Early Modernity and Video Games 9781443862349, 1443862347

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Early Modernity and Video Games

Early Modernity and Video Games

Edited by

Tobias Winnerling and Florian Kerschbaumer

Early Modernity and Video Games, Edited by Tobias Winnerling and Florian Kerschbaumer This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Tobias Winnerling, Florian Kerschbaumer and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5394-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5394-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix The Devil is in the Details: Why Video Game Analysis is such a Hard Task for Historians, and how we nevertheless try Florian Kerschbaumer and Tobias Winnerling Prelude ...................................................................................................... xxi Special Difficulties, Special Opportunities Tom Chatfield Section One: Methodology and Theory Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 The Game is a Medium: The Game is a Message Rolf Nohr Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 24 Do Computers Play History? Josef Köstlbauer Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 38 The History beyond the Frame: Off-Screen Space in the Historical First-Person Shooter Adam Rowan Chapman Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 52 Homo Ex Machina? – Cyber-Renaissance and Transhumanism in Deus Ex: Human Revolution René Schallegger Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 64 Does History Play the Role of Storyline? Historiographical Periodization as Theme in Video Game Series Simon Maria Hassemer

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 76 Research the Spinning Jenny, Gain +8% Wealth by Textile Industries: The Transformation of Historical Technologies into the Virtual World of Empire: Total War Lutz Schröder Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 91 Construction as a Condition to Win: Depiction and Function of Early Modern Architecture and Urban Landscapes in Strategy and Economic Simulation Games Marc Bonner Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 105 Pharaoh Mao Zedong and the Musketeers of Babylon: The Civilization Series between Primordialist Nationalism and Subversive Parody Stefan Donecker Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 123 Towards an Analysis of Strategies of Authenticity Production in World War II First-Person Shooter Games Tim Raupach Section Two: Case Studies Chapter One ............................................................................................. 140 Narration and Narrative: (Hi-)Story Telling in Video Games Angela Schwarz Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 162 The Remediation of History in Assassin’s Creed Simon Huber Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 175 Players in the Digital City: Immersion, History and City Architecture in the Assassin’s Creed Series Gernot Hausar Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 189 Games within the Game: On the History of Playing in Assassin’s Creed II Andreas Fischer

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 201 Assassin’s Creed and the Fantasy of Repetition Martin Isaac Weis Bibliography ............................................................................................ 212 Monographs ....................................................................................... 212 Chapters ............................................................................................. 218 Articles............................................................................................... 225 Web Sources ...................................................................................... 227 Films .................................................................................................. 231 Games ................................................................................................ 231 Contributors ............................................................................................. 237

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are tremendously grateful to the following individuals and organisations that made this book possible: First of all we want to thank the association of the 'Freunde und Förderer der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf', the Philosophical Faculty of Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and the Faculty of Humanities of Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt who contributed funds for the conference 'Early Modernity and Video Games' in Düsseldorf, March 2013, which was the starting point for this book. In this context we would like also to thank the Düsseldorf State and University Library for providing the necessary rooms and being such a friendly host. A heart-felt "thank you" goes to Anja Burwitz, Jan Eikenbusch and Katharina Heitmann who contributed significantly to the editorial work. We are also indebted to Lorna Schatzmayr and Marion Koschier for their critical comments and linguistic annotations. Silvia Osada has to be credited for her invaluable support and help in all organisational matters. Without any of you neither the conference nor the book would ever have come to be finished. We would especially like to thank Prof. Achim Landwehr and Prof. Reinhard Stauber, who supported this project from the beginning. Finally, our thanks go to the authors – their ideas and thoughts have vastly broadened our perspectives on games and history, and without them, there simply would be no book. Save game and retry!

