Aesthetics of Prohibition: Moral Transgression, Control, and Pleasure in Political Games

This paper argues that political and historical games can turn legal and moral constraint into a source of aesthetic and affective pleasure, a condition it calls "juridical play." Its central case is the German legal framework around §86a of the Strafgesetzbuch, which criminalised the use of unconstitutional symbols such as swastikas and, until a 2018 reinterpretation by the USK, excluded digital games from the social adequacy clause granted to art, science, and education. The author contends that games such as Through the Darkest of Times and Attentat 1942 operate as moral laboratories in which the player's awareness of both internal ludic rules and external prohibitions becomes a constitutive part of ethical and sensory experience, rather than a mere narrative backdrop.

The analysis contrasts the two titles as products of different legal moments. Attentat 1942, developed before the 2018 reinterpretation and initially banned in Germany, relies on a hybrid documentary structure combining live-action interviews, archival footage, and interactive sequences, with its affective force lying in the silences where history cannot be pictorially represented. Through the Darkest of Times, released after the reinterpretation, deliberately incorporates Nazi symbols and uses a stylised expressionist aesthetic to convert recognition into moral tension between resistance and survival. Both games use procedural rhetoric to model the bureaucratic violence of totalitarian systems, but the paper argues that law itself functions as a designer of affect, shaping what can be represented and how.

Drawing on Sicart's theory of ethical gameplay, Galloway's concept of "allegories of control," and affect theory, the paper concludes that the pleasures of these games are reflexive and epistemic rather than cathartic or escapist. Prohibition, on this account, becomes a productive condition for moral and affective reflection, transforming the apparatus of control into a site of play. The study's scope is qualitative and theoretical, centred on two case studies within the German regulatory context, and it draws on a wide body of game studies, legal, and philosophical literature rather than empirical audience data.