses about the Second World War. For example, Nazi motivations to engage in dangerous and forbidden supernatural practices within the text (and the ‘believability’ of them doing so) may be due to extreme caricatures, but these caricatures emerge from very real political discourses. The idea that fantasy can hold a meaningful metaphorical relationship to reality motivates close-reading approaches to textual analysis. The trope of the zombie, for example, tends to be interpreted as metaphorically representing oppressed groups controlled or disempowered through economic practices (Harper 2002) and the subsequent fear of homogeneity and levelling of individualism (Dendle 2007) – as in the exploration of mass consumerism in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Clearly then,

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fantasy can hold a meaningful metaphorical relationship to real discourses, unsurprisingly given that no fiction is formed in a creative vacuum but inevitably reflects the real experiences, ideologies and knowledge of its creators. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that at least some fantasy audience members link this kind of symbolic material to their everyday lives (Hasebrink and Paus-Hasebrink 2016). It does not seem too much to assume that when combined with the historical, fantasy elements may be used to add metaphorical meaning to these histories. Using metaphor to make meaning about the past is also part of conventional history. Indeed, the figurative nature of language used in historical writing implies a metaphorical quality. Furthermore, history (as a practice) has to have a metaphorical (or, from another epistemological standpoint, at least a metonymic) relationship to the past, standing in for it as a representative process and outcome. History, whether the words of the book or rules and images of the game, cannot be the past itself because the past is gone, cannot be experienced and is irretrievable given the vastness and complexity of lived events. If we accept the figurative, subjective, poetic, essentially artistic quality of even conventional written history, then we have to accept that it functions through metaphor and metonym. As Frank Ankersmit (1994: 170) puts it in his discussion of the relationship between postmodernism and historiography, ‘the work of art, that is to say, the language of the artist, is not a mimetic reproduction of reality but a replacement or substitute for it’. Many other scholars treat historical language as in some sense artistic (posed against the supposedly objective or scientific) and therefore point to history’s inherently metonymic and metaphoric nature (e.g. Munslow 2007). This is not to say that history cannot ‘function in truth’ (as Foucault would have it) or is not basically referential. Rather, it is to say that, beyond the traces of the past left in the present, meaning is constructed through figurative narrative means which metonymically or metaphorically stand in for the absent past. As Ankersmit (1994: 170) puts it, ‘Language and art are not situated opposite reality but are themselves a pseudo-reality and are therefore situated within reality’. (Notably, this resonates with Jackson’s rejection of fantasy’s transcendence.) Finally, the metaphorical nature of history is found not only in its relationship to the past itself but also the rhetorical means by which this relationship is expressed. For example, in White’s (1973) quadruple tetradic theory, four tropes positioned as structural forces that shape historical narratives (alongside four modes of emplotment, argument and ideology) are metonymy, synecdoche, irony and metaphor. Consequently, the notion that fantasy might be used metaphorically to make meaning about the past does not seem as distant from conventional historical writing as we might first assume, again a difference of degree but not kind. Rosenstone (2006: 8–9) describes the historical drama film as ‘a separate realm of representation and discourse, one not meant to provide

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literal truths about the past … but metaphoric truths which work, to a large degree, as a kind of commentary on, and challenge to, traditional historical discourse’. It does not seem too much to take this idea to its logical conclusion and consider historical fantasy as another distinct (though interrelated) realm that can make metaphoric meaning in relation to our conventional discourses about the past. But what do such representations offer in terms of making meaning about the past? As aforementioned, it is not only important what we say about the past but also how we say it (and what this in turn allows us to say). For example, David Machin (2013) has described how the stone of war memorials invokes classical ideals and associations that would be considered inappropriate if stated explicitly in direct language: the stone has an ambiguity that language would not, and thus can invoke these notions whilst avoiding critique. Fantasy, whilst being a question more of content than modality, may function in a similar way, allowing sensitive themes to be discussed without being directly represented, as with Wolfenstein. Furthermore, fantasy provides a viable arena for our anxieties about the real world. Unbound from reality, fantasy provides a ready framework for the building of metaphor, offering much, for example, in terms of the economy of storytelling/world-building and allowing for the tropes of genre fiction (horror, science fiction etc.) to be used as a diegetic shorthand. Such metaphors offer the useful abstraction of technical language whilst remaining readable and accessible for wider audiences. Thus, zombies and the post-apocalyptic scenarios they inhabit can be used to express (and play on) our anxieties about the historical process in the language of popular culture, rather than using the technical language of theories of historical causality. And they can do so whilst maintaining the flexibility needed to engage the ‘living’ ambiguous quality of these often contradictory, negotiated and malleable discourses in a way that theoretical language rarely seeks to abide. In Nazisploitation! Daniel Magilow (2012: 4) emphasizes the necessity of considering the kinds of text that we might initially dismiss under more conservative definitions of ‘art’ or indeed ‘history’, describing an ‘academic sensibility that increasingly bases its cultural histories not solely on “grand narratives” or politicians’ grandiose pronouncements or high art films, but instead on surfaces, ruins, decay and ephemera’. These ‘surfaces’ are important because ‘they yield clues to mentalities and histories that official narratives may not’ (ibid.). The same may be true of historical fantasy games; the genre may allow for discussion of issues that are not, or are less commonly, explicitly addressed elsewhere. Such discourses can be important to the kind of work that the past does in the present. The potential importance of this metaphorical relationship between fantasy and history in games becomes clearer by turning to two specific examples.

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Example One: Historical Anxiety and the Videogame Zombie The zombie seems to appear in historical games at points in history where great changes were underway that engaged or produced widespread cultural anxieties. For example, the Undead Nightmare DLC pack for Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego 2010) sees a zombie plague added to a fictional world that ruminates on the closing decade of the American Frontier and the changes brought by technology and expansive state and economic apparatus. Similarly, the zombielike weepers of Dishonored (Arkane Studios 2012) fit well within a world inspired by the tensions and anxieties of an exponentially urbanizing and industrializing Victorian Britain. So too, the Fallout series’ (Interplay Productions et al. 1997, 1998, 2008, 2010, 2015) subversive twist on the zombie, the mutated ‘ghoul’, sits easily within a series rife with the Cold War paranoia and atomic anxieties of the 1950s and 1960s. Even the seemingly light-hearted comedy Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse (Wideload Games 2005), where players play as the eponymous travelling-salesman-turned-zombie, works through the zombie metaphor’s classic engagement with anxieties about capitalism (the game is set initially during the Great Depression and then later in the economic boom of the 1950s). Similarly, perhaps the most well-known historical videogame zombie, the Nazi variety (most notably found in Call of Duty), obviously relates to a history underpinned by anxiety. Indeed, the figure expresses our unease even whilst soothing it by turning the Nazi into a literal monster, indulging collective memory by simplistically characterizing the Nazi as the evil and irrational ‘other’ and thus suppressing the historically widespread nature of Nazi support and troubling similarities in contemporary politics (Chapman forthcoming). It seems important then to explore the zombie as almost a fin de siècle trope, drawing from, and expressing our anxieties about, the historical process and historical change. This is perhaps unsurprising. The zombie can be understood as a barometer of cultural anxiety and has a rich history of tracking a wide range of cultural, political and economic anxieties (Dendle 2007). As these anxieties can never be truly separated from the historical events, processes and discourses that give rise to them, it seems important to consider the relationship between the fantastic figure of the zombie and history – even more pressing when the zombie is situated in an explicitly historical context. Games are a medium suited to expressing ideas about historical change. Like theories of historical causality, they are inherently concerned with tensions between structures (rules), human (player) agency and contingency (unpredictability or randomness). The zombie adds to this in interesting ways. Firstly, the apocalyptic themes the zombie implies link to anxieties about the

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end/stagnation of the historical process in its dominant interpretation, i.e. the dissolution of the Enlightenment grand narrative of inexorable, linear, universal progress. The zombie apocalypse is generally a bleak future of violence and state dissolution, wherein civilization’s victory of order over chaos fails, as does the basic technological structure of everyday life, while culture, morality and memory erode. These are futures that signal humanity’s downfall rather than continued ascendance, and engage our fear of the past – the pain, violence, fear and barbarism that we often assume dominated the lives of the people before us. Put simply, these are futures expressing our anxiety of both returning to the past and in doing so ending (human) history. The Gothic figure of the zombie is well suited to such a task, as ‘the Gothic was initially a tool for disturbing the Enlightenment project by unveiling the nightmarish monsters that modernity produced’ (Höglund 2016: 187). The Gothic revels in the anxious dissonance between the promises of the Enlightenment metanarrative and the historical realities of modernity (e.g. slavery, genocide, colonialism) that has become even more apparent through the suspicion of metanarratives (and their relationship to power) introduced by the discourses and conditions of postmodernity. It therefore seems inevitable that the zombie would engage such anxieties when introduced to a game with historical themes. For example, as the Gothic signals ‘the disturbing return of the pasts upon presents’ (Botting 1996: 1), the Nazi zombie naturally seems to express anxieties about the return (‘undeath’) of fascism – particularly since fascism (though possible only due to the conditions of modernity) is often hegemonically viewed as an unnatural aberration along history’s ‘proper’ (meta)narrative path, suppressing unease about the actual fragility of historical progress. The zombie undoubtedly expresses contemporary anxieties, yet these cannot be disentangled from history. Whilst the renewed popularity of zombie fiction must be viewed in the context of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, it is the Second World War that provided the moral framing for American foreign policy at this point (Höglund 2016). Furthermore, the reanimation of the (faster and deadlier) zombie in films such as the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later (2002) expresses contemporary anxieties about worldwide unrest: pandemics, economic failure, climate change and social collapse. Such narratives often similarly subvert the Enlightenment ideal of historical progress, depicting humanity as sowing the seeds of its own destruction (e.g. through unchecked scientific experimentation). Most importantly, however, the zombie apocalypse engages a particular historical anxiety: a fatalistic view of the historical process as disturbingly beyond the capacity of human agency to control or resist. This anxiety is expressed in the very gameplay of the zombies mode of the Call of Duty series. There is generally no way to win or complete the mode in the traditional sense: regardless of player skill, the game almost

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always ends in the player-character’s death. In some of the later additions to the series there are ending cutscenes hidden as ‘Easter eggs’ that can be triggered through following a series of complicated hidden objectives, but these do not guarantee the player-character’s survival (sometimes even depicting their deaths), never see the zombie menace entirely destroyed, and are highly unlikely to be experienced by most players. The challenge generally lies only in delaying the inevitable conclusion of death for as long as possible. The game ‘will end not with the triumph of victory, with the downfall of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan as in the campaign, but with the avatar swamped by a mass of frenzied zombies’ (Höglund 2016: 187). This subverts the conventional Enlightenment metanarrative, in which rational democratic-capitalism inevitably defeats the irrational other of fascism (or other political undesirables), expressing anxieties about unstoppable historical change. No matter the player’s actions, s/he cannot reverse the unfolding apocalypse, or generally even survive it. At best, s/ he can delay it slightly. This idea permeates the zombie modes of Call of Duty. The storyline obsesses over diversions in the timeline, with temporal fractures and alternate dimensions emphasizing  the unpredictability and chaos of history and thus the impossibility of human control. The series lore features conspiracy theories, secret societies, alien influences, dark energies and ancient conflicts, each speaking to the fear of hidden, unscrupulous explanations for change that cannot be resisted or controlled through conventional humanist means (and which stand outside the models of causality embedded in Enlightenment rationality). At points in the storyline the player-character is told that their actions can alter the timeline for corrective purposes, yet it is eventually revealed that all the events are part of an ancient universal cycle that these actions inevitably complete. Thus, in both gameplay and narrative the series emphasizes the impotence of human agency in the face of historical change. Far from being unique to Call of Duty, this anxiety is woven into many games featuring zombies and, for example, the impossibility of victory beyond survival is a common narrative framing (and, as in Call of Duty, sometimes even survival is impossible). This has an ironic intertextuality in that games frequently cast us as protagonists in romance (adventure) stories with the skill, will, and means to resolve established conflicts and thus exert agency over the world (Chapman 2016b). What better way to express anxiety over the impotence of action in the face of large-scale change than by subverting the conventions of a medium often marketed on its capacity to offer us a sense of agency, control and mastery? Thus, the participatory zombie game seems a particularly apt means of expression for such anxieties. We do not simply root for a protagonist but consign ourselves to selling our virtual life as dearly as possible in the face of an unstoppable, undead tide of historical change. Even in those games where we can survive an outbreak, often there is no way to permanently resist the zombie apocalypse (in the aforementioned

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Undead Nightmare, for example, the player-character cures the outbreak only to find it returned in the game’s epilogue). In such moments, the grand ideals of history vanish, leaving only the animalistic, and thus ahistorical, hope of individual survival. That such anxieties would come to permeate popular culture in the contemporary moment may be due to the focus in the past century on structural theories of causality that minimize human agency (making their way into popular culture through, for example, the political significance of Marxism, fears over climate change, and the impact of crossover texts such as Jared Diamond’s 1997 environmental-determinist book Guns, Germs and Steel). Zombies are an excellent metaphor for expressing these anxieties, serving easily to represent large-scale material or superstructural conditions. The Nazi zombie in particular stands starkly representative of this relationship between historical anxiety and the zombie. This figure plays on fears exacerbated by a post ‘good war’ world that has since seen the Vietnam War and the War on Terror, and that challenges simple notions of continual historical ascendance. Furthermore, generally our greatest fear concerning history is that we will forget, and thus fail to learn as we move into the future – the frequently paraphrased idea that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana 1905: 461). The discourses of collective memory surrounding the Holocaust exemplify this notion. Nazi zombies have an obvious connection to this history. Zombies symbolize our need for history, both through the history-ending apocalypses that they bring about and in their literal feeding on humans (including brains) and the mindlessness that infection causes. Zombie plagues destroy the memories, individual and collective, that allow us to hold shared histories and identities. That these zombies should sometimes be Nazis also seems particularly appropriate given the continuing far-right propensity for denial and revisionism in regards to the Holocaust. Just as the survivors of any zombie fiction must withdraw from a world increasingly ruled by the undead, the zombie expresses our fear of humanity’s withdrawal from history itself. Zombies therefore offer a useful example for considering the role of fantasy in making meaning about the past in games. If the future or alternate past (and concurrent alternate present) that the zombie symbolizes is to be as scary as the horror genre generally requires, it must be relevant to our real ideas and anxieties about how change over time (i.e. history) occurs. Whilst the technical academic language of historical causality, progress, agency and structures understandably has little presence in popular culture, the apocalyptic world of the zombie – a fantasy world of plagues, undeath and monsters – offers a means to discuss, and express anxieties about, these large-scale issues in a relatively accessible way. Indeed, such worlds would seem to necessitate the expression of these anxieties in the construction of their affective relationships with audiences. The zombie, and the apocalypses it inhabits, therefore seem to have a potentially meaningful

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relationship to the real discourses of history (particularly when combined with the historical settings and inherent concern with agency found in historical games), despite its status as fantasy.

Example Two: Wolfenstein and the Holocaust Recent entries into the Wolfenstein series also leverage the possibilities of fantasy to make meaning about the past.3 Set during the Second World War and in the 1960s, Wolfenstein offers a fantastic historical world in which use of dark occult technologies drawn from an alternate ‘Black Sun’ dimension results in Nazi victory. Enemies and technologies are frequently disturbing creations born from Nazi experimentation meshing science and the supernatural technologies of the Black Sun dimension. As veteran soldier William ‘B. J.’ Blazkowicz, the player must attempt to stop the Nazis by impeding their experimental efforts and facing down the resulting hordes of enemies, including robots, ‘mecha-Nazis’ (cyborgs) and other monstrous adversaries. Such themes have permeated the series for many years. However, it is the recent entries by MachineGames that are of most interest here. Analyzing instances where videogames generated controversy by including content perceived as inappropriate, previous research found that games are often seen as an unsuitable medium for exploring contentious and/or serious themes (Chapman and Linderoth 2015). Controversies seemed to revolve around two particular issues. Firstly, the fear that placing serious themes into a ludic frame in which they inevitably gain a double meaning (as both representational and gameplay elements) means these themes risk becoming trivialized because players might only attend to their gameplay meaning, thus treating them less respectfully than they are commonly perceived to deserve. The second, related fear revolved around the appropriateness of particular playable positions, i.e. instances where a game ‘casts at least some of the players in the role of the generally perceived historical antagonist and thus allows the players to re-enact historical episodes of exploitation, cruelty and abuse through their in-game actions’ (Chapman and Linderoth 2015: 140). These ‘limits of play’ seem to influence the kind of history included in games and the ways in which this inclusion occurs. For example, the First World War tends to be represented in games in ways that omit sensitive imagery central to popular collective memory of the conflict (Chapman 2016a). Similarly, though the Second World War is a frequent theme for historical videogames, the Holocaust is never mentioned or included unless couched in extremely strong negotiating frames. Even elements associated with the Holocaust (Nazi ideology, units, organizations, symbols and leaders) are frequently excluded, particularly when Nazi forces are a playable position

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(Chapman and Linderoth 2015). Whilst intending sensitivity, this has meant games ‘whitewashing’ the Holocaust from Second World War history, particularly troubling given the popularity of games and thus their potential as cultural tools utilized by audiences to form historical understandings and negotiate collective memory. Despite this widespread exclusion of the Holocaust (also noted by others, e.g. Frasca 2001, Heckner 2012), newer entries into the Wolfenstein series (particularly The New Order) stand as a notable exception. Somewhat paradoxically, it appears to be the series’ status as historical fantasy that allows this. Though notable by its absence, the Holocaust remains an ever-present justification for the violence of gameplay in Second World War games (underpinning notions of ‘the good war’ etc.), and thus serves as an unspoken ‘moral disengagement factor’ (Hartmann et al. 2014). However, MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games, almost uniquely, do seem to make efforts to explicitly include the Holocaust. The games’ themes of Nazi human experimentation recall the terrible experiments of the concentration camps. In one level of The New Order, players find themselves in a labour camp that draws heavily on the imagery of the Holocaust, despite including science-fiction architecture and machinery. Piles of emaciated human corpses with shaven heads are incinerated, inmates have numbered tattoos, train carriages transport packed prisoners, and Nazi guards casually torture and abuse inmates. In another level of the game, the player-character awakens in a psychiatric facility. Whilst the staff are kind, the player also witnesses them being forced to hand over patients to Nazi authorities, recalling the mass murder of those with disabilities during the Holocaust. These themes also recur elsewhere in the game. For example, in one instance the player is forced to make a ‘Sophie’s choice’ between two allied NPCs, deciding who will meet a gruesome end at the hands of a Nazi scientist in a human experimentation laboratory. It may seem strange that a game with an alternate fantasy world of supernatural and science-fiction elements engages with this most emotive and provocative aspect of the war, rather than one of the many Second World War games marketed on the basis of their allegedly comprehensive historical accuracy. But it is precisely fantasy that seemingly enables this, allowing the games to allude to the Holocaust without literally representing it. ‘Semiotic resources can be used to both create meaning but also to avoid certain kinds of commitments’ (Machin 2013: 350). This idea is important to the distancing allowed by using fantasy as metaphor, and thus to the way that Wolfenstein seems able to reference the Holocaust within the game form whilst avoiding controversy. Games that include potentially sensitive content often attempt to deflect critique by couching this content in particular frame cues emphasizing, for example, a documentary, memorial, educational, or artistic value (Chapman and Linderoth 2015). This seeks to add another layer of meaning to the representation by ‘upkeying’

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(Goffman 1986) away from the primary framework of meaning. However, it also appears to be possible to deflect criticism by adding a fictional layer (and concurrent frame), creating an upkeying that offers an alibi through ambiguity by situating the real and potentially sensitive content in a larger fictional diegesis (Zarandona, Chapman and Jayemayne 2018: 185). In such moments, it becomes unclear if what is being referred to or commented on is the original, sensitive event (arguably, the primary framework) or the events of the fictional layer the game introduces. Introducing a fantasy element takes this approach to its logical end-point, nestling the sensitive themes in a layer with even more claimed distance from reality and thus with even more potential to deflect critique. This distance allows the game to metaphorically invoke the event even whilst pointing to the fact that its world is fantasy and thus cannot really be about those events or themes that we consider most real (i.e. events or themes that are sacred and thus conventionally held to be beyond question). In a sense, we can imagine a kind of Venn diagram of overlapping frames (what Goffman refers to as ‘laminations’ or ‘layers’) in a game such as Wolfenstein, one frame being ‘history’ and the other ‘fantasy’. The game works through this overlap (e.g. part of the fantasy frame may be an upkeying of the historical), but it is also free to draw from each (and asks players to move conceptually between them during play). In this way, these games can still operate through notions such as historical authenticity even whilst paradoxically utilizing the freedoms of fantasy. This approach also means an ambiguity in any given moment, where meaning can never be finitely pinned down. Is what is being commented on/represented the real past or simply the fantasy world? William Empson (1947: x) argues that ambiguity occurs when ‘alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading’. Such is the case with Wolfenstein, which can be viably enjoyed as a pure fantasy world or as a commentary on the past in which this fantasy world is actually grounded. However, the rhetorical utility of this ambiguity is that it also deflects potential critique by allowing the argument to be made, if necessary, that the latter reading, seeing the game as history, is in fact a misreading (that it is a fantasy world and therefore cannot contain a representation of the Holocaust). Thus, the game offers two distinct (though overlapping) categories of meaning potentials, and can deflect critique by pointing to the fantasy element as the supposed intended meaning. The game can give the appearance of fantasy as transcendent, even whilst actually representing and commenting on events that are all too real. The potential utility of this fictional/fantasy distancing and the risk of being perceived as trivializing seems to be clearly understood by the game’s makers. Marketing for the game (and sequels) includes the following proviso: Wolfenstein: The New Order is a fictional story set in an alternate universe in the 1960’s. … The story and contents of this game are not

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intended to and should not be construed in any way to condone, glorify or endorse the beliefs, ideologies, events, actions, persons or behavior of the Nazi regime or to trivialize its war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. (my emphasis)4 Wolfenstein’s fantasy historical world allows the depiction of an alternate genocide at an alternate time (the 1960s) that yet remains grounded in the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This creates an uncertainty and ambiguity of framing between the real and the fantastic that mounts a ready defence against questions of inappropriateness. The game can therefore include themes related to Holocaust history in a game (something generally not done) and yet simultaneously deflect critique by arguing that this is not actually a representation of the Holocaust itself. Fantasy allows for a metaphorical relationship to history whilst allowing sufficient distance and ambiguity to avoid directly representing it. This strategic ambiguity therefore makes it more difficult to pin down whether what is being commented on in any particular instance of the game is the fantasy world or the real history in which it nonetheless remains grounded (as, arguably, the primary framework). Through this approach, Wolfenstein functions somewhat like a ‘conceptual simulation style’ historical game (Chapman 2016b: 69–79): those games, such as historical grand strategy games, that use visual abstraction and thus admit the inherent metaphorical relationship of history to the past. This is unusual for Second World War-themed first-person shooters, which tend to use a naïve realist-reconstructionist epistemological approach and simulation style (Chapman 2016b) that claims to show the past ‘as it was’. Though the change is one of content rather than style in Wolfenstein, this similarly allows the game to function as a simulation of discourse about the past rather than a (claimed) simulation of the past itself – making meaning through abstraction and metaphor, and offering both distance and creative licence. As aforementioned, the fictional is often paradoxically utilized alongside claims to authenticity in historical games. For example, Emil Hammar (2017) notes how the Assassin’s Creed series is marketed on the basis of the authenticity of its historical settings, material culture and geography whilst simultaneously emphasizing the fictionality of its narrative and characters. This ‘double-binding mechanism’ allows the game to ‘conveniently both be marketed as alluring for its so-called historical authenticity and simultaneously not bound to criticisms of its depictions’ (Hammar 2017: 376). Though relevant, this is less the case with Wolfenstein, whose fantasy world of Nazi robots and alternate history almost necessitates an epistemological honesty that de-emphasizes claims to authenticity (outside of the representation of basic material culture). Indeed, the series revels in its fantasy nature both in-game and in marketing. And yet the distance from

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the real events of the Second World War offered by this seems to be precisely what allows this game to deal with aspects of the real history that other games with stronger claims to authenticity cannot. However, as a final note, this approach also requires a careful balance to be struck between the historical and fantasy frames lest this disturb the ambiguity of framing. There are therefore aspects of the Holocaust that cannot be easily included. For example, the specific persecution of Jewish people by Nazi authorities, a central part of Holocaust history and collective memory, is generally downplayed in Wolfenstein in favour of a more universalized victimhood. There are Jewish characters in the games but the central anti-Semitic tenets of Nazism are relatively muted. Persecution of these characters is generally on the basis of their participation in a secret Jewish society that provides futuristic inventions for the resistance, rather than the ‘crime’ of simply being ethnically Jewish under the Nazi state. The potential of this aspect of the real Holocaust to unbalance the strategic ambiguity of framing perhaps explains why the player-character’s Jewish heritage is hinted at (B. J. can, for example, read Hebrew) but remains carefully unconfirmed by the game’s publisher and developer (Totilo 2013).

Conclusion These examples suggest that even the most loosely historical games are worthy of analytical consideration, and that even the most seemingly nonhistorical, fictional and fantastic elements of such games can be important to the meaning potentials they offer in relation to history. The figure of the historical zombie seems able to express our anxieties about, and engage discourses concerning, the nature and possibilities of the historical process, and does so in a flexible tropic language offering a particular accessibility. Similarly, though Wolfenstein’s fantastic alternate historical world has little claim to epistemological authority through typical notions of authenticity/ accuracy, the game does seem to attempt to make meaning about the past. We must consider the notion that fantasy may also allow problematic ideological elements to escape critique by avoiding the kind of commitments that a more realistic representation might imply. However, the alibi offered by fantasy also allows Wolfenstein to include the Holocaust as a part of game-based history without provoking controversy. Whilst historical games as a genre are typically obsessed with Second World War history and claims to authenticity, they also typically whitewash the Holocaust and associated elements from their representations. Given the popularity of these games, Wolfenstein’s attempt to redress this imbalance seems potentially important. In this subversive resistance to the well-meaning, though problematic, exclusion of the Holocaust from history in games, Wolfenstein actually

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fulfils a typical function of fantasy that ‘characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints …. [fantasy] traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made “absent”’ (Jackson 2003: 4). This aspect of fantasy simultaneously points to those elements that have previously remained unspoken, acting as a kind of ‘values thermometer’. This relates to the ‘limits of play’ in games, whose exclusions similarly reveal ‘information about norms and values on a broader social level’ (Chapman and Linderoth 2015: 137). The two cases discussed here seem to point to the necessity of considering the metaphorical role of fantasy for making meaning about the past in games. Specifically, both point to the importance of considering what fiction and fantasy allow (e.g. challenging the paradigms of historical representation) as well as exclude (e.g. conventional notions of accuracy). It therefore seems important to take an inclusive definition of the ‘historical game’ moving forward, to consider the relationship of even the most outlandish of examples to the complex, multifaceted and negotiated discourse that we term ‘history’, and to remain focused on the possibility that these games may not only make meaning about the past despite their fictional or fantasy elements but precisely because of them.

Notes 1 See Chapman, Foka and Westin (2017) for more information on the field. 2 For an excellent introduction to some of White’s ideas on the relationship between fiction and history see White (2005). 3 These latest entries include Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (2015) and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017). 4 For example, see https://bethesda.net/en/games/WO4CSTPCDENA (accessed 21 March 2019).

References Ankersmit, F. R. (1994) History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Armitt, L. (2005) Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. New York, NY: Continuum. Botting, F. (1996) Gothic. London: Routledge. Chapman, A. (2012) Privileging Form over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1 (2), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/ privileging-form-over-content-by-adam-chapman/(accessed 21 March 2019).

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Chapman, A. (2016a) It’s Hard to Play in the Trenches: WWI, Collective Memory and Videogames, Game Studies, 16 (2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/ chapman (accessed 21 March 2019). Chapman, A. (2016b) Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapman, A. (forthcoming) The Undead Past in the Present – Historical Anxiety and the Nazi Zombie, in P. Zackariasson and S. Webley (eds) The Playful Undead and Video Games. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapman, A., A. Foka and J. Westin (2017) Introduction: What Is Historical Game Studies? Rethinking History, 21(3): 358–71. Chapman, A. and J. Linderoth (2015) Exploring the Limits of Play: A Case Study of Representations of Nazism in Games, in T. E. Mortensen, J. Linderoth and A. M. L. Brown (eds) The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments. New York, NY: Routledge. de Groot, J. (2015) Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. London: Routledge. Dendle, P. (2007) The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety, in N. Scott (ed.) Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. New York, NY: Rodopi. Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Empson, W. (1947) Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing. Frasca, G. (2001) Ephemeral Games: Is It Barbaric to Design Videogames after Auschwitz? in M. Eskelinen and R. Koskimaa (eds) Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän Yliopisto. Goffman, E. (1986) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Hammar, E. L. (2017) Counter-Hegemonic Commemorative Play: Marginalized Pasts and the Politics of Memory in the Digital Game Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, Rethinking History, 21(3): 372–95. Harper, S. (2002) Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Americana, 1 (2), www.americanpopularculture.com/ journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm (accessed 21 March 2019). Hartmann, T., K. M. Krakowiak and M. Tsay-Vogel (2014) How Violent Video Games Communicate Violence: A Literature Review and Content Analysis of Moral Disengagement Factors, Communication Monographs, 81(3): 310–32. Hasebrink, U. and I. Paus-Hasebrink (2016) Linking Fantasy to Everyday Life: Patterns of Orientation and Connections to Reality in the Case of The Hobbit, Participations, 13(2): 223–45. Heckner, M. N. (2012) Deleting Memory Space: The Gaming of History and the Absence of the Holocaust, in E. Torner and W. J. White (eds) Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Höglund, J. (2016) Virtual War and the Nazi Zombie Gothic in Call of Duty, in S. Hantke and A. S. Monnet (eds) War Gothic in Literature and Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Jackson, R. (2003) Fantasy. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Jenkins, K. (1991) Re-thinking History. London: Routledge. Koski, J. (2017) Reflections of History: Representations of the Second World War in Valkyria Chronicles, Rethinking History, 21(3): 396–414. Machin, D. (2013) What is Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies? Critical Discourse Studies, 10(4): 347–55. Magilow, D. H. (2012) Introduction: Nazisploitation, in D. H. Magilow, K. T. Vander Lugt and E. Bridges (eds) Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. London: Continuum. Munslow, A. (1997) Deconstructing History. Abingdon: Routledge. Munslow, A. (2007) Narrative and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave. November, J. A. (2013) Fallout and Yesterday’s Impossible Tomorrow, in M. W. Kapell and A. B. R. Elliot (eds) Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. London: Bloomsbury. Rosenstone, R. A. (2006) History on Film/Film on History. Harlow: Pearson. Rosenstone, R. A. (2007) A Historian in Spite of Myself, Rethinking History, 11(4): 589–95. Santayana, G. (1905) The Life of Reason. London: Constable. Serrano Lonzo, D. (forthcoming) Ludus (Not) Over: Video Games and Popular Perception of Ancient Past Re-Shaping, in C. Rollinger (ed.) Representations of Classical Antiquity: Playing with the Ancient World. London: Bloomsbury. Todorov, T. (1973) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1966) The Tolkien Reader. New York, NY: Random House. Totilo, S. (2013) Is This Nazi-Killing Video Game Hero Jewish? Maybe, Kotaku, 29 May, http://kotaku.com/is-this-nazi-killing-video-game-hero-jewishmaybe-510303278 (accessed 21 March 2019). White, H. (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1978) Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1990) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (2005) Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality, Rethinking History, 9(2–3):147–57. White, H. (2010) The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zarandona, J. A. G., A. Chapman and D. Jayemanne (2018) Heritage Destruction and Videogames, ToDiGRA, 4(2): 173–203.

Ludography Arkane Studios (2012) Dishonored. Bethesda Softworks. Interplay Productions, Black Isle Studios, Bethesda Game Studios and Obsidian Entertainment (1997, 1998, 2008, 2010, 2015) Fallout [series]. Interplay Entertainment/Bethesda Softworks.

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MachineGames (2014) Wolfenstein: The New Order. Bethesda Softworks. MachineGames (2015) Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. Bethesda Softworks. MachineGames (2017) Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Bethesda Softworks. Muse Software, id Software, Gray Matter Interactive, Splash Damage, Raven Software, and MachineGames (1981, 1984, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2017) Wolfenstein [series]. Muse Software/Apogee Software/FormGen/ Activision/Bethesda Softworks. Rockstar San Diego (2010) Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar Games. Treyarch (2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018) Call of Duty Zombies Mode [series]. Activision. Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Sofia, Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Quebec, and Ubisoft Toronto (2007, 2009–15, 2017–18) Assassin’s Creed [series]. Ubisoft. Wideload Games (2005) Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel without a Pulse. Aspyr.

7 Machine(s) of Narrative Security: Mnemonic Hegemony and Polish Games about Violent Conflicts Piotr Sterczewski At the beginning of 2018, matters of Polish historical memory became the topic of international news, when the Polish government found itself in the midst of a diplomatic row over an amendment to the Law on the Institute of National Remembrance (often referred to by foreign news media as the ‘Holocaust Memory Law’ or ‘Polish Memory Law’). The amendment sought to impose ‘sanctions up to three years of imprisonment to anyone who attributes “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich”’ (Belavusau and Wójcik 2018). This was widely interpreted internationally as an attempt to whitewash Polish history of the Second World War, and especially to hide or downplay anti-Semitic acts committed by regular Polish people without coercion from Nazi Germany (Zubrzycki 2018). Commenting on the international controversy, Andrzej Zybertowicz, a professor of sociology connected to the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) party that rules Poland at the time of writing, said in a now-famous radio interview: What I call the ‘MaNaSec’, the Machine of Narrative Security, would be a synchronization of significant resources owned by the Polish state in order to monitor how the image of Poland in the world is being transformed, what are the nodal places where the image of Poland is created, and – on one hand – active anti-defamation action, just as Jewish or Israeli circles worked out decades ago, and on the other hand, the message in which we

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create the positive image of [Polish] transformations. … In my opinion, MaNaSec is our main challenge for this year.1 While Zybertowicz thinks of the project of MaNaSec mostly in terms of the government’s international relations strategy, the view that Polish memory matters is also relevant to the theme of this chapter. The concept of a ‘machine of narrative security’ assumes a certain view of memory discourses: it sees them as a matter of construction, a field of struggle of conflicting visions and interpretations, an area that should be managed through the deliberate, planned actions of national institutions. Such open admission of the changeable, negotiable character of the dominant interpretation of history is somewhat unusual for an intellectual connected with a conservative, nationalist party. Representatives of this side of the political spectrum would usually rather try to paint national history as a fixed set of events and characters; a stable repertoire of identities, values and explanations of the present. Common strategies of nationalist discourse (in a broad sense) involve presenting the nation as obvious and natural, ancient and timeless, its origins lost in a mythic past (Hall 1996: 611–18, Nijakowski 2010: 240, Wodak et al. 2009: 27). The academic field of memory studies, focused on the ‘past as a human construct’ (Erll 2011: 5), acknowledges that representations of the past are dynamic and changeable. Berthold Molden’s (2016) concept of mnemonic hegemony links such constructions to an analysis of power relations. Molden applies the notion of hegemony – based mostly on the works of Antonio Gramsci, its later reworkings by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001), and writings of Michel Foucault – to the analysis of discourses of memory. According to this perspective, in order to stabilize current relations of power, the dominant discursive forces in a given society privilege certain ways of remembering the past over others, aiming to essentialize them and present them as natural while marginalizing competing views and practices. This chapter proposes a framework for investigating the intersection between games (both digital and non-digital) and discourses of memory: to show games as ‘memory devices’ (Kobielska 2016: 21–2), that model memory practices and participate in establishing, maintaining and modifying mnemonic hegemonies; and to see them as historical media texts aiming for political relevance. The framework is based on the assumption that memory is always mediated, that ‘collective memories are produced through mediated representations of the past that involve selecting, rearranging, redescribing and simplifying, as well as the deliberate inclusion and exclusion of information’ (Assmann and Shortt 2012: 3–4); and that every media technology ‘has its specific way of remembering and will leave its trace on the memory it creates’ (Erll 2008: 389). Accordingly, this chapter looks at how generalized media conventions and the specific design choices of games,

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especially those concerning in-game conflicts, contribute to and interact with the dominant motifs of Polish memory culture. The chapter also introduces to game analysis the notions of antagonistic and agonistic modes of conflict, as understood by Mouffe (2013, 2009, 2005). Antagonistic conflict is based on essentialist identities, a good/evil dichotomy, and a strong friend/enemy opposition. The ultimate goal in the antagonistic conflict is to eliminate the enemy. Conversely, agonistic conflict is a struggle between ‘adversaries’. As Mouffe (2009: 102) explains, ‘an adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground’. In a framework of agonistic conflict, each side is able to express its collective aims and passions, and adversaries acknowledge each other’s legitimacy (while still aiming to establish their own hegemonic projects). In general, a theory of hegemony allows for the description of political aspects of culture in a way that does not rely on positing essentialist, selfcontained entities, and which accounts for historical changeability and contingency, and their dependence on power relations. When applied to issues of cultural memory, it helps us conceptualize various societal uses of the past as power-related projects. Molden offers just such a framework: building on the work of Laclau and Mouffe, his concept of mnemonic hegemony captures how ‘the bases of the always-specific constitution of the present are depicted as necessities and … are essentialized as inevitabilities rather than shown in their contingency’ (Molden 2016: 127). As a way to investigate the ‘intersection between material structures, social experience, and discursive practices’, the concept ‘emphasizes that any sign, word, or memory can be multi-vocal and can be put to use differently by different speakers, according to their experience, context, and needs’ (Molden 2016: 130). This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the concept of mnemonic hegemony to game analysis through case studies of games that are a part of a wider cultural phenomenon – namely, the proliferation of games about national history in Poland since 2009.

The New Wave of Polish Historical Games The titles examined in this chapter belong to a new wave of Polish historythemed board and card games. This trend started in 2009 with the publication of the family-oriented board game Little Insurgents (Mali Powstańcy, Miłuński 2009), created in partnership with the Warsaw Rising Museum and set during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Since then, over fifty historical card and board games have been published, some as purely commercial products, but many of them created by or in cooperation with state or regional institutions or NGOs, serving both entertainment and educational purposes.