INTRODUCTION THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: WHY VIDEO GAME ANALYSIS IS SUCH A HARD TASK FOR HISTORIANS, AND HOW WE NEVERTHELESS TRY

FLORIAN KERSCHBAUMER AND TOBIAS WINNERLING

I Terms and Conditions of Use Before continuing to the chapters of this book, please read down to the end of this introduction and accept the terms and conditions set down therein. As you have evidently continued reading, you seem to be more of a scientist than a gamer, or at least appear to expect more from our terms and conditions than most people who download games do from theirs. We will try our very best not to disappoint you, but for those of you already searching for the “I accept”-button in order to be able to skip this introduction and move on to the chapters, we have good news; you may do so without running the risk that we will sue you for unlicensed use or sell your private data to others across the globe. We promise. As to making a game of it; if you do not continue reading, you will never know. Well, by now you will have become aware that this is of course a rather crude analysis of a much more complex situation and that the term “game” is probably not very appropriate in this context. Moreover it is not even clear what “game” should mean in this context at all, making the whole concept a rather poor analogy. However, in many ways, precisely this analysis turns out to be a reasonably good analogy of the situation of video game analyses in the historical sciences. Most of them seem to be

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rather crude, with basic terms not well defined and simple short stories made out of complex interwoven situational contexts. So why not just quit the field, pressing “I accept” and leave to get on with some real work? In his widely discussed bestseller FUN INC., Tom Chatfield claims that video games are one of the most serious businesses in the 21st century (2012).1 And, for many reasons, he is definitely right; every day millions of people play video games on their consoles, personal computers and mobiles. The times when gaming was something for loners in their quiet little rooms are not only long gone but gone for good. Nowadays, in the Internet Age, gamers from around the world play together in huge networks and experience exciting adventures without any national borders. In addition, the gaming industry has exploded and no longer has to fear any comparisons regarding sales figures with Hollywood or the music business, as Angela Schwarz points out in her contribution to this volume. Bestselling game titles have been sold in millions, and there are a lot of them out there that can boast such records. The ASSASSIN’S CREED Series, of which several dozen million units have been sold, if the publisher is to be believed, is only one of them, but one that falls well within the range of this volume and is therefore duly treated, in the second part of this volume, as an exemplary cross-sectional study. Video games have also become an issue under public discussion where an irreconcilable battle is being waged between people who emphasize the great potential of this medium, because of the way it encourages creativity, troubleshooting and teamwork, and those who represent the exact opposite. They warn of the dangers of isolation, learning disabilities and the promotion of violence.2 Alongside this partly populist discussion, the sciences are also dealing intensively with the topic. Media Studies, Psychology, Education Science, as well as technically and economically oriented perspectives are occupied with the phenomenon of video games. The Historical Sciences however, with few outstanding exceptions, have more or less neglected this topic in recent years; a fairly incomprehensible situation because large numbers of video games deal with historical content and day by day millions of players from around the world take a walk back into a virtual past in which they are confronted with historical images. However not only should the mediation of history be interesting for Historians, but also the medium itself, due to the ways it challenges us with its concept of narration,

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technical possibilities and force of attraction. Surely this provides reason enough to focus on video games from a historical perspective? Thus we should again take the advice of Tom Chatfield, who recommends us "to talk seriously about the world as it is: about how to get the best out of its media, where the worst really lies, and what the games we play can tell us about ourselves and our future".3 And of course this also involves talking about what video games can tell us regarding history. But, before doing so, we still owe you the terms of use so that you may read or ignore them as you see fit. The two sections of this book are outlined below. They are unequal halves, but still halves in that we think reading one without the other would provide only half the insight and half the fun. Now, as these are elaborated in further detail, just a few words about the literature which is not. We collected all the literature from the contributions, to form one comprehensive bibliography that you may perhaps find helpful, organized into the different kinds of sources and resources available. So, if you are reading this book with the aim of gaining a quick overview of the field, first take a look at the bibliography, for it will take time to gain such insight from the chapters. Bet you are already leafing through the pages anyway to thumb down there right now? If you are not (or have already finished doing so), here’s for something completely different: the contributions.

II How to handle this book: Section 1 The aim of this section was to collect glimpses of what could evolve into a methodological framework for the historian’s approach to game analysis. The individual contributions each follow a clear focus and path of inquiry and may be taken as instances of the possibilities for research rather than as maxims on how matters really are. Taken together, we think they illuminate the potential avenues and opportunities for further research as well as the difficulties that can be encountered. While they of course can be consulted selectively for guidance in a single direction, taken together they encompass a broader field and open up larger perspectives that may come in very handy for properly situating your historical video game study in the relevant context.

