Fact and Fiction in Video Games: How Much Fiction Is Needed for Good Design?

This paper is a design case study examining how much fictionalization a historically grounded video game needs in order to function well as an interactive experience. Its central case is Follow the Crown (2022), a PC game developed by a small Hungarian team under a grant from the US Embassy in Budapest to mark the 100th anniversary of Hungarian-US diplomatic relations. The game centers on the Holy Crown of Hungary, which was taken out of the country at the end of the Second World War and held at Fort Knox until diplomatic relations stabilized in the 1970s. The authors frame their inquiry around the tension between authenticity, the faithful capture of the experience and expectations of the past, and accuracy, the correctness of historical facts, drawing on prior scholarship on heritage representation in games.

The game is split into two gameplay modes: a top-down, real-time stealth segment set during the Second World War, in which the player is a Crown Guard smuggling the relic out of Hungary, and a narrative-driven dialogue segment set in the 1960s, in which the player acts as the US ambassador mediating among more than a dozen non-player characters. The developers report that they sacrificed as little historical authenticity as possible, but they introduced counterfactual events to make situations more plausible and dramatically engaging. Player agency was deliberately limited to execution of orders from an authoritative figure, and the dialogue system allowed expression within guided outcomes. The authors identify complexity management, balancing exposition across decades of backstory, and tailoring mechanics to the target audience as the major design challenges. They candidly note that running two game concepts simultaneously was a mistake, and that some players struggled with certain mechanics, leading them to prioritize engagement over strict historical accuracy.

The paper's evidence is qualitative and drawn from the developers' own reflections rather than player data, and the game reached only a limited audience, which constrains its generalizability. Its principal contribution is the argument that a measured degree of fictionalization can be necessary for historical games, paired with an acknowledgment of the ethical risks involved in blurring the line between history and interactive fiction.