Digital Games, Cultural Memory, & Hegemony

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, argues that digital games function as designed objects that shape cultural memory and historical understanding, with particular attention to how marginalized and dominant identities intersect in these processes. Drawing on game studies, memory studies, cultural studies, and political philosophy, the research examines how games mediate understandings of the past through their narrative and procedural design, and how player agency can interpret, negotiate, or resist those meanings. Its stated aim is to contribute an apparatus for both designing and critically analyzing historical games, with an ethical-philosophical dimension planned for later stages.

The project's empirical approach combines close analysis of specific titles with semi-structured interviews with developers, critics, and players, aiming to contrast the encoding contexts of production with the decoding contexts of play. Preliminary findings center on two mainstream titles. An analysis of Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry explores its treatment of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade and contemporary White supremacy, contrasting the author's own play experience with that of players more affected by historical trauma and ongoing marginalization. A follow-up examination of Mafia 3 applies the concept of identity tourism alongside prosthetic memory to assess how the game was produced, applied, and received. The interview data are reported as revealing specialized knowledge that shapes the research trajectory, supplemented by documentary research of online articles, videos, and audio.

The author's central hypothesis is that digital games operate as objects that factor into memory politics and commemoration, with emphasis on marginalized intersecting identities, and that this influence is moderated by player agency. The work is framed around power hierarchies that privilege some perspectives over others, and it raises questions about commodity racism and the paradox of engaging with past oppression through technologies shaped by contemporary oppression. As a work in progress, the abstract presents preliminary rather than conclusive results, with the project's full ethical and theoretical contributions still under development.