Research hypothesis and questions

This dissertation is best approached by reading this introductory chapter first and then the articles thereafter. These articles represent an essential line of inquiry for developing an understanding of the relationship between games and cultural memory. Each article tests the central hypothesis of the research project: Production, game form, and play practices through historical digital games have a role in the formation of hegemonic cultural memory. This dense hypothesis is answered in four articles, that contain the following underlying research questions:

1. What is the role of digital games in the negotiation and formation of cultural memory and how do players negotiate games via practices of play?

2. How do historical digital games offer or limit the affective and political potentials of cultural memory via mass culture? And how do player positionality influence these potentials?

3. What role does the political economy of games have in the formation of cultural memory and to what extent do individuals negotiate and reproduce hegemonic structures that they operate within?

4. How do we analyze games and play as distinct experiential phenomena in the formation of cultural memory?

The first article serves as the initial research into the intersections between cultural memory, historical digital games, play, and hegemony. I focus on the game Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (Ubisoft Québec 2013) and unpack how its simulation of the 18^th century transatlantic slave system in the Caribbean offers players the possibility for what I call counter-hegemonic commemorative play. Via formal game analysis, I demonstrate how the game’s mechanical and sign systems work in

conjunction to produce cultural memory about colonialism, liberation, the Haitian revolution, and most importantly, the nature of contemporary racial and colonial struggles. To contextualize this analysis, I introduce two perspectives from two black American critics who recount their thoughts and actions during and after playing Freedom Cry. Here they reflect on their own memory of black and Afro-Caribbean historical struggles in mass culture, as well as their own current-day situation in the U.S., a society and mass culture structured along racial categories. The perspectives of these two critics reveal the inflection point between cultural memory, identity, hegemony, and the cathartic potential of play. Namely, that counter-hegemonic commemorative play refers to “instances where a game’s design features allow players to playfully negotiate, and perform against, contemporary hegemony, thereby influencing processes of cultural memory […] and […] to perform and actively resist the depicted past hegemony in a potentially cathartic way.”(Hammar 2017b, 387, my emphasis) The first article then sets up the overall research project by using one particular game as a case study to show how games can be formally analyzed as memory-making media that in turn are appropriated³ by marginalized players in order to generate meaning-potentials within a present-day hegemonic context.

3 By appropriation, I refer to the ways that players take a game’s encoded meaning potentials and express themselves based on their own personal values and norms. (Sicart 2011)

The second article takes its point of departure in memory studies by critically interrogating Alison Landsberg’s (2004; 2015) concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ via the analysis of Mafia III (Hangar 13 and 2K Czech 2016), a historical digital game that represents the 1960s freedom struggle for black

Americans within the narrative frame of an organized crime drama. Landsberg’s prosthetic memory identifies the affective and political potential in mass culture, where mass cultural media form mnemonic limbs in audiences that can then potentially shape political alliances via empathy for particular subjects’ political struggles. I then adapt prosthetic memory to Mafia III. Similar to the first article, I conduct a game analysis and close reading of the game’s memory-making potentials, which I then contrast with player perspectives to show how the game is appropriated within contemporary contexts. I analyze Mafia III via Landsberg’s prosthetic memory potentials in order to show how the game generates affect in players via its mechanical system, sign, and materiality. I also critically investigate how the game, according to prosthetic memory, might potentially form political alliances in support of black freedom struggles.

This analysis and investigation identify the limits of Mafia III and mass culture more broadly, since its political economy often sets the boundaries of the discourse in which players form their memory of the past and establish political alliances. For example, because Mafia III is reliant on exploitative work conditions in a capitalist economy reliant on 21^st century imperialism of global commodity forms in the games industry, I argue that its political economy necessarily restricts mass culture’s affective and political potentials. To nuance the promise of empathy via mass culture, I also locate the identity positions in broader societal power hierarchies, using critical race theory to ask the incisive question of who is playing who? As the scholar Kishonna Grays (2017) points out in the article, a white

American playing Mafia III can easily engage with its representation of 1960s white supremacy, while still ignoring and benefitting from self-said system in today’s American society. I thereby conclude that while mass culture’s inclusion of marginalized identities may invite empathy at the level of text, it does not necessarily mean that their inclusion result in political conscience and a drive to coordinated collective action. The second article thus stands in contrast to Landsberg’s political promises of prosthetic memory by me identifying the limitations set by mass culture with reference to political economy and critical race theory. Landsberg’s concept might therefore be re-evaluated in light of the frames of production and consumption, particularly within the context of the games industry.

The third article is the primary empirical investigation into the production-side of cultural memory in historical digital games. First, I provide a general overview of the political-economic aspects of the games industry, where I outline its demographic composition, the global economic system through which it operates, and its labor conditions. These aspects, I argue, reinforce and reproduce an oppressive system that predisposes the articulation of hegemonic memory-making potentials of historical digital games. I interrogate this argument by positing the divide between production and reception, where especially players are able to negotiate and activate these memory-making potentials differently, as my previous two articles also demonstrated. Subsequently, I introduce my empirical data based on nine semi-structured qualitative interviews with game developers that I conducted between 2015 and 2017. Here I inquired about their motivations for representing the past, what creative choices they made, to what extent they relied on other media, how the economy affected these choices, and how industry gatekeepers determined what is produced, among a range of other

questions. The informants ranged from student and indie developers to CEOs of mid-sized studios to

one lead writer working in a so-called AAA⁴ multinational game company. I segmented the collected data into four different themes: self-reflections; mnemonic reinforcement and contestations;

technoludic constraints; and economic axiom. These themes reflect some of the general trends of producing a historical digital game and each reveals the underlying structures that motivate developers to produce certain types of memory-making potentials in their products. Overall, the findings illustrate how individual workers do not necessarily intend to reproduce received systems of power and

hegemony. Instead, certain cultural and material relations tacitly motivate and/or marginalize workers in the digital game industries and thus motivate the reproduction of hegemonic power relations in cultural memory. Finally, the article argues that attention to cultural production networks such as the games industry constitute important factors that need to be taken seriously in research on cultural memory and game studies.

The fourth article introduces a theoretical framework for the analysis of memory-making potentials of digital games. Not much explicit research within the field of memory studies has been conducted on the relations between memory and play, whereby this article serves to fill this epistemological gap.

First, I qualify why play matters in the creation of culture by using the play theory of Johan Huizinga and the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer. This qualification of play’s importance in the

formations of and struggles over culture helps establish the link between play and cultural memory. I then introduce a practical component by including the game studies scholar Gordon Calleja’s ‘player involvement model’, the purpose of which is to identify and map how players experience games and thereby become experientially involved. The model serves as a heuristic to capture six different dimensions through which players become experientially involved in the playing of games, namely the 1) kinesthetic, 2) spatial, 3) shared, 4) narrative, 5) affective, and 6) ludic modes. I then explore the memory-making potentials in each of the six dimensions by relating each type of involvement with examples of memory-making in historical digital games. As such, the article is both an illustration of the importance of studying play in cultural memory, but also a methodological proposal on how to study this phenomenon via established heuristics from the discipline of game studies.

4 AAA is the colloquial term for the large size of the budget of the game’s production. These budgets are estimated to run up to hundreds of millions of dollars (Nieborg 2011), rivaling the level of large-scale and financially risky Hollywood productions.