The Great Game of History: an Analytical Approach to and Analysis of the Videogame As a Historical Form
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1 THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL The Great Game of History: An Analytical Approach to and Analysis of the Videogame as a Historical Form Being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy: Media Culture and Society in the University of Hull by Adam Chapman, BA (Hons), MA (July 2013) 2 To Ninian Kinnear-Wilson, my friend and mentor, who never lived to see me finish my work and to my Grandad Fred Kelly, without whom I would never have had the chance to start it. 3 Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is difficult. For the privilege and highs of creating something absolutely your own, there is the price of absolute responsibility and the lows of doubt and anxiety. I emerge from this process stronger, thanks to those around me who have inspired me and helped me to think and survive. To these people I extend my gratitude. Firstly, to my tutor James Aston for his valuable feedback and accepting my research (footnotes and all) and to my first tutor Matthew Pateman for the initial focus and confidence. I extend my thanks to all the colleagues I have had discussions with but must specifically mention Tom Apperley, Alun Munslow and Alex Drace-Francis. My thanks to the University of Hull for funding this work for three years and to the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS) for their funding to attend doctoral courses and the University of Gothenburg for a month of research. In particular I must thank Doris Gustafson for her help organising these trips and the Higher Games Studies Seminar (HiGS) group for their discussions. My thanks to all my friends and family for helping me during this journey. However, some of you must be thanked in particular. Jimmy Trippier for the brilliant front-cover, even though we never got to use it. Camilla Olsson for answering my questions about references, I wish I could have implemented more of her suggestions. Filipe Penicheiro for the opportunities, pints and insightful conversations on historical videogames. Jonas Linderoth for our discussions, believing in me, opening the door to the academic world and helping me face the exploratory challenges of research and academia. My sister Hannah for her constant reassurance, distraction and putting up with living with a stressed first-year PhD student. My partner Sian for her constant, loving and vital support in every way imaginable. This work would not have been possible without her. And finally in this and everything I do, to my Mother Therese who first made the past come alive for me and taught me to always want to know. 4 Contents Epigraph.......................................................................................................5 Introduction.................................................................................................6 Chapter 1: Interacting with the Videogame as History.........................22 Chapter 2: Epistemology and Simulation...............................................47 Chapter 3: Time.........................................................................................79 Chapter 4: Space.......................................................................................95 Chapter 5: Narrative in Games..............................................................124 Chapter 6: Narrative in Brothers in Arms and Civilization.................140 Chapter 7: Affording History.................................................................170 Chapter 8: Brothers in Arms and Reenactment....................................189 Chapter 9: Civilization, Counter-History and Postmodernism...........221 Chapter 10: Play and Deconstruction...................................................249 Conclusion................................................................................................258 Reference List..........................................................................................268 5 Gaming history is not a crass attempt to make the subject relevant to today’s kids. Rather it’s an attempt to revitalize history with the kind of technology that kids have pioneered. And why not? After all, the Game Boy generation is growing up. And, as they seek a deeper understanding of the world we live in, they may not turn first to the bookshelves. They may demand to play – or rather replay – the great game of history for themselves. -Niall Ferguson 2006 6 Introduction ‘Granted, you have to understand that in a video game, they’re going to dramatize history and twist things to make the story more interesting. As such, it is important to note, for example, that we did not send in one dude to kill robo-Hitler; that was actually a team of seven people.’ -Comment by user Kevin Feasel on the 36 Chambers – The Legendary Journeys Blog, March 18, 2013 ‘I am fond of history - and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.’ -Jane Austen, 2012, 75 I am told it is June the 6th 1944, 6.35am, just off the coast of Normandy. The sky is grey, the water a little choppy. The other soldiers huddling in the landing craft all look scared. Ahead, one of them nervously taps his rifle against the floor. A commanding voice shouts ‘Clear the ramp, thirty seconds!’ Suddenly, I hear the whistling of distant artillery shells answered by the nearby crump of impact and jets of water. Soldiers flinch with each explosion. The occupants of a nearby landing craft all fall injured or dead, strafed by a swooping enemy fighter-plane. We speed past. With a bang our transport stops. The ramp lowers to the sound of artillery and ricocheting machine-gun fire. Suddenly we are underwater. There are soldiers, some dead, some struggling with wounds and the water is filled with blood and whizzing bullets that leaving spiralling patterns in their wake. Breaking the surface I run forward onto the beach. There are bodies everywhere and in the distance huge concrete bunkers spew machine gun fire. The sounds of explosions, gun-fire and men screaming are intense and confusing. Each impact is met with a geyser of sand and I can feel the vibrations of the close-by explosions. My objective is only to survive. I run to a crater occupied by one of my compatriots. With a loud bang the air is filled with fire. I pause for a second, startled. Now the crater is empty, its sole occupant vaporized. Just as I am about to reach the comparative safety of the depression, machine-gun fire stitches the sand in front of me. The beach turns black as my perspective falls to the floor, side-on. Nearby there is a 7 call for a medic but it is too late. Abruptly I am confronted by two words: ‘continue’ or ‘exit’. Thus ended my first teenage encounter with the opening level of Medal of Honor: Frontline, a first-person shooter (FPS) set during World War 2 (WW2). This game’s achievements have been surpassed in the decade since its release but it has remained significant to me. Firstly, the chaos, sensory bombardment, random ‘violence’ and tension of this encounter became a reference point in my mind when thinking about the events of D-Day. Secondly, this was the first time I realized (however clumsily) that games could say things about the past and this was exciting because my role was not subsumed but was, in fact, the point. Whatever we may think of historical film, few of us today would doubt its power to influence our perception of the past. Like my memories of Medal of Honor, how many of us when trying to conceive of the madness of those D-Day landings in some way reference Saving Private Ryan or before it, The Longest Day? For many it is ‘impossible…to think of the Normandy landings without thinking of fuzzy images, the handheld camera close to the ground, the muted sound of Saving Private Ryan’ (Engelen 2007, 562). Such films are important because they are ‘public texts that people can refer to when communicating ideas about the world in the past and present’ (Metzger 2007, 68) and because through contact with these kinds of experiential popular histories ‘a person sutures him or herself into a larger historical narrative’ (Landsberg 2009, 222). Accordingly, forms that encourage this kind of prosthetic memory are also important because they retain the ability to ‘shape an individual’s subjectivity and politics’ (Landsberg 2009, 223). Most of us can then relate to the idea of cinema or television as part of our interpretations of the past, but what about the other media success story of the past 100 years: videogames? Certainly, historical videogames are extremely popular. For example, according to vgchartz.com, WW2 FPS Call of Duty: World at War has now sold over 13 million copies worldwide. So too, historical game series like Brothers in Arms, Civilization, Assassin’s Creed, Europa Universalis and Age of Empires have all sold millions of copies. Whatever its variable fortunes in other popular forms and however incidentally, it appears that history in the videogame form is thriving. As Rosenstone notes, 8 ‘for every person who reads a book on a historical topic...many millions of people are likely to encounter that same past on the screen. Rather than dismissing such works….it seems more judicious to admit that we live in a world shaped, even in its historical consciousness, by the visual media, and to investigate exactly how...[they] work to create a historical world.’ (2006, 12) This thesis is an attempt to begin such an investigation of the videogame form, which may be influencing the ways we understand, think, talk about, and engage with the past. This is the first deep exploration of the videogame from this perspective and is thusly not only an original contribution to knowledge but also a much needed one. Indeed, like Rosenstone notes of film, games ‘may well have already changed the way we see and describe the past’ (2006, 158) and yet they are barely understood.