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Rolf Nohr (Brunswick) opens the section with a contribution that explicitly “will not deal with history” (p. 5) but with games as media. In doing so, he focuses on the discourses in, as well as, on inter-discursive connections between the specific elements of games to show that films like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and video games like AGE OF EMPIRES III do not so much try to provide a kind of window on the past, but rather to hide their specific mediality by clothing it in colourful historical garb. In this way their use of history is decidedly utilitarian and designed to authenticate themselves. This presents the researcher with the problem of overcoming the transparency such media strive for as they tend to make themselves and their workings invisible to the consumer. The scheme Nohr proposes to alleviate these difficulties, is based on a critical discourse analysis of elements of game content that to us seems highly useful for historians dealing with games no matter whether it originally deals with history or not. In a similar vein, Josef Köstlbauer (Vienna) probes into the issue of simulation and poses the question as to whether games are akin to simulations, his example being the military simulations used at least from the 18th and 19th centuries to prepare for real war. Where are the boundaries between enactments of battle for enjoyment and for matters of life and death to be drawn? Are SID MEIER’S GETTYSBURG or EUROPA UNIVERSALIS simulations of the latter kind? As he explores the complicated history of both the term “simulation” itself and of the early modern military simulations and compares them to video games, we begin to become aware of the difficult problems underlying this seemingly simple comparison; what are the parameters that can qualify something as a dynamic tool for the modelling of real processes, whether past or present, rather than those that provide a method for fun? Adam Chapman (Hull) then reminds us that the construction of games not only consists of what is on the screen but also and perhaps more importantly, of what is not on the screen. He deals with off-screen space as the part of a game’s visual narration that seems to be pure imagination as it comprises the spaces that the game does not show but that are presumably there. He deals with BROTHERS IN ARMS as a prime example of this use of space in games as it is a first person shooter where only those parts of the game your character can see at any given moment are shown, whereas those you don’t see, for example, what is behind your back or where your enemies are positioned, are of vital importance for you if you are to succeed in the game. This broadening of the perspectives on parameters of

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the construction of games is also vitally important to us, as it reminds us that it is just as necessary to pay attention to what the games imply as to what they ostensibly indicate. The situation of a given game in a broader framework of reference, with attention to details both ostensible and implied, is also attempted by René Schallegger (Klagenfurt). In a close examination of DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, he first tries to show how specific in-game choices are connected to meta-choices concerned with issues of truth, responsibility and moral duty. He then proceeds to decipher the efforts to deconstruct common game patterns and tropes presented by the publishers of HUMAN REVOLUTION. And, as in-game choices point to larger issues, including in-game elements, which, as Schallegger maintains, in turn point to larger historical references, a meta-historical framing surrounds the game and subliminally infuses it with new layers of meaning. In this instance the games point to the Renaissance in many different ways, and via this Renaissance connection not only to Early Modernity but also to philosophical concepts such as Trans-Humanism that can be seen to be based on Renaissance ideas too. Simon Hassemer (Freiburg) further elaborates on questions of narrative. He suggests that the video game is not a narrative medium as commonly understood by this term, but that it broadens our perspective again by reminding us that games seldom exist alone. Games that sell, or games that excel, are likely to be continued by sequels. The series may be connected chronologically and structurally, as AGE OF EMPIRES or ASSASSIN’S CREED, or mainly structurally, as TOTAL WAR, but in any case encloses a master narrative within the arc of the series as a whole. He then proceeds to a methodological proposal for handling video games in research via video-graphics and runs test cases with and without recording the actual player in addition to recording the game played. This method seems to be able to overcome a lot of the difficulties of quotation and illustration that hamper so many of the existing fine game analyses and deserves every attention, especially when including players’ reactions and commentaries. After the concentration on narrative issues, Lutz Schröder (Hamburg) once more focuses on choices. He attempts the narrowing of the focus to one single game of a series – EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR – and further, down to one seemingly unimportant micro-element of that title. As he ponders the small influence of inventing Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny in the game and