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In terms of themes, three main groups stand out among Polish historical tabletop games: (1) depictions of armed conflicts between Poland and its enemies; (2) family-oriented games focused on everyday life in Poland during communist rule (mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s); and (3) mechanically simple educational titles, such as quizzes and memory games, focused on national symbols, historical dates and figures, and other trivia. In general, most of these games depict situations of confrontation between the Polish people and either an external enemy or an authoritarian ruler. In the case of military-themed games, it is important to note that what I call ‘the new wave of Polish historical games’ is distinct from wargames understood as a tabletop genre. The lineage of tabletop wargames can be traced from chess through the Prussian military training tool Kriegsspiel and H. G. Wells’s miniature-based system Little Wars to its commercial, entertainment form first produced by an American company Avalon Hill in the 1950s. The dominant genre conventions were stabilized during the 1960s and 1970s: wargames (also called conflict simulations) are typically focused on simulation understood as a relatively accurate depiction of warfare on a strategic or tactical level. They usually have detailed, hex-based maps, counters or blocks representing specific units, and complex rules for combat, based on those units’ parameters (Lowood 2016, Peterson 2012, 2016, Sabin 2012). They also typically allow playing as either side of a given battle or war, and choosing a side is normally not perceived as an identity choice. While some players do envision themselves as historic commanders while playing – as described by the hobbyists’ term ‘the Rommel syndrome’ (Peterson 2016: 31) – the primary appeal of the genre lies in complex simulation, historical accuracy and the possibility of counter-factual play (Dunnigan 2016, Lowood 2016, Peterson 2016). Polish historical wargames have been published since the early 1990s, but they have the status of niche hobby products, are not aimed at a mass audience and do not focus on education and identity building.2 Titles belonging to the new wave of historical games aim for a decidedly more mainstream and familyfriendly appeal, use simpler, more accessible (but also more diverse) game conventions than wargames and appeal to patriotic identities (and thus usually, with some exceptions, do not allow players to play as the enemies of the Polish side). Even when everyday life – rather than warfare – is the dominant topic, the oppressiveness of the system and the people’s struggles against it are underlined. For example, the popular game Queue (Kolejka, Madaj 2011), created by the Institute of National Remembrance, revolves around acquiring goods from undersupplied stores during communist times. The variant of patriotic identity projected by most of these games focuses on dichotomous conflict situations and heroic themes, which in turn lead to various omissions and exclusions: privileging certain subject-positions; downplaying the internal diversity of Polish society; depersonalizing the

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enemy; concealing problematic aspects of depicted historical events. The theory of hegemony is particularly suited for analyzing such discursive effects in the depiction of social and political conflicts. This chapter focuses on games about violent conflicts, a subcategory of the broader set of historical games, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it helps to draw out the differences between titles accentuating Polish national identity and those seeking a more universal appeal. Secondly, since conflict is arguably one of the most basic categories of the game medium (Crawford 1982, Salen and Zimmerman 2004, Siitonen 2014), and violence is perhaps the easiest and most common expression of conflict in games (see Nikolaidou Chapter 10 in this volume), deviations from mainstream design conventions  – defying expectations about the friend/enemy dichotomy or the meaning of victory, for example – are most noticeable in games depicting violent conflicts. Finally, the focus on war games is related to the militaryoriented character of Polish memory culture.

Hegemonic Polishness A concise and fully accurate summary of the memory culture of a nation is, inevitably, impossible. Hegemony theory tells us that social orders are unstable, changeable, influenced by constant power struggles and rearrangements, and the same pertains to mnemonic hegemony. A certain level of generalization is, however, possible and necessary: a prevailing hegemonic order is the result of sedimented historical practices, established nodal points of discourse, naturalized meanings, partially stabilized chains of equivalence. It also benefits from certain elements of this order being interlinked: ‘national mythologies are compelling insofar as the myths that comprise them are complementary, reinforcing, or overlapping at a given time’ (Zubrzycki 2011: 22).3 Describing key features of Polish mainstream approaches to national history and memory will help to show how contemporary media texts – games, in this case – are influenced by, relate to and contribute to these mnemonic hegemonies; how they become memory devices, tools for enacting and explaining history to the community, domestic-use ‘machines of narrative security’. Geneviève Zubrzycki (2011: 26) discerns two central myths of Polish national mythology: ‘that of Poland’s intrinsic Catholicity and of its messianic martyrdom’. She describes these as representing Poland as: essentially and eternally Catholic … the bulwark of Christendom defending Europe against the infidel (however defined). A nation assailed by dangerous neighbors, its identity is conserved and guarded by its defender, the Roman Catholic Church. … Christ among nations,

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it was martyred for the sins of the world and resurrected for the world’s salvation. Last but not least, it is a nation that has given the world a Pope – deferentially referred to as the ‘Pope of the Millennium’ – and rid the Western world of communism. (Zubrzycki 2011: 25) The strong association between Polishness and Catholicism results in the prevalence of religious symbols and practices in political movements, as well as in remembrance initiatives (Gliński 2016, Orla-Bukowska 2006). This is also noticeable in some of the titles belonging to the new wave of Polish historical games, including one specifically devoted to the linkage of politics and religion: the board game This Land (Ta Ziemia, Reputakowski and Sadowski 2014), which is about organizing the first pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979, under communist rule. Maria Janion (1998), a literary scholar specializing in Polish Romanticism, argues that this key period for the Polish national identity produced a strong semantic opposition between the personal and the social (national, communal), putting stronger emphasis on the latter. Sacrifice and heroism, especially embodied in a military act, are highly cherished values. Lech Nijakowski (2008: 199) describes the importance of the notion of ‘martyrology’ (martyrologia) in Polish culture: it favours the trope of Poles as fighters for a noble cause, relentless even if doomed to be defeated by evil powers; and exalts the notion of the victim as somebody who does not simply lose, but who sacrifices their life on the ‘altar of the fatherland’. Polish games depicting historical conflicts heavily use such heroic overtones, while also attempting to satisfy the tragic/sacrificial perspective, even if these tendencies produce surprising tensions when bundled together and put into game conventions (see Sterczewski 2016a for an analysis of this discrepancy and its discursive effects in Polish board games depicting lost battles). Polish mnemonic hegemony has undergone two significant shifts in the last three decades. The first occurred in 1989 and was the result of the political transformation to democracy. As Maria Kobielska describes, from that moment onward, the period before 1989 was seen as significantly and antagonistically different from the present. After the turning point, the environment of memory discourses started to change in significant ways: new conditions of the functioning of culture are being formed, and the culture freed from the official state censorship finds itself in the situation where new forces start to shape it: for instance, the dominant media discourse, market demand, politics of memory produced by various institutions, especially those belonging to the apparatus of the newly established state. (Kobielska 2016: 9–10)

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The second moment of shift is less clear-cut, but the beginning of the trend can be traced to 2004, with the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. In particular, the opening of the Warsaw Rising Museum ‘launched the … offensive of politics of memory, opening a new chapter both in the shaping of the image of the uprising and in the way of building relations to the past in the Polish public discourse’ (Kobielska 2016: 70). A certain intensification of memory practices and their generally favourable reception by the public coincided with elites adopting the ‘politics of history’ as a key element of political strategy (Kobielska 2016: 166–7). As Nijakowski (2008: 190) notes, ‘politics of history’ has even been included in the official programme of the conservative Law and Justice Party, the ruling party in 2005–7 and again from 2015 until the time of writing in 2019. Describing the tone of this intensification of practices of commemoration, Nijakowski (2008: 199) speaks of a ‘martyrological offensive’, which entails focusing on the sacrificial and tragic historical narratives, on the notions of victimhood and oppression, but also on retaining dignity and the moral high ground in conflicts against powerful forces. An important part of this national ‘memory boom’ consisted in a deliberate search for new means of expression of patriotic historical content: in the hope of reaching the youth, many institutions started using popular media such as music, comics and games. ‘Polishness’ is not only a simple geographical or cultural descriptive term pertaining to the new wave of Polish historical games, or just their superficial theme: it is their crucial semantic category, their projected ideal, their ‘absent fullness’. According to Laclau, absent fullness is the ideological image of the impossible fullness of the community (2014: 18) that cannot have a form of representation of its own (2007: 42) and must be incarnated in particular objects different from itself. In this case, these objects can be, for instance, sets of heroic characters, national imagery, key concepts, the shape of Poland on the map, etc. From the point of view of mnemonic hegemony, each of these titles, through its particular content, projects a certain vision of Polishness, presented as obvious and universal. The games abound references to Poland and Polish issues – they can be found in game texts, paratexts (manuals, cover texts, educational brochures), promotional materials and imagery used in graphic design (flags, national colours, the white eagle symbol, the ‘Fighting Poland’ anchor, etc.). Educational materials accompanying the games usually devote such attention only to the Polish side – the situation is somewhat different only in the case of traditional wargames, in which information is typically given about both conflicting sides (although such trivia are mainly military-oriented, in keeping with the genre’s focus on simulating warfare). Given the fact that the new wave of Polish historical games is to a large extent influenced by institutional support and openly

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stated educational intent, all of these titles can be read as attempts at forming mnemonic–hegemonic articulations fixing memory discourses through depicting particular perspectives on historical events and characters, and presenting them as both factual and admirable. The identity-building aspect is definitely more salient here than the simulational ambition. ‘Polishness’ is here both a precondition and a destination point: Polish identity is constructed as something to be proud of, but also something to aspire to, and is inextricably linked with the notions of heroism, bravery and (often) tragedy. The three following examples, chosen from a body of Polish historical games about armed conflicts, will illustrate how these hegemonic formations work in practice. Here I use the term ‘hegemonic formations’ in the plural. From the perspective of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory, multiple hegemonic projects can exist and compete in a given discursive space simultaneously (Laclau 2007: 35, 44, 71, 2005: 131, Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 144). For the purposes of this chapter, I treat each of the analysed games as a hegemonic articulation: a partially separated discursive structure with its own construction of conflicts (antagonisms), its own chains of equivalence, and its own vision of ‘Polishness’ and patriotic Polish identity. This enables the usefulness of hegemony theory in the analysis of the ideological projects of single media texts to be demonstrated. These texts are of course intertextually linked with broader discourses and have to be examined in relation to the historical narratives, political projects and national motifs to which they refer. They may also be persuasive tools used in shaping or reinforcing a larger, encompassing hegemonic project (such as a ruling party’s version of mnemonic hegemony). The hegemonic articulations constructed in different texts might also overlap with each other, forming similar chains of equivalence; or diverge, for instance when trying to mobilize the same signifiers for a different hegemonic project (Laclau 2005: 131). While most of these games are very much in line with Polish ‘hegemonic master narratives’, some of them can be connected to what Molden (2016: 125) calls ‘defiant counter-memories’ that evade the hegemonic memory canon or engage it critically. Examples of the latter are the board games Kraków Trail of Women (Krakowski Szlak Kobiet, Fundacja Przestrzeń Kobiet 2013), a ‘herstorical’ game focused on women’s-rights activism at the turn of the nineteenth century; Revolution 1905 (Rewolucja 1905, Lipski and Radojičić 2016) depicting a multi-faction struggle for workers’ rights at the beginning of the twentieth century; In Desert and Wilderness (W pustyni i w puszczy, Rzadek 2016), an educational game based on the classic young adult adventure novel of the same title by Henryk Sienkiewicz, which attempts to counter-balance the colonial overtones of the source material (mostly through additional text content); and Warsaw Rising Up 1945–1980 (Odbudowa Warszawy 1945–1980, Grzymisławski

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and Szopka 2016), a game about rebuilding Warsaw after the destruction of the Second World War, a topic somewhat neglected in the current Polish mnemonic hegemony because of the connection to the communist authorities and policies. Of these games, only Revolution 1905 touches on the theme of violent conflict (and therefore lies within the scope of this chapter). This game will be described as a step towards the ‘agonistic mode of remembering’ (Bull and Hansen 2016: 10): avoidance of the simple good and evil dichotomy, representation of multiple and diverse historical/social actors, recognition of the emotional side of practices of remembering, and reconstruction of historical context, socio-political struggles and individual and collective narratives of the time. This chapter focuses on board and card games, but there are also several Polish digital games about Polish history (up to a dozen, depending on the criteria used). The biggest difference, apart from the obvious but often overemphasized difference between the digital and the non-digital, is the former’s aim to appeal to an international audience instead of a mostly domestic one. The combination of the ambition to succeed in the international market while also maintaining a national specificity that would appeal to Polish players produces non-obvious discursive effects. Polish-made historical games often try to put specific Polish events and identities into broader, more commonly understood contexts, and to draw comparisons between Polish history and historical events that are more recognizable for a foreign target audience used to Anglo-centric historical games. This often entails the use of internationally popular, easily understood game conventions and narrative modes, even if they do not align well with the usual way of depicting certain events in Polish memory culture. I have described such tensions in the cases of digital games belonging to the shooter genre (Uprising44: The Silent Shadows and Enemy Front), in an earlier article (Sterczewski 2016b). My analysis of games from the point of view of hegemony theory consists of four main parts (though these are not always clearly separable in practice): ●●

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identifying discursive nodal points (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 111– 14) – the key stabilizing signifiers – of historical discourse presented in the game; describing basic chains of equivalence in the game: assessing what meanings and identities are brought together, made equivalent and opposed to another, negatively marked identity (Carpentier 2013: 255, Laclau 2014: 45–7, Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 127–30); describing the construction of in-game conflicts in terms of Mouffe’s (2013, 2009, 2005) concepts of antagonism and agonism; and

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assessing the use of intertextuality in the memory discourses of the games in order to evaluate their relation to external mnemonic– hegemonic projects.

In the case of Polish historical games, such hegemonic analysis means looking at their focus on notions of patriotism, heroism, the moral high ground, unity and martyrdom, their projected ideal of ‘Polishness’ and their most common interpretations of historical conflicts. Attention can also be given to such elements as the depiction of the conflicting sides, rules governing conflict and other in-game mechanisms, the identity of game characters, and their relation to other game elements and subsystems. Other important game aspects are the system of rewards and penalties; in-game tactics, strategies and winning conditions; and the textual and paratextual elements (flavour text, cover art, illustrations, manuals, educational brochures, etc.). The aim of the chapter is not to present a comprehensive analysis of the new wave of Polish historical board games as a whole trend, but to show the possibilities of using hegemony theory to approach games that heavily reference national history. The specific examples chosen as case studies are the games First to Fight, Outcast Heroes and Revolution 1905. The choice of these specific games on violent conflicts is justified by the possibility of demonstrating various potentialities of hegemonic analysis. All three games are cooperative to an extent, but also contain a depiction of an external enemy. Each of them constructs in-game conflict in a different way. They also represent different attitudes to socialism and communism in Polish history: from sharp antagonism (Outcast Heroes) through erasure (First to Fight), to a rehabilitation of socialist tradition (Revolution 1905). Additionally, the first two games align to current Polish mnemonic hegemony. They follow a decidedly heroic and sacrificial pattern of memory and form rather rigid and exclusive notions of national identity. Revolution 1905, on the other hand, is an atypical attempt to implement a more diverse, agonistic view of conflict in a game form.

Allies and Enemies: Equivalence and Antagonism When games belonging to the new wave of Polish historical titles depict armed conflict involving the Polish side, they typically do not allow players to play as its enemies. This is a consequence of the identity-forming ambition of these games: encouraging the players to fight against Poland would require additional explanation. There are some exceptions to this tendency, but it is telling that the games in which it is possible to play as

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opponents of the Polish side are usually close to traditional wargames in terms of gameplay conventions, and focus on the more tactical and technical aspects of warfare.4 Here, I will focus on two cooperative games depicting armed conflicts, and analyse the chains of equivalence they construct. The titles Outcast Heroes (Bohaterowie Wyklęci, Kwapiński and Sieńko 2013) and First to Fight (Kwapiński and Sieńko 2014) share some design solutions: both are cooperative board games in which players assume the roles of Polish soldiers or commanders who fight against a common external enemy, represented through automated rules (such as drawing cards from a deck). The core mechanics consist in using soldier cards to win historical battles or missions (depicted as cards drawn from a special deck). In both, the precondition for victory is defeating the enemy, but there are also mechanisms for competition between the players, making it possible to determine the winner of the game. The specific solutions used differ, but the general similarity is that the more significant certain players’ contribution to winning battles, the more points they receive (in Outcast Heroes these are called ‘glory points’, affirming that victory here is not understood only in pragmatic, military terms).

Who Gets to Be a Hero? First to Fight First to Fight is a board game designed by Adam Kwapiński and Michał Sieńko and published in 2014 by the company Factory of Historical Games (Fabryka Gier Historycznych) in partnership with several state institutions, such as the Foundation for Independence (Fundacja Niepodległości), the Ministry of National Defence and the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa). The topic of the game is the Polish military contribution to the Second World War, dealing with the presence of Polish soldiers in Allied armies, fighting on foreign fronts after the fall of Poland in 1939, as well as in the resistance inside Nazi-occupied Poland. The goal is to defeat the Axis countries through winning missions (battles), drawn as cards at the beginning of the game and treated as ‘secret orders’. It can be played by two to four players. The board depicts a map of Europe, and the gameplay mostly consists of allocating soldier cards to regions and using order cards for actions (such as movement, training, sabotage, recruitment, concentration of forces, manoeuvres) (see Figure 7.1). The game commemorates individual, named combatants (depicted on soldier cards), but also aims to evoke a certain national, heroic unity of soldiers fighting for a common cause on different fronts. Such a case of articulating identity through a set of linked elements can be usefully analysed through the

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FIGURE 7.1  Part of the board of the game First to Fight: division into regions and Axis domination tracks visible. Picture taken by the author, 2018.

notion of chains of equivalence, a basic element of the ‘logic of simplification of the social field’ (Laclau 2014: 21) in Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony theory. Chains of equivalence are sets of contingent elements (notions, identities) which together form an antagonistic relation to something else (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 127). The elements of a chain of equivalence can, to an extent, replace each other, but their particular meanings do not simply vanish: the main effect of this remaining particularity is ‘to place limits on those links that can become part of the equivalential chain’ (Laclau 2014: 47); or in other words to exclude certain elements from being added to the chain. As Laclau puts it: ‘to have a true equivalence, the differential particularity of its terms has to be weakened, but not entirely lost’ (ibid.). In games, the conflicting sides set out the relations of antagonism. An antagonistic relation to an enemy forms a chain of equivalence between allies: for instance, in cooperative games, it would consist of the list of identities (characters, factions, etc.) working together against the common threat or enemy. At another level, a set of various resources and capabilities at players’ disposal can also be regarded as a chain of equivalence, especially if it goes beyond ‘technical’ terms (as in the case of ‘glory points’, ‘faith tokens’, etc.). While particular elements of these sets are worth analyzing on their own, hegemony theory encourages us to also look at them as

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chains (sets): to examine what elements are linked together, what is the level of their internal differentiation, or how a relation of antagonism tries to force a common identity on them; it can also be assessed what other elements could be included in the chain and which probably could not. In terms of mnemonic hegemony, the chains of equivalence in historical games attempt to fix the possible (thinkable, memorable (Molden 2016: 132)) identities connected with the notions of patriotism and memory of historical conflicts. In First to Fight, looking at chains of equivalence uncovers interesting discursive effects. The board depicts a map of Europe divided into regions. It is in the choice of regions where we can first see the work of mnemonic hegemony – in terms of geography, the anti-German chain of equivalence consists of five regions: Warsaw, Poland, Western Europe, Northern Europe and the Atlantic, and Northern Africa and Italy. What is omitted from this chain is the Eastern Front, despite the significant presence of Polish soldiers there, alongside the Red Army. The simplest explanation for the omission would be the decidedly anti-communist character of the current dominant Polish memory culture and the complexity of historical Polish–Soviet relations (before becoming Poland’s uncomfortable and contested ally, the Soviet Union had invaded Poland in 1939 and perpetrated the Katyń Massacre – the mass execution of around 20,000 Polish citizens, mostly military officers, in 1940). As further explanation of the omission, grounded in hegemony theory, the game’s title and discourses can be connected to the presence of Polish soldiers in Western armies: ‘Poland First to Fight’ is the title of a famous propaganda poster authored by Marek Żuławski, depicting a shattered Polish flag, and published in 1939 in Great Britain with the intention of reminding the British of the sacrifice of the Polish people (the game uses the imagery from the poster on the backs of cards). Remembrance of Polish participation in the Allied armies after Poland’s defeat in 1939 is an important motif of Polish memory culture: it is meant to underline the bravery and selflessness of the Polish combatants as well as point out the perceived injustice or even betrayal on the part of the Allies (Kwiatkowski 2010: 19), who let Poland fall under Soviet influence after the war. During communist rule, the merits and achievements of Polish forces in the West were often overlooked or discredited (ibid.: 16). Taking all these factors into account, the inclusion of the Eastern Front in the game could indeed break or weaken the hegemonic chain of equivalence (consisting of Polish combatants and the fronts where they were active). The ‘First to Fight’ slogan is not only a message of heroism, but also a proclamation of access to the Western world (denied in the years 1945–89 despite the efforts of Polish soldiers) that downplays the

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cooperation with the Soviet Union and contributes to stabilizing this hegemonic formation. In the current Polish mnemonic hegemony, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form a ‘patriotic’ chain of equivalence which could contain a ‘communist’ element: Polish units subordinated to the Soviet command are already too ‘tainted’. This reflects changes in attitudes towards these forces in Polish memory culture. During the time of the Polish People’s Republic, the remembrance of the army fighting on the Eastern Front was favoured over commemoration of the Polish soldiers in the West and most of the resistance groups in Poland, with the exception of socialist, communist and left-leaning groups (Kwiatkowski 2010: 14–15). The official memory underlined the participation of Polish soldiers in battles on the Eastern Front, liberating Poland together with the Red Army, and their conquest of Berlin. After the transformation of 1989, the centre of attention shifted to previously neglected Polish squads in the West, particularly the so-called Anders’s Army (formed in the USSR in 1941 and then evacuated through Central Asia and the Middle East towards the Italian front), and to the resistance forces in Poland, with the strongest accent put on the combatants of the Warsaw Uprising (Kobielska 2016, Orla-Bukowska 2006). In recent years, the Polish Army in the USSR came to be seen in antagonistic terms, and actions were undertaken to downplay its memory: in a wave of official ‘decommunization’ of public space, street names referring to these soldiers, the Red Army or to the liberation of Poland in 1945 are being changed in hundreds of towns and boroughs, and as many as four to five hundred monuments could be taken down (Kałużna 2018). The notion of the liberation of Poland has been re-framed as falling into another (Soviet) occupation. In terms of identity, First to Fight privileges the subject position of combatant. Soldier cards depict named historical figures, usually commanders, attached to different kinds of armed forces (land army, navy, airborne and the resistance fighters – the latter marked by a ‘Fighting Poland’ anchor symbol). Several female soldiers are also present (not a common occurrence in Polish historical games). The soldiers are, however, not the only subjects depicted in the game: there are also field nurses (the game uses the word sanitariuszki, which denotes female nurses specifically), represented only through tokens with the red cross symbol (and used as a disposable resource to heal wounds sustained in a battle). The Nazi forces are abstractly represented only by the ‘Axis domination tracks’, showing parameters influencing the difficulty in a given region on the map. In this variant of mnemonic hegemony, only the Polish combatants are worthy of individuality: support personnel (such as nurses), foreign allies and enemies are present as literal tokens or abstract, nameless forces.

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The Only True Fight and Pure Antagonism: Outcast Heroes A similar hegemonic project can be observed in another game made by the same studio, Outcast Heroes (Bohaterowie Wyklęci), published in 2013 in partnership with the Foundation for Independence, and like First to Fight, connected with state-sanctioned commemoration. The title is a direct reference to the phrase ‘żołnierze wyklęci’ (outcast/forsaken/cursed soldiers), which is an umbrella term for the Polish anti-communist guerrilla groups active at the end of the Second World War and several years afterwards (most resistance activity ceased by 1953). The cultural memory of these groups (operating in various regions, without a centralized structure, and often belonging to different political traditions) was neglected in the years before the transition of 1989: the umbrella term ‘outcast soldiers’ entered the public discourse only in 1993 thanks to a far-right historian Leszek Żebrowski (Skory 2016), and became part of mainstream popular memory in the 2000s. Since 2011, the ‘outcast soldiers’ have had their own national memorial day, and in the past few years the memory of anti-communist underground combatants of the time has become one of the central nodal points of Polish memory culture, gaining a prominence similar to that of the fighters against Nazi Germany. Kobielska (2016: 397–8) argues that this is ‘the newest boom in Polish memory culture’ that ‘strengthens the mnemonic axis of anti-communism’ and ‘proposes a black and white image of the past in which there are no debates, ideological conflicts, hard decisions and historical context, but there are communist traitors and anticommunists who are completely in the right’. An especially visible cultural practice connected to remembering the ‘outcast soldiers’ is the popularity of patriotic apparel with emblems and slogans referring to Polish history. As Łukasz Łoziński (2016: 315) notes about the company Red Is Bad, the most popular producer of such apparel, ‘outcast soldiers’ have a prominent place among the designs, and the manifesto of the brand stresses anti-communism while not openly mentioning Germany or the Third Reich. The presence of the ‘outcast soldiers’ in Polish public and popular discourse is a good case study for observing mnemonic hegemony in the making: the very object of these memory practices has been articulated quite recently (the anti-communist armed underground had of course existed, but was not remembered as a separate entity); it is based on an antagonistic relation to the memory discourses of communist times (and, by extension, has a decidedly anti-left character in contemporary use); it downplays differences between the various stances towards the Soviet-backed authorities after the Second World War and promotes a unified understanding of the period; and, last but not least, it is a field of ongoing discursive struggle. The memory practices connected to these groups are promoted by state institutions, but

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some historians, writers, journalists and activists try to contest this memory, often by attempting to break the chain of equivalence inside the set of the ‘outcast soldiers’ (pointing to those individuals and groups who should not be regarded as heroes as they were responsible for instances of ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitic incidents, killings of civilian personnel and even collaborating with the Nazis (Jurszo 2017)). Designed for two to four players, Outcast Heroes is a cooperative card game that shares some basic design features with First to Fight: the objective is to fulfil the requirements of mission cards representing battles by forming squads of soldier cards and assigning them to those battles. Players also have secret goals, execute actions (‘mobilization’, ‘deployment’, ‘taking over’) and use order cards. The enemy is represented mechanically through ‘government action cards’. The players compete with each other for ‘glory points’ granted for winning battles. (See Figure 7.2.) The game is very much in line with the current mnemonic hegemony pertaining to the ‘outcast soldiers’. Like First to Fight, it also contains a deck of cards depicting named individual soldiers. While all the soldiers and specific battles are historical, the randomized nature of the game mechanics mixes the soldiers operating in different regions, periods and military organizations, and forces them to participate together in more or less randomly assigned battles, making both the combatants and the specific elements of their struggle perfectly replaceable with one other – equivalent, in terms of hegemony theory. Laclau describes such a phenomenon taking place under conditions of strong antagonism:

FIGURE 7.2 The game Outcast Heroes (Bohaterowie Wyklęci): battle card, character cards and the card ‘Execution’ visible. Picture taken by the author, 2018.

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The more the confrontations between groups define the social scene, the more society will be divided into two camps: at the limit, there will be a total dichotomization of the social space around only two syntagmatic positions: ‘us’ and ‘them’. All social elements would have to locate their identities around one of these two poles, whose internal components would be in a mere relation of equivalence. (Laclau 2014: 68) The enemy of the ‘outcast soldiers’ in the game is shown in a purely antagonistic way, to the point of being almost invisible. The enemy – described as ‘illegal communist power’, or even more emphatically, ‘the red plague’ – is abstract and automated: the battles have places and dates, but lack descriptions of their contexts, and it is not clear against whom exactly the heroes are fighting. Getting to know the details of the struggle would require accessing sources external to the game. The only places where enemies are (partially) visible are the illustrations on cards belonging to the ‘government actions’ deck, which depict, for example, guns pointed at Polish soldiers, violent interrogations or ambushes. The hegemonic formation proposed by the game attempts to stabilize the concept of ‘the outcast soldiers’ as a unified group, and by setting an extremely antagonistic mode of conflict, depicts them – synecdochally – as the true carriers of Polishness in the period depicted. In a hegemonic move, it aims to present a particular group’s stance in terms of universal values (Laclau 2014: 48, Laclau and Mouffe 2001: x). Such a view promotes total, armed opposition to the new post-war authorities as the only admirable choice, and ignores the variety of other attitudes present at the time. It also excludes from the picture a range of civilian experiences: being supportive of the new authorities, being critical of the authorities but not willing to fight them violently, or simply being caught in the crossfire between fighting forces. Interestingly, the same studio later published the game Warsaw Rising Up 1945–1980, which depicts the process of rebuilding Warsaw in the post-war period – an activity that required cooperation with the new authorities, and as such, subject to discourses of memory hard to reconcile with the logic of total antagonism against communism.

Towards Agonistic Game Design: Revolution 1905 The game Revolution 1905 is an untypical title among the new wave of Polish historical tabletop games, for several reasons. Firstly, despite being subsidized by a state institution (the Polish History Museum), the game was

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created and published by a decidedly and recognizably leftist institution – Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej (Political Critique Publishing House), known also for publishing left-leaning books, a journal and a web magazine. Only a few Polish tabletop games are openly connected with left-wing discourses. Secondly, the game presents events that otherwise rarely appear in mainstream Polish memory discourses: the Polish experience of workers’ revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905. On Polish territories under Russian rule, it was socialist and Marxist parties that were most prominent in organizing the general strike, and the direct fight against the tsar’s regime and factory owners allied with it (Davies 2005: 272–4). This is underlined by the image of a red banner over a barricade on the box cover. The anticommunist character of Polish mnemonic hegemony makes the revolution of 1905 difficult to include in patriotic mnemonic chains of equivalence. Thirdly, it is one of the rare cases of a Polish historical game that does away with a clearly antagonistic division of conflicting sides, including instead multiple factions, thus instantiating a tendency I would call agonistic game design. At the beginning of Revolution 1905, each player secretly draws one of six available faction cards: Polish Socialist Party; Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania; National Democracy/National Workers’ League; United Jewish Workers’ League in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Bund); the Tsarist regime; and the factory owners’ faction. Each faction has different aims, expressed through the desired final score on four parameters: the success of the revolution, workers’ rights, workers’ solidarity and national consciousness. Two of the factions (the Tsarist regime and the factory owners) are put up against the other players: the rest can play to a certain extent cooperatively, but might give priority to various parameters and various desired outcomes of the revolution (reflecting the historical variability of the factions’ interests). The core of the gameplay consists of resolving event cards from the pool on the table (depicting various historical moments of revolutionary struggle) through a dice game. A player can also acquire character cards: there are ten of them, representing various historical figures, from revolutionaries through nationalists to factory owners, regime functionaries and an anti-revolutionary archbishop. Character cards can be used as support in the dice game (see Figure 7.3). The revolution may ultimately succeed or not, depending on the sum of the points from resolved event cards. The gameplay of Revolution 1905 is based on luck, risk assessment, proper timing of moves, keeping one’s faction (and therefore its true aims) secret and predicting the aims of other players. Mainstream Polish memory culture tends to blend different historical figures and movements under the unified notion of ‘patriotism’. This is perhaps especially visible in the case of the successful struggle for independence in 1918, where differences between the political projects of proponents of national autonomy are usually downplayed. In contrast, the

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mnemonic logic of Revolution 1905 is more complex: it shows significant internal differences between the factions and their interests. In some cases, players leading one of the Polish factions – such as nationalist National Democracy – may find their successes helping the victory of the Tsarist regime in the end. Thus, the message of divergent aims and tactics of various factions is also communicated indirectly in the mechanics of the game, through its procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007). Chains of equivalence in the game are contingent and unstable, and can differ from one game to another, depending on circumstance and players’ tactics. Depicting such political complexity is in line with the broader mnemonic project of the publisher of the game, stated and partially realized through its book on the 1905 revolution: to bring this event back into Polish memory, show Polish society’s internal diversity and demonstrate that violent conflict with an oppressor does not have to be conceptualized only in national terms (Piskała 2013). Revolution 1905 also includes historical actors that are underrepresented in Polish historical games (and in Polish memory culture in general): this pertains particularly to Jewish revolutionaries (explicitly present via a specific faction card, two event cards and one character card) and female activists (one event card, three character cards). The gameworlds of Polish historical games are heavily male-dominated and, with few exceptions, do not show any ethnic diversity in the characters and groups available to

FIGURE 7.3  The game Revolution 1905 (Rewolucja 1905). Faction cards (below) and character cards (middle). Picture taken by the author, 2018.

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players. For instance, among thirty mission cards in First to Fight depicting battles and underground operations, there is no mention of the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, or even of the deliveries of supplies to Jewish combatants by the Polish underground, and the description of the only Holocaust-related card (‘Establishment of the resistance movement in Auschwitz’) mentions only Polish activists. In terms of Mouffe’s distinction between antagonism and agonism, Revolution 1905 represents a more ‘agonistic mode of remembering’ (Bull and Hansen 2016: 10): the game includes multiple and diverse historical/ social actors and a more nuanced (even if cursory) reconstruction of historical context, socio-political struggles, and individual and collective narratives of the time. Revolution 1905 demonstrates some possibilities of an agonistic game design: diversification of factions and their goals, complication of victory conditions, and the inclusion of various social actors. A clear friend/enemy dichotomy is questioned, factions can overlap in terms of one aim and diverge in terms of another, and the final result can prove unexpected even if aims and means seemed clear to a player during the game. An agonistic game is harder to enlist in support of orders and identities presenting themselves as stable, obvious, natural and ancient.

Conclusion Games about wars and other violent conflicts are inherently political. Willingly or not, they always participate in broader discourses on specific events and identities, but they are also influenced by and contribute to general understandings of conflict, war, the nation, etc. As shown in this chapter, games can participate in national mnemonic hegemonies: titles from the new wave of Polish historical board games often serve as ‘machines of narrative security’, repeating and reinforcing mainstream, governmentbacked views of Poland’s past and present, painting a picture of a brave, heroic, defiant and united nation. The theory of hegemony supplemented by memory studies offers useful tools for approaching such historical games and for understanding their immersion in local discourses, their socio-political contexts, educational aspects and imbrication with official institutions. Games can, however, also distribute and reinforce alternative hegemonic projects. A non-stereotypical, pluralist construction of conflicts, articulation of minority identities, depiction of unusual alliances, reaching for neglected and forgotten themes and characters – all these tactics can question, complicate, disturb, or even upend a currently dominant ‘narrative security’.

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Notes 1 Zybertowicz was speaking on the Poranek [Morning] programme, hosted by Jan Wróbel on TOK FM radio station, on 2 January 2018. ‘Machine of Narrative Security’ is ‘Maszyna Bezpieczeństwa Narracyjnego’ (MaBeNa for short) in Polish. 2 Arguably the first Polish title to consciously merge the complex, simulational gameplay with distinct educational and identity-building ambitions is the game Semper Fidelis. Bitwa o Lwów 1918–1919 (Semper Fidelis: Battle of Lviv 1918–1919) (Wydawnictwo Wysoki Zamek 2017), focused on the Polish– Ukrainian battles over Lviv. 3 Zubrzycki uses the term ‘hegemonic’ in her article in a different meaning than is used in this article and her notion of myth is inspired by Roland Barthes (‘stories that are posited by a given social collective as real, true and important’ (Zubrzycki 2011: 22)), but her perspective on the conflictual and changeable character of myths is to a great extent compatible with Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of hegemony. 4 Examples are: 303 – Battle of Great Britain (303 – Bitwa o Wielką Brytanię, Ginter and Madaj 2010), 111 – Alarm for Warsaw (111 – Alarm dla Warszawy, Ginter and Madaj 2013), WarCard: Afghanistan (Kuźnia Gier 2013), Time of Honour: Operation Bridge III (Czas Honoru: Operacja Most III, Phalanx 2013), Semper Fidelis: Battle of Lviv 1918–1919 (Semper Fidelis: Bitwa o Lwów 1918–1919, Wydawnictwo Wysoki Zamek 2017).

References Assmann, A. and L. Shortt (2012) ‘Memory and Political Change: Introduction, in A. Assmann and L. Shortt (eds) Memory and Political Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Belavusau, U. and A. Wójcik (2018) Polish Memory Law: When History Becomes a Source of Mistrust, New Eastern Europe, 19 February, http://neweasterneurope. eu/2018/02/19/polish-memory-law-history-becomes-source-mistrust/(accessed 28 February 2019). Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bull, A. C. and H. L. Hansen (2016) On Agonistic Memory, Memory Studies, 9(4): 390–404. Carpentier, N. (2013) Deploying Discourse Theory: An Introduction to Discourse Theory and Discourse Theoretical Analysis, in N. Carpentier, I. T. Trivundža, P. Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, E. Sundin, T. Olsson, R. Kilborn, H. Nieminen and B. Cammaerts (eds) Media and Communication Studies: Intersections and Interventions. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Crawford, C. (1982) The Art of Computer Game Design. London: Pearson.

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Davies, N. (2005) God’s Playground: A History of Poland: Volume II: 1795 to the Present. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Dunnigan, J. F. (2016) Foreword: The Paper Time Machine Goes Electric, in P. Harrigan and M. G. Kirschenbaum (eds) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Erll, A. (2008) Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Erll, A. (2011) Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gliński, M. (2016) When Poland Became Polish – An Interview with Geneviève Zubrzycki, Culture.pl, 21 March, https://culture.pl/en/article/when-polandbecame-polish-an-interview-with-genevieve-zubrzycki (accessed 28 February 2019). Hall, S. (1996) The Question of Cultural Identity, in S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson (eds) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Cambridge: Blackwell. Janion, M. (1998) Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic! Jurszo, R. (2017) ‘Żołnierzy wyklętych’ wymyślono w 1993 r. OKO.press przedstawia historię politycznego mitu, OKO.press, 1 March, https://oko. press/zolnierzy-wykletych-wymyslono-1993-r-oko-press-przedstawia-historiepolitycznego-mitu/ (accessed 28 February 2019). Kałużna, J. (2018) Dekomunizacja przestrzeni publicznej w Polsce – zarys problematyki, Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne, 2: 157–71. Kobielska, M. (2016) Polska kultura pamięci w XXI wieku: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN. Kwiatkowski, P. T. (2010) Wprowadzenie. Doświadczenie II wojny światowej w badaniach socjologicznych, in P. T. Kwiatkowski, L. M. Nijakowski, B. Szacka and A. Szpociński (eds) Między Codziennością a Wielką Historią. Druga Wojna Światowa w Pamięci Zbiorowej Społeczeństwa Polskiego. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2007) Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2014) The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (second edition). London: Verso. Lowood, H. (2016) War Engines: Wargames as Systems from the Tabletop to the Computer, in P. Harrigan and M. G. Kirschenbaum (eds) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Łoziński, Ł. (2016) Patriotyczny marketing i design. Przykład marek odzieżowych Próchnik i Red Is Bad, Prace Etnograficzne, 44(4): 307–26. Molden, B. (2016) Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations of Collective Memory, Memory Studies, 9(2): 125–42. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political. Abingdon: Routledge. Mouffe, C. (2009) The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2013) Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Nijakowski, L. M. (2008) Polska polityka pamięci. Esej socjologiczny. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne.

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Nijakowski, L. M. (2010) Pamięć o II wojnie światowej a relacje Polaków z innymi narodami, in P. T. Kwiatkowski, L. M. Nijakowski, B. Szacka and A. Szpociński (eds) Między Codziennością a Wielką Historią. Druga Wojna Światowa w Pamięci Zbiorowej Społeczeństwa Polskiego. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Orla-Bukowska, A. (2006) New Threads on an Old Loom: National Memory and Social Idenitity in Postwar and Post-Communist Poland, in R. N. Lebow, W. Kansteiner and C. Fogu (eds) The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peterson, J. (2012) Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego, CA: Unreason Press. Peterson, J. (2016) A Game Out of All Proportions: How a Hobby Miniaturized War, in P. Harrigan and M. G. Kirschenbaum (eds) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piskała, K. (2013) Zapomniana rewolucja, in K. Piskała and W. Marzec (eds) Rewolucja 1905. Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Sabin, P. (2012) Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games. London: Bloomsbury. Salen, K. and E. Zimmerman (2004) Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Siitonen, M. (2014) Conflict, in M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron (eds) The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Skory, T. (2016) Żebrowski: Pojęcie ‘Żołnierze Wyklęci’ nie jest sztuczne. Pochodzi z listu do żony zamordowanego, RMF24.pl, 1 March, www.rmf24.pl/tylko-wrmf24/danie-do-myslenia/news-zebrowski-pojecie-zolnierze-wykleci-nie-jestsztuczne-pochod,nId,2154397 (accessed 28 February 2019). Sterczewski, P. (2016a) Replaying the Lost Battles: The Experience of Failure in Polish History-Themed Board Games, Kinephanos, special issue, April: 71–89. Sterczewski, P. (2016b) This Uprising of Mine: Game Conventions, Cultural Memory and Civilian Experience of War in Polish Games, Game Studies, 16(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/sterczewski (accessed 21 March 2019). Wodak, R., R. de Cillia, M. Reisigl and K. Liebhart (2009) The Discursive Construction of National Identity (second edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zubrzycki, G. (2011) History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology, Qualitative Sociology, 34(1): 21–57. Zubrzycki, G. (2018) New ‘Holocaust Law’ Highlights Crisis in Polish Identity, The Conversation, 12 February, https://theconversation.com/new-holocaust-lawhighlights-crisis-in-polish-identity-91283 (accessed 28 February 2019).

