The American Historical Review is now taking an interest in games. In the most recent issue, Andrew Denning provides “an autoethnographic journey through recent presentations of the Nazi era in video games” (182). This essay, together with a three-review subsection on Assassin’s Creed games, might be taken as an official entrance of historical game studies into the profession. The attention is merited, but the questions asked, it seems to me, are not always the right ones.
Andrew Chapman, who is among the scholars who has done the most to constitute historical game studies into a field, last month posted an introductory essay for the new Historical Games Network. Historical truth will be the theme for this forum’s opening quarter. One point of Chapman’s short text is to re-assert the usefulness of the fundamental observation made by defenders of postmodernism in history – and Chapman looks here especially to Alan Munslow and Robert Rosenstone and Rethinking History – that, minimally, history is not just facts. Indeed not! As Chapman points out, this is an old observation. Arguably it has by now been so fully assimilated into professional historical practice that what is interesting is not whether or not scholars acknowledge the existence of something other than facts, but what exactly they think that other stuff is. Chapman here focuses on the point that any plausible notion of historical truth admits at least a place for fiction. This opens the way to discussing games, which must be, in some sense, fictions. Now, Chapman is in this instance simply putting in a plea for scholars to take seriously the fact that “these games are still out there doing some kind of work in the world by communicating through historical imagery, narratives and ideas.” Very few people, at this point, would disagree. But – should the games “out there” be hunted down and brought to justice for their historical crimes? Or should we be glad they are out in the world? Are they doing work we historians cannot or will not do? Perhaps the AHR can help us decide.
Denning’s main object is the new Wolfenstein games, reboots of the OG FPS, which now are set in an alternate future-past in which the Nazis won. Why exactly games are so interested in these alternative future-pasts – famous other examples include the Bioshock and Fallout series – is worth considering under the rubric of postmodernism and the historical transformation it names. In any case, Denning notes—as Eugen Pfister for instance has as well—that Wolfenstein manages to have much more to say about the Holocaust than WW2 games like Call of Duty that might otherwise be thought to be much more “realistic,” a descriptor that here is genuinely obscene. For Denning it is not really the plot of Wolfenstein that does interesting historical work (so much for the narrative turn of historiography). It is rather what we might call the game’s worldbuilding. Perhaps we need to pervert the Barthesian reality effect into a historiographic effect to name this. That in the game’s world the Nazis found eager allies in the KKK, for instance, implies an important historical point about the nature of white supremacy in the USA. But of course the game also reproduces fairly appalling stereotypes, from the sexually deviant SS-Woman all the way to affirming the existence of globe-spanning ancient Jewish conspiracies (189). If reality effects work on any reader, the historiography effect requires a historian to interpret it, to guide the player as to which vulgarization and brutality ought to be taken seriously, and which not.
The Nazis of course are a privileged object. Denning, whose footnotes indeed contain a whole syllabus in historical game studies, is right to point out the dangers here. “The mechanics of video games, the details of alternate history, and the obsessions of popular history reinforce one another. The public fascination with these subjects, and the public’s desire to comprehend the minutiae of military uniforms, the atrocities in prisoner-of-war camps, and the intimate details of history’s heroes and villains, can teeter on the edge of fetishization” (192). What would be a critical, rather than a fetishistic, gamic representation of National Socialism? Denning’s goal is to point to moments of such critique in Wolfenstein, but it’s difficult to know how to achieve this in a more durable way. Certainly it does not have to do with the energy invested in the simulation. Arguably developers of games like Call of Duty shy away from complex depictions of Nazis precisely because the meaning of the game is not in the developer’s hands. It is in fact extremely difficult – and perhaps Wolfenstein succeeds in this? – to build a game involving Nazis that cannot be repurposed into something pro-Nazi. The tortured history of Hearts of Iron modding communities suggests that this is the case.
Denning grasps the basic problem here, which throws us back to a form of historical thinking that is modernist rather than postmodernist. The historical realities to which games refer, Denning writes, are
always already politicized when the public encounters the subject in publications and classrooms…Video games are forms of digital history and public history…that shape public understanding before and oftentimes in lieu of our [historians’] input. If we criticize video games for placing entertainment and aesthetics over analysis and significance, we ignore an influential medium in the creation of public knowledge of the past and perpetuate a false division between (serious) work and (juvenile) play (196).
Denning wants historians to embrace the pedagogical possibilities afforded by the play of these games – experiences that, at least properly framed, lead to good questions about the historical past. Denning of course does not in fact wish to reject the distinction between serious work and juvenile play – the Geertzian references are not really helpful:
It is not our task to separate serious historical work from frivolous historical play; our task is instead to explore the potential of deep play while encouraging the critical thinking and analytical tools that will inspire broad play…When students play with history through the eyes of first-person avatars and interact with virtual historical worlds, they build knowledge through experience and share their creations with one another and the world. Recognizing the potential of historical play, let’s join in the fun (198).
Indeed rather than censoriously rejecting frivolity, let us encourage broadness rather than narrowness and deepness rather than shallowness. Well, sure. Still the point here is that historical pedagogy will be successful when students get a critical distance from their games, are able to pause and analyze the cultural logics in which they are so eagerly immersing themselves. This is a worthy goal, and it should of course be pursued in terms of games as well as movies, television, media in general. But what is the specificity here of the game? It seems to me no more plausible that historians will be able to go meet the youth—or, really, just people in general—where they are in this than in any other case.
It is worth paying attention at least to the ways digital games shape memory and historical consciousness. That is a minimal position. Constitutively, indeed, games are fictional. Since they require the agency of the player, they cannot be a mimetic representation of a past that we perhaps admit is, even if unavailable, in itself fixed.
