Save the Park, Punish the Traitors: Games as Historical Documents

The paper argues that video games produced during periods of social and political turmoil can serve as historical documents, much as political cartoons and opinion pieces do. Existing scholarship on games has tended to examine how games depict past events long after they occurred, treating them as texts about history rather than as historical texts in their own right. This study instead considers timely games as artifacts that capture the perceptions, emotions, and political climate of the moment in which they were made, which often disappear from circulation quickly.

To test this idea, the authors conducted a comparative analysis of short, reactive games created during two episodes in Turkey: the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the aftermath of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. The analysis examined audio-visual elements, narrative components, and game mechanics across a selection of titles from each period. The evaluation is qualitative and rests on close readings of the games themselves rather than on large samples or survey data, and the paper frames its findings as an illustrative case study.

The findings indicate that the two sets of games reflect markedly different political moods. Gezi-era games displayed a variety of perspectives and a prevailing call for peaceful resolution even amid clashes with security forces. Post-coup games, by contrast, conveyed anger and a desire for revenge, and they showed a persistent confusion about the coup's origins that the games themselves did not resolve. The authors note that some of these differences may simply reflect the distinct natures of the two events, but they contend that the contrast nonetheless demonstrates the evidentiary value of games as records of their time. The paper concludes that such games reveal both their designers' personal experiences and the circumstances of their production.