Ludography Fundacja Przestrzeń Kobiet (2013) Krakowski Szlak Kobiet (Kraków Trail of Women). Fundacja Przestrzeń Kobiet. Ginter, T. and K. Madaj (2010) 303 – Bitwa o Wielką Brytanię (303 – Battle of Great Britain). Instytut Pamięci Narodowej.

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Ginter, T. and K. Madaj (2013) 111 – Alarm dla Warszawy (111 – Alarm for Warsaw). Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. Grzymisławski, P. and Ł. Szopka (2016) Odbudowa Warszawy 1945–1980 (Warsaw Rising Up 1945–1980). Fabryka Gier Historycznych. Kwapiński, A. and M. Sieńko (2013) Bohaterowie Wyklęci (Outcast Heroes). Fabryka Gier Historycznych, Fundacja Niepodległości. Kwapiński, A. and M. Sieńko (2014) First to Fight. Wydawnictwo Fabryka Gier Historycznych, Fundacja Niepodległości. Lipski, P and V. Radojičić (2016) Rewolucja 1905 (Revolution 1905). Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Madaj, K. (2011) Kolejka (Queue). Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Trefl. Miłuński, F. (2009) Mali Powstańcy: Warsaw 1944 (Little Insurgents: Warsaw 1944). Egmont Polska. Ozon, M. (2013) Czas Honoru: Operacja Most III (Time of Honour: Operation Bridge III). Phalanx, Telewizja Polska SA. Reputakowski, M. and R. Sadowski (2014) Ta Ziemia (This Land). Centrum Myśli Jana Pawła II. Schechtel, K. and M. Zasowski (2013) WarCard: Afghanistan. Kuźnia Gier, Ender. Wrona, Ł. (2017) Semper Fidelis. Bitwa o Lwów 1918–1919 (Semper Fidelis: Battle of Lviv 1918–1919). Wydawnictwo Wysoki Zamek.

8 National Memories and the First World War: The Many Sides of Battlefield 1 Chris Kempshall One of the enduring tensions of modern understandings and commemorations of the First World War lies within its fractured transnational experiences. Traditional views of the conflict, its battles and its aftermath have been rooted in particular national histories and understandings of the conflict.1 Yet the First World War was defined by interacting alliances, rather than by the actions of any single nation in isolation, and any adequate representation of the First World War should therefore highlight these interlinking alliances. More often than not, however, this aspect is under-examined and under-appreciated in popular memory. Whilst a focus on the national experience over the allied or transnational one is not a new development, it does manifest itself further within the production of contemporary First World War-focused computer games. This chapter focuses on the depiction of nationality, alliances and national memory within First World War computer games. The primary focus is on the 2016 game Battlefield 1 (EA DICE 2016) and its depiction of nationality through its ‘War Stories’ in the core game and also in additional material from its later expansion content. However, the depictions of Battlefield 1 do not exist in a vacuum: in games about war, there is a hierarchy of which nations are depicted, and how, and this hierarchy needs to be examined and understood. Therefore, in order to analyse Battlefield 1, the notion of ‘primary nations’ must first be examined. Following this, and after a closer investigation of Battlefield 1, this chapter will also examine the role and depiction of nations outside of established narratives. Through this examination the chapter will highlight how nationality and conflict are portrayed in computer games.

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National Identity and Popular Portrayals Reflection on national experiences and national memories of particular wars and conflicts is an important aspect of building understandings of war. However, the tendency to focus on these national experiences almost in isolation presents an ongoing problem when understanding past wars, and the First World War in particular. Whilst it is true that participant nations in the conflict did of course have distinct national experiences and national aims, the wider connections between them should not be overlooked when it comes to understanding the conflict militarily and also culturally, particularly across Europe. Although most European warfare since at least the age of Napoleon has involved coalitions and alliances, an understanding of the First World War as either an allied or, perhaps better, as a transnational experience, has not permeated far into contemporary understandings of the conflict. In Britain, for example, enduring representations of the war foregrounding specific ethnicities and experiences in well-defined temporal and geographic spaces – the trenches, British officers, death and destruction – obscure the visibility of colonial soldiers, other fronts, other nations and the role of women. As a result, the memory of the First World War in Britain remains contradictory: it is understood, at least in part, as a catastrophic failure of the pre-war alliance system to avoid violent conflict (Clark 2012), whilst simultaneously also being seen as a war of singular national struggle. However, as Dan Todman (2005: 221) has outlined, this vision of the war is rooted in ‘the events and emotions of the time’ and is therefore ‘a distortion, not a fabrication’. Furthermore, whilst elements of the British memory of the war remain rooted in the national experience, that is not entirely the case in nations such as Belgium or France. Within such national histories there is also an additional commentary on what the war was for and why it began. Although the British historiography of the First World War has undergone several evolutions when it comes to assessing the reasons behind the war’s outbreak, mainstream discourse has often divided into one of two schools of thought: the unintended ‘sleepwalking’ path to war (Clark 2012), where responsibility for the conflict is shared; or the view of the war as a consequence of intentional aggression for which Germany should bear responsibility (Fischer 1967).2 These two opposing views of the First World War have had a lasting effect on how the conflict is portrayed in popular culture, including in games. The ability to both narrow and widen the national focus depending on a game’s settings, genre and narrative allows the medium a fair degree of narrative flexibility, but it also provides space for rigid national histories as well. There needs to be an understanding of how games portray not just alliances and relations between nations in a transnational space but also of how they portray distinct nationalities. It is becoming apparent following the release of key First World War games such as Valiant Hearts (Ubisoft

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Montpellier 2014), Verdun 1914–1918 (M2H, Blackmill Games 2015) and Battlefield 1 that both the location and nationality of the developers may be just as important as the intended audience in shaping the representation of the conflict. Whilst some nations, such as Britain and Germany, are consistently represented in First World War computer games, others only become more visible when included by European developers. Further to this, whilst depictions of specific nations fuel trends in national identity, it is not always the case that a nation’s representation corresponds with a dominant version of that nation’s identity. The view of particular nations taken by developers from different countries is an important aspect in understanding the creation of a war narrative. The depiction of Germany, the Ottoman Empire, France and Italy in First World War games is often determined not by developers from those countries, since most mainstream games have their development studios located elsewhere, but by popular imagery and stereotypes that are shared and understood by developers of different nationalities, the audience for their games, and also how the developers understand the desires of that same audience. Representations of Germany and Italy are, particularly for the former, heavily linked to their activity in the Second World War and their actions under fascism (as discussed in greater detail below), while the Ottoman Empire becomes a placeholder for contemporary commentary on the Middle East. Who crafts and directs these national identities and how they work within First World War computer games is an important aspect of understanding how these games work as cultural transmitters and as important memory-making media. Before undertaking a closer examination of the portrayal of different nations and their interactions in Battlefield 1, it is important first to examine existing depictions of principal nations such as Britain and Germany within the genre of First World War games. By establishing a framework that shows how these nations appear it will then become possible to see how Battlefield 1 and other games either replicate these tendencies or are beginning to move away from them.

Principal Nations Computer game representations of the First World War have often appeared hamstrung by issues regarding both the war’s legitimacy and its meaning (Kempshall 2015b: 18–19). A war that was fought for little to no purpose and which seemingly produced an unsatisfactory conclusion cannot be reduced to easily digestible portrayals and representations. However, this image is based on particular national understandings and is viewed through a variety of contemporary lenses. Whilst there were similar aims, objectives and eschatological fears amongst the various competing nations in the First

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World War, none had an identical reason to fight compared with their allies or their enemies (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002). The primary common thread was the desire to protect one’s own way of life from potential destruction. How this desire manifested and motivated different nations was dependent on both individual circumstances and shared objectives between allies. It must also be acknowledged that the notion of entirely unified nations during the war itself is not an accurate representation. Even in the case of a country such as France with its union sacrée, the nation was not united in the sense of speaking or acting with a single voice or identity even before the sacred union collapsed in 1917. When discussing the identities and actions of nations, this chapter will be considering them in line with mainstream perspectives and experiences during wartime: the Entente nations wanted to defeat Germany and defend their homelands. Whilst these positions do not account for the nuanced perspectives within those countries at the time or in later historiography, they do allow for a usable discussion and summation of national actions, and there is notable literature available on both the coherence of national identity and on the construction of national memories and the erasure of events that threaten it (Anderson 1983, Molden 2016, Russo 1991). When objectives diverged and were replaced with specific national interests and intentions, this was the source of great turmoil within the alliance between Britain, France and America in the final months of the war and during the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference (see Kempshall 2018: Chapters 5 and 6). The representation of national aims within First World War computer games is often dependent on the genre of game in question. Strategy games are more likely, by their very nature, to include multiple countries and allow for greater interaction between them than are first-person shooter (FPS) games or flight simulators. Strategy games also, by their top-down nature, present the player with far greater power and often allow for the total control of a nation as if it operated as a single unified entity. FPS games, by contrast, present a far more bottom-up experience of warfare, with the agency of the player embodied in a single individual. However, even within these games the choice of which nations are portrayed and how they interact with others, if they do so at all, is of great interest. Both modern understandings of the First World War and computer game portrayals of the conflict tend to elevate the actions of particular ‘principal nations’ over others, and also reduce the impact of the alliances in which they were participants. The representations of these countries are not equal, nor are their roles seen as the same. What emerges is a hierarchy of nations ordered in regards to their perceived importance to the narrative, to the conflict, or both. The nature of this perceived importance can at times be simply a matter of fulfilling audience expectations, but it can also run counter to historical events. The importance placed on American voices in Battlefield 1, for example, likely plays to a key audience demographic but

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is also at odds with the fact that America did not participate in much of the First World War. This trend is further noticeable in the portrayals of Britain, Germany and France. Britain and Germany are probably the most represented nations but with Britain being given added importance for its role on the winning side. Germany’s role becomes complicated by the fact that there are strict narrative obstacles in many games that limit its use as a playable nation. France, a nation absolutely integral to the Entente alliance on the Western Front, is represented noticeably less often than Britain (but is more likely to be portrayed in games designed by European developers). America has, in contrast, grown to greater prominence in First World War related games in recent years, while factions such as Italy, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, have had little individual representation outside of narratives that widen the international scope of these games, as discussed further below. The latter nations, though marginalized, do at the very least have some screen time and incorporation into these games: the experiences of soldiers within colonial, imperial and dominion armies continue to be largely overlooked. This is a transnational aspect that must be improved on if First World War focused games are truly to evolve in their portrayal both of the conflict and of those who participated in it. The accepted dominant understanding of the British experience of the war has been through a series of evolutions since the armistice and has taken an important place in the hegemonic social consciousness of the country. However, this position is primarily based on isolated moments of experience such as the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the mud of the Passchendaele Offensive, and doubts over the capability and humanity of British generals (see Sheffield 1996, Corrigan 2004, Todman 2005). The role of Germany and German soldiers in this construct is to suffer the defeat and death that British strategy had made inevitable. This view of the First World War has found resonance within particular computer game portrayals of the conflict. Perhaps most notable amongst these is the BBC’s supposedly ‘educational’ game Trench Warfare (BBC 2001), which places the player in control of British forces during a variety of battles. Indicative of the narrowed focus discussed above, the battles that Trench Warfare allows the player to command were actually a mix of British and French engagements. Trench Warfare was designed explicitly for educational use and appeared on the BBC Schools website.3 The game drew no distinction between different nations and portrayed all the battles and levels as being essentially British affairs fought against the Germans. Some of the British portrayals in other games are equally ahistorical, with the British campaign in Trenches 2 (Thunder Game Works 2011) beginning with battles on the British mainland rather than in Europe, for example. The German place within First World War games may be the most interesting and narratively complicated of any nation. As the principal member of the Central Powers and, therefore, the losing or ‘enemy’ side in

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the conflict, Germany cannot easily be excluded from gameplay. However, the extent to which Germany is a playable option within games varies dramatically, as does the stigma attached to including it as a playable option, although some games have included it in such a role, such as Toy Soldiers (Signal Studios 2010), Trenches 2 and 11–11 Memories Retold (Digixart, Aardman Animations 2018). As previously mentioned, the absence of Germany as a playable faction in a single-player ‘War Story’ in Battlefield 1 largely fits in with the existing dynamic of military-themed games, specifically the expectations created by successful Second World War titles and their treatment of the nation. However, the peculiarity of Germany being excluded from a First World War game that makes the explicit point in its own prologue that the war was a universal experience appears to have disrupted this dynamic for later titles. Ahead of the launch of Battlefield V (EA DICE 2018), set during the Second World War, franchise design director Daniel Berlin announced in an interview with Eurogamer that this new game would allow players to control a German Tiger tank crew in a War Story, and said that this was a direct result of the feedback on Germany’s absence in Battlefield 1 (YinPoole 2018). By conflating these two wars, which are very different both in how they were waged and in the societal and cultural spaces they inhabit, Berlin is making a significant departure from the established hierarchy of nations and their portrayal in historical computer games. Of greater importance is that the pathway to this change in Battlefield V seems to be the inverse of how the development of Germany as a playable nation would be expected to happen. A more predictable route would surely have seen a desire for Germany to become incorporated into the collection of playable nations in war games manifested by its inclusion in a First World War game rather than the other way round. The difficulties faced by EA DICE by taking this particular pathway via a Second World War game are neatly encapsulated by the fact that the Eurogamer article in which Berlin made his announcement later had to be edited to clarify that ‘the German soldier you play as in Battlefield 5, is not a Nazi. Rather, the War Story in question depicts “the German perspective”’ (Yin-Poole 2018). What has become clear is that Battlefield 1’s approach to nationalities and specific nations is already having a wider effect on the industry than might otherwise have been predicted, particularly in regards to the portrayal of Germany in Battlefield V. However, EA DICE are not alone in their portrayal of an international cast of nations. Beyond the representations of Britain and Germany, images of other countries in First World War computer games have begun to expand in respect of the purpose of the war, specific national memories of it and also the extent to which it was an allied effort. The largest commercial title focused on the First World War, Battlefield 1, attempts to interact with the international nature of the conflict on a variety of levels, though with mixed success.

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Battlefield 1 at War The idea that the war was an unintended consequence is often prevalent in First World War computer games, and is particularly present in the early stages of Battlefield 1. The game itself is an FPS title built around several standalone single-player War Stories and a comprehensive multiplayer system designed for online play. The game was released worldwide on 21 October 2016 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The opening narration of the game and its prologue spend very little time discussing the causes of the war. The war is said to be all-consuming and the characters and soldiers on both sides share in the struggle and the misfortune. In this sense it mirrors many of the established games in the genre, such as Valiant Hearts, Verdun 1914–1918 and Trenches 2, that only give, at best, a cursory examination of the origins and nature of the conflict (Kempshall 2015b). However, despite this there remains the implication that not all nations are equal in this war. In Battlefield 1, whilst Germany is a playable nation in multiplayer matches, the option of a German single-player campaign or War Story is conspicuous by its absence. The opening prologue and narration of Battlefield 1 closely follow the pathway of an unintended war that solved few problems. From this standpoint it would be reasonable to assume that all nations would therefore be eligible for player control and representation, but this is clearly not the case. The legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust has largely rendered Germany unsuitable for particular ludic interactions (Chapman and Kempshall 2017). Furthermore, the artistic portrayal of German characters in games such as Trenches 2 strongly link the Germany of the First World War to the Germany of the Second, and suggest a relationship between the Reichs of the Kaiser and the Nazis (the artistic depiction of German soldiers in Trenches 2 is discussed in greater detail in Kempshall 2015a). The Second World War has long been a source of both inspiration and contention regarding computer game portrayals, but the representation of the Germans as the ‘bad guys’ is a staple of the medium (Chapman and Linderoth 2015). That this has also carried over into restricting portrayals of Germany in the First World War is curious, given the different ways that the World Wars inform popular understandings not just of conflict but of its morality and sometimes necessity (Kempshall 2015b: 103). Whereas the Germany of the Second World War is understood as a terrible evil that had to be stopped, the ‘sleepwalking’ view of the First World War shares blame around equally. Yet considerations of Germany’s actions in the Second World War feed back into notions of German guilt in the First. Battlefield 1 contains a series of single-player War Stories that take in an assortment of theatres spread across the four years of war. These War Stories consist of storming beaches at Gallipoli, fighting an Ottoman armoured train on the Arabian Peninsula, manning a tank during the Battle of Cambrai, flying a British fighter plane, fighting in the Dolomite mountains,

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and a ‘prologue’ where the player takes on the roles of various AfricanAmerican soldiers in 1918. Whilst these locations are a bold step forward for such a mainstream portrayal of the conflict, they also reveal some severe limitations. In none of the offered single-player campaign settings is the player able to take on the role of anyone outside of the Entente Cordiale. They play British tank drivers, American soldiers, an American fighter pilot, Italian Arditi, an Australian soldier and a Bedouin rebel working with T.  E.  Lawrence. Moreover, only the Gallipoli story takes place before the entry of America in 1917. The stories and experiences of the Central Powers are heavily restricted to being the enemy and nothing more. This is curious in a game that explicitly states in its own prologue that ‘the war is the world and the world is the war. But behind every gunsight is a human being’. Despite this, clearly some of these human beings are seen as unsuitable for full inclusion in the game as a playable faction (see MacCallum-Stewart 2009, MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2007). Furthermore, there are some conspicuous absences from the Entente side as well. If we consider the base version of Battlefield 1 to be EA DICE’s portrayal of the core of the conflict, then the absence of both the French and the Russians, and the enhanced role of the Americans become an ahistorical point of contention. EA DICE has long been a proponent of releasing further material for their games as downloadable content (DLC), and both France and Russia are the subjects of dedicated DLC releases in ‘They Shall Not Pass’ (released March 2017) and ‘In the Name of the Tsar’ (September 2017) respectively. The exclusion of these two nations from the base version of Battlefield 1 implies that an understanding of their experience is not needed in order to understand the war as a whole. Additionally, even though these nations have received their own dedicated DLC this did not include new single-player War Story campaigns set within either the French or Russian armies. The new DLC was entirely focused on adding new multiplayer content. The release trailer for ‘They Shall Not Pass’ draws heavily on existing French cultural memory of the First World War as a defensive war to protect la Patrie, but also on French republicanism and the notion of a citizen soldier.4 The very title of the DLC is drawn from General Robert Nivelle’s declaration, ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’, during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. The DLC introduced new multiplayer maps set around locations at Verdun but also in the countryside at Soissons to enable tank combat. The paraphernalia of this new content is based on French material, but there is nothing about the actual gameplay or nature of the DLC that redirects it towards a French identity. This is an issue that impacts more games than just Battlefield 1: the same can also be said of Verdun, for example. Finding a way to represent national identity and national differences beyond just the aesthetic is an issue that games are yet to perfect, although Valiant Hearts does produce a recognizably French experience through its narrative focus

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on a largely French family, its choice of battle depictions and its interaction with notions of French citizenship. The Russian focused DLC, ‘In the Name of the Tsar’, added an additional level of nuance to the portrayal of the conflict and forces on the Eastern Front. Whilst several of the multiplayer maps focused on battles between Russian forces and either the Germans or Austro-Hungarians, the maps ‘Tsaritsyn’ and ‘Volga River’ introduced the Russian Civil War and the armies of Red and White Russians into the dynamic. Similar to the decision to include battles between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces in the Dolomites, the inclusion of Russian Civil War forces is to Battlefield 1’s credit and helps widen both the geographical and political framework of both the game and the war. By the same token, however, the result of Battlefield 1’s national and narrative choices is to open out the geographic world of the First World War but also to place direct restrictions on which nations and stories are seen as valuable or acceptable. Much of Battlefield 1 seems aimed at American or British audiences rather than European ones, despite the European origins of the game’s development team, which was predominantly Swedish. Certainly, much of the narrative exposition appears to be targeted towards an American audience, with most of the single-player narration and the introduction of each War Story setting being done by an American soldier, even in the case of battles in which Americans did not participate. Despite the depiction of multiple nations, interactions between them, and specifically between allies, is almost non-existent in the War Stories: the only substantive examples of international contact between allies are a British officer commanding Australian soldiers at Gallipoli, T. E. Lawrence fighting in Arabia and an American pilot stealing a British pilot’s identity. Germany is included as a recurring enemy and a playable faction in multiplayer mode, but not as a War Story in its own right, and both France and Russia are relegated to the status of optional extras. The temptation is to conclude that Battlefield 1 has been designed purely to fulfil British and American expectations regarding the First World War, but that explanation does not entirely stand up to scrutiny either. Firstly, the game takes in multiple fronts such as the Dolomites and the Arabian Peninsula that are rarely present in modern British memories of the conflict. Furthermore, the popular social memory of the First World War was largely non-existent in the US until the First World War centenary (Whalan 2017). Instead, what might be more accurate to conclude is that Battlefield 1 has been ‘Second-World-War-ized’ in order to increase the perceived action and excitement, and to correspond with existing desires among British and American audiences, not just for movement and combat but also, effectively, for killing historical Germans who have been stripped of their humanity to an almost zombielike state. Whilst Germany should surely be an acceptable nation to play in a First World War game, a game like Battlefield 1 that actually reproduces Second World War-style cosmetics, tropes and themes

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means it is placed off-limits due to the change in connotations. Despite the Scandinavian origins of the game’s development, Battlefield 1 is one of the most Anglo-American portrayals of the First World War in the popular mainstream. It is caught between historical accuracy and entertainment potential: between a desire to represent the wider war whilst also meeting the expectations and interests of a very specific audience. To EA DICE’s credit, they have not been shy about justifying their decision, when forced to choose, to prioritize entertainment possibilities over accuracy. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal said that the developers were ‘not trying to create a documentary about that era. We’re trying to make a game, it’s supposed to be fun’ (Gault 2016), which is a fair justification for the primary motivation behind editorial decisions taken in the game. However, the decision to lean ‘more towards the later stages of the war where mechanized warfare was starting to come online’ also means that the players of the game will receive an experience more in line with mobile combat during the Second World War than they will with the trenches and offensives of the First. Beyond the principal nations portrayed in Battlefield 1 and elsewhere there are, of course, numerous other nations and soldiers who could be included but are not. In order to understand why some nations are consistently absent from these games or are only included sporadically it is necessary to also examine the role other nations can play in the portrayal of this conflict.

A Wider Cast As mentioned above, it is often strategy games that most fully feature and represent the allied nature of the First World War and place the conflict within such a context. This is partly because of the nature of the games and their tendency to, at least on some level, represent the map of Europe or the world as part of the game space. Having included such a feature, it becomes much easier to represent different nations within the game world. However, from a player’s perspective, being told you are in an alliance is not the same as actually fighting alongside or interacting with allies. The inclusion of an ally or an alliance does not guarantee a workable allied system within the game. Technological restrictions have hampered the ability of artificial intelligence (AI), computer-controlled nations and factions to interact with players in a realistic and proactive way (Plunkett 2014, Kempshall 2015b). However, advances in systems for controlling AI strategies and interactions have made workable alliances more stable in strategy games. Creative Assembly’s Total War: Rome II (2013) introduced the allied ‘war target’ objective, which allowed players to designate lands and territories

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they wish their allies to attack. This does allow for a measure of allied coordination of strategy between the player and the AI that had previously been impossible in Total War titles. Some restrictions on allied functionality have proven to be an ongoing issue for allied coordination in First World War-themed strategy games, and for mods such as The Great War (The Great War Dev Team 2013), which was an adaptation for Napoleon: Total War (Creative Assembly 2010). These restrictions not only limit the possibility of allied interaction, they actually greatly increase the difficulty of the game when playing as one of the Entente Powers. For example, when playing as France allied to Britain in The Great War mod, there is no guarantee that the British Army will cross the channel and land in Europe whilst under the control of the AI. Outside of strategy games, the nature of allied interactions has to be understood differently. Removed from the top-down approach of international relations strategy overseen by an all-controlling player, notions of alliance and national experience have to be understood from the ground up. It is often with the nations of the Entente Cordiale rather than the Central Powers that the strongest allied portrayals are found. Valiant Hearts includes playable characters of French, German, Belgian and American nationalities. These characters then exist within a world populated by the soldiers and civilians of a variety of combatant countries including Britain and Canada. In all cases (except for a German soldier named Karl), they interact with soldiers from allied nations. The central character of Valiant Hearts is a French farmer named Emile who is called up and sent to war, leaving behind his daughter and her German husband Karl, who departs to join the opposing army. Through Emile’s story he fights with French soldiers and alongside an American named Freddie, whose wife was killed in an early German attack and is motivated by vengeance, who in turn also cooperates with Canadian and British soldiers. Although at the end of the game Emile declares that he fought to defend his country and his liberty, the game does address the fact that this is not a fight France is undertaking alone. The main characters of Valiant Hearts operate in a number of different spheres. At their base level they are representatives not simply of nations but of a shared humanity that transcends borders. Whilst Karl and Emile are pitched against each other on opposite sides of the conflict, their reasons for going to war are almost identical: both are forced through conscription. More than this, it is the war itself that is represented as the true enemy throughout the game. Victory is not to be achieved through the defeat of France or Germany but through surviving the conflict (Kempshall 2015a). However, this does not mean that these characters do not also operate within clearly defined national spaces as well. Whilst voiceovers and subtitles can be adjusted to the audience’s language, French and German characters throughout the game speak in their native tongues. They wear the uniforms

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of their nations, and are often surrounded by the symbols of modern nation states. French and German flags appear repeatedly, the background casts for both armies are designed as being recognizably French and German. When the African-American character of Freddie interacts with British and Canadian soldiers, they too become signifiers for their nation. Whilst neither Karl nor Emile seem overly motivated to kill in the name of their country, Freddie’s war involves both a desire for personal revenge and national symbolism. He rips apart the flag of Germany in one scene and, later in the game, cooperates with allied soldiers to raise a British-Canadian flag at Vimy Ridge. In an after-the-credits sequence Freddie welcomes the arriving forces of the United States to the war. The France portrayed in Valiant Hearts is one that has been invaded by a hostile power and whose citizens will be forced into an undesired war. Little backstory is given to explain the events preceding the First World War, nor is there an examination of European politics. Whilst the Germans are the aggressors in this scenario, that does not automatically make them the enemy. The player controls assorted characters through a variety of battles in Valiant Hearts but the objective is never to kill: rather, it is to survive. The French characters, particularly Emile, are motivated by the desire to reunite their family, survive the war and defend la Patrie. Whilst this view removes the element of German aggression both in 1914 and previously in 1870 that marked the contemporary view of the conflict and has influenced its popular understanding in France, it still distils an essentially French response to the outbreak of war (see Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002, Smith et al. 2003). It is an image of France brought to the brink and sacrificing its sons and daughters in order to protect itself. Emile’s final words outline his belief that he has fought for both his nation and his liberty, despite the fact that although he was present in battles in the strictest sense Emile does not actually do any fighting. Karl’s rationale for fighting is less clear-cut, for his personal and national objectives do not correspond in the way that Emile’s do. Karl’s overarching aim is to return to his French wife and their young child. The difficulty in reconciling this with Germany’s war aims causes Karl to effectively desert the army in an attempt to reunite with his family. Allied warfare in Valiant Hearts is therefore not merely a cosmetic affair. There is active cooperation between the player – in the role of either a French soldier (Emile) or an African-American serving in the French Army (Freddie) – and other allied soldiers during particular levels and missions. The rationale and motivation for these other nations being in the war are not explored from a narrative perspective, but the game nonetheless offers a strong portrayal of a functioning alliance. This alliance is not crucial to the story, let alone eschewing national narratives for transnational humanity, but it does highlight the fact that the alliance existed and plays a role in the

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war experiences of the characters. It is an alliance that both underscores the perilous position that France finds itself in – the need for allies suggesting that this is not a war a single nation can win alone – and also further embeds the war within the wider geography of Europe. That Valiant Hearts roots the war in a European context and theatre should not be a surprise. Many of the driving forces behind the game, such as the creative and audio director Yoan Fanise, have French backgrounds, and it was produced in cooperation with the 2014 French television documentary series Apocalypse: World War 1. One of the outcomes of this collaboration is the presence of European and transnational themes running throughout the game. European developers have been behind some of the more interesting French and transnational approaches to the First World War. The online multiplayer FPS game Verdun 1914–1918 was developed and released following a collaboration between two Dutch companies, M2H and Blackmill Games, and in many ways acted as a precursor to Battlefield 1 by proving not only that an FPS game focused on this conflict could work but also that there was an audience for such a game (Kempshall 2015b: 26–7). Though initially planned to focus only on the battles between France and Germany at Verdun in 1916, the game soon expanded to include British, Canadian, Belgian and American soldiers in a variety of battles as well. According to the founder of Blackmill Games, Jos Heobe, these four nations were originally chosen to match a set of interconnected criteria – ‘historical “presence” (fighting on the Western Front) and “skill” (Canadians known for their role as assault units)’ – to a requirement to include particular types of units (‘the need for an assault unit or light infantry’) for gameplay reasons.5 Originally there had been a desire to include Moroccan infantry in the French Army but Hoebe says that the ‘big presence of Canadians in [Verdun’s] community’ meant they were replaced with the Canadians. Later expansion to include additional battlefields on the Western Front allowed Verdun’s developers to further increase the cast of available nationalities, although full cooperation between the soldiers of these nations is not possible within the constraints of the game as certain nations are, understandably, only available on battlefield maps where they actually participated in the fighting. However, the inclusion of these nations does further widen the accepted cast of allied participants. M2H and Blackmill Games also later developed and released a sequel, Tannenberg (2017), which focused on the war on the Eastern Front. An acknowledgement that the First World War had a wider effect on Europe than just that experienced by the active combatants has been an emerging theme within First World War academic scholarship (Kruizinga 2016). That game developers from European countries that were not military participants are now focusing their attentions on the war is a welcome aspect of this.

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Alternative Narratives Germany’s role as a ‘principal nation’ in First World War computer games ensures that it will almost always fulfil the role of the enemy or adversary but, as an extension, this dramatically reduces the need to include the other members of the Central Powers. Whilst both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires are included in Battlefield 1, like Germany they are not playable nations in the War Story campaigns or indeed in other games within the genre. In Trenches 2, for example, the only member of the Central Powers included is Germany, whilst Britain, France, America and Russia are all included from the Entente. Whilst strategy games do allow for the selection of playable factions such as Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, they are notable by their absence in more story-driven offerings such as Valiant Hearts and Battlefield 1, whether they are either missing from the game entirely or are unavailable as a playable component. In part this can be explained through their absence from Western European memory of the war. For both Britain and France the primary adversary was Germany, particularly on the Western Front. Although Britain, in particular, did fight directly against the Ottoman Empire, most modern commemoration is concerned with the battles in Europe, especially those that took place on the Western Front. The Italian battles against Austria-Hungary, and indeed the battles between the Russians and both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, have no memorial traction in the West and are largely absent from British popular memory, although the Ottoman Empire does feature in understandings of the Gallipoli Offensives of 1915 (Todman 2005: 29, Clements 2015). What further complicates any potential use of the Ottoman Empire, in particular, as a playable nation is a level of caution similar to that which is evident in treatments of Germany. Given the events of the Armenian Genocide, making the Ottomans a playable option risks a similar level of danger for developers as including Germany in games about the World Wars. If Germany is rendered inaccessible because of past genocide then so too is the Ottoman Empire. That the Ottoman Empire no longer exists does somewhat mitigate this risk, but the matter is still highly contentious in present-day Turkey and is a controversial cornerstone of their contemporary understanding of the conflict (Buckley 2017). Furthermore, British and French colonial and imperial policies in the years before and after the First World War are also notable for their brutality and slaughter. That they are not also disqualified is a clear indication that there is a distinction in perceptions of Germany and the Holocaust and the activities of the British Empire. Given the difficult nature of the Ottoman war experience, it is an interesting curiosity that far more is seen of them than of the Germans as recognizable individuals in the Battlefield 1 War Stories. The final singleplayer campaign of the game, ‘Nothing Is Written’, places the player in the

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role of Zara, a Bedouin rebel and ally of T. E. Lawrence. Her principal enemy is an Ottoman officer called Tilkici, who plays a deeper role in the plot of this War Story than any enemy in all the others combined. His role, however, is not simply to be an antagonist but to act as an anachronistic narrator of a wider theme. If Battlefield 1 is truly an Anglo-American examination of the war, nowhere is this clearer than in Tilkici’s monologue to the Bedouins following his capture. With impressive foresight he declares that ‘you can never stop the progress of machines’ and then warns that ‘one day, the whole world will take your lands and the precious black gold beneath its sands’. The inclusion of the Ottoman Empire does help broaden the war’s geographic setting but it also provides a contemporary editorial voice relating to modern conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East. As a result, the Ottoman Empire provides something that neither Germany nor AustriaHungary are able to offer: contemporary resonance. It is this resonance that also helps to determine which nations are given active representation in First World War computer games and which are not. As ‘principal nations’ both Britain and Germany are mandatory, but the contemporary resonance of the Second World War has a dramatic effect on the extent to which Germany can be interacted with. The legacy of the Second World War, and games focused on it, casts a long shadow onto the First World War and its games. As a result, conventions that exist within Second World War games are then applied to First World War ones as well. The growing inclusion of the United States as a playable nation in these games should not be a surprise. The fact that America is a key market for games means its inclusion is almost mandatory. In the first month of its release Battlefield 1 was the top-selling game in North America, meaning that the financial rewards alone may have justified the game’s editorial decisions (Grubb 2016). However, it is also important to consider that its role in the war was minimal when placed in comparison to nations like France. Though France played a key role throughout the conflict on the Western Front it appears that its role is at times replaced by the inclusion of either Britain or America, or both. The inclusion of either of these nations fighting against German opposition means the game can stay rooted in an Anglo-American experience and reproduce the previously discussed nature of Second World War games. The Eastern Front remains a little understood and acknowledged theatre of the war in British and American popular memory and, as a result, the desire to include Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire is also dramatically reduced, whilst the Ottoman Empire seems to offer EA DICE a useful contemporary reference point for Western nations regarding the Middle East. Although in such cases a contemporary resonance can be a useful aspect for these games, it can also cause unforeseen issues. The inclusion in Battlefield 1 of a War Story focused on the Arditi fighters in the Dolomites – a group who later had a complicated history with Italy’s

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move towards fascism in the inter-war years – prompted a number of negative headlines in Italy at the time of the game’s launch (Cionci 2016, Di Puno 2016). The belief that Italy’s fascist past should not be a source of ludic potential essentially recreates the same fears that prevented Germany’s inclusion in the first place. That Germany was deemed out of bounds but Italy was not speaks either to the difference in these countries’ Second World War activities or potentially a lack of understanding of the same subject. Within all of these interlinking national narratives, the fact remains that First World War computer games continue to struggle fully to represent the conflict as a clash of alliances. The acknowledgement that more than one country was fighting in particular theatres, such as in Valiant Hearts, is welcome progress but it is still not a fully realized image of the alliance that made such cooperation possible. The reason why such representations are proving intractable stems largely from the fact that national history, even in the case of nations within active alliances, is often seen to have the virtue of being easily understandable for a wider national audience. In strategy games, the use of an individual nation within a collective system works principally because the player is given almost unlimited power over his or her nation of choice and therefore becomes the embodiment of an entire nation through the actions and decisions of a single actor. Games involving particular soldiers from different nations tend to represent both the player and soldier as either an ‘Individual’ or as part of a ‘Mass’ (Kempshall 2015a). There are, however, nuances for these identities. A character that is an ‘Individual’ can still be a representative for a wider group of people or, indeed, an entire nationality. The characters of Valiant Hearts are not simply soldiers or nurses but, specifically in the cases of characters such as Emile and Karl, also French and German. Though their actions differentiate them from the ‘Mass’ of both those nations they are still representatives of them whilst also showing their shared humanity towards combatants on both sides. When a player is given control over just their own character, the motivations and rationale behind the presence of other characters is a matter of interest but not one of necessity. In such situations it becomes much easier to explain why, as a British tank driver (such as in Battlefield 1), you are in the battle, than it is to explain why one of your allies is also there. By narrowing the focus games are able to remove variable narratives that take up time and are perceived to have no immediate benefit. Until such mindsets undergo dramatic changes it will be difficult for First World War computer games fully to break out of national perspectives and into inter-allied experiences. Furthermore, as long as some countries are seen by both the developers and the audience as ‘Principal Nations’ and others are not, a natural hierarchy of representation will continue to define the limits of an international focus. Within that hierarchy also lurks the spectre of associations with the Second World War, which have previously

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prevented nations such as Germany from being included on the same terms as Britain or America. The emergence of Battlefield V’s ‘Last Tiger’ mission focused on a German tank commander who ‘begins to question the ideology that got them to this point’ suggests that this previously rigid dynamic is beginning to shift (Yin-Poole 2018). Whether it means that Germany may yet appear as a rounded nation in future First World War games remains to be seen.

Notes 1 In Britain, this view of the war as a national event has not dramatically changed, despite attempts to recognize imperial soldiers and dimensions during the First World War centenary, although the same has not universally been the case elsewhere in Europe, as centenary events in France have been notable for establishing links with Germany, for example (Ribeiro S. C. Thomaz 2018). 2 The balance between these two viewpoints has alternated over the years. Blame for the war is now often spread among a number of nations by historians, including Austria-Hungary, but Germany does still receive sole blame from some. See World War One: 10 interpretations of who started WW1, BBC News Magazine, 12 February 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine- 26048324 (accessed 14 January 2019). 3 See www.bbc.co.uk/schools/worldwarone/hq/trenchwarfare.shtml (accessed 21 March 2019). 4 Battlefield 1 Official They Shall Not Pass Trailer, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=msXl2ZybwTk (accessed 21 March 2019). For more on the nature of French national identity and the role of the citizen as a soldier see Kempshall 2016. 5 Email interview with Jos Hoebe, 15 November 2014.

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www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/07312.51468.pdf (accessed 21 December 2018). Molden, B. (2016) Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations Of Collective Memory, Memory Studies, 9(2): 125–142. Plunkett, L. (2014) Why Gandhi Is Such an Asshole in Civilization, Kotaku, 3 November, https://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-incivilization-1653818245 (accessed 21 December 2018). Ribeiro S. C. Thomaz, J. (2018) Centenary of the First World War in France, presentation at the Centenary Reflections in the Entente Alliance conference, University of Kent, 28 November. Rousso, H. (1991) The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Paris: Du Seuil. Sheffield, G. D. (1996) ‘Oh! What a Futile War’: Representations of the Western Front in Modern British Media and Popular Culture, in I. Stewart and S. L. Carruthers (eds) War, Culture and the Media: Representations of the Military in 20th Century Britain. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Smith, L. V., S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker (2003) France and the Great War, 1914– 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todman, D. (2005) The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Bloomsbury. Whalan, M. (2017) America’s Forgotten War, OUPblog, 29 August, https://blog. oup.com/2017/08/americas-forgotten-war/ (accessed 21 December 2018). Yin-Poole, W. (2018) The Battlefield 5 Campaign Lets You Play from the German Perspective but ‘It’s Not a Hero Story’, Insists DICE, Eurogamer, 18 October, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-18-the-battlefield-5-campaign-lets-youplay-as-the-nazis-but-its-not-a-hero-story-insists-dice (accessed 21 December 2018).

Ludography BBC (2001) Trench Warfare. British Broadcasting Corporation. Creative Assembly (2010) Napoleon: Total War. Sega. Creative Assembly (2013) Total War: Rome II. Sega. Digixart, Aardman Animations (2018) 11–11: Memories Retold. Bandai Namco Entertainment. EA DICE (2016) Battlefield 1. Electronic Arts. EA DICE (2018) Battlefield V. Electronic Arts. M2H, Blackmill Games (2015) Verdun 1914–1918. M2H, Blackmill Games. M2H, Blackmill Games (2017) Tannenberg. M2H, Blackmill Games. Paradox Development Studio (2016) Hearts of Iron IV. Paradox Interactive. Signal Studios (2010) Toy Soldiers. Microsoft Game Studios. The Great War Dev Team (2013) The Great War (Napoleon: Total War mod). The Great War Dev Team. Thunder Game Works (2011) Trenches 2. Electronic Arts. Ubisoft Montpellier (2014) Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Ubisoft. Wolferos (2016) Hearts of Iron IV: The Great War Mod. Wolferos.

