“Playing Memories? Digital Games as Memory Media” by Tabea Widmann

In this blog, scholar of Holocaust memory and computer games Tabea Widmann takes a mission from Call of Duty WWII (2017) as a starting point to speak to the themes of memory and witnessing in video games. During the gameplay players join a squad of American soldiers discovering a deserted Nazi forced labor camp. Upon recognizing the abhorrent past of this location, in-game NPC (non-playable characters) teammates start documenting the horrors by taking photographs. As the photographs are taken, they are shown to the player in unskippable full screen moments. The game’s narrative constructs a moral burden for the player, a need within the story to remember and to communicate what they have found to other characters in the story once the mission concludes. 

Central to Widmann’s discussion of this mission is the notion that the in-game photographs are remediations of real world “documentations by the Allies upon finding the concentration and labor camps of the Nazis”. Correspondingly, the narrative context of these remediations, compelling the player to tell others about what they have found, casts the player in a position theorized by Cultural Memory scholar Aleida Assmann as the “secondary witness”; those who translate, but don’t necessarily experience, first-hand trauma. Further depth is added by likening this transfer of cultural memory to Alison Landsberg notion of “prosthetic memories”; “memories [that] are not naturally obtained. Rather, they are a result of a pre-shaped mediated experience with the past”. 

Widmann nuances the picture by discussing how video games can represent memories not just through images and signs but also by determining the game mechanics through which players interact with these signs: This leaves open the possibility that games can subvert or polemicise by, for example, awarding points in a manner that might not align with the interpretations a player might bring to a game. This effect is not totalizing and all-encompassing for players, they are not uncritical, but rather speaks to what game designer Jasper Juul has called the “half-real”-quality of video games; the way the game world hermeneutically entangles with lived experiences. In this mechanism Widmann locates the productive potential of video games to enact the “playful testing of roles and narratives and most especially the very personal contribution of, what at least feel like, self-created outcomes”.

This blog also offers a rich library of examples of video games, published roughly from 2010 to present, which centralize representations of memory, perpetration and perpetrators specifically in the context of the Holocaust and WWII. This encompasses franchise games from large studios, the first-person shooter Wolfenstein appears alongside Call of Duty, and of note is the mention of the Clash of Clans app from the often-overlooked mobile gaming space. But also smaller productions from independent developers and even developers of mods (new games created often by communities through the modification of existing games) are considered, particularly in the context of single-concept games like KZ Manager, a concentration camp management game, and Don’t Starve in the Holocaust, a holocaust survival game, providing interesting discussion of the complicity and intention of game developers themselves.

Author of this entry: Alie Tacq

Widmann, Tabea. “Playing Memories? Digital Games as Memory Media” Reframe. Digital Holocaust Memory, University of Sussex. 2020, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/2020/09/17/playing-memories-digital-games-as-memory-media/