Abstract:
Battlefield of Remembrance: The Second World War in digital games
With their close interweaving of narration and interactivity, digital games have become one of the key media of the digital age. As such, they are also the scene of ideological struggles around representation of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. One of these battlegrounds is the “correct” representation of the past. Supposed “authenticity” and “factuality” are used as excuses to tell a hegomonic white and male history and to hide other stories. Identity-relevant events such as the Second World War are particularly highly contested sites of collective memory and at the same time particularly popular content in digital games. Using selected examples, I will trace such conflicts and illustrate that digital games are a particularly hotbed of recent culture wars.