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9 Let’s Play War: Cultural Memory, Celebrities and Appropriations of the Past Stephanie de Smale Figure 9.1 shows the performance of jacksepticeye in his series on the game This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014). jacksepticeye is the online persona of Seán McLoughlin – a ‘Let’s Player’ whose YouTube channel, which features gameplay content, has over 16 million subscribers. Videos of Let’s Players are ‘increasingly and widely popular self-recorded gaming videos where the respective gamers … comment on their journey through the game as well as on various aspects of it’ (Radde-Antweiler, Waltemathe and Zeiler 2014: 17). With an estimated net worth of €2.2 million, McLoughlin belongs to the top ten YouTubers worldwide (Independent 2017) and can be classified as a micro-celebrity: a type of ‘self-made’ celebrity who has emerged on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. This particular video, which at the time of writing had been watched over 1.4 million times, concerns This War of Mine (TWoM), a game inspired by the 1992–5 Bosnian War, most notably the Siege of Sarajevo.1 As this example suggests, Let’s Players can play an important role in the translation and global circulation of cultural war memory by sharing their recorded gameplay videos. Recent debates have drawn attention to the relationship between cultural war memory and digital popular culture (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen 2017, Hoskins 2009), including how cultural memory travels on and through digital platforms (Erll 2011), and how it ‘morphs’ when adapting to the specificities of each medium (Rigney 2005). Previously, the relationship between cultural memory and games has been explored by scholars focusing on the formal aspects of games and play, such as representations, narrative, procedures, or performativity (Pötzsch and Šisler 2016, Chapman 2016), as

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FIGURE 9.1 A Let’s Player performing with the game This War of Mine (jacksepticeye, 2015).

well as those studying production processes (de Smale, Kors and Sandovar 2017), and those designing games to deal with complex memories of conflict (Šisler 2016). Whilst the formal aspects of games in relation to cultural memory have already been studied, this chapter contributes to existing scholarship on memory and games by focusing on the specific context of Let’s Players, describing how cultural memory travels through these cultural expressions. It complements Kristine Jørgensen’s work (Chapter 5 in this volume) examining the appropriation of memory by players. Josef Nguyen (2016) proposes that Let’s Players should be seen as performers rather than simply players since, through their performance, they frame their gameplay for an imagined audience. In these videos, it is not the skills but the reactions of Let’s Players that are the source of entertainment (Menotti 2014). More importantly, Let’s Players may diverge from structured narratives or the intended game design (Glas 2015, Kerttula 2016). Thus, references to past wars embedded in a game’s design may be appropriated differently by Let’s Players with their own specific interpretations of its potential historical framing. In other words, Let’s Players may appropriate cultural memory in games for their own specific needs. Their performances raise the question of how Let’s Players appropriate, mediate and communicate cultural memory through their gameplay videos. Videos of Let’s Players playing games about past wars and atrocities are an aggregate of the cultural memory embedded in the game environment, Let’s Player performances, as well as how they frame the game

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on YouTube. This chapter analyses video content and meta-data of Let’s Players playing This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014). As collections of informal cultural memories, gameplay videos made by Let’s Players become part of the everyday expressions of memory.

Cultural War Memories and Digital Popular Culture Memory scholars such as Astrid Erll or Ann Rigney remind us that media and memory are intimately connected. The concept of cultural memory ‘highlights the extent to which shared memories of the past are the product of mediation, textualization and acts of communication’ (Rigney 2005: 15). As Erll (2011: 2) suggests, ‘cultural memory is the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’. When discussing the role of digital games as transmitters of cultural memory, it is fruitful to establish a distinction between media of cultural memory and institutions of cultural memory. Institutions of cultural memory collect, archive and preserve culturally relevant information about the past, whereas media that portray cultural memory prompt both forgetting and remembering through their representation of the past (Erll 2011: 100).2 Media should be understood here in a broad sense, including statues, literature, films, music and games. All such forms of (popular) culture can serve as material reminders of war and can direct attention either towards specific events (such as the Siege of Sarajevo) or towards particular aspects of a conflict (such as sexual violence). These may serve as conflicting, yet iconic references to the past. As Erll (2011: 116) observes, media are ‘not neutral carriers or containers of memory’, but rather ‘create media worlds of cultural memory according to their specific capacities and limitations’. Game culture comes with its own cultural practices, through which cultural memory travels along different paths. With the widespread circulation of historical gameplay content come specific cultural circuits of memory. The networked and digital characteristics of games allow for the emergence of different media practices – such as the immense popularity of Let’s Players on YouTube. The ease with which gameplay videos can be recorded, and the availability of platforms such as YouTube or Twitch on which to post or stream the content generated, have given rise to a huge online culture of gameplay videos. Indeed, as T. L. Taylor (2009) aptly illustrates in her study of esports communities, the game itself is only a small part of the wider social reality of games. Thus, Let’s Play videos should be considered as a social phenomenon in their own right, rather than as mere paratexts of games (Consalvo 2017). Digital games afford the sharing of play experiences, and platforms such as YouTube or Twitch stimulate these user practices. It

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is precisely by tracing different enactments such as gameplay videos that we can study the complexity of digital popular culture’s convergence with cultural war memory. This requires understanding the relationship between how games afford potential frames of cultural memory, and how Let’s Players, through their specific situated context, are transforming memorymaking by producing content specifically for YouTube.

Games affording frames of cultural memory Game environments offer potential historical frames through affordances that invite specific actions. The term ‘affordances’, popularized by Donald Norman (1990), but originally conceptualized by William Gibson, refers to the relationship between a subject and its environment. ‘[A]ffordances are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ (Gibson 2011 [1979]: 127, original emphasis). Key in affordance theory is the relationality between the subject and the designed environment. A designed environment affords specific interactions, but they have to be perceptible to the subject. In other words, games afford potential historical frames through representations such as objects, architecture, narratives (for example, character development), yet all cases are dependent on a player’s interpretation of a specific situation. How (and indeed if) games can be considered forms of cultural memory is dependent on the situational framing of the material affordances of a given game environment. A game environment offers a primary frame of reference that provides both organizational structure and coherence. Sebastian Deterding (2013: 222) refers to this structure as the ‘game frame’, which consists of all the actors involved (and their dispositions), as well as the objects, settings, events, communications and experiences. Holger Pötzsch and Vít Šisler (2016: 6) delineate four aspects relevant for the memory-making potential of games: representation, narrative, procedure and performativity. Representational and narrative aspects are the historical references to a particular time or event found, for instance, in the objects used, historical references and the representation of individuals, events, places or documents. However, game environments, like other platform environments, are not neutral spaces: design decisions leave both visible and invisible traces through formal aspects of gameplay (see Pötzsch Chapter 13 in this volume). War games offer selective representations of conflict through a series of filters that exclude certain aspects of war, such as suffering civilians and sexual violence (Pötzsch 2017). As illustrated in the case study analysis, TWoM differs in this respect, in the sense that these forms of violence are featured in the game, and players navigate narratives of moral decision-making via engagement with these atrocities. Intertextual connections, title sequences, notes with historical information and cut scenes all tie a game’s narrative to

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a specific historical time or event (Pötzsch and Šisler 2016: 10). Combined, these intertextual references to a wider historical discourse give fictional content an aura of authenticity (Erll 2011: 141). If a game’s representations and narrative afford the mise-en-scène of memory-making, its procedural and performative aspects enable potential mnemonic enactments. An obvious point of reference is Ian Bogost’s (2007) concept of procedural rhetoric, which postulates that digital games communicate real-world social norms and values through their rule systems. Thus, a complete analysis should also focus on the individual gameplay experiences of players. This is precisely the argument that Miguel Sicart (2011) makes when he suggests the ‘need to understand the design of the game, but only if we acknowledge that a living, breathing player will engage with it in ways that make gameplay a personal affair’. Thus, the performative aspect of games illustrates how mnemonic gameplay is always a negotiation between a player’s performance and the boundaries afforded by the game (Pötzsch and Šisler 2016). Together, they offer potential enactments of cultural memory. As Adam Chapman (2013: 327) illustrates, the multiplicity of narratives that unfold as players progress in the game allows ‘opportunities for play within and with history’ (original emphasis). One of the ways in which a multiplicity of narratives is achieved in TWoM is through particular encounters (called ‘special events’). The narratives and the game environment in these special events resonate with the Bosnian War through intertextual connections. As players navigate moral dilemmas in these special events, different actions cause a multiplicity of narratives to develop. Combined, these aspects afford the primary memory-making potential of a game. However, Let’s Players add another layer of complexity to the gameplay because they are playing with another environment in mind: YouTube.

Let’s Players and YouTube frames To study cultural memory and Let’s Players, we must focus on YouTube as another environment that informs a player’s gameplay experience. How designed experiences and their inscribed meanings are enacted in gameplay is dependent on their perceptability (Deterding 2013, Linderoth 2013). In other words, whether or not the player perceives the afforded framing as historical depends on the specific disposition of the player in question. There is a clear distinction between ‘the player’s ability to perceive affordances’ and ‘the player’s ability to use affordances’ (Linderoth 2013: 3, original emphasis). Just as our perception is conditioned by specific frames through which we interpret our environment, Jonas Linderoth (2013) argues we must learn to discover affordances by cultivating our perception. The distinction made between perception and action is important when studying how a player interprets the past through games, because these are dependent on a

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player’s own dispositions and knowledge of that particular time or event in history. We make sense of the world by becoming attuned to our environment (Gibson and Pick 2000). Someone with a specific interest in a particular historical event inevitably picks up subtleties and fine-grained historical references that other players with limited knowledge would miss. Players frame their experience by narrating their gameplay experience (Deterding 2013: 185–6). How a Let’s Player positions him- or herself with regard to the characters and specific historical gameplay events is one way of analyzing how the game’s historical framing resonates with that particular player. Let’s Players may transform, or potentially subvert, the intended gameplay experience because the practice of Let’s Playing is all about performing for an imagined audience (Nguyen 2016). As a result, the Let’s Player may subvert a game’s intended design (Glas 2015, Kerttula 2016). The rise of competitive video gaming and esports paved the way for gamers to generate income through their gameplay. This coincided with the possibility for cultural production and self-promotion via platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. Users can also use various social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram to market their work. With this in mind, it is useful to examine how Let’s Players have become part of a new type of celebrity emerging on digital media platforms: micro-celebrities. Micro-celebrity entails a form of self-presentation whereby individuals position themselves as public figures, inviting others to consume their digital media content. The micro-celebrity is a topic-specific, platform-specific, selfmade celebrity (Marwick and Boyd 2011, Senft 2008). The focus by microcelebrities on specific topics means that they remain relatively unknown to people outside of their particular realms of interest. The ‘self-made’ nature of micro-celebrities could be said to stem from the fact that, within the constraints of the YouTube environment, they make, edit, publish and manage all of their own content. In this process, their ‘self-made’ character is co-constituted by the specific ‘rules of engagement’ of the platforms they use. On YouTube, their growth coincides with increasing numbers of viewers and subscribers. By understanding the rules of how to amass more views, clicks and ‘watch time’ (YouTube’s term for the total time viewers have watched a video), Let’s Players are able to increase their audience. To do this, platforms provide tutorials on how to increase the number of viewers. By providing a ‘guidebook’ in the form of tutorials and the YouTube Creator Academy, in combination with success stories from the top earners on the platforms, YouTube offers a ‘carrot’ to draw in new content producers. Those who are successful are able to generate a significant income from their videos. However, just as Let’s Players are dependent on YouTube for their income, YouTube in turn is dependent on game content. The importance of game content producers to YouTube is evidenced by the 2015 launch of YouTube Gaming – a dedicated application through which viewers can directly access YouTube gaming content.3

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There is a small group of Let’s Players who achieve success on the platform, and are able to maintain the stable and growing fan base needed for generating profit. Individuals are informed on how they can increase their audiences by following the rules of content creation on YouTube. The fame of a micro-celebrity materializes through self-presentation: successful Let’s Players such as jacksepticeye can draw millions of views. These successful Let’s Players excel in branding their online persona. This branding success materializes in how gameplay content is personalized, either through performance, or by adding unique content such as opening or closing sequences, music and catchphrases. To summarize, games afford potential mnemonic frames through representations and narratives with intertextual references to historical events or periods, as well as procedural and performative aspects that offer plural historical narratives. However, the constrained historical gameplay experience is dependent on a player’s interpretation in specific situations. Let’s Players add another layer of complexity to gameplay in this regard, because their experience is informed by the affordances of YouTube. Thus, the practice of performing in a Let’s Play video brings with it a double framing. On one hand, players are given game worlds in which to perform, yet on the other, their performance is informed by the rules and norms for participation on YouTube. In the following subsection, I describe the method for studying Let’s Players.

Method: Studying the Performance of Let’s Players For this chapter, video content analysis was conducted on a special event in TWoM, ‘The Girl in Peril’ event. This event was chosen because it is one of the most iconic special events in the game, in which the player makes an explicit moral choice in relation to wartime atrocities (see further Pötzsch Chapter 13 in this volume). More importantly, the frame of sexual violence is explicitly related to the Bosnian War – a parallel can be drawn to the war atrocities committed between 1992 and 1995, when it is estimated that around 20,000 Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak women (who made up the majority) and men were victims of sexual violence (Council of Europe 2009: §6).4 A dataset of 174 videos featuring the supermarket location was obtained by scraping YouTube titles related to the special event in TWoM, using the DMI YouTube application (Rieder 2015). Since ‘The Girl in Peril’ event does not occur in every instance of players visiting the supermarket location, this sample set was checked to see if the event took place. This resulted in a dataset of thirteen videos that featured ‘The Girl in Peril’ event, all published between November 2015 and November 2016. The total views of the thirteen videos up until the moment of scraping in December 2016

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was 1,102,439, with an average of 84,803 views per video. Sixty-two per cent of channel owners were male, whilst the rest of the video posters were unidentifiable. Forty-two per cent of the Let’s Play channels were from the United Kingdom, and 33 per cent originated from the United States, thus the majority of Let’s Players were Anglophone. The data analysis focused on the Let’s Players’ interactions in the YouTube environment and the game environment, as well as the interrelations between them. First, I analysed player behaviour during the event by analyzing the choices made by the player. For this event, key choices were which character was chosen, which weapons were brought (if any) and if the player intervened in the sexually violent event. Second, the performance of the player was analysed by studying players’ narrations and facial expressions if video footage of the player was recorded. Sixty-two per cent of the Let’s Players narrated their gameplay experience through audio recording, and of these videos 25 per cent also recorded themselves visually. The performance in combination with player behaviour renders the primary framing of the game and the meanings attached analyzable. Third, I analysed how Let’s Players personalize gameplay content for the YouTube environment, focusing on the meta-data (title, description, tags), as well as personalization of the video in player narration (through catchphrases or calls to action), intro- and outroshots. This personalization is particularly salient because the gameplay activity is re-framed for the YouTube environment. In frame analysis, this process is also called ‘frame transformation’ (Benford and Snow 2000). In sum, to analyse the meanings produced by the Let’s Players, the analysis focused on (1) behaviour, (2) performance and (3) personalization. In the next section, I describe how the game environment and the YouTube environment are intimately connected in the situated action of the Let’s Player.

Case Study: Micro-Celebrities and Bosnian Cultural Memory in Gameplay Videos Originally released in November 2014, TWoM is a single-player survival game set in a city under siege. The game focuses on civilian suffering in wartime and the goal is to survive with at least one playable citizen until the siege ends. For example, one of the playable characters is Katia, who used to be a reporter before the war, and keeps a war diary. She is traumatized because her parents are reported missing, and her fragile mental state makes her even more susceptible to the hardships faced in the game – she can even commit suicide as a consequence of a player’s actions. The game sets the stage for the player to experience how it feels to be in war, and the difficult moral choices that survival entails. As one of the game’s writers explains:

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Our goal was to make the city feel real, so even though its significance is meant to be universal, we decided to use subtle cultural touches, mostly inspired by Eastern Europe (including Poland) and the Balkans, for instance in the architecture and the names of the characters. (Kwiatkowski 2016: 694) A keyword here is universality: as the designers adapted the narrative to fit a global audience the experience is made to feel Eastern and SouthEastern European via the names and the architecture. Since the designers are Warsaw-based, some elements of the Warsaw Uprising find their way into the game, but more prominent is the inspiration drawn from the Siege of Sarajevo. Although the game is fictionalized, symbolic references to the Bosnian War are embedded in both the game’s representations and its narratives. The game’s setting, which implicitly and explicitly frames TWoM in relation to the Bosnian War, (1) includes representations related to Sarajevo’s architecture; (2) contains references to specific war zones as locations; (3) draws on objects made and used during the Siege of Sarajevo; and (4) references narrative elements related to the Siege of Sarajevo, such as the incorporation of neighbour solidarity, suffering children and sexual violence. Of course, narrative elements such as suffering children are not excusive to Bosnia-Herzegovina, yet combined, these references make the game environment resonate with the specific history of the war. This resonance with the Bosnian War is further strengthened through intertextual connections that connect the game’s representations to the war’s historical discourse. One of the most iconic buildings of the Sarajevo skyline is the ‘Executive Council Building’, also known as the parliament building, which features prominently on the English Wikipedia page about the siege. As seen in comparing Figures 9.2a and 9.2b, the designers created an inverted representation of the iconic image visible as the game’s loading screen between each new day, thus making it a prominent part of the imagined landscape of the game environment. Another intertextual connection is seen in Figure 9.2c, which references a prominent place during the siege, known as Sniper Alley. Since Sarajevo is enclosed between hills, snipers positioned themselves around the city, making specific areas, such as Zmaja od Bosne Street and Meša Selimović Boulevard, areas where civilians were particularly in danger of sniper fire. Crossing these streets was necessary for some civilians, either to reach family on the other side of the city or to get supplies. Echoing this, a location in the game is called Sniper Junction, and the playable civilians have to run to cross the square without being harmed by sniper fire. The level even shows similar warnings (Pazi Snajper) painted on the walls of buildings during the siege. Lastly, during the siege, Sarajevans made their own appliances to stay warm and to cook food (Figure 9.2d). The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina features a permanent exhibition of a variety of stoves, heaters and other objects made by those caught up in the violence.

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The designers used the online version of the exhibition as inspiration for the design of objects and items, such as the stove players craft in the game (Figure 9.2e).5

FIGURE 9.2A  Image of burning parliament building, Sarajevo: Mikhail Evstafiev, 1992 (CCBY- SA 2.5).

FIGURE 9.2B  Screenshot of burning parliament building in This War of Mine.

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FIGURE 9.2C  Screenshot of Sniper Junction’s location description.

FIGURE 9.2D  Image of stoves used during the Siege of Sarajevo taken from the permanent exhibition of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2018. Author’s own image.

The designers used historical documentation, images, digital archives and life histories, such as Zlata’s Diary (Filipovic 2006 [1993]), to set the game’s narrative. This war diary was written between 1991–3 by Zlata Filipovic, a young teenager at the time, who describes the transition between peace and the siege. Her first entries describe a normal childhood, practising the piano and the attacks on the city from March 1992 onwards. Zlata describes taking shelter, how family members were injured, how food and water became scarce, and the strength of the community during the siege. Amongst other stories, this diary was a source of inspiration for the game’s narrative. Zlata’s

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FIGURE 9.2E  Screenshot of homemade stoves used by civilians in the game.

perspective strengthened the designers’ decision to incorporate children into the game – indeed, they even make them playable in a later version – and Zlata also features as one of the young playable characters in the game.6 Further narrative elements that echo the cultural memory of the Bosnian War are the atrocities linked to the conflict, most notably ethnic and sexual violence. For example, in notes found in different locations within the game, there are references to neighbours killing neighbours. This violence between neighbours is explained through ethnic differences, expressed primarily through differences in language. In sum, TWoM’s game environment fictionalizes civilian suffering, but affords a historical framing of the Siege of Sarajevo by referencing the Bosnian War in its representations and narratives. Such inscriptions assert the historical framing of this game environment by relating it directly to ‘historical discourses’ of the past (see Erll 2008). However, as mentioned earlier, interpretations of these frames by players are not ‘given’ or assured; rather, they afford potential interpretations. This is why analyzing gameplay, when Let’s Players interact with the frames of civilian suffering in the game, is crucial.

Framing war atrocities in gameplay Now that we have established how the game’s environment affords a primary framing of specifically Bosnian cultural memory, it is important to consider if, and how, Let’s Players make sense of what the game affords. To accomplish this, the case study analysed all of the Let’s Players’ reactions

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to ‘The Girl in Peril’ event. The event unfolds in a location called the Supermarket. Players enter the supermarket, and as they walk inside the dialogue between the soldier and the young woman automatically starts (see Figure 9.3). As the dialogue continues, the soldier slowly becomes violent. Players can also optionally peer through a keyhole and see the soldier abusing the young woman. In any case, players cannot ignore the event. Once aware of the rape scenario unfolding, players have the option to intervene. When choosing to intervene, there is a high risk of death, because the soldier is armed with an automatic weapon and, since the game does not allow reboots, dying has permanent consequences. Procedurally, the game invites the player to feel compassion towards the female victim and is designed to incite intervention. When the player revisits the location the following night, an older female non-playable-character (NPC) appears. If the player intervened, the woman will say the girl got her groceries and that it is a good thing somebody saved her. If the player did not intervene, the female NPC will tell the player that somebody should have done something and stopped the soldier. Another form of feedback is provided through the mental state of playable characters. The majority of playable characters will get a mental boost when the player intervenes, or become sad or depressed when the player does not. Some characters, like Katia, can commit suicide as a consequence of the player not intervening. The message is: we should feel pity for the young woman and come to her aid. Another illustration of this moral subjectivity is found when players do

FIGURE 9.3 A Let’s Player’s character witnessing ‘The Girl in Peril’ scenario unfolding.

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not aid the victim. Let’s Players weigh the risk of permanent death against the moral obligation to help a female victim in need. There are different factors that determine the likelihood of a player intervening: how many characters a player has left, the physical and mental state of the remaining characters, and whether the player has chosen to bring weapons. Interestingly, in nine out of thirteen videos (69 per cent) players opted to intervene, despite the odds being against a successful intervention. Of these videos, only one person died trying to save the young woman. This is one of the key conventions of play, which invites players to play the hero. The prevalence of this convention is revealed in the way Let’s Players frame their experience on their YouTube channels: the videos of the nine Let’s Players who intervened suggest heroism in titles such as ‘Saving the Girl’ and ‘Being the Hero’. The four non-intervening Let’s Players address their decisions in the first person, explicitly commenting on why they did not intervene during their performance. One says ‘This makes me feel terrible. I’m such a piece of shit’, for example, while another explains: Damn weirdo is probably trying to rape some woman: If only I had a gun, I would try to take him on. … Ah damn that boy’s a bastard [as the soldier kicks the young woman]. Damn if I only had a gun I would shoot you in the head my friend. I will shoot you in the head. … That is messed up. It is important to note here that players do this because they are performing before an imagined audience. Anticipating possible reactions of the YouTube audience, players situate their actions and immediately state why they did not intervene in the scenario. Here, Let’s Players perform as victims of the situation: if the situation were different, they would have responded differently. These reactions make those Let’s Players who do not intervene moral subjects, even though their actions in the game are immoral. Only one performer mentions the scenario in his framing on YouTube, and explicitly states why he did not intervene in the video description. The other Let’s Players opt for more vague descriptions, such as ‘S*** GETS REAL!’ or ‘The Supermarket’. Whilst Let’s Players perform as moral subjects witnessing atrocities by either applying the heroic conventions of play by intervening, or by stating why they did not, explicit references to the Bosnian War are missing. Let’s Players do not pick up on the cultural references to the Siege of Sarajevo. The reasons for this are threefold: (1) the globalized narrative leaves cultural references to the war too implicit, (2) players generate different interpretations of their gameplay experience because they play with YouTube in mind, and/or (3) Let’s Players might not know about the Yugoslav war, the Bosnian War, or the Siege of Sarajevo. The designers’ decision to refer only

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implicitly to actual events in order to create a universal gameplay experience renders the actual violence of the Bosnian War more distant. This flattening of cultural references renders them so subtle that players who do not have specific knowledge of the conflict do not pick up on them. The Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo are not as well known globally as, for example, the Second World War. Another reason why Let’s Players do not explicitly pick up on the Bosnian references is because they transform this frame with their own: Let’s Players perform with the intent to publish this content and, as a consequence, their performance and its framing is informed by the primary framing of the YouTube environment.

Performing cultural memory for self-marketing The transformation by Let’s Players of the frames afforded by the game is best seen in the way they personalize their performance – the video and metadata. This is amplified by the fact that, whilst gameplay content resonates with Bosnian cultural war memory, historical references are indirect and obscured. Rather than focusing on the suffering and atrocities that occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the content is used to further the Let’s Player’s own interests. The market logic of the platform contributes to the flattening of cultural memory because it encourages an emphasis on high turnover and attractively presented content. Six of the thirteen videos examined in this study also link to other digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, thus drawing in audiences from different places. A loyal viewer base generates income that can be increased by engaging audiences who then subscribe and watch as many videos as possible.7 These six videos have also personalized their content by adding different things to the recorded gameplay. Some players added captions, music and/or personalized opening and closing shots to the TWoM video recordings. For instance, four videos added personalized closing shots intended to engage and monetize viewers. Two videos refer to their own merchandise store, where shirts, mugs and other fan items can be bought. Figure 9.4 illustrates an example of a personalized closing shot. Each contains links, either to watch more content, to leave a comment, to subscribe to the channel, or to buy merchandise. These forms of personalization are an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion. In conjunction with the specific calls to subscribe made in the descriptions, the videos themselves and the Let’s Players’ performances are geared towards gaining more likes, views, commenters and subscribers. This behaviour is stimulated by the platform. For example, the YouTube Creator Academy advises how to grow a fan base by creating a regular flow of content, with relevant titles, descriptions and calls to subscribe (YouTube Creator Academy 2017). Thus, whilst playing TWoM, Let’s Players are thinking about the

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FIGURE 9.4 Screenshot of a personalized closing shot of a YouTube video on TWoM.

content they are producing, and how their performance will resonate with their audiences. As Hector Postigo (2016: 340) notes, Let’s Players often refer to playing the game as ‘making gameplay’. Let’s Players are not only skilled gamers, but first and foremost content producers. In creating Let’s Play videos, the meaning of the activity of gameplay shifts from playing to producing content in order to generate revenue. The actualization of this logic is seen in the actual gameplay performance, which involves selectively picking levels that the Let’s Player thinks will generate a high number of views, and in calls to ‘click on the subscribe button’. The close relationship between platform governance and how producers create their content was also revealed by a 2017 change in YouTube’s advertising policy, causing the demonetization of many YouTube channels. Advertisements are algorithmically generated, and the new policy allowed advertisers to appeal against content they felt inappropriate to their brand, including the excessive use of profanity or violence (Tassi 2017). Ultimately, of course, most value is not created for Let’s Players who make videos, but for the platforms that benefit from selling advertisements around this content. By turning playing, watching and clicking into sources of revenue, the historical framing of the game is appropriated and transformed by Let’s Players because they are producing content for the YouTube environment. The frame afforded by YouTube stimulates Let’s Players to make engaging content, publish regularly and engage audiences. The actual setting of the game environment is not as important as the performance of the Let’s Player.

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As a result, the primary framing afforded by the gameplay experience does not resonate with the Let’s Players and thus, the cultural references to Bosnia are not engaged with. Yet, despite failing to interpret the game’s war references as resonating with the Bosnian War, Let’s Players nonetheless aid in the circulation of a version of Bosnian cultural memory, albeit a globalized one. As cultural memory travels across borders, its form changes. In the videos of these Let’s Players, we witness two such transformations. The first occurs in the game environment, where designers appropriate Bosnian War memory to design a game experience fit for a global audience. The second transformation is the appropriation by Let’s Players, who use the game environment as a setting in which to perform and produce meaningful content for YouTube. Thus, although the iconic references to Bosnia are not explicitly described by the Let’s Players in the description or title of their videos, these references remain. Harnessed to individualistic projects of self gain, Bosnian cultural memory in this example is not circulated by individuals or institutions with expert knowledge, but by persons far removed from the historical context. In the context of transnational memory, the global circulation of game content is part of the shifting ways that individuals remember. As cultural memory travels across digital platforms – from the game to YouTube – it takes on different forms. However, digital platforms also afford new modes of interaction, which in turn afford new modes of potential remembrance. As micro-celebrities have a global audience, this content has the potential to reach local audiences that see these videos and hence, recognize the cultural references made to the Bosnian War. Indeed, the power of Let’s Players to engage their audiences even stimulates discourse and publics to emerge via the comment section of YouTube (de Smale 2019). In this sense, each Let’s Play video of TWoM becomes a potential space for a meaningful interaction with the Bosnian War. Where the cultural memory of Bosnia becomes decontextualized, it can also become re-contextualized (de Cesari and Rigney 2014: 13). What this illustrates is that cultural memory, although it may change in form, can always be re-appropriated. In sum, the recorded videos of Let’s Players are informal carriers of cultural memory, even though the Let’s Players themselves are seemingly unaware of the fact that the game content is inspired by past events.

Conclusion: The Unintentional Circulation of Cultural Memory The argument presented in this chapter examined how Let’s Play videos of war games function as carriers of informal cultural war memory, even if the Let’s Players themselves do not perceive these historical frames, or if they

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subvert them for their own interests. Let’s Players differ from players who do not publish their content online, in that they are performers who fall somewhere between simply playing (reacting to gameplay) and producing (editing and framing game content). So why consider these videos as capable of carrying cultural memory, when their content is fictionalized and framed by players for whom their historical context does not resonate? These videos by Let’s Players matter, because they aid in the circulation of cultural war memory. The potential of micro-celebrities to act as ‘influencers’ has long been understood by digital marketers (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan 2010). Let’s Players are part of a complex network of platforms, companies and communities in and through which economic, social and cultural value is exchanged and extracted (Boomer, Harwood and Garry 2018). It is undeniable that gameplay videos are immensely popular, with a global reach attracting millions of viewers. Although not perceived as such by the Let’s Players, the game environment of these videos still affords a historical framing that is related to the Bosnian War. Just as the gameplay experience depends on a player perceiving a game’s historical framing, the viewing experience of gameplay content recorded by Let’s Players depends on the historical ‘perceptability’ for the YouTube viewer. However, this depends on the specific viewer and their dispositions. In other words, these gameplay videos have an agency of their own – one that exceeds the gameplay experience. Let’s Play videos produce effects of their own because they are embedded within a network of other actors. For instance, YouTube affords commenting as another form of interaction with these videos and within the larger network of cultural practices and expressions of a game such as TWoM. This gives rise to another meaningful practice for commemoration: commenting as a practice. In further research, I analyse the commenting practices of YouTube viewers in relation to gameplay videos and describe how the comment section offers a space for informal commemoration by post-Yugoslav individuals (de Smale 2019). In short, Let’s Players matter because they help to circulate images and narratives of the past to a global gaming audience. What remains to be seen is whether watching gameplay content on YouTube also causes ‘moments of connective memory’ (Hoskins 2011) to emerge.

Notes 1 The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the larger series of conflicts that led to the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (also referred to as the Yugoslav Civil War, Yugoslav War, Yugoslav Wars, Post-Yugoslav Wars). To simplify, in this chapter I refer to the Bosnian War because the game draws heavily on this specific context.

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2 One example of Bosnian institutional cultural war memory is the Sarajevo War Tunnel Museum, a cultural heritage site memorializing Sarajevo’s lifeline to the outside world during the siege. 3 The launch of the gaming channel coincided with YouTube Kids and YouTube Music, as two dedicated gateways to YouTube. The launch of YouTube Gaming was, at least in part, a reaction to Amazon’s purchase of the live-streaming platform Twitch. In September 2018, however, YouTube announced it would end YouTube Gaming as a separate application. Instead, YouTube Gaming will be integrated in the platform itself (YouTube Official Blog 2018). 4 This is the most reliable figure, although other estimates suggest that this number is only around 20 per cent of the actual victims (Amnesty International 2017: 16). 5 The online source of the digital collection of the museum was shared with the author by one of the designers via personal email communication. 6 Focus-group interview with four members of 11 bit studios, September 2016. 7 It is beyond the scope of the chapter to analyse the affordances of the platform itself, but YouTube’s search algorithm plays a central role in the platform’s governance. For instance, it determines which new videos appear as suggested content, which in turn generates more views and therefore more opportunities for income (van Dijck 2013). See also de Smale (2019) on the role of YouTube in creating accidental communities of memory around game publics.

References Amnesty International (2017) ‘We Need Support, Not Pity’: Last Chance for Justice for Bosnia’s Wartime Rape Survivors, Amnesty International, www.amnesty.org/ download/Documents/EUR6366792017ENGLISH.PDF (accessed 15 November 2018). Benford, R. D. and D. A. Snow (2000) Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment, Annual Review of Sociology, 26: 611–39. Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bond, L., S. Craps and P. Vermeulen, eds (2017) Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Boomer, J., T. Harwood and T. Garry (2018) Value Transformation in the ‘Let’s Play’ Gaming Subculture, Journal of Creating Value. DOI: 10.1177/2394964318804705. de Cesari, C. and A. Rigney (2014) Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Chapman, A. (2013) Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History? Rethinking History, 17(3): 312–32. Chapman, A. (2016) Digital Games as History : How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Consalvo, M. (2017) Player One, Playing with Others Virtually: What’s Next in Game and Player Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(1): 84–7.

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Council of Europe (2009) PACE – Resolution 1670 – Sexual Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict, http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/XrefXML2HTML-EN.asp?fileid=17741&lang=en (accessed 3 November 2017). de Smale, S. (2019) Memory in the Margins: The Connecting and Colliding of Vernacular War Memories, Media, War and Conflict. DOI: 10.1177/1750635219828772. de Smale, S., M. J. L. Kors and A. M. Sandovar (2017) The Case of This War of Mine: A Production Studies Perspective on Moral Game Design, Games and Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1555412017725996. Deterding, S. (2013) Modes of Play: A Frame Analytic Account of Video Game Play. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Erll, A. (2008) Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Erll, A. (2011) Memory in Culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Filipovic, Z. (2006 [1993]) Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. New York: Penguin. Gibson, J. J. (2011 [1979]) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Gibson, E. J. and A. D. Pick (2000) An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development. New York: Oxford University Press, https://trove.nla.gov.au/ version/44891836 (accessed 17 January 2019). Glas, R. (2015) Vicarious Play: Engaging the Viewer in Let’s Play Videos, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 5(1–2): 81–6. Hoskins, A. (2009) The Mediatisation of Memory, in J. Garde-Hansen, A. Hoskins and A. Reading (eds) Save As … Digital Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoskins, A. (2011) 7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-Scarcity Culture, Memory Studies, 4(3): 269–80. Independent (2017) Gamer JackSepticEye’s €2.2 Million YouTube Earnings Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg, Independent, 20 September, www.independent.ie/ entertainment/players/gamer-jacksepticeyes-22-million-youtube-earnings-arejust-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-36150477.html (accessed 7 November 2017). jacksepticeye (2015) S*** GETS REAL! | This War of Mine #3, www.youtube. com/watch?v=p_6eBoMDoB0 (accessed 24 January 2019). Kerttula, T. (2016) ‘What an Eccentric Performance’: Storytelling in Online Let’s Plays, Games and Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1555412016678724. Kotler, P., H. Kartajaya and I. Setiawan (2010) Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Kwiatkowski, K. (2016) Civilian Casualties: Shifting Perspective in This War of Mine, in P. Harrigan, J. F. Dunnigan and M. G. Kirschenbaum (eds) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Linderoth, J. (2013) Beyond the Digital Divide: An Ecological Approach to Gameplay, Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 1(1). DOI: 10.26503/todigra.v1i1.9. Marwick, A. and d. boyd (2011) To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2): 139–58.

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Menotti, G. (2014) Videorec as Gameplay: Recording Playthroughs and Video Game Engagement, G|A|M|E journal, 3: 81–92. Nguyen, J. (2016) Performing as Video Game Players in Let’s Plays, Transformative Works and Cultures, 22, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/ article/view/698 (accessed 21 February 2017). Norman D. (1990) The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Doubleday. Postigo, H. (2016) The Socio-Technical Architecture of Digital Labor: Converting Play into YouTube Money, New Media & Society, 18(2): 332–49. Pötzsch, H. (2017) Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters, Games and Culture, 12(2): 156–78. Pötzsch, H. and V. Šisler (2016) Playing Cultural Memory: Framing History in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination, Games and Culture, 14(1): 3–25. Radde-Antweiler, K., M. Waltemathe and X. Zeiler (2014) Video Gaming, Let’s Plays, and Religion: The Relevance of Researching Gamevironments, Gamevironments, 1: 1–36. Rieder, B. (2015) YouTube Data Tools: Digital Methods Initiative, https://tools. digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/(accessed 26 September 2017). Rigney, A. (2005) Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory, Journal of European Studies, 35(1): 11–28. Senft, T. M. (2008) Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Sicart, M. A. (2011) Against Procedurality, Game Studies, 11(3), http://gamestudies. org/1103/articles/sicart_ap (accessed 26 January 2016). Šisler, V. (2016) Contested Memories of War in Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination: Designing a Serious Game on Contemporary History, Game Studies, 16(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/sisler (accessed 15 August 2018). Tassi, P. (2017) Video Game Content Creators Are Upset Over YouTube’s Demonetization Policies [Update], Forbes, 22 August, www.forbes.com/sites/ insertcoin/2017/08/22/youtube-is-making-it-almost-impossible-to-monetizevideo-game-content-involving-guns/(accessed 9 November 2017). Taylor, T. L. (2009) The Assemblage of Play’, Games and Culture, 4(4): 331–39. YouTube Creator Academy (2017) Lesson: Write Smart Descriptions, https:// creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/descriptions?hl=en#yt-creatorsstrategies-3 (accessed 5 October 2017). YouTube Official Blog (2018) Gaming Gets a New Home on YouTube, https:// youtube.googleblog.com/2018/09/gaming-gets-new-home-on-youtube.html (accessed 24 January 2019). van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA.

Ludography 11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine. 11 bit studios.

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PART III

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10 The Wargame Legacy: How Wargames Shaped the Roleplaying Experience from Tabletop to Digital Games Dimitra Nikolaidou ‘Kill the Monsters! Loot the Treasure! Stab your Buddies!’ This is the tagline of Munchkin, a popular spoof of classical tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). While meant to be humorous, it also highlights a major fact about TRPGs: combat has always been a core component of the roleplaying experience. The prevalence of war and combat in RPGs can be traced back to the genre’s wargaming roots: the wargame mentality became ingrained in the TRPG gameframe from the moment of its conception, and remains explicit in the most influential games, such as Dungeons and Dragons and World of Darkness, even when game designers have actively attempted to distance themselves from combat-centric gameplay. Digital roleplaying games, which were initially inspired by their tabletop counterparts, followed in TRPGs’ footsteps by establishing combat as a central component of their narrative and game design. By examining the core role of combat in roleplaying games and in emergent RPG narratives, we can see how the wargames of the seventies continue to influence and shape the gaming experience of today. Such understanding is needed to open the way for further innovation in the roleplaying genre. This chapter examines the prevalence of combat in tabletop and digital roleplaying games from 1974 to the present day, in order to trace the lingering influence of wargames in both digital and tabletop roleplaying. The first part focuses on tabletop roleplaying games, with an emphasis on Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness and GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System). Through an interdisciplinary frame that combines historical

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perspectives with narrative and cultural theory, the history of roleplaying games is traced in direct connection with the hobby’s wargaming origins, as well as with the games’ literary and cultural sources. The second part focuses on digital games. The literature review traces the direct and indirect influence of wargames and tabletop roleplaying on digital roleplaying games. A brief analysis of the most commercially successful digital titles aims at further establishing this connection, and at verifying the important role combat continues to play. The combined findings underline the fact that the legacy of wargames, along with a number of cultural elements and the nature of play itself, have ensured that combat remains entrenched in the core of the roleplaying experience.

