The Technological Mediation of Collective Memory Through Historical Video Games

Abstract

This article discusses how genre-related procedural rhetorics might be employed in video games to (re)shape the way we think about history. The theoretical interpretation follows a postphenomenological line of inquiry in understanding how the sense of collective memory is shaped across playable environments. Through their medium-specific characteristics, historical video games define the nature of the representations through which history is brought to human experience and knowledge. However, collective memory should be understood neither as a process of recall nor as an aesthetics of historiophoty, but, rather, as a phenomenon of technological mediation: historical video games disclose the reality of the past as “a world to be remembered” and shape humans as “remembering subjects” in morally relevant ways. Therefore, video games based on history participate in the politics of remembrance and play a powerful role in the governance of mnemonic subjectivity by activating and reifying contingent norms of commemoration.