But of course our evidence of the past is not fixed. This is Abe Gibson’s concern in a May 17th column in Perspectives about the “deepfake” phenomenon. It is getting easier to manipulate images, and that means that the vast numbers of ‘historical’ images online are suspect not only because of context collapse. This is of course also not a totally new thing, but the ease with which it can be done is new. DeepNostalgia allows you to animate, in a limited way, a still photograph. Is this a charming gimmick? Does anyone actually want to see their dead grandmother re-animated in this way? Sometimes digital manipulation of photographs or old images leads to no more than an amusing embarrassment; but also in more insidious forms they can be a profound moral violation. Gibson admits the usefulness of these in enlivening history – movement, we learn, even uncanny, is life – but puts such fakes rather in the context of other dangerous falsifications, for instance the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Surely very few people, when they are playing a game, think they are seeing real footage for instance of Ronald Reagan giving a black ops hit squad “whatever they want” to “take out” a terrorist, however realistically the Gipper is animated. Some of the pleasure of the thing is in the conscious mixture of historical (real) footage of the politician and this fictional (false) animation. But, just as surely, whatever the politics of the game, for many more people, this little snippet of historicity contributes to what we might call the Reagan myth. He was just the sort of strong president who would have ordered the hard choice made, we can imagine. We are very much on the unstable terrain of the sense of things that people get from their exposure to contemporary media. Here we have the kind of thing that worries Gibson – not, perhaps, a weirdly animated photograph of Lenin belting out a Britney Spears hits from the late 1990s, but what about politician of your choice with Jeffrey Epstein? Or, in one of Gibson’s examples, a video of Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a dipshit? Any such image or set of images can be debunked, but that takes time and investment. The damage will already be done. Truth decay, as Gibson writes, will already have taken place. Gibson does not sound very confident that the historical profession has any real response to such deepfakes. He even suggests a return to a sort of authority of archival experience; it is hard to believe that this time, on this occasion, after everything, expertise will save us.
Together with Denning’s longer essay the AHR has a section of three short reviews of Assassin’s Creed games. The review editor justifies this in terms of public perception and understanding of history – “For good or for ill, many young people receive their initial impression of historical epochs, characters, and events in this visually compelling ludic format, and historians should pay attention to these virtual renderings of the past” (214). That is, this is where the undergraduates are getting their ideas about history, so we should know about it. As Michael Hattem writes about AC:III, the game “must be understood as an expression of popular culture and as a product of the cultural memory of the Revolution.” On this basis, Hattem seems pleased that the game does not take sides in the American Revolution – avoiding a good vs evil representation of the conflict, and that the game represents the everyday experience of common people (through architecture and NPCs, mainly). Thus, “the game reflects the historiographical efforts of the New Left, neo-Progressive, and more recent “inclusion school” historians not only in its depiction but in its foregrounding of the racial and ethnic diversity of the colonies in this period.” Ultimately, for Hattem, the game brings “the spirit of recent academic scholarship” the “collective memory” of the Revolution in a way much superior to Hamilton. We are in the presence again of a historiography effect.
There is however an interpretive divergence between Hattem and Julien Bazile’s review of Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. Hattem reads the conflicting personal motivations of the main character, Conner, as a historiographic intervention, writing that they give the game “a greater degree of contingency than one might expect in a game about a historical event for which the outcome is known.” For Bazile, in contrast, because of “the fundamentally interactive nature of the video game medium, the character design cannot give the player anybody else to control but a hero.” That a hero should have conflicted motives is not especially interesting – what matters is rather that, almost by generic necessity, an individual agent is setting events in motion.
Many commentators have noted that Freedom Cry at least puts the player into the shoes – let us not raise too many questions by saying the skin! – of a subaltern figure. (Especially useful here is Alyssa Sepinwall’s discussion of the game alongside earlier games thematizing slave resistance designed by Muriel Tramis and written by Patrick Chamoiseau). Yet the subaltern playable in Assassin’s Creed is exceptional:
Freedom Cry’s history is one of touristic exploration punctuated by bursts of violent liberation. The game strongly suggests that Adéwalé’s commitment to the Maroons led him to plant the seeds of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), the first largely successful slave revolution. That is to say, without the protagonist—and through him, the player’s—intervention, there wouldn’t be a savior enabling the insurgents to make history by giving birth to the first Black republic. While being a beautifully crafted and engaging game, Freedom Cry is also a great example of the historiographical implications of video game design. In the writing of history, whether in academia or in video games, the risk of colonialism remains real.
Games, it has recently been argued, essentially involve shaping agency, staging specific kinds of agency. There has been a temptation in historical game studies – going back it seems to me to Uricchio’s classic article on this subject – to conflate player agency and the idea of the contingent or indeterminate or unknowable in history. This I think is the result of too narrow a reading of the claim that history is narrative. The logic goes like this: if history is narrative and games are sort of narratives that nonetheless demand the agency of the player, then games are historical narratives that foreground contingency within limits, undecidability, and so on. Yet this cuts both ways! We have Hattem praising contingency in the US case for very much the same reason that Bazile warns of subtle colonialism, through the agency of the player, in the Haitian one. We are back to the “always already political” observation Denning made about representations of Nazis in games.
The issue is neither novel nor pedagogical. History is political because it is about who we are. Hence the anxieties over multiplicity, instability, contingency. So the interesting question is not whether or not games can be used in the classroom or have cultural significance – of course sometimes yes in both cases – but rather, as has been asked many times of other forms of historical representation, what kinds of politics do they allow? If games work in the medium of agency, and if historical games are necessarily political ones, then what kinds of collective action, what modes of living together, are games capable of helping us to imagine? What possibilities do games foreclose? What new subjects do they allow us to become?
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