Part I: Tabletop Roleplaying Games TRPGs are collaborative storytelling games. During a session, each player is in charge of a character’s life and can, in theory, direct this life and subsequently the course of the story any way they want to. However, any experienced roleplayer understands that in most tabletop gaming sessions, combat is expected to be part of the story. Evan Torner (2015: 160) goes as far as to suggest that the objective of the game at some points becomes the elimination of the opponent’s body; he further claimed that the experience of combat is ideologically ingrained in TRPGs. Tim Bryant (2016) suggests that in TRPGs, conflict has almost always been imagined as combat. The emerging question then is this: why is combat so prevalent in a game that theoretically allows the player to narrate any kind of story?

The development of RPGs According to Shannon Appelcline’s (2013) exhaustive historical treatise Designers and Dragons, the story of roleplaying games is the story of two different trends coming together: one concerning wargames, the other reflecting the new-found love for fantasy that flourished with the sudden US success of Lord of the Rings in the 1960s. Daniel Mackay (2001) sums it up in a simple formula: Fantasy literature + Wargames = Roleplaying Games. Other scholars expand the claim in more detail. Andrew Byers and Francesco Crocco (2016) write that the origins of the modern RPG can be traced back to 1974 with Gary Gygax and David Arneson’s publication of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), the first commercial tabletop roleplaying game. D&D reflected its creators’ shared interests: a love of fantasy literature, with a particular fondness for J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–5)

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trilogy, which spiked in popularity during the 1960s with the availability of inexpensive paperback reprints; and a penchant for tabletop wargames, such as those produced by Avalon Hill since the 1950s and enjoyed by small but dedicated communities of gamers (through which Gygax and Anderson met, according to Jon Peterson’s 2012 Playing at the World), which allowed players to conduct complex battle simulations, historical or otherwise, using miniatures on a tabletop, with outcomes determined by the aid of statistical charts and dice. The advent of D&D marked the historic convergence of these two media, combining the setting, characters and themes of the former with the rule systems and accoutrements of the latter. Players still gathered around a tabletop, with or without miniatures, and used statistical charts and dice to determine outcomes, but instead of playing armies they played individual characters engaged in fantasy adventures (Peterson 2012). A very brief history of wargames would tentatively begin in ancient Egypt, while in Greek and Roman times the existence of the genre is already well documented. Weiqi in China (called Go in Japan) and the Indian chaturanga, which likely evolved into chess, are further examples of ancient wargames. Chess was introduced into Iberia around 900 CE, and many variants evolved separately in Europe, some of them accommodating up to six players. In 1780, the first version of the Kriegsspiel, a tactical wargame drawing inspiration from chess, appeared in Braunschweig, Germany. Following the evolution of cartography, Das Kriegsspiel (‘The Wargame’), as the game was named in its 1803 revision, became appreciated throughout Europe. In 1810, the Prussian George Leopold von Reiswitz Sr. further innovated the game, taking it closer to a war simulation. His contacts made the game popular in court and military circles. Peterson (2012) even suggests that the game may have played a part in the Prussian victories of the 1860s and 1870s. In 1873, the first non-military wargaming association was founded in Oxford University. Unlike Prussia, where the game was mostly adopted by officers, in Britain the strongest proponents were genre novelists: Robert Louis Stevenson, Fred T. Jane and H. G. Wells. The game crossed the Atlantic with the 1880 publication of the first American wargame, Charles Totten’s Strategos. The two World Wars reduced interest in militarism, however, and Peterson (2012) notes that it was not until the 1960s, with some distance separating players from the Second World War, that wargaming became a hobby popular enough to create a community around it, complete with clubs and periodicals. From this small but dedicated community, the TRPG genre would spring in 1975. To examine how the wargame legacy affected TRPGs, this chapter focuses on two games that shaped roleplaying culture – Dungeons and Dragons and World of Darkness, and on one game that reflects it – GURPS. Dungeons and Dragons is, as Erik Mona (2007) suggests, not only the first

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roleplaying game but also the most commercially successful and culturally influential by far. Most TRPG players get acquainted with the hobby through D&D and so, even if they move to other systems, their perceptions of what a roleplaying game is are still shaped by D&D. World of Darkness has been selected firstly as the second most successful roleplaying game (Hindmarch 2004, Appelcline 2013) both in terms of sales and in terms of cultural capital; secondly because it successfully revolutionized the genre by prioritizing story and plot; and thirdly because its game text actively encourages players to distance themselves from the D&D mentality during play, in part by prohibiting combat from taking centre stage. Finally, GURPS promises to deliver a system that allows for any kind of game to be played. The commercial success of all four editions suggests it did deliver on that promise. The historical evolution of these three games will provide the first insights into the wargame legacy in RPGs.

Dungeons and Dragons In his research on the early history of roleplaying games, Peterson (2012) charts how wargames provided much more than the initial inspiration for the new gaming genre: the creators of the first TRPG were dedicated wargamers who, apart from concepts, frameworks and rules, also incorporated their hobby’s mentality into the new game. Peterson’s analysis charts how miniature gaming eventually allowed for the concept of roleplaying in wargames. Early signs appeared in community zines such as The General, Wargame Digest and International Wargamer among others, when wargamers incorporated roleplaying elements in their public correspondence. In 1970, Gary Gygax, the future co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, founded the Castle and Crusade Society, a wargaming organization modelled on medieval kingdoms (complete with titles, honours and even tourneys). His future D&D co-creator, Dave Arneson, joined the Society in 1970. In 1971, Gygax created the Chainmail miniature game, in which, for the first time, significant attention was given to individual combatants, as opposed to mass armies. Moreover, a supplement was added in the later stages of the game’s development so that gamers could ‘refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own “world”, and conduct fantastic campaigns and conflicts based on it’ (Wargamer’s Newsletter, 1971, cited in Peterson 2012: 41). As noted above, Lord of the Rings achieved tremendous success in the USA in the mid-1960s, following its release in paperback. Peterson notes how this ‘sudden and enormous’ popularity triggered reprints and sales of many other fantasy authors: Chainmail named fantasy writers Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock as inspirations, for example (Peterson 2012: 41).

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Peterson goes on to chronicle the actual creation of D&D. Dave Arneson’s group enjoyed Chainmail’s fantasy rules, and in 1972 Arneson publicly introduced an important innovation: a referee who determined the course of events, allowing players to identify with the leader of their forces instead of an entire army, and to seek treasures together as individuals in the dungeons of imaginary Blackmoor instead of fighting wars. The referee both acted as narrator and controlled opposing characters and forces. Gygax invited Arneson to Lake Geneva in order to try this new type of wargaming, and eventually he and Arneson began working on a definitive set of rules. As was the norm in the wargaming genre, during the game’s design, Gygax and Arneson invited and incorporated feedback from the wargaming community either in person or through zines. Thus, the final product was influenced not only by the creators’ vision, but also by the norms of the wargaming community (Peterson 2012). The new rules were soon released commercially under the Dungeons and Dragons name: even though at $10 it cost much more than any other game (Appelcline 2013), it was to be an instant classic and originated an entire industry. In Peterson’s (2012: 459) words, ‘as the 1970s drew to a close, Dungeons and Dragons became an international phenomenon and then a commercial juggernaut’. Dungeons and Dragons remains the most successful TRPG. Appelcline’s (2013) research shows that many of the games that followed were conceived as responses or improvements to D&D, while Mona (2007: 25) describes it as a lingua franca for roleplaying  gamers, observing that: ‘Most gamers’ understanding of “what happens” in a roleplaying game is … defined by how D&D explains these concepts’. Despite its continual evolution, as witnessed in five consecutive editions reaching up to the present, D&D did not distance itself from its wargaming roots. This is evidenced by the use of miniatures, diagrams and battle grids during actual play, the fact that experience points are granted almost exclusively as a result of combat encounters, and by the existence of multiple combat encounters in all published D&D adventures. The rules may be simplified or enriched, but they continue to govern the same set of actions. Furthermore, successful D&D novels, such as Dragonlance Chronicles (Weiss and Hickman 1988) or The Dark Elf Trilogy (Salvatore 2000), also feature the same combat-centric narratives. The initial role of combat as the central event of a roleplaying session, appears to have been preserved in the gameframe.

World of Darkness In contrast to D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), which was the first game published in the World of Darkness gaming universe, was meant to be ‘dark and moody’, an ‘urban fantasy’ (Appelcline 2013: 11). Appelcline

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further notes that the game ‘revealed a world of politics, machinations, angst, and internal conflict. Though RPGs were already becoming more about plots and people – and less about dungeons and fighting – centring a whole game on these subjects was entirely new’ (2013: 12). Vampire was followed by sub-games Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992), Mage: The Ascension (1993), Wraith: The Oblivion (1994) and Changeling: The Dreaming (1995), all taking place within the eponymous World of Darkness. A second edition soon followed, but the revised edition of Vampire, which came out in 1998, proved even more influential. The revised Werewolf and Mage games came out in 2000. From the very beginning, developer White Wolf made it clear that they desired to distance themselves as much as possible from the D&D mentality, often going as far as to make disparaging comments: in Vampire: The Masquerade a certain vampiric clan is described as ‘D&D geeks’ (Achilli et al. 1998: 69), while Mage: Dark Ages (2002) warns the players that it is not a game about ‘+5 swords’ (Bridges et al. 2002: 103). The rules followed suit, making combat lethal and punishing, while experience points and thus character advancement were not related to combat at all. Supplemental materials focused heavily on setting and storytelling instead of new abilities or powers. In all their subsequent incarnations up to the present, World of Darkness games continue to state that they remain focused on storytelling rather than combat.

GURPS When Steve Jackson created and published GURPS in 1981, he named the game Generic Universal RolePlaying System for three reasons: ‘Generic: It would work at any level of expertise and complexity’; ‘Universal: It would work for any game setting’; and ‘Role-Playing System: [it would] encourage real role-playing’ (Appelcline 2013: 38). In other words, GURPS was designed to allow gamers to play exactly the roleplaying game they wanted to play. Jackson’s final admonition seems to suggest that GURPS was meant for players who wanted to emphasize character and plot over dice rolls. However, despite Jackson’s statement, his company chose to release the combat rules first, in 1985. The Basic Set was published in 1986, while GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Autoduel followed later the same year. These games were followed by GURPS Horror (1987), GURPS Space (1988), GURPS Cliffhangers (1989) and GURPS Supers (1989). While Jackson admitted in 2004 that his initial aim of GURPS becoming the ‘standard’ roleplaying system was not feasible, his statement that eventually the game became ‘one of the standards’ was supported by sales figures (Appelcline 2013).

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Historical Context A final note on the history of the era might further explain why combat remained entrenched even though TRPGs evolved into a different genre from wargames. According to Bryant’s (2016: 73) analysis of the effects of the Cold War era on gaming: ‘Role-playing games … like Dungeons & Dragons further expanded the imaginary relations available to American youth in search of a positive, even enjoyable part to play within the abstracted dynamics of war in the nuclear age by imagining warfare in simpler terms’. Gaming afforded players a sense of empowerment and control over their fate, in part by replacing the impersonal threat of nuclear war with romanticized, personalized conflicts resolved through swordplay. Bryant (2016: 74) posits that ‘the evolution of wargaming culture into RPG culture is both historically and logistically linked to the evolution of conventional warfare into nuclear contingency planning’. In this way, RPGs with their emphasis on personal choice represent a counter-cultural trend for balance in the nuclear age, where the future is uncertain and beyond the individual’s control. Throughout all its editions, players face personal threats that are resolved according to a specific protocol, by rolling a twenty-sided die, applying damage and waiting for their turn, until the enemy’s hitpoints are reduced to zero – a simplified, all or nothing conflict that nevertheless takes place within a terra incognita that likely reflects the hostile environment of the nuclear era (Bryant 2016: 82–3). It should be noted that at that time, both game designers and players were aware of the cultural conflict taking place around the question of war. As Peterson chronicles, even before the creation of TRPGs, the wargaming community was conflicted concerning the question of war itself. H. G. Wells, an avowed pacifist, thought that his Little Wars wargame could help end real-life wars, while wargamers in the 1970s were split between those who considered war to be a necessary evil, its brutality inherent in human nature, and pacifists who thought that their games did not concern actual war but functioned solely as a pressure valve. However, Gygax himself was quite openly anti-war, as evidenced by his letters and editorials: it is likely that as a player and designer he soon moved away from modern-era wargames into historical and fantasy wargames, and eventually into the creation of fantasy roleplaying, in part due to his aversion to actual warfare (Peterson 2012). Fantasy games were indeed very far removed from the realities and dilemmas of the war in Vietnam or the Middle Eastern conflicts that were often the target of counter-cultural critiques. Extrapolating from Peterson’s and Bryant’s arguments about the interplay of history and gaming, a similar argument can be made regarding the increasing complexities that accompanied the concept of conflict into the 1970s. Both the counter-culture of the 1960s and the cynicism of the seventies had eroded the good/evil dichotomies that were still plausible immediately

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after the Second World War. In contrast, the first RPGs, where enemies were clearly labelled as such and few moral dilemmas accompanied the invitation to battle, provided players with the opportunity to guiltlessly experience the intensity of conflict, which is a basic element of an engaging story.

Narrative and culture The historical context alone does not explain why TRPGs did not eventually evolve away from combat-centric storylines, especially as the Cold War waned. For this, we need to examine narrative1 in TRPGs, as well as the culture of the fantastic of which TRPGs are a part. TRPGs are as well-rooted in genre culture as they are in wargaming: this is why Gary Alan Fine (1983) calls them ‘shared fantasies’, while Byers and Crocco (2016) state that TRPGs are ‘collaboratively created’. Along with Daniel Mackay (2001), Sean Hendricks (2006) and Sarah Lynne Bowman (2010), Byers and Crocco argue that the success of TRPGs is due in part to the fact that they provide players with the opportunity to step into the world of favourite movies and novels. This material, however, tends to produce combat-centric narratives, as we shall see.

Dungeons and Dragons In his introduction to the original Dungeons and Dragons booklets, Gygax named several fantasy and horror authors as his sources, such as Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (and he later also acknowledged the influence of Tolkien). Michael Tresca (2010) adds Moorcock and H. P. Lovecraft to Gygax’s influences. Apart from genre, these literary works have another thing in common: the protagonists are either fighters to begin with, or are forced into fights in the course of the narrative. Thus, the narrative solution to most plots comes through fighting, combat or even large-scale war (Lovecraft being a notable exception). Moreover, Gygax’s pulp sources, with their emphasis on action, also contributed to the construction of a specific gameframe in D&D, in which combat is the core incident around which the narrative revolves, and later editions of the game (1977, 1989, 2000, 2003, 2014) also cite similar literary sources.

World of Darkness Judging by its sources, World of Darkness did not invite its players into a combat-centric universe. Initially inspired by Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), a novel where violence and horror abound but combat

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plays no role, the World of Darkness gameline claims a variety of cultural sources. An initial connection can be drawn between the published games and Universal’s Monsters, which in turn are drawn from classical literature, though the movies they are presented in are decidedly pulp. Additionally, non-fictional works are included in the source material section, including historical works, psychological treatises and works of philosophy. Popculture items co-exist with literary sources: Vampire: The Masquerade (Achilliet al. 1998: 25) cites as inspirations both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Byron’s vampiric poems; while the more philosophical Mage: The Ascension (Brucatoet al. 2002: 25) suggests familiarizing yourself both with works such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as well as with movies such as The Matrix, Rashomon and even Zardoz or the television series Kung Fu. The suggested reading in Dark Ages: Vampire (Baugh et al. 2002: 17) includes works such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades and Paul Carus’s The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. These references are not simply cosmetic: the careful reader will identify a wealth of influences and references in the game text of all three sub-games. This mixture of pulp, literary and academic resources supported World of Darkness’s attempts at being a game centred not on combat but, as Appelcline (2013: 6) suggests, on ‘plot and character’.

GURPS As Appelcline (2013) suggests, the first games published in the GURPS series reflect what was popular in roleplaying culture. Unlike other games, the inspiration for GURPS was found within the roleplaying culture itself, and not any cultural genre. Notably, in the introduction to the fourth edition Jackson names as inspirations solely other games such as Champions, Tunnels and Trolls and Empire of the Petal Throne, while the ludography section at the end references older GURPS material.

From stories to narratives Does this cultural background influence players as they attempt to create their own narratives? The well-established transmedial quality of stories ensures they can be transferred from one medium (fiction, fable, graphic novel or movie) to another (in our case, a TRPG emergent narrative). MarieLaure Ryan (2004: 27) points out that ‘stories can exist in the mind as pure patterns of information … independently of their representation through the signs of a specific medium’. Some of these culturally-established stories are resilient and universal to the point of being considered ‘masterplots’, a term used by H. Porter Abbott (2008: 48) to describe skeletal stories that

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can accommodate a number of different narratives. Examples of masterplots would be the stories of revenge, of rebirth and regeneration and, of course, the quest. TRPGs, inspired as they are by both myths and popular culture, rely heavily on masterplots: D&D has been presented from the beginning as a series of ‘quests’. Moreover, Abbott (2008) connects masterplots with genre, another factor heavily influencing TRPG narratives. As Suzanne Keen (2003: 19) notes, genre is always connected with certain plots: the ‘power of implication’ often compels the reader to expect events to unfold one way and not another. The next question, then, is what happens when these culturally established stories are spun into TRPG narratives? While stories are independent of medium, narratives are not; every narrative is, as Abbott (2008: 51) posits, ‘an act of mediation and construction’. The then-new gaming medium carried the opportunity to alter well-known stories into something new, if players were inclined to do so. However, as a brief analysis of the TRPG rules will show, this particular medium tends to be very well suited to combat narratives, ensuring that stories, when spun as narratives through the particular gaming genre, will most likely continue to include combat encounters.

Game texts: Narratives, rules and illustrations The final factor in the creation of TRPG narratives is the game text itself, including the rules. Jennifer Grouling Cover (2010: 138) posits that ‘game rule books always serve as a key text that the players and DM interact with’; while Daniel Mackay (2001: 66) suggests that ‘The player who reads a game text … is created by that text’. Below, all elements of the game text – narrative, ruleset and illustration – are examined.

Narrative Text As discussed above, the three games set rather different goals. Across all editions of D&D, the introductions in the various Player’s Handbooks (Cook 1989: 9, Tweet 2003: 4, Heinsoo et al. 2008: 4–6, Mearls and Jeremy 2014: 5) emphasize adventure, battles and action. In contrast, all World of Darkness books begin with atmospheric short stories, and then move on to introductions that do not mention combat at all, focusing instead on the storytelling aspect of the game. Moreover, the text highlights several times that the long-lived and successful characters in World of Darkness are the ones who get others to fight for them. Finally, GURPS focuses on the roleplaying genre itself, making no special mention of combat. While the narrative text seems to support the intentions of the game designers, though, other game elements point towards the wargame legacy instead.

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Ruleset Joris Dormans writes that: The rules of a roleplaying game often imply a particular mode of interaction with the gameworld; the rules imply a certain style of play. … Fantasy roleplaying games such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons are often illsuited to accommodate stories in which action and combat play only a minimal role. … The rule-set of a roleplaying game more or less defines the possible actions for the players and their consequences on the game world. (Dormans 2006: 1) Dormans also suggests how different gameframes, such as those found in Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade and Star Wars facilitate a different kind of game than Dungeons and Dragons (2006: 1). Indeed, in World of Darkness combat was designed not to last long; also, it could prove lethal, so players had a very good reason to avoid it altogether. Furthermore, unlike D&D, experience points were not tied to kills, but to concepts such as participation, successful roleplaying, clever ideas and learning curves. GURPS also avoids emphasizing combat in its gaming text, though unlike World of Darkness it is not negative towards it, and the rules allow the players to make combat as long and detailed or as short and basic as they need to. At first glance then, the game design supports the designers’ intentions. However, the influence of Dungeons and Dragons means that what Dormans (2006: 1) calls its ‘style of play’ has also permeated the ruleset of other games. As a result, most tabletop roleplaying games include a detailed combat system even when combat is not emphasized in the text. In World of Darkness sub-games, in the revised editions, the percentage of combat-related rules is 44 per cent for Vampire: The Masquerade (1998: 200–32),2 53 per cent for Mage: The Ascension (2000: 222–49) and 71 per cent for Werewolf: The Apocalypse (2000: 178–218). Concerning the powers available to World of Darkness players, they appear to be combatrelated3 to the extent of 36 per cent for Vampire, 16 per cent for Mage and 38 per cent for Werewolf. Similarly, the proportion of combat-related rules in GURPS is 38 per cent. This discrepancy between the narrative text and the actions prescribed through the ruleset still positions combat in a central role.

Illustrations Another narrative element that often reveals the focus of a game is the artwork. Abbott (2008) has made a strong case for the ways in which art suggests a particular narrative. Ryan (2004: 139) quotes the poet A. Kibedi

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Varga to this end: ‘the image is not a second way of telling the tale but a way of evoking it. … In the most successful cases … the verbal and visual version blend in the mind of the reader-spectator into one powerful image, each version filling the gaps of the other’. In Vampire: The Masquerade, 32 per cent of the illustrations are combat-related.4 The proportion is 30 per cent for Mage: The Ascension and 60 per cent for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In GURPS Basic Set, the artwork analysis reveals that 50 per cent of the illustrations are combat-related. It appears that even when the narrative text suggests otherwise, the rules and the illustrations within a game text still suggest combat-centric narratives.

Agency, agon and change It should be noted that the player is of course not without agency. Roland Barthes (cited in Abbot 2008: 55–60) reacted against the idea of wholly prescriptive narratives through the concept of the ‘proairetic code’. Narratives arouse certain expectations we want to see fulfilled, but two needs compete within us: the need for closure, which will emerge out of the fulfilling of the code, and the need for surprise – the desire to see the expectations upturned. Thus, combat-centric plots are encouraged, but not forced. During play, participants can still de-emphasize combat, opt for diplomacy, treat conflict with greater gravitas than mandated by pulp conventions, etc. TRPG games may have begun as an offshoot of wargames, yet their functions immediately expanded: problem-solving, camaraderie, plot and story, socializing, and the exploration of fantastic worlds are more likely to come up as pleasures of tabletop roleplaying than the thrill of combat encounters. These encounters, however, remain ingrained in the game not solely as a result of the wargame legacy, but also due to the close relationship between play and agon, as defined by Johan Huizinga (1944: 31) and Roger Caillois (1961: vii).5 Combined with the common maxim that ‘there is no story without conflict’, this desire to compete informs the course of the narrative as much as the wargame legacy and the culturally mandated masterplots do. The latter two factors simply ensure that agon manifests in the form of combat encounters more often than as skill checks or luck-based challenges. Although some researchers, such as Torner (2015: 164), posit that TRPG combat is often reduced to a tedious numerical exercise instead of an epic showdown, we should acknowledge that the high stakes present in any combat encounter are, in terms of narrative, more likely to immerse and excite the player than any non-life-threatening challenge. Time-consuming and even tedious as combat might sometimes be, it still generates adrenaline and excitement; the element of chance inherent in rolling dice adds to the joy of play. At this point, it should also be noted that from the very beginning there have been many attempts to move TRPGs away from combat-centric

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narratives. Chaosium’s games such as Runequest (1978), Call of Cthulhu (1982) and Pendragon (1985) were very early examples of this trend, which World of Darkness strengthened. After 2000, several factors, including the appearance of crowd-funding and the academic-level discourse on TRPGs facilitated initially by the internet, incentivized the creation of many (mainly indie) games that attempted to completely distance themselves from the wargame legacy. An example can be found in narrative games, which are light on rules and put storytelling first; or serious games such as FreeMarket; even the newest D&D and World of Darkness editions insist on storytelling. The trend, then, definitely exists, but the market (and the perception of TRPGs among the majority of players) continues to be dominated by the classic gameframes.

Part II: Digital Roleplaying Games When it comes to charting the influence of TRPGs on digital roleplaying games, the Encyclopaedia Britannica definition is rather telling: Electronic role-playing game, electronic game genre in which players advance through a story quest, and often many side quests, for which their character or party of characters gain experience that improves various attributes and abilities. The genre is almost entirely rooted in TSR, Inc.’s Dungeons & Dragons (D&D; 1974), a role-playing game (RPG) for small groups in which each player takes some role, such as a healer, warrior, or wizard, to help his party battle evil as directed by the group’s Dungeon Master, or assigned storyteller.6 In examining the history of digital roleplaying games the above definition will prove to be quite accurate.

Historical overview In their introduction to Dungeons and Dreamers, a treatise researching digital games from the seventies onwards, Brad King and John Borland (2014: kindle) write: ‘Scratch almost any game developer who worked between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, and you’re likely to find a vein of role-playing experience’. Scholarship certainly suggests a direct line of evolution between tabletop roleplaying games and digital games. Matt Barton (2007), for example, suggests that the ‘holy grail’ of early computer programming was the adaptation of the tabletop roleplaying experience in digital form, and argues that, while both the rules and the playing experience

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differ greatly between TRPGs and computer roleplaying games (CRPGs), the thematic connection between the two types of games is clear. Tresca (2010: 134) notes that ‘Fantasy CRPGs borrowed heavily from Dungeons and Dragons rules’; and though not claiming D&D as the source of all fantasy-themed CRPGs, he considers such games as a continuation of its evolutionary path (Tresca 2010: 134–60). Two of the earliest CRPGs, Temple of Apshai and avid roleplayer Richard Gariott’s Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979) provide evidence for these arguments. Tresca and Barton examine how far both games went in emulating the roleplaying experience from a mechanics standpoint; King and Borland demonstrate the existence of a thematic connection between TRPGs and CRPGs. For example, the manual of Temple of Apshai begins by introducing TRPGs and proceeds to introduce the game itself as an easier alternative for those who do not have access to a roleplaying group. Barton further establishes the connection through game series such as Gariott’s Ultima, Wizardry, Tales of the Unknown Vol. 1: The Bard’s Tale and Phantasie, as well as several oneshot digital roleplaying games: Telengard, Dungeons of Daggorath, Tunnels of Doom, The Sword of Fargoal and Oubliette. TSR, sensing a commercial opportunity, bestowed the licence to create official Dungeons and Dragons games to SSI, a producer of both wargames and digital games, which published Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990), Pools of Darkness (1991), Champions of Krynn (1990), Death Knights of Krynn (1991), Dark Queen of Krynn (1992), Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991), Treasures of the Savage Frontier (1992) and Eye of the Beholder (1991), further cementing the connection. While not all CRPGs were related to fantasy settings, Barton shows that in the early years of digital gaming, innovations tended to come from fantasy titles, such as Dungeon Master’s (1987) 3D interface and Might and Magic’s (1986) emphasis on the consequences of a particular gender or class. Despite the early role of TRPGs in the development of digital games, a number of other factors eventually also influenced the shaping of the new gaming genre, which evolved into many different sub-genres and types of play. However, in the case of CRPGs in particular, the TRPG influence remains a factor. Barton (2007) terms the era after 1994 the ‘Platinum Age’ of digital roleplaying games, and charts the success of The Elder Scrolls (1994), the Might and Magic series, Diablo (1997) and of course Baldur’s Gate (1998), also noting the science-fiction-themed Fallout (1997) and Knights of the Old Republic (1998). His research suggests that: ‘Taxonomic quibbling aside, there is no doubt that while they are not direct descendants, CRPGs were deeply inspired by D&D. At the very least, it’s obviously more than a coincidence that so many of the themes and trappings are shared by both genres, and both are highly absorbing and addictive’ (Barton 2007).

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Narrative in CRPGs The arguments about narrative theory presented in part one of this chapter can explain why combat – already established as a central component of TRPG narratives – also became the lynchpin of digital roleplaying narratives: CRPG designers attempted to repeat the stories and narratives they were familiar with from TRPGs, and the core role of combat was thus reprised in the digital medium. The transmedial properties of stories were also at play as the genre evolved into digital form. It is possible that since transferring the TRPG narratives to digital form was innovation enough, the stories themselves changed little. Moreover, considering that early programmers were trying to mimic the TRPG experience as faithfully as possible, they had little incentive to change the primary narrative components. Combat, which was the easiest story component to replicate, being already turn-based and numerical, therefore retained its central position. Yet despite the thematic connections and common storylines, TRPGs and CRPGs do not provide players with similar experiences. CRPG players have far fewer choices in shaping the game’s narrative: digital games cannot accommodate an infinite number of plots, so the actions available to players are limited to what designers have chosen during the game’s creation. During a TRPG, players can attempt to avoid combat, or can actively refuse to participate even if this choice harms their characters; in a CRPG, often the only way to not engage in combat is to switch the game off. Furthermore, since the social aspects of a TRPG are not present in a CRPG, and the roleplaying itself is by necessity limited to few choices, the combat encounters become even more significant. The question, then, is whether modern CRPG design continues to enforce combat encounters as central components of the RPG narrative. Choosing which CRPGs to focus on, however, was not as easy as choosing which TRPGs to examine. Again, commercial success was used as the first criterion. The multiplicity of platforms, the multiple iterations of popular titles, and the games’ continuous availability, however, make it hard to compile a definitive list of the most successful or influential titles. In the end, an attempt was made to choose the fifteen most commercially successful digital roleplaying games of Western origin.7 The selected CRPGs are: The Elder Scrolls, Borderlands,8 Ultima Online, Everquest, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, The Witcher, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Divinity: Original Sin. As in the case of TRPGs, commercial success is meant as a starting point: a game achieving this level of sales is bound to become influential not only because it will dictate what games the studios are more likely to produce or finance, but also because it will also shape the idea of what a CRPG should ‘look like’ for many players, especially if it

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is the title that introduces them to the genre. With this in mind, the games are summarily examined in terms of (a) thematic connection to TRPGs, (b) artwork and (c) the narrative necessity of combat.

Thematic Connections Out of the fifteen titles on this list, twelve are fantasy-themed. Of these twelve titles, two are D&D tie-ins (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights) while the remaining games’ chronotopes are reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons, taking place in medievalesque environments and sporting creatures such as elves and dwarves. In all fifteen games, fantasy or not, the story is comprised of a series of quests, including dungeon crawls, culminating in a final battle.

Artwork The cover art for all fifteen games depicts either combat or armed characters. In-game, the character avatars are always depicted armed. Additionally, the promotional material for all games depicts acts of combat.

Rules and Narrative Necessity of Combat All fifteen games require the player to select roles that have built-in combat capabilities. The choices you make during character creation (save gender, when appropriate) mainly determine how the character will behave in combat. These capabilities are bound to come into play: for all fifteen titles, combat is mostly a given and the game cannot be progressed or concluded without engaging in it. In some of these games the roleplaying element is more heavily emphasized (Dragon Age, Witcher, Fallout). Here, the player can choose to resolve some encounters diplomatically and be rewarded for it; however in most of these titles the main storyline cannot be resolved unless the characters engage frequently in combat. Moreover, in all games referenced, combat offers the most direct path to levelling up, as experience points often correlate to enemies slain. Some titles also grant points for the use of skills or the solving of quests, yet combat encounters remain a main source of experience points.9 It should be noted that two well-known but commercially unsuccessful CRPGs that require almost no combat encounters are Torment: Planescape and Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines. Interestingly, the first is a D&D tiein while the second is a World of Darkness title. While both games were

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critically acclaimed, eventually achieving cult status, they struggled to find commercial success. This short analysis verifies that combat remains at the core of digital roleplaying games or is perceived as such in spite of affordances opening up alternative gameplay: despite the existence of many different types of CRPGs, wide commercial appeal seems to be reserved for those games in which combat continues to play a role. Marketing also emphasizes combat and often downplays possibilities for non-violent gameplay. Given the previous establishment of a strong connection at several levels between digital and tabletop roleplaying, it is very likely that this is in part a result of the initial influence of wargames on the roleplaying experience. Of course, this influence is not the only reason for the primacy of combat in CRPGs: the need for the element of agon and the force of genre conventions are as present in CRPGs as they were in TRPGs, while the prescriptive powers of the ruleset are even stronger in this medium. It should also be noted that while TRPGs were influential in the beginning, the opposite phenomenon can now be observed: often, when players turn to TRPGs from digital games, they prompt complaints among other players since they tend to be more combat- and loot-oriented than players accustomed to the more narrative and collaborative tabletop experience. In this way, nowadays CRPGs possibly influence TRPGs towards combat-centric narratives.

Conclusion Despite the promises of a narrative environment where anything was possible, roleplaying games have always prioritized combat encounters, in part due to their origins: while cultural and historical influences, as well as the very nature of play, also played a part, Dungeons and Dragons, a game crafted by dedicated wargamers, essentially defined the roleplaying experience. As a result, even when designers aim to create fundamentally different games, secondary narrative elements will often still underline the primacy of combat. This trend was continued and even strengthened in digital roleplaying games where player input is even more limited, and combat is often essentially unavoidable. If this invisible limitation is to be subverted, the wargame legacy needs to be better understood. Today, with the ever-expanding popularity of CRPGs and renewed enthusiasm for TRPGs, research on this particular gaming genre is more important than ever, especially if we consider the well-documented influence roleplaying has on the culture of the fantastic. Even as movements such as the Nordic LARP, and the plethora of both tabletop and digital indie-designed RPGs, attempt to redefine the roleplaying experience, game designers might find their work undermined without a

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deeper understanding of the circumstances that shaped the genre in which they work. An in-depth look at the factors that have so far defined the roleplaying experience can clear the way for changes and innovations that will guide games into the future. At the same time, further research should examine what makes roleplaying combat enjoyable for the participants: the wargaming origins of the hobby and even the cultural influences present would not have been enough to sustain the central role of combat if players considered its presence undesirable. As the roleplaying experience is understood in more depth, designers and players will be enabled to experiment and innovate, leading to a fuller realization of the huge potential of roleplaying games.

Notes 1 Some scholars have argued against applying narrative theory to RPGs, for a variety of reasons (for example, Abott 2008, Aarseth 2004, Costikyan 2007). However, Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) argues that games can ‘possess narrativity’, while Byers and Crocco (2016) take the narrative aspect for granted in their own approach. The most convincing argument probably comes from Jennifer Grouling Cover (2010), who posits that no matter what theorists argue, it remains a fact that players experience TRPGs as narratives. 2 Observations have been made based on the 1998 revised edition instead of the 1991 original edition, as the former has been presented as the definitive and more polished one. The same choice was made for the Mage and Werewolf sub-games. 3 The term combat-related refers to powers designed exclusively for use in combat encounters. Powers that could be applied in combat but are not exclusive to it (e.g. pyrokinesis) have not been included in the percentage calculated. 4 This includes pictures that depict or imply combat situations, including chases, as well as depictions of armed characters, unless the weapons depicted are implied to have ceremonial uses. 5 Contest (agon), in its various forms, is often ingrained in the act of play to the point that for Huizinga agon and play can be nearly interchangeable; Caillois critiques and expands Huizinga’s focus on agon, but recognizes contests as an important type of play. 6 See www.britannica.com/topic/electronic-role-playing-game (accessed 10 December 2018). 7 These games have sold over five million copies. Massive Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs) are included in the list, as the elements that separate them from single-player games are not relevant to the research question. Game series are examined as a single title. 8 Gearbox, Borderlands’ developer, suggests the game offers ‘First Person Roleplaying Shooter’ gameplay. See www.gearboxsoftware.com/game/ borderlands/ (accessed 21 March 2019).

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9 Fallout is a possible but often unintentional exception. Fallout: New Vegas was a title that offered a clearer path to completing the game without NPC casualties. However, lead designer of Fallout 4 Todd Howard said that ‘You can avoid [killing] a lot …. I can’t tell you that you can play the whole game without violence – that’s not necessarily a goal of ours – but we want to support different play styles as much as we can’ (Stuart 2015). Players have indeed managed to complete the game without violence, but in order to do that they had to play in very unorthodox ways and usually not by avoiding violence, but by making sure the violence they instigated was not attributed to their character.

References Aarseth, E. (2004) Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse, in M. Ryan (ed.) Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Abbott, H. P. (2008) The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appelcline, S. (2013) Designers and Dragons: A History of the A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry. Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions. Barton, M. (2007) The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, Gamasutra, 23 February, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132024/the_history_of_ computer_.php (accessed 10 December 2018). Bowman, S. L. (2010) The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Bryant, T. (2016) Building the Culture of Contingency: Adaptive Choice in Ludic Literature from Role-Playing Games to Choose Your Own Adventure Books, in A. Byers and F. Crocco (eds) The Role-playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Byers, A. and F. Crocco, eds (2016)The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Dormans, J. (2006) On the Role of the Die: A Brief Ludologic Study of PenAnd-Paper Roleplaying Games and their Rules, Game Studies, 6(1), http:// gamestudies.org/0601/articles/dormans (accessed 21 March 2019). Fine, G. A. (1983) Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Caillois, R. (1961) Man, Play and Games. New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe. Cover, J. G. (2010) The Creation of Narrative in Role-Playing Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Costikyan, G. (2007) Games, Storytelling and Breaking the Rules, in P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds) Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hendricks, S. Q. (2006) Incorporative Discourse Strategies in Tabletop Fantasy Role-Playing Gaming, in J. P. Williams, S. Q. Hendricks and W. Keith (eds)

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Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hindmarch, W. (2004) Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium, in P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds) Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huizinga, J. (1944) Homo Ludens: The Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. King, B. and J. Borland (2014), Dungeons and Dreamers: A Story of How Computer Games Created a Global Community (Kindle Edition). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Keen, S. (2003) Narrative Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Mackay, D. (2001) A New Performing Art: The Fantasy Role-Playing Game. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Mona, E. (2007) From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons, in P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds) Second Person: RolePlaying and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peterson, J. (2012) Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego, CA: Unreason Press. Ryan, M. L. (2004) Narrative across Media: The Language of Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Salvatore, R. A. (2000) The Dark Elf Trilogy (new edition). Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast. Stuart, K. (2015) Fallout 4: Todd Howard on Loss in the Post-Apocalypse World, The Guardian, 28 July, www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/28/fallout-4todd-howard-post-apocalypse-peter-hines (accessed 6 February 2019). Torner, E. (2015) Bodies and Time in Tabletop Role-Playing Game Combat Systems, in S. L. Bowman (ed.) The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2015. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con. Tresca, M. (2010) The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Weiss, M. and T. Hickman (1988) Dragonlance Chronicles. London: Penguin.

Ludography Tabletop Achilli, J., A. Bates, P. Brucato, R. E. Dansky, E. Hall, R. Hatch, M. B. Lee, I. Lemke, J. Moore, E. Skemp and C. Summers (1998) Vampire: The Masquerade (revised edition). Clarkson, GA: White Wolf Publishing Inc. Baugh, B., M. Butler, C. Hartford, S. Kenson, J. Kiley, J. M. Asheim and A. Tinworth (2002) Dark Ages: Vampire. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf Publishing Inc. Bridges, B., M. Rein-Hagen, R. Hatch, P. Brucato, B. Campbell, S. Chupp, A. Greenberg, D. Greenberg, H. Heckel and T. Woodruff (2000) Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf Publishing Inc.

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Bridges, B., K. Blackwelder, D. Bolack, S. M. Dipesa, M. Lafferty, J. Maliszewski, J. Maurer, T. Maurer and M. McFarland (2002) Mage: The Dark Ages. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf Publishing Inc. Brucato, P., Stewart Wieck, K. Ryan, Stephan Wieck, C. Early, B. Bridges, A. Greenberg, M. Rein-Hagen and T. Williams (2000) Mage: The Ascension. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf Publishing Inc. Cook, D. (1989) Player’s Handbook. Lake Geneva: TSR Inc. Heinsoo, R., A. Collins and J. Wyatt (2008) Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast. Mearls, M. and C. Jeremy (2014) Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast. Tweet, J. (2003) Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast.

Digital Arena Net (2005–present) Guild Wars. NCSoft. Bethesda Game Studios (1994–2015) The Elder Scrolls. Bethesda Softworks. BioWare (1998–2001) Baldur’s Gate. InterPlay. BioWare (2002–2006) Neverwinter Nights. Infogrames/Atari. BioWare (2003–present) Knights of the Old Republic. LucasArts. BioWare (2007–2012) Mass Effect. Microsoft Games Studio/Electronic Arts. BioWare (2009–2015) Dragon Age. Electronic Arts. Blizzard Entertainment (1996–2014) Diablo. Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment (2004–present) World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment. CD Project RED (2007–2015) The Witcher. Atari/CD Project. Gas Powered Games (2002–2011) Dungeon Siege. Microsoft Game Studio. Gearbox Software (2009–2015) Borderlands. 2K Software. Interplay Entertainment (1997–2015) Fallout. Interplay Entertainment. Larian Studios (2014) Divinity: Original Sin. Larian Studios. Origin Systems, Electronic Arts, Mythic Entertainment, Broadsword (1997–present) Ultima Online. Electronic Arts. Sony Online (1999–present) Everquest. Sony Online.

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11 Critical War Game Development: Lessons Learned from Attentat 1942 Vít Šisler In the past two decades, historical videogames have become one of the most widespread and successful forms of popular history (Chapman 2013, 2016, Uricchio 2005). This makes them potentially highly influential historical texts that are generally experienced in informal settings, particularly by a young audience (Atkins 2005, Šisler 2016). In other words, historical videogames are ‘capable of meaningful engagements with the past and have the potential to both determine and reflect how we both collectively and individually think about, understand, negotiate and talk about that past in the present’ (Chapman, Foka and Westin 2017: 360). Many historical videogames focus on war, with the Second World War being one of the most popular themes (Campbell 2008). Such games are becoming increasingly realistic, yet their realism focuses mostly on specific aspects of warfare and military operations (Halter 2006, Pötzsch 2017). The civilian perspective, casualties and the trauma of war are typically missing in war-themed videogames, with a few notable exceptions (see de Smale, Kors and Sandovar 2017). The war experiences of women and children tend also to be excluded, particularly in first-person shooters (Pötzsch 2017). As James Campbell puts it: World War II shooters leave the player with the idea that war is a precision game featuring agonistic contests between small groups of men. … A postludic war is presented as an exercise in controlled agonism. Ideologically, the games construct the war as an exercise in marksmanship, efficiency, and heroics. (Campbell 2008: 197)

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As a result, although many historical war games ‘attempt a representation of the Second World War’, in fact they ‘domesticate the chaos of violent history into a simulacrum of other games of the genre’ (Campbell 2008: 188). While attempting to inject the world of videogames with the reality of history, they make history unreal (Campbell 2008: 198). This chapter focuses on videogames aiming to overcome the aforementioned schematizations. In particular, it discusses the possibilities and limitations of an example of critical war game development. Paraphrasing Mary Flanagan (2009), by a ‘critical war game’ we mean a game that through its procedural rhetoric and/or narrative frames challenges the established design practices and generic conventions that dominate the representation of war in videogames, and potentially innovates. Several critical war games can be found within the emerging serious games genre and aim to provide more authentic and realistic accounts of history and war (Šisler 2016, de Smale, Kors and Sandovar 2017, and see Pötzsch Chapter 13 in this volume). At Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, we have developed a serious videogame about the Second World War, called Attentat 1942. It is a narrative-driven adventure game based on personal testimonies and historical research. It presents several key events from Czechoslovakia’s contemporary history and enables players to ‘experience’ these events from different perspectives. Importantly, the game strives to provide more authentic and realistic accounts of the conflict by including multifaceted perspectives and revisiting civilian trauma of war and Nazi occupation. As such, Attentat 1942 could be labelled a critical war game. The game was released in two different versions: first, as a free educational tool for Czech high-school students and teachers (released in 2015 in the Czech language only, as Československo 38–89: Atentát); and second, as a significantly enhanced, commercially distributed game for the general public (released in 2017 with English, German and Russian subtitles, as Attentat 1942). This chapter stems from our experience of developing the game and summarizes key lessons learned during the process. Although there is plenty of literature on video game development (for example, Bond 2015, Novak 2011, Schreier 2017), most of it deals with mainstream video game production, and this can differ significantly from developing critical games. More directly relevant guidelines and discussion of best practices can be found in an emerging genre of literature on developing serious games, mainly for learning. Yet the bulk of this literature focuses on the design of such games (for a systematic literature review, see Avila-Pesántez, Rivera and Alban 2017) or on their successful implementation in formal schooling (Whitton 2009). Only a few sources deal with historical serious game design (for example, McCall 2011, Schrier 2014, Schrier and Channel 13 2009), but without necessarily focusing on war and conflict. As far as we know, there is no literature critically describing the broader process of developing critical war games, taking into account institutional, historical and technological perspectives.

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This chapter aims to fill that gap and critically discuss our development process, the challenges we faced and our solutions to them, using retrospective analysis. We have already published a detailed description of the game’s design process and its limitations (Šisler 2016) and a preliminary study on the game’s implementation in formal schooling (Šisler et al. 2014). The present chapter revisits some of this material, but focuses on the broader aspects of the whole development process, rather than on its isolated parts, and summarizes our experience in a set of concrete recommendations. These recommendations should by no means be perceived as ultimate guidelines for developing critical war games but rather as a first attempt to map uncharted territory. As such, this chapter could be of interest to other critical and/or serious game developers, as well as researchers in game studies and cultural studies alike.

Game Description Attentat 1942 is a complex, single-player, dialogue-based, adventure game with a strong narrative. It includes interactive comics and authentic audiovisual materials. The game ‘aims to develop a deeper understanding of the multifaceted political, social and cultural aspects of the time period’ (Šisler et al. 2014). Emphasis is placed on the diverse historical experiences of the population, including previously marginalized groups, such as women and Roma (Šisler 2016). The story of Attentat 1942 covers the period following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, ‘Reichsprotektor’ of the Nazi-occupied Czech Territories and a leading architect of the Holocaust. The assassination triggered a wave of brutal retribution by the Nazis, including the extermination of the Czech villages Lidice and Ležáky. These reprisals created an atmosphere of terror and fear. Players take on the role of a grandson or granddaughter of J. Jelínek, the fictional main character of the game, who was arrested by the Gestapo hours after Heydrich’s assassination. Through the game, players engage in conversations with various eyewitnesses and try to reconstruct Mr. Jelínek’s personal story and discover the reasons for his arrest (Šisler 2016). In other words, Attentat 1942 does not focus on the well-known and dramatic story of the assassination itself, but rather on the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens under Nazi occupation. By doing so, it connects personal histories with overarching historical narratives (Couture 2017). In terms of gameplay, Attentat 1942 is essentially a point-and-click adventure game. Its core elements are conversations with ‘eyewitnesses’, where players choose between different responses from predetermined dialogue trees and influence the further development of the story (Figure 11.1). Some responses trigger testimonies by the ‘eyewitnesses’, which are rendered as

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FIGURE 11.1  Interview with a game character in Attentat 1942.

interactive comics and/or mini-games of various genres (Figure 11.2). The game presents the player with a central puzzle concerning the reasons for his/her grandfather’s arrest and has several potential endings. Depending on their actions, players might (or might not) discover the underlying story and ‘win’ the game (Šisler 2016). Importantly, Attentat 1942 does not allow players to ‘change history’ or take part in counter-factual historical scenarios. Rather, ‘what is open to negotiation in and through play are discourses about the past, rather than the past itself’ (Pötzsch and Šisler 2016: 19). Players in the game interact with the ‘eyewitnesses’ in the present and ‘travel’ back in time through the witnesses’ memories evoked during conversations. The individual testimonies are oftentimes contradictory and incomplete, or the ‘eyewitnesses’ simply do not want to talk about certain aspects of their past. As a result, ‘players have to evaluate critically the obtained information, use social skills and empathy, and approach the social construction of history analytically’ (Šisler 2016). The educational version of the game (Československo 38–89: Atentát) and its teaching methodology was evaluated in thirty-four high schools, where it was very positively received by teachers and students alike (Šisler et al. 2014). Since its release, the game hs been downloaded by approximately twenty per cent of Czech high-school history teachers. We do not have any information about how many of these teachers actually used the game in their classes, but the feedback we have received from teachers who did is largely positive. Currently, we are conducting two laboratory experiments measuring the game’s learning effect and its impact on players’ attitudes.

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FIGURE 11.2  Interactive comics in Attentat 1942.

The commercial version of the game (Attentat 1942) was critically acclaimed and won several major awards, including Most Amazing Game at A MAZE 2018 in Berlin, Best Learning Game at Games for Change 2018 in New York, Best Educational Game at the TIGA 2018 Awards in London and Czech Game of the Year 2017 in Prague. Despite these achievements, sales of the commercial version are only mildly successful, which is a fact that any developer has to take into account when reading the recommendations.

Development Process: Challenges and Recommendations The development of the game was funded by the Czech Ministry of Culture, the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University. The funding was secured through several competitive grants schemes that all required long-term planning and preparation of detailed project proposals. This fact significantly shaped the development process.

1. Be ready for agile development In the initial phase of the project, we planned to follow the waterfall model of software development. The waterfall model is a sequential development

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FIGURE 11.3 Waterfall (above) and agile (below) models of the videogame development process.

process, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of design, specification, implementation and evaluation (Figure 11.3). According to the plan, in the design phase we aimed to create the concept of the whole game and set its educational goals. In the specification phase, we aimed to write a specification document that would describe the whole game and all of its elements (dialogues, comics, mini-games) in detail, so the implementation could begin. In the implementation phase, we aimed to create all the audiovisual assets for the game (movie clips, animations,

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mini-game objects) and programme the code of the game. The evaluation phase was reserved for play-testing in schools and making final adjustments to the game and its educational methodology. The waterfall model of software development is particularly viable for management purposes since it allows for detailed allocation of resources in long-term planning. It also fits the way most grant project submissions are structured, with clear descriptions and timing of activities, milestones and deliverables. Yet real videogame development is a far less predictable endeavour, requiring significant adjustments of goals and reallocation of team members to different tasks according to the needs of the project. Early in the design phase, we dealt with various challenges, stemming both from the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium as well as the contested nature of the historical topic itself (Šisler 2016). As William Uricchio argues, if we take interactivity as one of the distinguishing characteristics of videogames, the interaction between a present-day player and the representation of a historically specific world would seem to challenge any notion of a unique configuration of historical ‘fact’ and ‘fixity’, giving way instead to the historically inconsistent and ludic. (Uricchio 2005: 327) Furthermore, such an interaction ‘provokes fundamental questions regarding the place of computer games in systems of historical representation’ (2005: 327). By the same token, Karen Schrier points out that there is an underlying question regarding historical videogames as to how far they represent history accurately: This is a key tension when designing and using history games, as there is always a tradeoff between maintaining accuracy and representing details, and simulating themes, questions, and consequences, while also ensuring a fun, engaging experience. This tension in how to appropriately represent history in a game parallels some of the key tensions in history education. (Schrier 2014: 75) This tension is further heightened by different notions of history, particularly in history education. Many history teachers and students of history classes ‘operate according to a belief that history is no more than the established record of past events and their causes, fixed by the professionals, and received by everyone else’ (McCall 2011: 9). During the initial debates among historians, educationalists and game designers about the aims of our project, we adopted a broader understanding of history, corresponding more closely to the way historians operate. As Jeremiah McCall puts it:

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History is the act of constructing meaningful, critically researched and validated interpretations of the past, interpretations focused on human motivations, actions, and the effects of those actions. It is a discipline, and those who practice in the discipline, historians, are in the business of rigorously sifting through evidence, drawing connections, and constructing defensible explanations and interpretations of past human actions, their causes, and their effects. (McCall 2011: 9) The way we thought about history and history education fundamentally shaped our design practices and development process, as well as our responses to the above-mentioned tensions. Theoretically, we grounded our project in pedagogical constructivism, historical empathy and social learning theory. Firstly, in accordance with pedagogical constructivism (Piaget 1962), we aimed to communicate to players of our game that ‘history is neither a closed past nor a collection of events and definite conclusions, but rather a platform for questions to be asked’ (Šisler et al. 2012: 71). Secondly, historical empathy focuses on successful reconstruction of other people’s beliefs, values, goals and feelings (Ashby and Lee 1987: 63). In other words, attaining historical empathy ‘suggests that one can contextualize these perspectives from within a historical frame of reference or put oneself in the mindset of someone in history’ (Schrier et al. 2010: 258). When translated to game design, historical empathy enables players to ‘try on someone else’s perspective and understand their cultural context, mindset, and obstacles’ and may thereby ‘help them better interpret the past’ (Schrier 2014: 82). Finally, social learning theory posits that people learn from observing other people’s experiences, rather than needing to experience something directly (Bandura 1977). In videogame design, this theory manifests itself in instances where players may observe an in-game character’s experience with an historical event but may not directly interact with such an event (Schrier 2014: 83). This theoretical grounding helped us in finding answers to many designrelated questions, albeit not all of them. In the early design phase, we faced very practical problems, related to tensions between authenticity and fiction, realism and schematization, and narrative and procedure. The questions we were dealing with were largely interconnected, namely: Should the game use fictitious characters or the memories of real people? Should the game allow players to ‘replay’ (and thus possibly change) history or not? What game mechanics should the game deploy in order to reach its educational goals? What should be its level of detail; in other words, what should be included and what omitted? I have described these design challenges and our responses to them in detail in previous work (Šisler 2016). Here, I will only briefly summarize the

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key five design principles we adopted. Most of these principles stem directly from the theoretical grounding outlined above: 1. Multiperspectivity: The game should introduce different characters to the player. Each of these characters should present a significantly different personal story, historical narrative and evaluation of the unfolding events. 2. Authenticity: The game should be based on historical research and real personal testimonies, but should not use these stories in a literal fashion. It should use them as sources for constructing realistic narratives, without gamifying real people’s testimonies. 3. Constructivism: The game should not allow players to ‘change history’ or take part in counter-factual historical scenarios. Players should explore the past through testimonies of in-game characters and have to evaluate critically the information obtained. 4. Inclusiveness: The game should include marginalized voices that are not typically presented in the dominant historical discourse in the Czech Republic. These should include the memories of Roma and Sudeten German citizens of Czechoslovakia. 5. Contextualization: The game should contain an extensive encyclopaedia that provides players with factual information about the given period. The game must also have a detailed step-by-step methodology for teachers on how to use it in a formal schooling context. Importantly, we did not formulate these principles from a table. Rather, we discovered that we were unable to find answers to many of our questions: neither our debates nor existing literature were of much help. Thus, we created simple game prototypes and tested various ideas in both school and out-of-school contexts. During this testing, we had to find out if the main story of the game, the dialogue structure and the game mechanics had the potential to reach the project’s educational goals; if the game was engaging and fun to play; if the audience perceived our characters as authentic, and so on. In terms of the waterfall model, we rapidly moved to implementation and testing, and then returned to design and specification phases without actually having any final specification at hand. In other words, we gradually abandoned the waterfall model for the sake of agile development, where all phases of the process (design, specification, implementation and evaluation) run in a series of spins focusing on rapid prototyping and play-testing (Figure 11.3). In this model, new prototypes are created quickly and tested as hypotheses in a laboratory as well as in real-world settings.

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Agile development was the only way we could progress: we were simply unable to define the final specification of our game without it. Yet this brought new challenges to the project: it disrupted the workflow, milestones and deliverables that had been planned in the rigid structure of the funding scheme. In order to keep the agile development going, we had to repeatedly ask for changes and amendments to the project plan, which was tiresome and time-consuming. Also, the move towards the agile development model fundamentally changed the structure and hierarchy of the team.

2. Build a diverse team with fluid roles In the initial phase of the project, we established an organizational structure and hired a team of various specialists. The structure resembled any other generic videogame development team, but with two significant differences: the strong presence of historians and educationalists (Figure 11.4). In total, we employed more than twenty-five people on a part-time basis. Since our project was based in academia, it was relatively easy to find historians, educationalists and programmers who were all either researchers (historians, educationalists) or students (game designers, programmers, testers). Yet we faced serious problems when we tried to recruit industry professionals and artists (such as illustrators, animators and musicians). Initially, either no one responded to our widely disseminated public calls for participation or we were not satisfied with the quality of the materials submitted. To resolve the situation, we hired professionals with social capital within the industry (for example, organizers of comics festivals) to disseminate our call personally. This step was of tremendous importance for the project: we suddenly had a number of high-quality proposals in all the previous problem areas. Most of the professionals told us later that they were dubious about a videogame project coming from what they perceived as ‘traditional’ academia and changed their mind only after professionals whose opinion they trusted recommended that they give it a try. The original idea was that only the core team – leaders of the different sub-teams, plus the game design consultant (a specialist from the game industry) – would draft a concept of the game in the design phase. We quickly realized that there were significantly different opinions among ‘our’ historians regarding which historical events should be included in the game and how these events should be presented to players. At the end of the day, all four historians took an active part in drafting the design. This significantly prolonged the (oftentimes heated) discussions, but helped to maintain the historical integrity of the game. When we entered the phase of agile development, the situation became more complicated. Unlike the hierarchical team structure devised for the formally rigid waterfall model, requirements and solutions in agile

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FIGURE 11.4  Team structure in the initial (above) and agile (below) development phases.

development evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional teams. Agile development demands adaptive planning, evolutionary design, early delivery and continuous improvement, and it encourages a rapid and flexible response to change.1 In this framework, the originally devised team hierarchy became to a large extent dysfunctional. Various team members started to acquire different roles in different building blocks of the game that were being developed and tested simultaneously. For example, a historian could be responsible for

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writing the dialogues pertaining to one in-game character, maintaining the overall coherence of a different character and drafting the main story in a completely different module at the same time. We had to break the original structure of teams and roles (historians, educationalists, scriptwriters, etc.) and start to operate in a fluid, projectoriented environment, where small teams emerged and were dissolved. A ‘project’ was typically a dialogue with one in-game character, for which historical research had to be carried out, a draft dialogue structure devised, final dialogue written, prototype-testing conducted, the draft re-written and tested again, and finally shot by the film crew and implemented in the game. In each phase of the cycle, we inserted a form of peer-review process, whereby typically a historian (or game designer) from a different ‘project’ served as a critic (Figure 11.4).

3. Involve critical stakeholders early on The overall objective of the educational version of the game was to present key events from Czechoslovakia’s contemporary history and to enable students to ‘experience’ these events from different actors’ perspectives. In doing so, the game should help students to develop a deeper understanding of the multifaceted political, social and cultural aspects of the presented time period. Together with our educationalists, we set concrete educational goals in the design phase for each planned scene of the game. The initial idea was that the detailed specification of each scene, such as writing the dialogue trees for particular interviews or the specification of individual mini-games, had to follow these educational goals. Simultaneously, we wrote a draft of the game’s educational methodology. Again, it very soon became clear that we were unable to finalize detailed educational goals and guidelines on how to use the game in a classroom without intensive play-testing of early prototypes directly in schools. We recruited five high-school history teachers (M=2, F=3) and gave them the first prototype of the game. This prototype was rudimentary and had only schematic graphics, but it contained all the elements planned for the final game. The teachers tested it in three to four lectures (of fortyfive minutes each) in their classrooms over a period of one month. We used qualitative and quantitative questionnaires from both teachers and students (and qualitative final reports from teachers) as research tools in order to analyse how the game was accepted in the classroom, how far it fulfilled its educational goals and which elements of the game they liked or disliked. The results were very positive, despite the fact that the game had been tested in a very rudimentary form. Both teachers and students positively

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evaluated the story of the game and the different perspectives on history it provides. Importantly, they accepted the game as an educational tool. Nevertheless, many teachers pointed out substantial problems both in the game’s structure and its educational methodology. When we analysed the teachers’ and students’ feedback, we realized we had to make several changes not only on the specification level (individual dialogue structures) but also on the design level (in-game characters, educational goals). We prepared a large-scale testing for every year of the project. Overall, we tested various prototypes of the game in thirty-four high schools over the course of three years. We recruited new teachers for each wave of testing, trying to get heterogeneous samples from different types of schools and different locations in the Czech Republic. The critical feedback from teachers was absolutely vital for the project; and particularly the teaching methodology could not have been completed without it. From a broader perspective, this approach is in line with the perception of history as ‘a shared cultural process spread across multiple forms, social domains, and stakeholders’ (Chapman, Foka and Westin 2017: 361), which should all be involved.

4. Be ready for slow development The project turned out to be far more demanding and the development much slower than we expected. This is a general problem with most videogame development projects, yet there are specific conditions pertaining to critical game development in academia. First, we hired a number of academics, who were only partially employed on the project and had their own careers and other commitments. None of us could afford to focus solely on this project. Second, the play-testing in schools that was vital for the project could happen only at a few specific times during the year. Teachers are generally not willing to test experimental methodology at the beginning of the school year or during final exams. Given that there is a two-month long summer holiday in the Czech Republic, the window for testing in schools was roughly from October to November and from February to April. Any changes or new features that were demanded by teachers as a result of testing had to be implemented in between these two testing windows; and retested again at the next one.

5. Secure public funding and institutional backing We would not have been able to finalize a project of the scale of Attentat 1942 without strong institutional backing and public funding. There

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are many mainstream videogames that hire professional historians as consultants. In our team, we had four historians and two educationalists who were ultimately not in the position of consultants but regular game designers and dialogue writers. The historical complexity of the game and its focus on detail and authenticity is a result of this inclusion of professional academics into the core team. This would not have been possible without Attentat 1942 being a university project, where people could juggle work for us with their other responsibilities. The institutional backing of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences helped us tremendously when negotiating with museums and other memory institutions. For the development of the game, we needed a vast amount of materials from archives (newspapers, photos, films, radio broadcasting, etc.). Many of these institutions would probably have had reservations about providing their material for a videogame about the Nazi occupation, given the lack of cultural capital of videogames in academia (Reichmuth and Werning 2006). The institutional backing provided muchneeded legitimacy for the project. By the same token, the willingness of teachers to sacrifice their classroom time to test a new experimental tool was closely linked to the cultural prestige of both of our institutions. We also made sure that the educational goals were set in accordance with the Framework Education Programme of the Czech Republic, which turned out to be vital (see also McCall 2011, Schrier 2014). Finally, although the revenue from the commercial version of the game has been invested into further development and dissemination of the project, the overall costs could by no means have been covered in this way. The public funding in the initial phase of the project was essential and it allowed us to carry through our vision without compromising it for the sake of profit.

6. Differentiate between reality and fiction In the beginning, our historians raised a number of important questions about the project. What genre are we creating? Is it a documentary, docudrama, or fiction? What level of historical authenticity are we striving for? How can we achieve it and communicate it to the players? As indicated earlier, in response to these questions we decided (a) not to allow players to replay (and thus possibly alter) the past; and (b) not to directly use real people’s testimonies, in order not to gamify their – oftentimes ethically and emotionally loaded – memories. The past in the game can be accessed only through dialogues with in-game characters, whose ‘memories’ are rendered as black-and-white comics. These characters and their stories are fictitious but based on real testimonies and historical research.

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In order to achieve this, we had to construct dialogues in the ‘present’ with each of the characters by transforming linear testimonies into a dialogue-tree structure that would allow players to choose the content as well as the tone of their inquiries. Usually, a single ‘real’ oral testimony did not cover all the topics that we wanted to provide players the opportunity to ask about. As a result, we typically combined several ‘real’ testimonies into one fictional character, while striving to maintain as much congruence between the different personal narratives as possible. The resulting characters and their stories could be labelled a ‘fictitious’ assemblage of authentic testimonies (Šisler 2016). In other words, the final result is constructed, creating a discrepancy between the ‘real’ and its representation (Šisler 2016). In Attentat 1942, we tried to approach this discrepancy in a meaningful way by emphasizing it, instead of obscuring it, through visually separating the ‘real’ materials from ‘constructed’ ones: When the in-game characters talk about general, well-documented events from the past, we provide players with film clips, newspapers, or radio broadcasts from the historical time period, which are related to that event. When the in-game characters talk about their personal ‘memories’ and/or show players personal objects from the past, their ‘memories’ are rendered as black-and-white comics and their personal objects as comic-style props. All these sources of information are equally open to the players’ critical reading and evaluation. The emphasized separation is further utilized in the methodological materials for teachers using the game in schools, where the ‘constructedness’ of the comic-style props is used as an invitation to think critically about the authored nature of all historical materials, including the ‘authentic’ film clips that are deliberately selected and presented to the players. (Šisler 2016) In this way, Attentat 1942 differentiates between historical reality and fiction, particularly when used in a classroom. This differentiation is generally praised by students and teachers alike (Šisler et al. 2014). More importantly, it allowed our historians a framework within which they could create fictitious, yet historically authentic, characters and stories.

7. Focus on well-documented events Oftentimes, our game designers proposed an idea that was then resolutely vetoed by historians. On many occasions, this was because of what they perceived as historical inaccuracy or schematization. Yet sometimes it was because the historians knew they would not be able to find archival materials

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and testimonies documenting the proposed events or characters. In several cases, they told us they were simply not able to find enough historical sources to defend the decisions they would have to make when constructing the characters or describing the events. In other cases, the events were well documented, yet the historians were unable to find corresponding visual materials. The work of a historian focuses mainly on written text: most of the historical sources they work with are written and most of their scholarly output is written too. Yet in our game we were asking them to provide us with not only descriptions of events but also very detailed visual materials (photos, films, uniforms, personal documents, etc.) that we needed as sources for the graphic novel segments, mini-games and so on. As all the historians told us, finding these materials in archives was far more demanding and time-consuming than they had originally expected, and in many cases, they were unable to find any authentic materials at all. Therefore, during the development process, we had to accommodate our design decisions not only to the main story, educational goals and results of play-testing but also to the availability of archival materials documenting certain historical events. In some cases, already created visual assets had to be redone, when more historically accurate evidence emerged.

8. Allow for dissenting opinion and critique For several events covered in Attentat 1942, there are significantly different narratives and evaluations among historians, politicians and the general public (for example, the assassination of Heydrich and its consequences for the Czech nation, the expulsion of German-speaking citizens from Czechoslovakia, the treatment of the Romani population during and after the Second World War, and so on). These events still resonate in the Czech public sphere and continue to influence the political scene. Since we wanted to include all these events in our game, we had to decide how to represent them and, more importantly, through which particular characters and lenses. We had many heated debates among our historians, educationalists and game designers about what to include and how to represent it. As described in the agile development section above, we integrated an internal peer-review procedure into the development process. For every character interview, mini-game, comic, or encyclopaedia entry, there was an author and a reviewer. Moreover, most of the key decisions were made by a consensus. Furthermore, where some historians felt that a certain perspective was overemphasized, we gave them an opportunity to balance it with a different perspective told through the lens of another character. The system of approvals and peer-review significantly prolonged the development, but

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arguably increased the game’s overall integrity and coherence (Šisler 2016; see also McCall 2011, Schrier 2014).

9. Define your audience We faced a number of challenges and delays during the development of Attentat 1942, stemming from accommodating to different audiences. Initially, the game was developed as an educational tool for Czech high schools, designed in every detail to be used in a classroom. The game was played by a teacher using a projector, with the students actively taking part in the decisions about what to do in the game. The game play was segmented into several model lessons, each consisting of approximately twenty-five minutes of gameplay and twenty minutes of discussion and pen-and-paper– based tasks. This segmentation follows the established educational practice in the Czech Republic and greatly eased the acceptance of the game as an educational tool by teachers (Šisler et al. 2014). Simultaneously, the first (educational) version of the game was slower, had longer dialogues, and contained more factual information and less game play elements than commercial games. When we decided to release the game to the general public, we had to reshape its content significantly. We streamlined the dialogues, added more mini-games and game mechanics, enhanced the graphics and user interface, and added several new scenes important for the main storyline yet unrelated to educational goals. In many instances, we had to change the fundamental structure of the game significantly, which caused many problems (mainly in scripting and testing). In retrospect, it would have been easier not to reshape the existing version but to build a new game from scratch, using the assets available. We faced a problem with audiences again when we decided to translate the game into English and release it on Steam. The original game was heavily contextual and did not explain many of the concepts and events that are generally well known to a Czech audience. Instead of a mere translation, we had to rewrite most of the text and add historical and social scaffolding for a global audience.

10. Adopt tools for rapid prototyping As described earlier, we adopted an agile development model and rapid prototyping. In order to be able to swiftly produce and test game prototypes, we developed an editor, called StoryBuilder: an online collaborative integrated development environment oriented to script-programmers. The tool enabled script-programmers to construct individual modules, blocks,

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and scenes of the game largely without the need of input from programmers. StoryBuilder itself was first developed as a simple prototype, enabling the creation of a textual version of the game only. While the script-programmers were working on the first text prototype of the game, programmers were adding new functionalities to the editor on an ongoing basis. Importantly, we separated game content data from the engine, exploiting the benefits of data-driven software architecture (Šisler et al. 2012). StoryBuilder structured game content data in the same way as designers and historians did when they specified the scenarios, i.e. into Hierarchical Finite State Machines (HFSMs) made of dialogue trees that capture dialogue possibilities for individual in-game characters. StoryBuilder was also an online collaborative editor, enabling programmers, script-programmers, game designers, testers, and (in theory) historians and educationalists to work on the same game scenes simultaneously, which proved vital given that most of the time the team did not share a single location.

11. Prepare for your technology to be outdated At the beginning of the project, we chose the Adobe Flash platform as the technology for our editor. At that time, it was the only platform that was able to play the videos we needed for the video interviews at the quality we required. During the development of the editor, Adobe announced that it would no longer support the Flash platform. As a result of a long development period, by the time we finished the game the editor was already outdated and did not work in several configurations. We faced a number of increasingly difficult problems every time we wanted to fix a bug or add a new language to our game. For our new project, we recreated our own editor in Unity, which was a costly but probably inevitable decision. The problem with middle-ware technology becoming outdated in projects that span for more than a few years is very real and there is no easy solution to it. Be ready to potentially be forced to change technology during the project. Data-driven architecture is one possible solution that makes the transition less costly, but costly nevertheless.

12. Dream big When we started working on Attentat 1942 in 2011, we thought about it primarily as an educational tool for Czech high schools. None of us would have bet that our game would be translated to English, released on Steam and nominated for an award at the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. Yet, we dreamed about it. And prepared the way for it. For example, when negotiating contracts for using various archival materials,

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we could have obtained much better terms if we had stipulated that we would use the materials only for educational purposes and only in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, we made sure in every contract that we could use the materials worldwide and for commercial purposes as well. We always kept this dream – even at times when everything went wrong, we were burnt out and it seemed the project would collapse.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have critically discussed the design and development process of the critical war game Attentat 1942. In doing so, I have tried to transparently and self-reflexively describe the challenges we faced in developing our game, taking into account institutional, historical and technological perspectives. By no means could our experience be translated into a general, overarching framework, since it is clearly anecdotal and focuses on one particular game in specific knowledge domains (contemporary history education, civilian perspectives and trauma of war). Yet the agile model of development and the research-based design approach we adopted, together with the fluid workflow and roles we set, could be viable for other critical war game projects. As Flanagan (2009: 252) points out, game designers follow an overall scheme of investigation or research, creating processes to address specific concerns and ideas. In return, the creation of rules of operation – and the constraints this entails – provokes ‘innovation in both the designer’s process and the player’s role’. Fundamental constraints of critical war game development are related to the tensions between the affordances of the videogame medium and forms of historical representation. As Robert Rosenstone (2006: 159) puts it, each media form represents the past according to its own ‘rules of engagement’. Like all historical forms before them, videogames ‘undoubtedly introduce new possibilities, but they also introduce new limitations’ (Chapman, Foka and Westin 2017: 367). Simultaneously, history in games is subject to new formal and cultural pressures (Chapman 2016), including those related to the status of videogames as ‘neglected media’ in academia (Reichmuth and Werning 2006). As is the case with any representation of the past, games can indeed embed a number of biases and oversimplifications (McCall 2011). According to Schrier (2014: 87), ‘No piece of media, whether a game or a different medium, can fully represent history and all of its complexity’. Or as Uricchio (2005: 331) puts it, ‘no imaginable set of “historical” representations can do justice to the fullness of “history” as past’. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to understand the values and biases embedded in videogames and their design, particularly when related to the representation of conflict and war.

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At the same time, paraphrasing Rosenstone (2006: 6), we believe that the historical videogame ‘doesn’t do away with the old forms of history – it adds to the language in which the past can speak’. If we take play as an integral part of mental development and learning, then ‘playful activities are essential aspects of learning and creative acts’ (Flanagan 2009: 4). Critical war games, when successfully designed and implemented, can help players understand motivations, actions and consequences; explore multiple and different perspectives; and promote critical historical thinking and historical empathy.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the development team behind Attentat 1942, namely Richard Alexander, Jakub Gemrot, David Vávra, Lukáš Kolek, Ondřej Paška, Jana Valečková, Petr Novák, Jaroslav Cuhra, Marie Černá, Jiří Hoppe, Stanislav Kokoška, Kamil Činátl, Jaroslav Pinkas, Brady Clough, Shawn Clybor, Cyril Brom, Tomáš Vlček, Matěj Beran, Tereza Selmbacherová and others. The development of Attentat 1942 was supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic. This study was further supported by the Charles University’s projects PRIMUS/ HUM/03, Progress Q15 and the European Regional Development FundProject ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

References Ashby, R. and P. Lee (1987) Children’s Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History, in C. Portal (ed.) The History Curriculum for Teachers. London: Falmer. Atkins, B. (2005) History Is Bunk? Historiographic Barbarism in Civilization [preprint, original English-language draft], published as Atkins, B. (2005) La Storia èun’Assurdità: Civilization Come Esempio di Barbarie Storiografica? in M. Bittanti (ed.) Civilization. Storie Virtuali, Fantasie Reali. Milan: Costa and Nolan. Avila-Pesántez, D., L. R. Escriba and M. S. A. Taipe (2017) Approaches for Serious Game Design: A Systematic Literature Review, Computers in Education Journal, 8(3). Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bond, J. G. (2015) Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.

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Campbell, J. (2008) Just Less than Total War: Simulating World War II as Ludic Nostalgia, in Z. Whalen and L. N. Taylor (eds) Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Chapman, A. (2013) Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History? Rethinking History, 17(3): 312–32. Chapman, A. (2016) Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Chapman, A., A. Foka and J. Westin (2017) Introduction: What Is Historical Game Studies? Rethinking History, 21(3): 358–71. Couture, J. (2017) Attentat 1942 Developers Tell the Emotional Impact of Capturing Stories of WWII Survivors, Siliconera, 7 August, www.siliconera. com/2017/08/07/attentat-1942-developers-tell-emotional-impact-capturingstories-wwii-survivors/#y2lPk1HkxpzW02PU.99 (accessed 24 March 2019). de Smale, S., M. J. L. Kors and A. M. Sandovar (2017) The Case of This War of Mine: A Production Studies Perspective on Moral Game Design, Games and Culture, 14(4), 387–409. DOI: 10.1177/1555412017725996. Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halter, E. (2006) From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press. McCall, J. B. (2011) Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. New York, NY: Routledge. Novak, J. (2011) Game Development Essentials: An Introduction. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning. Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York, NY: Norton. Pötzsch, H. (2017) Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters, Games & Culture, 12(2): 156–78. Pötzsch, H. and V. Šisler (2016) Playing Cultural Memory: Framing History in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination, Games and Culture, 14(1): 3–25. Reichmuth, P. and S. Werning (2006) Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns, ISIM Review, 18 (autumn): 46–7. Rosenstone, R. A. (2006) History on Film/Film on History. Harlow: Pearson Education. Schreier, J. (2017) Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. New York, NY: Harper Paperbacks. Schrier, K. (2014) Using Digital Games to Teach History and Historical Thinking, in K. Schrier (ed.) Learning, Education and Games: Volume One: Curricular and Design Considerations. Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Schrier, K. and Channel 13 (2009) The Research-Informed Game Design Approach to Mission US. Unpublished whitepaper. Schrier, K., J. Diamond and D. Langendoen (2010) Using Mission US: For Crown or Colony? to Develop Historical Empathy and Nurture Ethical Thinking, in K. Schrier and D. Gibson (eds) Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Šisler, V. (2016) Contested Memories of War in Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination: Designing a Serious Game on Contemporary History, Game

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Studies, 16(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/sisler (accessed 15 August 2018). Šisler, V., C. Brom, J. Cuhra, K. Činátl and J. Gemrot (2012) Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia, A Serious Game for Teaching History of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century – Notes on Design Concepts and Design Process, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7522: 67–74. Šisler, V., T. Selmbacherová, J. Pinkas and C. Brom (2014) Teaching Contemporary History to High School Students: The Augmented Learning Environment of Czechoslovakia 38–89, Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology, 8: 99–122. Uricchio, W. (2005) Simulation, History, and Computer Games, in J. Raessens and J. Goldstein (eds) Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Whitton, N. (2009) Learning with Digital Games: A Practical Guide to Engaging Students in Higher Education. New York, NY: Routledge.

12 Simulating War Dynamics: A Case Study of the Game-Based Learning Exercise Mission Z: One Last Chance Joakim Arnøy There is a long tradition of using games and simulation exercises as learning tools. For instance, Prussia used the game Kriegsspiel from 1812 to give military officers a safe way to get an overview of the theatre of war and allow them to test the consequences of possible military actions (Von Hilgers 2000, Lischka 2009). Since the 1970s, the Council of Europe has promoted non-formal learning methods, including game-based exercises and simulations, as a means of human rights education (Chisholm and Hoskins 2005). According to Patricia Brander et al. (2015: 32–3), nonformal education (NFE) constitutes a holistic means of learning, in that it involves cognitive, practical and attitudinal dimensions; it is open-ended, meaning that a variety of answers are invited to all questions; and learners are encouraged to identify, clarify and express their own conclusions with regards to values and beliefs. The game-based learning exercise Mission Z: One Last Chance (henceforth Mission Z) is an example of NFE that seeks to encourage reflection on war and the dynamics that may lead to war. This chapter offers a developer’s perspective on why and how the exercise was developed.1 This perspective includes an account of the mechanics of the exercise and the developers’ intentions for its design. Part of the idea behind Mission Z was to have a relatively short route from introducing the topic, to critical and potentially transformative reflection and learning. To that end, a number of mechanics and manipulative traits are built into the exercise: this chapter will critically discuss these mechanics

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and whether they have to be peaceful and visibly constructive for Mission Z to be an anti-war exercise. Mission Z is an analogue exercise, and this chapter complements work on digital educational games (see Šisler, Chapter 11 in this volume), offering a different route of inquiry into the relationship between war, learning about war and the playing subject.

Designing Mission Z: One Last Chance Mission Z was developed within the context of European youth work, in which NFE is the main method. Whereas formal education takes place in a distinct and institutionalized environment, such as schools, NFE can be found in a diverse range of places and situations (Chisholm and Hoskins 2005). In formal education, the learning goals are mostly externally set, learning progress is monitored and assessed, and learning outcomes are recognized by a diploma or certificate. NFE, on the other hand, is semistructured. There is a stated goal to learn and the activities and learning objectives are planned, but the learning goals are normally formulated by the learners themselves (Brander et al. 2015: 31–3). Active participation and voluntariness are emphasized, and participants are meant to have a say in all aspects of how to learn about a topic, including the learning objective itself. In Europe, NFE has a key role in promoting civil society and human rights education (Du Bois-Reymond 2003, Brander et al. 2015) and in encouraging intercultural learning, including through the youth programmes of the European Commission (Lafraya 2011). The project group that developed Mission Z consisted of organizations from ten European countries, who perceived a need for better practical tools with which to address conflict and reflect about conflict management for young people. Young people in this context are defined as being from 13 to 30 years old.2 Given the funding available, the competence of the project group, the intended target group of the exercise, as well as the objectives of the project as a whole, the exercise had to be analogue.3 The method of choice was a game-based exercise, which would fit into the kinds of educational programmes the organizations work with. The concrete aim of Mission Z was to create an immersive learning exercise that would help raise awareness of obstacles to cooperation and peaceful relations. Whereas Kriegsspiel was meant to help hypothesize around and plan military conflict and to train for war (Brynen and Milante 2013), Mission Z was made to help reflect on how difficult it can be to create a constructive outcome when the scales seem to be tipped against you. The exercise was made explicitly for reflection and learning, and draws on mechanisms from games and simulations. This format was chosen due to the experience of the people who developed the exercise, and to draw the

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participants in by giving them a feeling of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Instructional games, just like recreational games, aim to create flow, but also need to create links between the learners and the material the game is trying to relay learning about (Jacobs and Dempsey 1993, Hays 2005), making the learner interact with the material in a meaningful way. Mission Z seeks to train its participants and enhance learning about the dynamics of a scenario in which there is a perceived shortage of resources, vested interests on the part of key actors and secrecy. However, the aim is to reflect about how to find alternatives. There is much literature to support the learning effectiveness of such immersive experiences. In general, learning is found to work best when it is active, goal-oriented, contextualized, interactive and attention-grabbing (Shute, Rieber and Van Eck 2011). Games played in larger groups are also found to be effective for learning (Wouters et al. 2013). If a game is experienced as fun or enjoyable, studies have found, there is a positive relation to learning performance (Giannikos 2013, Brom et al. 2016). Flow, understood as a state of total involvement experienced in an autotelic activity, such as a game (Csikszentmihalyi 1975), has also been shown to correlate positively with learning (Sabourin and Lester 2014). Cyril Brom et al. (2016) have the same finding, although they limit the applicability of their findings to the particular games in their study. Furthermore, flow, as manifested by an emotional experience, normally leads to greater retention of memories from that experience (Reisberg 2006). It is also found that participants in simulation games learned more when the simulation was a more active experience, and even more when the simulation was supplemented by other means of instruction (Sitzmann 2011). The project group behind Mission Z is reluctant to call it a game, preferring the term ‘game-based learning exercise’. However, with its set-up and presentation to its participants it closely resembles a game, including in terms of the curiosity this form may excite in participants. According to Philip Sabin (2012), games provide changing dynamics based on player choices and their simulated outcomes. And for participants to face various dilemmas first hand as actors, rather than just reading or theorizing about them, holds great educational potential (Sabin 2012: 31). The learning potential of games and simulations includes enabling participants to get a better sense of dynamic relationships and complex environments, as well as how mistakes can occur in such a setting (Brynen and Milante 2013). The participants get to make those mistakes themselves, thus cementing them to memory. With the many mechanisms built into Mission Z which lead the way towards in-game conflict rather than cooperation, the participants are stimulated to become more aware of the many hidden forces and influences around us which may play a part in leading us towards violent conflict and war. Mission Z lets participants interpret the narrative of the exercise in their own way, and they are positioned and enabled to act out the scenario

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according to their own interpretation. The approach has some similarity to the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal 2000), in which participants become spect-actors able to change key settings and break the structure of the narrative. Such a feature is enabled for some computer war games: for example, as Holger Pötzsch argues in Chapter 13 of this volume, the modding centre in This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014) can enable debate and discussion around war dynamics among players. For an analogue exercise like Mission Z, this form of discussion around the formal frames of the game and the forces, influences, choices and consequences it presents, are part of its rationale, and are a possible advantage of an analogue and non-commercial set-up.

The Exercise Mission Z consists of one central map of the fictive world in which the scenario takes place. The exercise builds around the narrative that humans have overexploited the earth and, as a consequence, have had to leave the planet. The participants, split into five groups, are the selected vanguard of their nations, sent to Planet Z to build their new nations there. The groups – or nations – are each characterized by different colours. The objective is to settle and thus occupy land on the map by means of territory pieces of their colour in a rounds-based exercise (Figure 12.1). Mission Z is facilitated. The role of the facilitator is to introduce the participants to the narrative of the exercise and explain the rules. The facilitator should not limit or steer what participants may do. Instead, after

FIGURE 12.1 The Mission Z central map, two rounds in, with a number of territory pieces played. Image taken by the author during a training event in Israel, June 2016.

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the introduction, the facilitator’s role is reduced to keeping track of time and structure. Each group of players is guided by a mission, given to them at the outset, and marked ‘secret’. The missions of the groups are compatible, meaning that all five missions can be achieved, and no one is instructed, in any way, to compete with each other. However, the narrative and frame of the exercise gives the impression from the start that the groups are competing with each other in a winnertakes-all setting. For example, we need only look at a classic strategy board game like Risk to see that once a secret mission card is involved, participants will distrust each other and continuously assess their own situation based on what other participants do. Mission Z runs over five rounds, with each round consisting of two parts: Strategy Time and Action Time. During Strategy Time, which is common for everyone, groups can plan ahead and decide on long- or short-term courses of action. Here, the different groups need to exchange one territory card for territory pieces from the facilitator’s control centre. Having to approach one common control centre is a mechanism that aims to heighten tension by making a key part of each group’s plans transparent for all. No moves are made on the central map during Strategy Time. When Strategy Time is up, the facilitator initiates Action Time. During this phase, each group in turn places their territory pieces onto the central map. There are no restrictions on movement in the room, as long as the acting group is not hindered from performing its tasks. Territory pieces are placed onto the central map, on squares adjacent to space the group already occupies, so that a group’s area expands as they wish from round to round. A given square always belongs to the group whose territory piece is on top. Already occupied squares can simply be taken over unless they are protected by walls, which must be circumvented entirely, forcing movement in a different direction. All groups have a selection of action cards, which can be used to cause or influence events on the central map. These include weaponry, but also nonviolent alternatives such as acts of diplomacy, exchange and cooperation. The use of these is optional, but groups who wish can play action cards in every round. Any action cards played are read out loud by the facilitator and implemented during the Action Time. Other mechanics in the exercise that influence participants’ expectations include background music that is played to increase tension, time limits, information overload combined with perceived information imbalances, physical placement of the groups’ stations in the room, and newsflashes formed and named as newspapers, containing requests and speculations made by editors, commentators, or reporters. The newsflashes deliberately beat the war drums, often inciting aggressive conduct. As the rounds go by, the facilitator becomes an observer, gathering information on the exercise that can form the basis for later debriefing with

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FIGURE 12.2  One of the group’s tables at the start. Image taken by the author at Narvik War Museum, October 2018.

FIGURE 12.3  One possible set-up of the room, with physical obstacles here and there. Image taken by the author during a training event in Portugal, October 2016.

participants. The facilitator may opt to peel away some of the layers of the exercise, such as changing the music into something more peaceful, or simply lowering the volume of the background music. S/he may also subtly ask the groups to consider whether their current paths and strategies are working. After five rounds the exercise ends and moves on to the structured debrief, during which possible outcomes are connected and reflected upon.

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A Sample Session Mission Z is a concept and an exercise that was developed in spurts. From the start the project group had clear ideas of what Mission Z could bring in terms of learning outcomes, but the requirements of the project were such that early prototyping with improvised materials added a lot of new insights. We adopted an agile development model, whereby design, specification, implementation and evaluation took place in parallel, or in repeated cycles. We collected feedback, which helped us streamline the introduction and rules of Mission Z, and input on which topics could be included in the debriefing. Continuous improvement is part of this development model, and Mission Z is an exercise that is still being developed based on feedback and play experiences. Indeed, this chapter could be considered part of that development. For the reader to get a fuller picture of what I see when observing or facilitating the exercise, this section describes the key events of a particular session of Mission Z, coupled with some reflections on potential learning outcomes. The description that follows is of a qualitative nature, using a method of direct participant observation without any particular format. The methodology is flexible in form, and generally focuses on detailed description of the phenomenon being studied (Jorgensen 1989: 23). When observing the session, I was particularly interested in seeing the balance between aggressive actions and more cooperative alternatives, and how participants justify how they proceeded. The session description is followed by a section with some general reflections on some typical events of a Mission Z session. A few concrete comments by former participants are included, based on written feedback collected after some sessions (the end notes list the nationality of the participant, and time and place of the session in question). I have opted to describe this particular session – of 15 November 2017 – because it was, in many ways, an ideal facilitation of Mission Z. For five days, members of the project group organized a training course for twentythree youth workers from eleven European countries. The training course, called ‘One last chance – conflict resolution training’, had Mission Z built in as a key component of the programme. The participants had been working with the topic before Mission Z, and had, as groups, created their own nation with their desired form of governance. The possibility of providing relevant input during the sessions beforehand, as well as having ample time for follow-up with the participants, made this an ideal version in many ways. The session’s main points are described round by round.

Round 1 The groups entered the room and found their places. The facilitator introduced the narrative, explained how the exercise works and the gameplay began.

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For the first round everyone stayed within their groups, reading their action cards and discussing how to move forward. However, in Action Time all groups opted for aggressive strategies on the central map. Most groups took territory from each other, and several walls were set up to block others off.

Round 2 More movement occurred around the room and cautious attempts to form alliances were made. There were many questions to the facilitator regarding what exactly the rules are and how they are implemented, and participants scrutinized the moves and actions of other groups. Some groups started wandering around trying to gauge the strength of the other groups. One faction assumed that they were stronger than all the other groups; that the exercise was or could be tipped in their favour. Others acted more introvertly, focusing mostly on their own strategies and capabilities. The nation located closest to the speakers pulled its entire station farther away, presumably distracted by music and sound.

Round 3 At this point of the exercise, the newsflashes started to have an impact, with questions posed to the facilitator about how exactly they work and can be implemented. The level of engagement was very high, and participants were geared towards ‘winning’ by capturing the most territory on the central map. As a consequence, the weaker groups lost ground and had their attempts at dialogue with other groups rebuffed.

Round 4 Some participants started the round looking a bit deflated. A few began looking at their phones. But the newsflashes renewed their engagement, and discussions in the groups abounded once again. Some were walking around trying to strike deals with other groups. During the Action Time one peace agreement previously struck between two groups was broken, leading to accusations of treachery.

Round 5 The facilitator changed the music and replaced the war-like tunes with soft music at a comfortable volume. The groups were discussing loudly. One

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of the groups deployed the most powerful action card, which is also the most destructive: the nuclear bomb. The action was implemented on the central map by the facilitator, and the participants of the perpetrating group immediately reacted with notable embarrassment.

Debriefing The example session had a high level of engagement and much interaction between participants. During the debriefing many participants said they had started thinking strategically as soon as they saw the set-up of the exercise; that they felt a need to take as much land on the central map as possible while it was still available. Many said they felt very tense and some felt confused. Others said the outcome seemed predictable, and that they did not trust other participants when they came to talk to them. One said they continued to act strongly throughout, whereas another said that when the initial strategy did not come off, they let the exercise run its course, sat back and observed the dynamics more closely.

Some General Reflections on the Gameplay Without exception so far, every session of Mission Z has generated comparable behaviour by participants, regardless of age or background. This has been a relevant observation for the designers, and one we rely on. Designing an exercise to have a game-like appearance invites and encourages a ludic attitude from participants (Brom et al. 2016). Judging from our observations, this applies to most participants in Mission Z. Despite the strong introduction of a narrative about the fictional world of Planet Z and it being our last chance to get things right, this ludic attitude takes over. In the early rounds of the exercise, groups typically act as though they can control the outcome of the scenario by themselves. By the end, most participants realize that not everything is as clear as it seemed in the beginning, and that they have largely followed a conventional path of a winner-takes-all scenario. Some previous participants have pointed out that Mission Z seems to portray a realist scenario of international relations. Realist theory holds that entities, most often states, struggle for resources and power to satisfy their own interests and no communal solutions are possible – one party’s gain inevitably becomes perceived as another’s loss (see, for example, Donnelly 2000 for the basics of realism). One participant in a previous session of the exercise said: ‘I really expected us participants to find alternative solutions to many problems, but instead we did what we are used to doing – the

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easiest option’.4 For all groups to achieve their objectives in concert would require someone to break the structures of the exercise and act contrary to the conventional expectations in the given setting. The project group’s aim was that this very conscientization would be the main outcome for participants of Mission Z. In the session described above, the group changing the physical set-up of the room is one such – albeit, as it turned out, insignificant – example. Sometimes there are participants who feel that everything they try to do is hopeless, and that they want the exercise to end after a few rounds. The project group has considered shortening the exercise but has opted to keep it as long as it is in order to retain this effect of frustration. Frustration is a powerful emotion, and as Daniel Reisberg (2006) has noted, an emotional engagement may help to reinforce memory. This point made by one former participant elaborates how frustration may pan out in Mission Z: ‘At one point I raised my hands and told my group to do whatever they wanted, because I didn’t want to be part of it. At the same time, I did not oppose what they were doing as I felt powerless to change the “rules of the game”’.5 In most sessions of Mission Z, a ludic attitude and desire to win trumps a more careful and considered approach. There are very clear military connotations to many of the mechanisms of Mission Z, so it is hardly surprising that participants act this way, being used to combat-centred games (see Nicolaidou, Chapter 10 in this volume). Maintaining this conventional frame throughout the exercise is aimed at increasing the effect of seeing one’s own actions laid out on the central map as they are. One participant has said: ‘We are introduced to what is called “one last chance”, and then someone uses a nuclear weapon. That broke my heart’.6 This reaction highlights the main point of the exercise: namely, to increase awareness of the many mechanisms that may lead participants into acting aggressively as opposed to diplomatically. The learning value of Mission Z is brought together during the debriefing. In any educational programme or session of NFE it is important to refer back to the events of an exercise, as the learning of the participants is elevated by the reflections and views raised during this time (Jakube et al. 2016). Without a thorough and structured debriefing, it becomes random what the participants take away from the session, or if they achieve any learning outcomes at all. As Robert Hays (2005) argues, a good debrief requires attentive facilitation and observation, linking the experience to the learning objectives of the exercise. As a starting point, our debriefings allow for a recounting of personal impressions and feelings, observations to recap what has happened, and a generalization of the outcomes of the exercise which can provide some direction towards the application of the learning outcomes in real life. The concrete questions of the debriefing are adjusted to the past play session and the receptiveness of the group of participants, but the questions

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below were formulated to help guide the debriefing, and provide an initial structure:7 1. Feelings a. How did you feel during the exercise? 2. Observations and happenings a. What happened during the exercise? b. What strategies did you use during the exercise to reach your group’s goals? c. If you could participate in the exercise again, would you change anything about how you proceeded? If yes, what, and for what reasons? 3. Implications and generalizations a. What was the exercise about? b. Did you notice any situations that bear resemblance to real-life situations? c. What can we learn from this exercise? Game-based exercises are story-living experiences in which participants can learn how to make better decisions by experiencing and reflecting on their behaviour, and then try again (Perla and McGrady 2011). Being immersed in a story, observing and feeling the consequences of their actions, has the potential to touch the participants and transform their thinking. The real world does not offer this opportunity so freely, or in some cases not at all. Participants have to bear the consequences of what they do in a game. That makes it more powerful than having the same story presented through literature or video. As one participant has said: ‘[Mission Z] contains elements connected with real life that I appreciated. Learning by playing, both about the situations in our world and about ourselves and how we relate to them. It can help learning that each person has a responsibility in the community’.8 A common framework for analyzing NFE exercises is the experiential learning cycle. This model, outlined by David Kolb (1984), consists of four steps: (i) Concrete experience, where the learner is involved in, and doing the activity; (ii) Observation and reflection, where the learner consciously reflects back to the experience; (iii) Abstract conceptualization, where the learner attempts to generalize the learning outcomes to form a theory or model of behaviour; (iv) Active experimentation, where the learner decides how to implement the new theory or model in a forthcoming experience. The steps of the experiential learning cycle provide some insight into the attempted learning process of Mission Z. The exercise is a new experience for participants, in which they are actively involved. Following the second step of the cycle, participants get to observe the consequences of their actions, both during the gameplay and during the debriefing. This entails reflecting

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on what, how and why something has happened. These observations are shared among the whole group during the debriefing – as described above – by focusing the participants’ attention on the different events that took place and the influences to which they were subjected. The debriefing also integrates the need to concretise learning points that can be generalized for use in the real world, by generating reflection on what the exercise was really about, and what can be learned from it that resonates also in real life. This constitutes the abstract conceptualization described in the experiential learning cycle’s third step. The fourth and last step of the experiential learning cycle is active experimentation. This is where the learner tries to apply their new learning to the world around them. For Mission Z, this would be the transformation of a participant’s thinking, or the more critical approach to situations that may resemble the experience the participant has had during this exercise. The experiential learning cycle is a continuous one and may, for some participants, happen more than once during one session as they try something in the gameplay, fail, reflect on it, learn from it and try to apply a new solution right away.

Pulling the Strings: A Discussion of Manipulation Young people in Europe are – mostly – brought up at a continent’s or generation’s distance from violent conflict, with all of the dilemmas and challenges that can produce. When using examples of violence and cruelty from a historic or contemporary war – for example the Second World War – young people often ask the question: ‘How could people do such things to other people?’ Without proper context it is near impossible to understand such issues. As David Crookall (2013) asserts, people act according to what they perceive to be their best interest, including in situations of violence and war. And a game-based exercise like Mission Z is one means to show some of the dynamics that may lead someone into acting a certain way. This is why the exercise contains manipulative cues and mechanisms. This manipulation is there to raise the participants’ awareness of influences and subtle forms of manipulation that impact individuals and groups in the real world. Mechanisms like the secret missions, time limitation and information overload, the media’s role, and the conduct of the facilitator contribute towards this. There are two main reasons for this: First, the exercise aims to get participants into a state of flow and get emotionally involved. Second, influencing participants into acting against their own convictions and societal values can help them reflect about their way of thinking and what conventions from their own lives make them act in a certain way.

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When reaching a state of flow, one action tends to follow another automatically or subconsciously (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). With the game mechanics of Mission Z, participants often enter a mode of competition. It is inconclusive whether mild forms of competition correlate positively to learning or not, as information on simulations and game-based exercises is scarce (Brom et al. 2016). But despite getting into a ludic state of mind, when realizing how they have acted and perhaps where they may have erred, the project group’s observations indicate that participants experience a powerful realization that stimulates constructive reflection. During Mission Z many participants feel excitement, or even elation. Others feel considerable frustration. These emotions are often real for the participants who are fully invested into the exercise. To be a powerful learning tool, an exercise has to be direct and personally engaging, and stimulate critical reflection in the participant during and after the experience (Taylor 2007). The debriefing phase connects all these dots, and helps participants generalize how such processes of behaviour happen in other fields in the real world, such as politics, school, or culture. Learning by trial and error is not conclusive, but there are many studies suggesting that it works (Akbar 2003). Mistakes are important opportunities for understanding and incorporating new ideas and thought patterns (Tjosvold, Zi-you and Hui 2004). This also applies to the experiential learning cycle (see Kolb 1984), whereby participants capitalize on a concrete experience to increase their awareness of what happened, and form new concepts or ideas to implement during the next iteration of a similar setting. Mission Z attempts to challenge participants’ assumptions and make it hard to reach firm interpretations. This is in keeping with Edward Taylor’s (2007) idea that a disorienting scenario, or dilemma even, can inspire change in someone’s mindset. Also, as Jack Mezerow (1997) argues, information is secondary: it is the experience itself and the critical reflectivity afterwards that creates learning. One participant has said about Mission Z: ‘With the world nowadays struggling with different conflicts, it is a great tool to discuss the topic and try to understand why such terrible things are happening’.9 Reflection, in the form of the debriefing, is the way to link and integrate the experiences of the learning activity with concepts and applications that can be transferred to a setting outside of the learning exercise itself (Dennehy, Sims and Collins 1998). Some of the manipulative mechanisms in Mission Z are controlled by the facilitator. These include the physical set-up of the room, loud music played to make it more challenging to start dialogues, and newsflashes, which are a (perhaps overly critical) rendering of the media’s role in macro-scale conflict. Other cues are kinaesthetic, meaning things that the participants create and influence themselves (Perla and McGrady 2011). This also includes the narrative they create within their own group, or by and for themselves. One example is the action cards, one of which is a nuclear bomb. These

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actions are optional to use, but when the pressure is on, some participants may feel compelled to consider it an accepted in-game strategy. As Dimitra Nicolaidou (Chapter 10 in this volume) observes, the development and evolution of tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) was inspired by military simulations and therefore tends to take on a combat-centric narrative, even if that was not the intention of the designer. If there are secondary narrative elements, however subtle, these will often drive the players towards a mode of combat. The many cues and mechanisms of Mission Z lure most participants into combat-mode right away. But even the presence of more sceptical participants usually does not stem the combat-centric narrative the group as a whole produces. One participant has said of the experience: ‘I felt very manipulated. Almost like a prison experiment in terms of the atmosphere. It made me wonder whether you can actually end up inspiring conflict with a manipulative game’.10 During the gameplay of Mission Z we are indeed inspiring conflict, trying to show dynamics that may induce destructive behaviour. But this is to raise awareness of modes of thinking that we can observe around us in society – including popular culture such as games, whether TRPGs or digital. In other words, it is in keeping with the designers’ aims for the exercise. As one of the designers of Mission Z, I have facilitated around sixty sessions of the exercise at the time of writing. Participants have included school pupils as young as fifteen years of age, teachers, youth workers and youth work trainers of ages from eighteen to sixty. The groups have been either Norwegian, in the case of school classes, or a mix of several nationalities in cases of exchange-oriented youth projects. The exercise has always run and ended similarly. Most participants have enjoyed the gameplay a great deal, and some have not. But our observations are consistent with the feedback we have received from participants: that even most of those who did not particularly enjoy the gameplay, have nevertheless taken something of value from the debriefing, and thus the process of Mission Z.

Conclusions This chapter has shown a different way of learning about war, games and the playing subject, through the analogue game-based learning exercise Mission Z. The exercise was developed to fit the framework of European youth work and its main vessel, non-formal education. Simulations and game-based exercises have been used for a long time in this sector, and the method was chosen by the designers for a few reasons: a game-based setup creates a ludic attitude in participants and draws them in by being fun as well as educational (Giannikos 2013); games and simulations can create an experience of ‘flow’ in participants (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1990);

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and because of the holistic engagement NFE creates, with the cognitive, practical and attitudinal dimensions of learning that it triggers (Brander et al. 2015). The designers of Mission Z, having long experience working with young people in many countries, saw a need for a structured learning exercise that would focus on conflict management. The goal was to challenge and transform attitudes by exposing participants to war dynamics, most specifically to forces and influences that may lead someone to behave contrary to their convictions. As such, Mission Z contains many elements that manipulate participants towards a very probable end scenario of destruction. We have relied on the combat-centricity of game narratives and how participants react to them, and have focused the design of the exercise to reach a negative conclusion on the central map through a disorienting scenario. This manipulation, and the destructive outcome, are an attempt to raise participants’ awareness of subtle mechanisms and influences that may impact the behaviour of individuals and groups in the real world. The learning of the experience is brought together in the debriefing. During this time, emotions and impressions are vented, manipulative elements are revealed and discussed, and links are drawn from the exercise to the real world. The whole experience takes three hours from introduction to this reflectivity among participants, which could be a step towards making participants think more critically about conventions or combat-centric narratives that may lead people into acting aggressively instead of diplomatically – in the real world, just like in Mission Z.

Notes 1 The author was the project manager of ‘Borderline Boardgames’, the project that developed Mission Z: One Last Chance. It was funded by Erasmus+, as project 2014–1-NO02-KA205-000069. The project has since been named as one of the Erasmus+ programme’s ‘Success Stories’. Read more about the project here: http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-projectdetails/#project/2014–1-NO02-KA205-000069 (accessed 21 March 2019). 2 The age bracket is defined by the Erasmus+ programme. Read more about the programme here: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/about_en (accessed 21 March 2019). 3 One of the project’s objectives was to produce all the sets by hand in a small village in Portugal, to provide a few months of employment there. 4 Armenian youth worker during international seminar on youth work tools in Hungary, December 2015. 5 Slovenian youth worker during the international training course ‘One Last Chance’ in Portugal, October 2016.

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6 Spanish youth worker during the international training course ‘One Last Chance’ in Norway, November 2017. 7 From the 2015 Facilitator’s Guide – Mission Z, available at: http://ec.europa. eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/project-result-content/4606187e-ff50-4edb8574-348a347aad24/Mission%20Z%20Facilitator%20Guide.pdf (accessed 18 October 2018). 8 Italian youth worker during international seminar on youth work tools in Israel, June 2016. 9 Austrian youth worker during international seminar on youth work tools in Hungary, December 2015. 10 Danish student during single session of Mission Z for a student group in Norway, April 2017.

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Giannikos, M. N. (2013) Enjoy and Learn with Educational Games: Examining Factors Affecting Learning Performance, Computers and Education, 68: 429–39. Hays, R. T. (2005) The Effectiveness of Instructional Games: A Literature Review and Discussion (Technical Report 2005-004). Orlando, FL: Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division. Jacobs, J. W. and J. V. Dempsey (1993) Simulation and Gaming: Fidelity, Feedback, and Motivation, in J. V. Dempsey and G. C. Sales (eds) Interactive Instruction and Feedback. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Jakube, A., G. Jasiene, M. E. Taylor and B. Vandenbussche, eds (2016) Holding the Space: Facilitating Reflection and Inner Readiness for Learning. Ghent: Sintjoris. Jorgensen, D. L. (1989) Participant Observation: A Methodology for Human Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lafraya, S. (2011) Intercultural Learning in Non-formal Education: Theoretical Frameworks and Starting Points. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Lischka, K. (2009) Wie preussische Militärs den Rollenspiel-Ahnen erfanden, Spiegel Online, 22 June, www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/spielzeug/kriegsspiel-wiepreussische-militaers-den-rollenspiel-ahnen-erfanden-a-625745.html (accessed 9 August 2017). Mezerow, J. (1997) Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 74: 5–12. Perla, P. P. and E. McGrady (2011) Why Wargaming Works, Naval War College Review, 64(3): 111–30. Reisberg, D. (2006) Memory for Emotional Episodes: The Strengths and Limits of Arousal- Based Accounts, in B. Utti, N. Ohta and A. L. Siegenthaler (eds) Memory and Emotion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell. Sabin, P. (2012) Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games. London: Continuum. Sabourin, J. L. and J. Lester (2014) Affect and Engagement in Game-Based Learning Environments, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 5(1): 45–56. Shute, V. J., L. Rieber and R. Van Eck (2011) Games … and … Learning, in R. Reiser and J. Dempsey (eds) Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (third edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Sitzmann, T. (2011) A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games, Personnel Psychology, 64(2): 489–528. Taylor, E. W. (2007) An Update of Transformative Learning Theory: A Critical Review of the Empirical Research (1999–2005), International Journal of Lifelong Education, 26(2): 173–91. Tjosvold, D., Y. Zi-you and C. Hui (2004) Team Learning from Mistakes: The Contribution of Cooperative Goals and Problem-Solving, Journal of Management Studies, 41(1): 1223–45. Von Hilgers, P. (2000) Eine Anleitung zur Anleitung. Das taktische Kriegsspiel 1812–1824, Board Games Studies, 3: 59–77. Wouters, P., C. van Nimwegen, H. van Oostendorp and E. D. van der Spek (2013) A Meta-analysis of the Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Serious Games, Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2): 249–65.

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13 Positioning Players as Political Subjects: Forms of Estrangement and the Presentation of War in This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line Holger Pötzsch In his book Playing War, Matthew Thomas Payne (2016: 4) asserts that ‘the virtual realm of games and the physical world exist in a complex … coevolving dialectic’. This chapter aims to present a set of analytical tools from literary scholarship and art criticism that enable a closer investigation of this dialectical relationship between game form and socio-political context. The inquiry conducted below assumes a constraining function of form. I argue that the formal properties of games – rules, mechanics, as well as narrative structures and devices – function as systemic patterns of support and restraint that do not determine players and audiences, but that tacitly predispose a paradigm of possible actions and readings. As such, my analyses identify meaning potentials that are invited at the level of game form, but do not attempt to assess if and how these potentials are activated, negotiated, or potentially subverted in concrete contexts of reception and play. In particular, I will employ the concepts of ostranenie (Shklovsky), V-effect (Brecht) and spect-actor (Boal) to show how the two anti-war titles This War of Mine (11 bit studios 2014) and Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Development 2012) invite a critical re-articulation of the realities of violent conflict. Arguing for a nexus between cultural expressions, memory and politics along the lines of, among others, Pötzsch and Šisler (2016), Sterczweski (2016) and Hammar (2017), my contribution provides a case study of how critical games can formally challenge and potentially renew hegemonic frames of war (see also Sterczewski, Chapter 7 in this volume).

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Ostranenie, V-Effect and Spect-Actor as Analytical Tools for Game Studies This section will introduce the concepts of ostranenie (enstrangement), V-effect and spect-actor, and propose an application to analyses of war games. Subsequently, I will use the developed terminology to analyse This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line, arguing that both games invite perceptions and play practices that estrange received genre conventions and socio-cultural frames and, in this way, invite counter-articulations of past and present wars and warfare.

Ostranenie A formalist concept coined by Viktor Shklovsky (1990 [1918]), the term ostranenie is normally translated as ‘estrangement’ and points to art’s capacity to surprise the viewer by deploying formal devices that slow down and complicate reception, thereby renewing relations to what appears well known and familiar. Today, ostranenie enjoys widespread acceptance as an analytical tool for literary research, studies of art, film studies and cultural analysis. In a previous article, I critically mapped uses of the concept in game studies (Pötzsch 2017b). Russian formalism has often been associated with a text-centric art-forart’s-sake approach that disregards the manifold ways through which textual structures and socio-political, cultural, or economic contexts reciprocally condition and frame one another. The movement has therefore repeatedly been charged with being politically irrelevant or with implicitly following a reactionary agenda (see for instance Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978 [1928] or Trotsky 1957 [1924]). Indeed, early works of key formalist scholars, including Shklovsky, do seem to exhibit a certain reductionism. Inherent in their ideas about the proper methods and areas of inquiry of literary sciences and scientific approaches to art is the notion of an autonomous existence of form which constitutes the sole material for empirical analysis. As such, not literature but an abstracted notion of literariness emerges as the proper field of the critic. However, as a number of analysts have shown, Russian formalist thought emerged in more than one form during the years of the movement’s existence and continued to morph and to adapt to competing currents and tendencies also long after its alleged demise (Hansen- Löve 1978, Striedter 1969, Lachmann 1970). During this history, formalism constantly oscillates between an arguably reductive focus on autonomous textual devices and attention to how these operate in context – an ambiguity that is also reflected in different understandings of Shklovsky’s key concept of ostranenie that is of particular significance here.

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By means of the concept of ostranenie, Shklovsky puts two different modes of perception up against one another – a passive and automatized mere recognition and an innovative and creative seeing – that both lead to (different forms of) knowledge, before asserting that the process of perception itself carries intrinsic value. This move is enabled by a technique of creating difficulties, of slowing down reception and of making unfamiliar not only the way textual structures and features are perceived, but also regarding what these devices point to in an extra-diegetic world. Shklovsky writes in his 1918 essay Isskustvo kak priom (here in Sher’s 1990: 5 translation), ‘The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious”’. By means of de-habitualizing perception, works of art not only renew generic conventions in an autonomous play of form, but always also invite and facilitate new perspectives on the world. Precisely such new ways of seeing the world, rather than merely recognizing it within given frames, enabled by forms of estrangement made the concept useful for wider frames of cultural analysis, and constitutes the core of its relevance to this chapter. In the case of games, the de-habitualizing effects of estranging devices can be extended from perception and cognition to the senso-motoric. Inspired by Ian Bogost’s (2007) concept of procedural rhetoric, I propose the notion of a mechanics- and rule-based procedural ostranenie as a specific tool suitable to analyse how games complicate and thereby draw attention to player interaction with game worlds and characters. Estrangement is a historically contingent process. According to Shklovsky, a work of art that de-habitualizes will not do so forever or everywhere. Any formal innovation or transgression will, over time, become conventionalized, thereby losing its challenging and reinvigorating capacities. Possible socio-cultural implications of ostranenie emerge as contingent on specific configurations of situated spectators, prevalent genre conventions and habits of reading and reception. As such, ostranenie lies neither in the work of art, nor in the world of the spectator, but emerges in and through the specific contingent relations between these factors.

The V-effect Bertolt Brecht’s (1957) concept of Verfremdung – put into practice on stage through theatrical techniques inviting the V-effect, a deliberate makingstrange of received theatrical structures and socio-political positions – points in a similar direction to Shklovsky’s ostranenie. Indeed, the proximity of the two terms has led to an at times heated exchange between scholars of Brecht and Shklovsky as to who influenced whom in developing the terms.1 Today, it is beyond doubt that the two writers knew each other’s work and that they tapped into similar general currents of thought. However,

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as Ilja Fradkin (1974) and Galin Tihanov (2005), among many others, have observed, despite pointing at similar processes, the two concepts follow fundamentally different theoretical trajectories. Tihanov (2005), for instance, argues that Shklovsky’s ostranenie is inherently backward-looking in that it aims at reinvigorating, through art, a relation to the world now apparently lost. Brecht’s thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward the future and deeply indebted to Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. As such, ostranenie enables the recovering of intrinsic values lost in modernity, while the V-effect deliberately breaks the immersive nature of the illusionary stage play and points spectators to current contradictions, thus facilitating active political change. In his writing on the V-effect, Brecht (1957) describes formal theatrical devices that stage-directors and actors can use to break immersion in the dramatic events on stage and to encourage critical reflection in the audience. In his didactic phase, Brecht aimed to convey knowledge through the content of plays that subsequently led to a conscientization process on the side of the spectator. In his later dialectical theatre, specific devices would radically break theatrical immersion by, for instance, making actors suddenly interrupt the play to insult spectators or enquire about their passive, consumerist attitudes. Similarly, songs could be used to critically undercut the narrative or highlight the biased assumptions the play’s moral universe is built on; or large posters could suddenly appear interrogating audiences about their realworld responses to the contradictions depicted on stage. In all these cases, Brecht’s V-effect aimed at not only informing the spectator about injustices and suffering, but at facilitating, and indeed enforcing, direct political action by dialectically exposing and performing the contradictions characterizing contemporary societies. Play and world appear as intrinsically connected in and through the reactions of spectators, and estrangement is a key formal feature to guide and predispose these reactions.

Spect-Actors and Forum Theatre The term spect-actor grows out of Augusto Boal’s (1979, 2002) critical theory of the stage. Accepting Brecht’s premise of the inherently political nature and function of theatre, Boal extends and expands Brecht’s ideas. Rather than reifying the actual play as a static element in processes of conscientization, mobilization and empowerment that are inherently director- and playwrightdriven, Boal puts spectators in charge of the stage. By these means, he directs attention away from the ready-made play performed by professional actors, and gives audiences an active role in the formal constitution of plays and their staging through performances. In Boal’s forum theatre, spectators are transformed into active participants – spect-actors – who, while watching a play, are enabled to

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intervene actively at any moment, question or challenge certain actions or events, and change the setting according to their own convictions. These alterations can then be challenged by other participants, thus ensuring a constant dialogue and debate about key issues takes place at a meta-level, constantly connecting stage events and performances with real-world issues. For Boal, the play – its formal structure, devices, techniques – becomes secondary. It is not the play that conveys knowledge and calls to action; rather, the act of collaboratively staging and witnessing it is an inherently political process where people come together, engage, reflect and learn about the world, its contradiction, processes of interaction and about themselves. According to Gonzalo Frasca (2004), this makes Boal’s stage more similar to a simulation game inviting modding practices and other forms of player intervention, than to traditional theatre.

Playing War with Shklovsky, Brecht and Boal: Strategies of Estrangement in This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line This War of Mine (2014) and This War of Mine: The Little Ones (2016) are serious games set in an abstracted eastern or central European war zone. Though not directly addressing concrete historical incidents, both games are inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, and thus at a general level deal with history and cultural memory (see de Smale Chapter 9 in this volume). Both games open up unexpected perspectives on war and highlight issues often eschewed in the war game genre (Pötzsch 2017a, Salvati and Bullinger 2013, Ramsay 2015). Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Brecht’s V-effect and Boal’s spect-actor are viable analytical tools to fathom how these games invite the adoption of such critical vantage points.

Renewing perceptions (and actions): ostranenie in This War of Mine Both This War of Mine (TWoM) and This War of Mine: The Little Ones are management games that let players take control of a small group of civilians caught up in a war zone. The main objective is survival for a random number of days determined by the computer in settings that are characterized by a constant lack of even the most basic goods and services. Players have to gather resources, build equipment, scavenge, and defend themselves against intruders and bandits. Play is divided between a daytime mode enabling building, trading and other interactions, and night mode, centred

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around scavenging nearby areas or resting and guarding the shelter. TWoM repeatedly demands difficult ethical decisions from players and disables both aggrandizing power fantasies and simplifying black-and-white narratives. The newest version, The Little Ones, introduces children as crucial nonplayable characters (NPCs) that are put in the player’s care, thus charging the game with significant potential for emotional involvement and affective engagement. However, as Kristine Jørgensen points out in Chapter 5 of this volume, not all audiences activate these dominant potentials of meaning and critical engagement. I have previously argued that the war game genre exhibits a tendency to provide a reductive impression of war that excludes salient features of actual warfare in order to enable pleasurable experiences of play (Pötzsch 2017a). To achieve this, most mainstream war games employ a series of filters that preclude access to deeply problematic, yet salient, aspects of war, thus affording the transformation of inherently inhumane, violent and destructive practices into easily digestible, leisure-time entertainment. For instance, a ‘violence filter’ focuses attention on physical harm exerted on male combatants’ bodies, thus excluding more problematic harms such as collateral damage, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), rape, or other effects of violence (Pötzsch 2017a: 159–61). Moreover, a ‘consequence filter’ excludes detrimental long-term economic and societal effects of warfare; a ‘character filter’ disregards subjectivities other than those of predominantly white, male soldiers; while a ‘conflict filter’ frames the deployed violence as unproblematic, aggrandizing and without viable alternatives. In sum, these filters make largely unproblematic surface phenomena readily accessible and discourage engagements with the complexities and contingencies of warfare (Pötzsch 2017a). Most mainstream war games follow such genre conventions regarding settings, playable characters, mechanics and narrative frames (see also Ramsay 2015, Salvati and Bullinger 2013). Generic types thus gradually habitualize a simplified and biased perception of war and warfare, foreclosing the complexities and contingencies inherent in real-world violent conflicts. The filters that consistently select and emphasize certain aspects of war, while supressing others, melt into the background and, once removed from conscious sight, tacitly predispose acceptance of what is made to appear as the only viable form of seeing and acting in war. The formalist concept of ostranenie can help us to better understand how certain games break with these conventions, challenge players with new perspectives, and thus facilitate a reinvigoration and renewal of automated forms of perception, cognition and ultimately performance. The design of TWoM and The Little Ones enables a productive estrangement by recalibrating the filters identified above. As Elisabeta Toma (2015: 212, 216) puts it, the games use ambiguity as a ‘resource to create ethical gameplay’, thereby ‘countering the mainstream war ideologies which

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appear in many games’. This revamping of generic conventions is tied to such formal game elements as playable characters, game controls and options, combat mechanics, resource management, and set design. The potentials for estrangement invited at the level of the games’ formal elements are prepared and initiated at a paratextual level in game trailers and other promotional material (Toma 2015: 210). The official game trailer for This War of Mine starts with a panning shot that follows a group of soldiers running in slow motion through a battle-torn city street. In what appears to be a rather conventional setting, some of the uniformed men are shot and fall, while others stop and fire at unseen enemies. The scene is accompanied by a low and sad tune that gradually transforms into a rock ballad with tragic, yet somehow valorizing undertones. As the steadily moving camera reaches a wall blocking sight of the street, the screen briefly turns black before it suddenly reveals the inside of a bombed-out apartment where three despairing adults and a child have found apparently inadequate shelter. When the camera reaches the room, the music fades and then stops, giving way to a soundscape of war – a blend of gun fire, explosions and remote sirens. Finally, the game’s tag line appears stating in simple white letters that ‘in war, not everyone is a soldier’.2 Through the sudden break with the character and consequence filters, the trailer estranges the habitualized perceptions invited by generic war games. The short film contrasts conventionalized pop-cultural imageries of war, centred on the aggrandizing experiences and heroic bodies of male soldiers, with the suffering of a variety of civilians. This renewed visual perspective is reiterated by the change in the soundscape that replaces emotionally charged music with actual sounds of battle once the camera reaches the bombed-out shelter, denoting a more immediate connection to the realities of war. In sum, a formal estrangement invites viewers to critically interrogate and possibly challenge what is taken for granted, thus enabling a renewed perspective on war and warfare in games. In a similar manner, the launch trailer of This War of Mine: The Little Ones contrasts a child’s fantasy world where wars are fought by superheroes battling evil, with the bleak reality experienced by parents who are forced to do the unimaginable to sustain themselves and their children. In this case, the children’s fantasies not only denote a difference in perception between adults and the young, but also constitute a critical comment on the conventions of war games that are constructed around similar tropes and omissions as the childish fantasies.3 By means such as those described above, the paratexts of TWoM and The Little Ones invite altered perceptions of war in games, pointing beyond the received frames of the genre and raising certain expectations regarding unconventional experiences and renewed perspectives on an apparently well-known phenomenon. The estranging effects invited at the level of paratext are reiterated in narrative framing and game mechanics. The choice of civilians, rather

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than combatants, as playable characters fundamentally challenges the character filter and recalibrates the player’s position and possible actions. The gameplay experience is characterized by repeated setbacks, such as exposure to nightly raids that suddenly destroy meticulously developed ingame progression. Scarcity of food, medicine, building materials and other essentials requires players to scavenge at night, putting their characters at increasing risk and imposing genuine ethical challenges as resources quickly deplete. In both games, progress cannot be saved and all in-game actions and decisions entail direct impacts on the physical and mental well-being of characters. Such devices, combined with almost inevitable failure and the necessity to act immorally to survive, preclude the emergence of power fantasies otherwise characteristic of the genre and replace these with a bleak frustration presumably more in line with actual experiences of war (for actual player responses to these formal frames, see Jørgensen, Chapter 5 in this volume). One scene in particular merits attention in this respect. The scene in question plays out in a derelict supermarket during one of the player characters’ many nightly scavenging raids.4 Peeping through a keyhole, players are able to observe a soldier harassing a girl and pushing her towards a room at the back. Segments of dialogue, sounds, as well as the body language of the NPCs clearly indicate that a rape is about to take place. By the formal means through which the scene is presented, TWoM deliberately plays with war game conventions that usually put players into the position of a powerful saviour on a mission to prevent precisely such atrocities. Game design and settings, however, quickly frustrate these expectations as the vast majority of attempts to save the girl end with player characters being killed or severely wounded, thus jeopardizing the chances of survival of the whole group. The game conveys a feeling of utter helplessness and powerlessness when the soldier simply turns around and shoots the advancing saviour. Another strategy of making-strange employed in This War of Mine is specific to the medium of games – a procedural form of ostranenie. Through the deployment of estranging devices at a senso-motoric level, the process of learning game mechanics and rules is deliberately slowed down and thereby extended. To achieve this aim, the game does not contain even the simplest tutorial.5 After starting play for the first time, players are cast into a derelict building in charge of three civilians with a minimal background story about how they met and ended up in the same dysfunctional shelter. After that, players are forced to test and try the various affordances signified by simple icons deployed on screen while in-game time relentlessly passes. Similarly, during nightly scavenging raids no tutorial explains combat or other mechanics, thereby inevitably transforming the first hostile encounters into an almost inevitably deadly experience. The fact that the game does not allow for saves creates an urgency in relation to in-game decision-making

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that has irreversible effects, thus raising the ethical stakes of even apparently straightforward choices. The absence of tutorials and saving options estranges habitualized play practices such as testing-and-trying various outcomes of ethically demanding decisions or a gradual adjustment of player capabilities to the senso-motoric challenges at hand. Through these devices, TWoM draws attention to, and problematizes, received conventions of play, thus inviting players to perceive and enact the game in a new and different manner. As with all estranging devices, however, the effects described above inevitably wear off and disappear over time. When engaging with these games, players gradually become used to the renewed conventions and adapt their expectations and perceptual as well as senso-motoric apparatuses accordingly (see Jørgensen, Chapter 5 for more examples of this dynamic). As the various walkthroughs posted on YouTube and elsewhere show, players eventually learn the mechanics of the game and use their gradually growing insights into the capabilities and weaknesses of particular characters and pieces of equipment to beat the various challenges TWoM presents them with. Using the right character, weapon and tactic, the girl in the supermarket can actually be saved, yielding a powerful gun to the player and providing a morale boost for the group of civilians struggling to survive. Similarly, once learned, combat and other mechanics do not significantly constrain players and it becomes easier to approach the various challenges with a ludic attitude aimed at beating the game (see for instance Lee 2014). In line with formalist thinking, the effects of the estranging devices used in This War of Mine will inevitably fade over time and lose their de-habitualizing potentials. Having used Shklovky’s concept of ostranenie to show how renewed practices and perceptions are invited through particular narrative and mechanical devices in TWoM, I will now turn to a game that requires a different set of tools to account for its de-familiarizing potentials. This War of Mine estranges and thereby de-automates received play practices and invites players to adopt new perspectives. At the same time, however, the game affords an uninterrupted immersive experience and invites emotional and affective involvement. As such, it can be argued that estrangement in TWoM is not predominantly directed at players’ relations to the world, but at generic conventions and received play practices. The effects of the employed devices quickly wear off once the renewed frames have been habitualized through repeated play. Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line, on the other hand, employs a form of estrangement that is different from ostranenie in that it deliberately breaks the immersive quality of game play by directly addressing players as political subjects, thus explicitly redirecting in-game performances and interests towards the world. Brecht’s concept of V-effect is a suitable tool to account for such formal strategies and the effects they invite.

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Re-positioning players: V-effect in Spec Ops: The Line At the outset, Spec Ops: The Line appears to be a fairly conventional, combatfocused third-person tactical shooter. Players take control of Captain Martin Walker, who has been sent on a reconnaissance mission to Dubai together with two soldiers, to find out what happened to his former superior John Konrad, who had entered the city with his battalion in a relief effort after a giant sandstorm had swallowed the town. The game is structured as a series of map-based fighting sequences, interconnected through cut scenes and quick-time events that drive the evolving narrative. In the beginning, players encounter ‘suitably othered’ opponents (Heron and Belford 2014: 17) who have to be killed to complete the respective maps and ensure progress through the game. Walker’s appearance and behaviour resemble that of the classic military game hero in charge of eradicating evil and saving the day. In contrast to more conventional shooters, however, Spec Ops: The Line soon starts to deliberately play with, interrogate and undermine these received frames, thereby challenging player habits and genre conventions. In contrast to TWoM, Spec Ops: The Line not only recalibrates the genre conventions and constitutive filters of war- and violence-based first- and third-person shooters (Keogh 2012, Pötzsch 2017a), but also deliberately punctures the immersive illusion of three-dimensional photorealistic games to make a political point about players and their relation to games and the world. On the one hand, the game highlights unintended blow-backs, long-term psychological as well as societal consequences, and civilian deaths and suffering in a ‘conventional subversion of the military shooter’ (Keogh 2013: 1) that estranges the habitualized perceptual regimes of the genre. In addition to this, it directly addresses players as political subjects by drawing them out of a purely ludic engagement, thus bringing largely automated in-game performances to their renewed attention. The experience of play is thus connected to concrete political concerns. The first form of estrangement can be accounted for by means of Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie, while the second requires Brecht’s V-effect as an additional analytical resource. As I and others have argued (Pötzsch 2017a, Keogh 2012, Heron and Belford 2014), the thoughtful interplay of narrative and game mechanics in Spec Ops: The Line successfully challenges automated forms of perception of war constituted in and through genre conventions and the conflict, consequence and violence filters. The result is a form of de-habitualization that gradually develops throughout the game, enabling an incremental unsettling of received notions of heroism, good/evil distinctions and the beneficial role of violence. Much of the experience afforded by the game is centred on the slowly-dawning awareness among players that their automated ingame behaviour does not quite serve the expected goals, but rather entails unintended, unethical and ultimately outright monstrous consequences (for player responses to these formal frames see for instance Jørgensen 2016).

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The game deliberately plays with and gradually undermines the hero device by challenging the authority of the main character. Walker slowly transforms from an elite soldier in control of his mission and companions to a wretched renegade fighter erratically changing allegiances and mission objectives, and apparently only caring for his own idiosyncratic understandings and goals. This transformation is reflected in changes to Walker’s appearance, voice and interaction with his companions. In the beginning, he wears a clean and neat uniform, speaks calmly and with natural authority, and reveals a compassionate relation to his soldiers. At a later stage, in contrast, his clothes are dirty and blood-stained, he almost screams orders and utters despicable comments indicating a deteriorating relation to his team and a worsening mental condition. Originally deployed to find possible survivors and then return, Walker repeatedly changes the objective of his mission until he makes the eradication of Konrad his main priority. These changes, together with repeated shifts in allegiance and an increasingly wretched leadership and combat style, put strains on the relation between the character and the player forced to follow his whims and sudden ideas in order to be able to progress through the game. When Walker finally enters the hideout of his alleged main opponent to avenge all the evil Konrad is supposedly responsible for, the character has, among other things, eradicated dozens of US soldiers, burned civilians in an attack with white phosphorous, destroyed the city’s last water reserves and has proven unable to prevent the deaths of his two companions. The game elegantly lures players into committing or at least accepting the ultimate necessity of these deeds for the sake of in-game objectives that have been radically changed throughout the narrative. When Walker finally confronts Konrad, he and the player learn the ultimate truth. Konrad has been dead for a long time and his guiding voice emanating from the intercom was only Walker’s hallucination – the result of a rapidly progressing PTSD that subtly changed the player-character’s ability to relate correctly to in-game reality. Rapid flashbacks then reframe crucial past game events, subverting the last traces of heroism in any of the ‘achievements’ Walker and the player had made on the various game maps. By such means, Spec Ops: The Line successfully brings received play conventions of the shooter genre to the attention of players, enabling a critical interrogation of generic frames and storylines, and of their possible political implications. However, the game not only estranges habitualized practices and perceptions of ludic war in Shklovsky’s sense, but also reconstitutes the playing subject as a political one. This is achieved through the thoughtful use of loading screen messages which directly address the player as a political subject, thereby interrupting the immersive illusion of game play. Through the loading screen device, Spec Ops: The Line problematizes the boundary between game/play and world, and facilitates critical reflections

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on a war/game nexus that reach beyond ludic and diegetic challenges and settings. Brecht’s concept of the V-effect is a suitable tool to interrogate such mechanisms and their possible implications (de Wildt 2014). Initially, loading screen messages in Spec Ops: The Line are directed at a ludic subject and serve a conventional purpose. Recommendations and tips regarding game mechanics are combined with contextual information to improve player capabilities and enhance immersion in the narrative. However, in the aftermath of the white phosphorous attack ending Chapter 8, ‘The Gate’, where the player-character burns a large group of US soldiers and Dubaian civilians alive, the content of the short messages changes and develops an increasingly introspective and intrusive tone. In interrogating players directly about whether they even remember why they came to Dubai, whether they feel like heroes yet, or why they do not care about civilian deaths, a V-effect breaks the illusionary flow of the game and connects ludic experience and performances to real-world issues. This way, players seeking excitement and emotional catharsis inside the game are estranged and repositioned as political subjects strongly invited to see in-game decisions and actions in wider socio-political contexts. In line with Brecht’s thinking, the formal element of loading screen messages enables both a reconceptualization of cultural expressions as standing in complex dialectical relationships with the world, and a reconfiguration of the activities and perceptions of spectators/players as relevant beyond the boundaries of narrative and diegesis. In highlighting player complicity in Walker’s crimes, Spec Ops: The Line points to the fact that continuing to play is a conscious decision that implies the freely willed acceptance of a series of constraints imposed on the player by the game. This is emphasized in one loading screen message directly holding not only Walker, but also the player, responsible for the atrocities committed: ‘None of this would have happened if you’d just stopped’. It remains deliberately open whether the ‘you’ in the sentence above refers to Walker continuing to fight or the player continuing to play. This articulation pulls the player from the ludic shell of claiming that ‘this is only a game’ and points to the option of stopping in order to prevent further unintended effects. By way of analogy, this relation between players and game can be extended to the relation between soldiers and war, or between subjects and politics. Spec Ops: The Line’s loading screen messages create a V-effect that invites critical reflection by pointing to the dialectical relation between cultural expressions, viewers/readers/players and socio-political contexts. The game breaks the diegetic illusion to emphasize the wider significance of games as inherently political articulations directed at the world and highlights player responsibilities beyond the frames of a merely ludic engagement. In Brendan Keogh’s (2012: 8) words, ‘The Line … asks us to simply think about shooters with a bit more nuance, about what it is we are actually

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doing in these games, about what is going on in our minds while we play them, and why we are playing them in the first place’. In other words, it asks us to critically interrogate our own role as the subject of play.

Playing spect-actors: Modding war in This War of Mine Having considered possible uses of Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Brecht’s V-effect for analyzing formal elements of critical war games, I will now move on to an explication of the usefulness of Boal’s terms spect-actor and forum theatre for similar purposes. As explained above, Boal’s forum theatre is concerned with facilitating a formative engagement of audiences, aiming not merely at enabling active interpretation and re-interpretation of reified works, but encouraging direct interventions altering the behaviour of characters, the setting and/or the course of the dramatized events. Neither Spec Ops: The Line nor the classical game mode of This War of Mine make such a formative involvement of players possible. However, later versions of TWoM contain a modding centre that facilitates fine-tuned interventions into basic game configurations, thus enabling the reconstitution of players as spect-actors. The modding centre in TWoM provides an additional form of agency to players who are no longer dependent on the game’s pre-set choice architecture, variables and settings, but can actively intervene in these. On the one hand, this allows purely instrumental modding aimed at making it easier to ‘win’, for instance by increasing the carrying capacity of characters, reducing proneness to sickness or bad moods, changing temperature settings, the availability of resources or the frequency of raids and so on. On the other hand, however, careful interventions can change content or rules in correspondence with ethical or political considerations to bring the game into accordance with actual realities of war and violent conflict, and can thus facilitate discussion about what exactly these realities are and how they can be properly represented and enacted in the game. Such critical interventions point beyond the semi-public negotiations of war histories and memories on the basis of play experiences, as detailed by de Smale in Chapter 9 of this volume, as they make the very configuration of reality in and through game mechanics and procedures the main focus of player engagement. One such critical modification might, for example, counter the apparent ease with which the character Roman, armed with a knife, kills his way through the location ‘Military Outpost’ to secure vital weapons and resources, as shown in Dae Lee’s (2014) walkthrough. Subtle changes to characters’ combat abilities, mood configuration, or other attributes could make Roman’s task far more difficult, if not outright impossible, and

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introduce additional negative consequences to such an act of mass killing to bring it more into accordance with real-world conditions. Certainly, such modding practices would invite considerable discussion and debate about such questions. In line with Frasca’s (2004) thought, the open nature and recodability enabled by TWoM’s modding centre potentially turns players into Boalian spect-actors who are put into a position to critically interrogate and actively change the settings and procedures predisposing game play. Discussions in online communities could thereby become more than fora for the exchange of tips and cheats. Rather, they can be open spaces for informed discussion  of how exactly the game articulates and enacts the war/game nexus, and of how and why certain elements of this configuration could or should be altered. In other words, TWoM’s modding centre might become the core of a Boalian forum where informed citizens re-appropriate cultural spaces and aesthetic objects for the purpose of developing and testing alternatives, facilitating political mobilization and conscientization. In an extended form, this could enable play of non-Caucasian characters inserting racism and marginalization as relevant factors, further recalibrating the constitutive filters of the genre and enabling counter-hegemonic practices of play (Hammar 2017). In opening spaces for creative and conscientious interventions, the modding centre emerges as a potentially valuable tool for both formal and informal education.

Conclusion Cultural theories identifying estrangement as key to the critical function of art have a long history. In Fradkin’s (1974: 160) terms, estrangement is the ‘conditio sine qua non’ not only of genuinely artistic expressions, but also of the acquisition of new knowledge in general, and has been treated as such since Aristotle’s times (see Helmers 1984, Ungvarí 1979). With this in mind, I have argued that the concept is an appropriate tool to investigate the de-habitualizing potential of critical games dealing with issues of war and violence, and have exemplified this assertion with analyses of estranging devices in This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line. There is one element in the discussion about estrangement, however, that is often overlooked. As has been argued throughout this chapter with reference to the works of Shklovsky, Brecht and Boal, the concept of estrangement is usually invoked to argue for a peculiar status of art that enables audiences to see things in a new light, to set things in new perspectives, and thereby facilitate conscientization and possibly political mobilization. If art is seen as having this transgressive and empowering characteristic, the question emerges what function mainstream culture might have.

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If art de-familiarizes the apparently well known to enable us to see the work and the world with new eyes, mainstream culture might be perceived as doing the exact opposite, namely habitualizing and naturalizing inherently contingent and ideological perspectives and subject-positions. In this context, all cultural expressions emerge as inherently political and the problematic, implicitly normative, distinction between high art and popular culture re-emerges as a distinction between cultural expressions that reiterate and reinforce a certain status quo and those that challenge, question and problematize such received frames of reference. As a consequence, the distinction between art and popular culture can be recalibrated as a distinction between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural expressions.6 Which work acquires which function is dependent on two factors: (1) the formal properties inviting either estrangement or habitualization, and (2) the concrete contexts of reception that predispose situated audiences’ active engagement with these formal frames. This chapter has focused on the former and identified formal game elements at the level of both narrative and procedure that invite estrangement of apparently familiar perspectives on violence and war.

Notes 1 See for instance the opposing positions of Willett (1959: 179–80, 208–10) on the one hand, and Fradkin (1974: 153–7) as well as Knopf (1984 [1974]: 356–9) on the other. 2 The game trailer for This War of Mine can be accessed at www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=fyik9tJOUzU&ytbChannel=eGAM3Rs (accessed 21 March 2019). 3 The launch trailer for This War of Mine: The Little Ones can be accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyik9tJOUzU&ytbChannel=eGAM3Rs (accessed 21 March 2019). 4 The description of the scene is based on my own play experience. 5 In an email exchange with me on 19 September 2018, one of the writers of TWoM, Setlak Wojciech, confirmed that the lack of a tutorial was a deliberate device to highlight the unpreparedness of civilians in the event of war, deployed with the intent to question received notions of war as an arena for aggrandizing heroism where everyone seems to suddenly have acquired the expertise to use and maintain guns and other military equipment. 6 Hammar (2017) has articulated a similar understanding of the cultural function of games with reference to historical titles. Arguing for an inherent multi-vocality of games that always function in context, he identifies the formal properties through which the Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag DLC Freedom Cry (Ubisoft 2013) invites counter-hegemonic commemorative play in connection with the Caribbean slave trade, before he looks into player accounts of how the game was received and played by marginalized groups.

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References Bakhtin, M. M. and P. N. Medvedev (1978 [1928]) The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boal, A. (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Boal, A. (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors (second edition). London: Routledge. Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brecht, B. (1957) Schriften zum Theater: Über eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. de Wildt, L. (2014) Enstranging Play: Distinguishing Playful Subjecthood from Governance, Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2014, https://lirias. kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/486530/1/de-Wildt-2014.-Enstranging-Play_Distinguishing-Playful-Subjecthood-from-Governance.-PCG2014.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Fradkin, I. (1974) Bertolt Brecht: Weg und Methode. Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam. Frasca, G. (2004) Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance, and Other Trivial Issues, in N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan (eds) First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hammar, E. L. (2017) Counter-Hegemonic Commemorative Play: Marginalized Pasts and the Politics of Memory in the Digital Game Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, Rethinking History, 21(3): 372–95. Hansen-Löve, A. A. (1978) Der Russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Helmers, H. (1984) Einleitung, in H. Helmers (ed.) Verfremdung in der Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Heron, M. J. and P. H. Belford (2014) ‘Do You Feel Like a Hero Yet?’ Externalized Morality in Video Games, Journal of Games Criticism, 1(1): 1–22. Jørgensen, K. (2016) The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops: The Line, Game Studies, 16(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/jorgensenkristine (accessed 21 March 2019). Keogh, B. (2012) Killing Is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line. Marden: Stolen Projects. Keogh, B. (2013) Spec Ops: The Line’s Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter, Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies, www.digra. org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_55.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Knopf, J. (1984 [1974]) Verfremdungen’, in H. Helmers (ed.) Verfremdung in der Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Lachmann, R. (1984 [1970]) Die ‘Verfremdung’ und das ‘Neue Sehen’ bei Viktor Sklovskij, in H. Helmers (ed.) Verfremdung in der Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Lee, D. (2014) Military Outpost, Roman Knife Only, YouTube, 4 December, www. youtube.com/watch?v=utJCengYxkA&ytbChannel=Dae%20Lee (accessed 21 March 2019).

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Payne, M. T. (2016) Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York, NY: New York University Press. Pötzsch, H. (2017a) Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters, Games and Culture, 12(2): 156–78. Pötzsch, H. (2017b) Playing Games with Shklovsky, Brecht, and Boal: Ostranenie, V-Effect, and Spect-Actors as Analytical Tools for Game Studies, Game Studies, 17(2), http://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch (accessed 21 March 2019). Pötzsch, H. and V. Šisler (2016) Playing Cultural Memory: Framing History in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination, Games and Culture, 14(1): 3–25. Ramsay, D. (2015) Brutal Games: Call of Duty and the Cultural Narrative of World War II, Cinema Journal, 54: 94–113. Salvati, A. J. and J. M. Bullinger (2013) Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past, in M. W. Kapell and A. B. R. Elliott (eds) Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Shklovsky, V. (1990 [1918]) Art as Device, in B. Sher (ed.) Theory of Prose. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Sterczewski, P. (2016) This Uprising of Mine: Game Conventions, Cultural Memory and Civilian Experience of War in Polish Games, Game Studies, 17(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/sterczewski (accessed 21 March 2019). Striedter, J. (1969) Zur formalistischen Theorie der Prosa und der literarischen Evolution, in J. Striedter (ed.) Russischer Formalismus. Munich: W. Fink Verlag. Tihanov, G. (2005) The Politics of Estrangement: The Case of the Early Shklovsky, Poetics Today, 26(4): 665–96. Toma, E. (2015) Self-Reflection and Morality in Critical Games: Who Is to Be Blamed for War? Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 6(1): 209–24. Trotsky, L. (1957 [1924]) Literature and Revolution. New York, NY: Russell & Russell. Ungvári, T. (1979) The Origins of the Theory of Verfremdung, Neohelicon, 7(1): 171–232. Willett, J. (1959) The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen.

Ludography 11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine. 11 bit studios. 11 bit studios (2016) This War of Mine: The Little Ones. 11 bit studios. Ubisoft (2013) Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. Ubisoft Montreal. Yager Development (2012) Spec Ops: The Line. 2K Games.

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14 Afterword: War/Game Matthew Thomas Payne Toward the end of his life, American novelist and Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs offered these thoughts on the nature of our reality: This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. (Foye and Burroughs 1991: 95) I think about this passage a lot. I think about it more than I should; certainly more than I’d like. It comes to mind as I read about the ongoing territorial disputes between Israelis and Palestinians. It hovers on the periphery of my mind as I watch cable news reports of gun violence survivors cry, console and work to make sense of another senseless mass shooting. Burroughs’s words invariably resurface after I finish streaming coverage of professional gamers competing in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Fortnite tournaments. I mouth the words, ‘This is a war universe’, as I sacrifice another quarter to the ageing and faded Missile Command arcade cabinet hidden in the back corner of my local bar. Not surprisingly, I think of these words again after reviewing the chapters in this anthology. ‘War all the time. That is its nature’. The scholars in this collection wrestle with the contradictions embodied by its title: War Games. They aren’t the first to do so, of course. They join a long list of thinkers and cultural critics who’ve sought to make sense of militarized play’s perplexing holding power. How does this mysterious elixir of war and entertainment, fact and fiction, narrative strategies and technological affordances, cooperative play and disciplining feedback loops, engender a host of competing thoughts and feelings? Sometimes, these

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gameplay experiences can be positive and affirming: commemorating the sacrifices of soldiers lost in battle; the efficacy of networked communication technologies to collect real-time intelligence so as to foreclose disaster; the political righteousness of democratic nations to combat tyranny and oppression. Other times, militarized gameplay can be dissonant and confusing, laying bare the limitations of play technologies: glitches that tear digital assets asunder, revealing their fragile artificiality; human victors ‘tea bagging’ their vanquished foes in multiplayer rounds; all those paper-thin narrative justifications in single-player campaigns that are meant to excuse the extra-judicial acts of violence and torture but which quickly buckle under any scrutiny. Like other instances of human play, war games make for perplexing experiences because they are, and they are not, what they purport to be. And yet – for all of their ontological, epistemological, moral and experiential contradictions – these games remain captivating and beguiling objects of analysis and reflection. As the chapters in this collection attest, military-themed games engender all manner of questions. What strategies do they employ when interpellating us as virtual soldiers? Why do we, as players, make the leaps of faith necessary to believe – however temporarily, however tenuously – in their incomplete simulations of conflict? What political rhetoric, nationalistic mythologies and historical tropes do they draw upon, activate and reinforce when tasking us with completing their objectives? And what in-game choices do we ignore, excuse, or otherwise forgive in pursuit of obtaining a ‘Mission Accomplished’ win condition? This afterword’s title – War/Game – is inspired by the previous working title of this collection and the name of the editors’ research group. I’ve adopted it for my purposes because its punctuation neatly foregrounds the critical utility of the collection as a whole. Typically, the slash may serve one of several grammatical functions depending on its context. For instance, the slash may work as a conjunction in an ‘exclusive or’ capacity (e.g., A/B, meaning A or B). Yet such a mark might perform an ‘inclusive or’ function (e.g., A/B, A or B or both). The slash in the case of War/Game points in both directions: war or game, or both, war/game. Like the two-headed Roman god Janus – whose double visage looks simultaneously to the future and to the past – the slash defies any singular definition or point of view. To identify a cultural expression, an entertainment commodity, a recruiting tool, or an anti-war intervention as a ‘war/game’ reminds us that such a thing exists betwixt and between. The title’s Janus-like slash divides even as it binds. The titular slash is also a critical reading rupture. War-slash-Game temporarily arrests the eye. In doing so, it prompts reflection on how the terms are often presented as a single idea – as if this pairing were a natural and inevitable one. The editors have assembled chapters that support and reinforce this contemplative manoeuvre; pieces that decouple war from game (and game from war) so we might better understand their textual

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operations as individual titles, their social significance as engines of play and how they articulate forms of political power. In curating the original work of European game scholars, the editors have assembled critical voices that expand the international conversation around war/games. This anthology’s contributions offer provocations for reframing how we might think about these wily texts, and new directions for how we might study them. A few of the anthology’s more striking themes include: challenging the received wisdom of games’ ideological power and their supposed effects; new methodological tacks for conducting research, particularly as it concerns the cultural memory of nations at war; and the need for identifying structural and ludic war/game elements in titles that might not be labelled as such. Other contributions explore how generic expectations of conflict – including how certain forms of battle have long been privileged in analogue and digital games – precondition how war is played and interpreted. Critically, these latter chapters explore how games might serve as non-formal educational opportunities for revealing how assumptions about conflict shape players’ thinking about historical wars and solutions to future contestations. These pieces embody the deconstructive slash; they call for conversation and reflection. Janus, with one set of eyes fixed on the future and another locked on the past, is a figure defined by liminality and temporality. As such, Janus was associated with cycles of war and peace, but also more generally with life’s transitions and passages. And here’s where thinking of Janus might reveal something absent from Burroughs’s account of our universe. Rather than being a reality defined exclusively by war and games, Janus draws our attention to the spaces between those categories. War/games exist in/ as states of play; in/as states of becoming. Such a reframing begs a series of additional questions. First, might the Janus-like war/game slash be adopted as a heuristic device for analysis? Is it a prompt for studying wars and games both individually and in tandem: A or B, or both? Does understanding the slash as a temporal threshold demand that we attend to the experiential duality of war/games? Any gameplay experience, after all, is symbolically legible and culturally meaningful because it keeps one foot firmly planted in our world while inviting us to step into another. (This is why metaphor and fantasy are such useful handmaidens for war/games, as noted by a few of the essays.) Moreover, when viewed as a grammatical Janus figure, the war/ game slash has an additional, critical layer; one that highlights the value of considering multiple points of view across time. Yes, Janus was thought to usher in times of war and peace. But that same figure likewise transcends and exceeds such moments. Was Burroughs right? Is our universe limited to war and games, games and war? Are we really condemned to this state of affairs? Round, after round, after round of cyclical conflict? Or, can we imagine something else? Does the speculative nature of games fuelled by the liberatory spirit of play

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offer a way out of this damning paradigm? If so, perhaps the first step in short-circuiting the cycle that Burroughs describes is assuming an intentional stance toward that condition. Instead of hitting the ‘start’ button, it begins by taking a deliberate and reflective pause. It begins with taking a Janus-like orientation toward the history, politics and practices of war/games. Then, by looking in multiple directions, perhaps we can imagine ourselves as being more than winners and losers, losers and winners.

Reference Foye, R. and W. S. Burroughs (1991) The War Universe, Grand Street, 37: 92–108.

Ludography Atari (1980) Missile Command. Atari. Epic Games (2017) Fortnite. Epic Games. Valve Corporation (2012) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Valve Corporation.

INDEX

9/11 terrorist attacks 18, 20, 99 Aarseth, Espen 75–7, 196 n.1 Abbott, H. Porter 187–90 aesthetics 6, 11, 26, 43, 80, 93, 95, 142, 254 affect 5, 38, 40, 43–7, 49 n.8, 74, 85, 101, 246, 249 Allen, Robertson 3, 22, 23, 29, 37, 54 America’s Army 3, 17–18, 20, 22, 24, 26–7, 58–9 Appelcline, Shannon 180, 182–4, 187 Arneson, David 180, 182–3 Assassin’s Creed 95, 105, 255 n.6 Baldur’s Gate 192–4 Barthes, Roland 131 n.3, 190 Battlefield 8, 24, 53, 135, 137, 138–44, 147, 148–51 Baudrillard, Jean 19, 30 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 8, 26, 29, 31 n.1, 139, 151 n.2, 151 n.3 biopolitics 42, 44–8, 49 n.7, Boal, Augusto 11, 226, 241, 244–5, 253–4 Bogost, Ian 24, 43, 85, 129, 159, 243 Bosnian War 9, 24, 25, 79, 155, 157, 159, 161–6, 168–9, 171–2, 172 n.1, 173 n.2, 245 Brander, Patricia 223–4, 237 Brecht, Bertolt 11, 241, 243–5, 249–50, 252–4 Brom, Cyril 220, 225, 231, 235 Bryant, Tim 180, 185 Bullinger, Jonathan 54, 245–6 Burroughs, William S. 11, 259, 261–2 Byers, Andrew 180, 186, 196 n.1

Caillois, Roger 190, 196 n.5 Call of Duty 5, 7, 19, 21, 24, 26, 30–1, 44–5, 46, 53–4, 59, 78, 92–3, 98, 99–102 Call, Joshua 1, 37 Chainmail 182–3 Chandler, David 5, 41, 48 n.3 Chapman, Adam 2, 7, 53–4, 91–2, 98, 100, 102–5, 107, 141, 155, 159, 201, 213, 219 Cold War 4, 8, 18, 24, 27, 30, 54, 98, 123–4, 185–6 Cover, Jennifer Grouling 188, 196 n.1 Crocco, Francesco 180, 186, 196 n.1 Crogan, Patrick 2, 43, 47 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 225, 235, 236 de Peuter, Greig 55, 58, 63 de Smale, Stephanie 9, 61, 79, 156, 171–2, 173 n.7, 201–2, 245, 253 Der Derian, James 3–4, 49 n.5, 54 Deterding, Sebastian 158–60 Doom 3, 12 n.1, 49 n.5, 58 Dungeons and Dragons 9, 179–86, 188–92, 194–5 Dyer–Witheford, Nick 55, 57, 58, 63 effects of videogames 4–5, 17–18, 19–22, 25, 38–9, 46, 85, 204, 225, 261 Elder Scrolls, The 192–3 Empson, William 104 Erll, Astrid 112, 155, 157, 159, 166 esports 60, 157, 160 Fallout 98, 192–4, 197 n.9 First World War 8, 54, 102, 135–51

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Flanagan, Mary 202, 219–20 Foka, Anna 2, 7, 107 n.1, 201, 213, 219 Formalism 11, 242, 246, 249 Fortnite 60, 259 Foucault, Michel 48 n.1, 49 n.7, 96, 112 Fradkin, Ilja 244, 254, 255 n.1 Frasca, Gonzalo 103, 245, 254 Full Spectrum Warrior 58–9 Fuller, Matthew 61–2 Gagnon, Frédérick 17–18, 21 Galloway, Alexander 18, 41, 62 Glas, René 74–6, 156, 160 Goffman, Erving 94–5, 103–4 Gramsci, Antonio 112 Grand Theft Auto 5, 26, 28, 32 n.2 Gulf War (1990–1) 3, 19, 30 GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) 9, 179, 181–2, 184, 187–90 Gygax, Gary 9, 180–3, 185–6 Hall, Stuart 6, 21, 64, 78, 84, 112 Halo 53, 64 n.1 Hammar, Emil Lundedal 5–6, 7, 8, 17, 54, 56, 61, 105, 241, 254, 255 n.6 Hammond, Philip 4–5, 18, 44 Hays, Robert 225, 232 Heydrich, Reinhard 10, 203, 216 Hollywood 2, 27, 29, 54 Holocaust 7, 10, 92, 101, 102–6, 111, 130, 141, 148, 203 Huizinga, Johan 190, 196 n.5 Huntemann, Nina 1, 22, 29, 37, 54, 55, 58 Hush 23, 24 Iraq War (2003) 18, 25, 32 n.2, 149 Islamic State (ISIS) 19, 26–9 Jackson, Rosemary 94, 96, 107 Jackson, Steve 184, 187 Jørgensen, Kristine 6, 9, 37, 39, 77, 156, 246, 248–50 Juul, Jesper 5, 38–40, 43 Kempshall, Chris 7, 8, 137–8, 141, 144–5, 147, 150, 151 n.4 Keogh, Brendan 78, 250, 252–3

Kerr, Aphra 55, 56, 57, 62 Kobielska, Maria 112, 116–17, 124, 125 Kosovo War 25, 30 Kriegsspiel 2, 114, 181, 223–4 Laclau, Ernesto 8, 112–13, 117–19, 122, 126–7, 131 n.3 Let’s Players 9, 79, 155–72 Linderoth, Jonas 7, 39, 102–3, 107, 141, 159 Machin, David 97, 103 Mackay, Daniel 180, 186, 188 Marx, Karl 54 McCall, Jeremiah 202, 207–8, 214, 217, 219 Mead, Corey 2, 49 n.5 military involvement with videogames 2–3, 6, 9, 58–60, 64, 65 n.5 modding 11, 48 n.4, 226, 245, 253–4 Molden, Berthold 6, 8, 54, 112–13, 118, 123, 138 Mortensen, Torill 39, 76 Mouffe, Chantal 8, 112–13, 118–19, 122, 127, 130, 131 n.3 neoliberalism 5, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48 n.2, 62 Nguyen, Josef 55, 156, 160 Nieborg, David 18, 20, 24, 56, 78 Nijakowski, Lech 112, 116–17 ostranenie (Shklovsky) 11, 241–6, 248–50, 253 Parkin, Simon 26–7, 59–60 Payne, Matthew Thomas 1–2, 11, 37, 44, 54, 58, 59, 64, 78, 241 Peterson, Jon 114, 181–3, 185 Pötzsch, Holger 4, 11, 37, 44, 54, 59, 78–9, 85, 155, 158–9, 161, 201–2, 204, 226, 241–2, 245–6, 250 propaganda 4–5, 17–20, 22, 25–9, 37, 54, 123 realism 4–5, 17, 19, 30, 54, 59, 60, 78, 80, 91–2, 94–7, 105–6, 144, 158–9, 201–2, 208–9, 231, 246–8, 250, 253 Reid, Julian 41–3, 48 n.2 Reisberg, Daniel 225, 232

INDEX

Rigney, Ann 155, 157, 171 Rosenstone, Robert 92–3, 96, 219–20 Ryan, Marie–Laure 187, 189, 196 n.1 Sabin, Philip 114, 225 Salen, Katie 39, 115 Salvati, Andrew 54, 245–6 Schiller, Herbert 3, 12 n.2 Schrier, Karen 202, 207–8, 214, 217, 219 Schulzke, Marcus 18, 22, 64 Second World War 7, 8, 24, 54, 83, 92, 95, 99, 102–6, 111, 113, 119, 121, 123–6, 137, 140–1, 143–4, 149–51, 169, 181, 186, 201–3, 216, 234 Shklovsky, Viktor 11, 241–3, 244, 245, 249–51, 253–4 Šisler, Vít 10, 54, 155–6, 158–9, 201–4, 207–8, 215, 217–18, 224, 241 Spec Ops: The Line 11, 241–2, 245, 249–54 spect-actor (Boal) 11, 226, 241–2, 244–5, 253–4 Stahl, Roger 3, 37, 44, 54, 59 Sterczewski, Piotr 7–8, 64, 116, 119, 241 This War of Mine 6, 9, 11, 24, 73–4, 79–86, 155–72, 226, 241–2, 245–50, 253–4, 255 n.2, 255 n.3, 255 n.5 Todman, Dan 136, 139, 148 Todorov, Tzvetan 93 Tolkien, J.R.R. 93–4, 180–2, Torner, Evan 180, 190 Trench Warfare (BBC) 8, 139, 151 n.3 Trenches 2 139–40, 141, 148 Tresca, Michael 186, 192

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Twitter 53, 61, 64 n.1, 64 n.2, 65 n.6, 155, 160, 169 Unmanned: A Day in the Life of a Drone Pilot 22, 49 n.5 Uricchio, William 201, 207, 219 Väliaho, Pasi 44–6, 49 n.6, 49 n.7, 49 n.8 Valiant Hearts 136–7, 141–2, 145–8, 150 van Vught, Jasper 74, 75–6 V-effect (Brecht) 11, 241–5, 249, 250, 252–3 Verdun 1914–1918 137, 141–2, 147 Vietnam War 101, 185 Voorhees, Gerald 1, 37 War on Terror 18, 20, 25, 42, 99, 101 Wells, H.G. 114, 181, 185 Westin, Jonathan 2, 7, 107 n.1, 201, 213, 219 White, Hayden 93, 96, 107 n.2 Whitlock, Katie 1, 37 Wolfenstein 7, 92–5, 97, 102–7, 107 n.3 Woodcock, Jamie 5–6, 8, 17, 54, 56, 57, 58 World of Darkness 9, 179, 181–4, 186–91, 194 YouTube 9, 151 n.4, 155, 157–62, 168–72, 173 n.3, 173 n.7, 249, 255 n.2, 255 n.3 Zagal, Jose 73–4, 77–8, 79–80 Zimmerman, Eric 39, 115 Zubrzycki, Geneviève 111, 115–16, 131 n.3

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