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the importance attached to it in historiography, he unravels a lot of the game’s built-in master narrative and patterns of authentication and construction. Read against the preceding contributions, it is instructive that many of the questions raised may be answered for a given game by concentrating on limitations rather than possibilities. As Schröder shows how players’ decisions are restricted and directed by the limited access to key fields such as politics, trade and research granted to players, we become aware that games are concerned with complexity management, and manage history’s complexity differently from history books. Marc Bonner (Cologne) turns quite literally to the depiction of historical content, as he explores architecture displayed in video games. Though the buildings are stylised – typological instances of functional categories of architecture – Bonner successfully applies not only Baudrillard’s concept of virtual architecture but also the contrasting enlightenment concept of architecture parlante to those pixel signifiers of historicity. He directly relates distortions in scale, shape, or the metamorphosis undergone by buildings when changed into game graphics, to the overall patterns of game construction and game play; form indeed follows function. But this does not mean that those exteriors are meaningless; they are a vital part of the games’ strategy of authentication. Bonner makes it clear that the visual construction of a virtual space convincingly perceived as a historical one, is not achieved by attention to detail but in the overall coherence of the picture and its affiliation with the functions it embodies and enacts. From buildings, we are taken to their inhabitants by Stefan Donecker (Vienna). In analysing the CIVILIZATION series’ concept of a people, he highlights the idea of immutable, preordained national characters built into these games that may carry the player’s civilization from Ancient Egypt to the colonisation of space, as progressed but essentially unchanged. He situates this primordial view of nations in the scientific historical and sociological discourses of the last centuries, as well as within popular representations today, to raise the question whether CIVILIZATION has a subconsciously delivered nationalistic message for all its players. He thus draws our attention to the discussion as to whether games influence players, and if so in what ways. This being a pressing question, Donecker does not succumb to the equation of a game embodying a criticisable concept with one that manipulatively misleads its players, but stresses the satiric potential, inherent in such titles without making it sound too easy.

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Closing the section, Tim Raupach (Marburg) asks how historical authenticity is produced by video games in his examination of World War II shooters. Comparing these games with related movies on the subject, he raises the question as to whether the possibilities for interaction and a seemingly realistic experience of historical war settings create a new kind of observation of the past. The high sales figures and the even higher share of World War II settings in the production of video games with historical content – nearly 50 per cent – necessitate such studies, and call for investigation of the related question concerning why other historical epochs are so dramatically less popular. In his use of media theory, especially the remediation concept, Raupach refers back to Nohr’s contribution which opens the section, and further clarifies how authentication is achieved and related to immersion. He warns us that realism is ascribed to games due to a complex interplay of various factors and cannot be deduced simply from one element or pattern in a given title; a warning we should keep well in mind.

III The Historian’s GameCAM From the chapters collected in this section, we think we can provide valuable insight and methodological procedures that form a grid for analysis; a guideline not yet developed into a full-blown method that will be of help to you in tackling all these difficult questions raised, up to now. Searching for a nice-sounding neologism to properly dress this up, we decided to label it the Historian’s GameCAM. As every good game cam should be able to, it provides us with a scheme for taking and analysing stills, as well as sequences from the games, and filtering them into separate channels of inquiry. These channels, as fields of analysis, seem to us to be [C]onstruction, [A]uthentication, and [M]ediality.

The Three Minefields of Inquiry As we are fully and painfully aware, our three CAM fields are minefields of scholarly disputatiousness, none of them well-defined or clearly delineated. Laden with associations, ripe with misunderstandings, and fraught with disagreements as they all are, we could have quite easily devoted this entire volume to each of them in turn. So as not to entangle ourselves in the complex web of interlocking and mutually exclusive definitions of these terms, and maintaining room for creative thinking and manoeuvre, we will not define them either. Rolf Nohr and Tim Raupach deal intensively with [A]uthentication, and also with [M]ediality. The

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scheme Nohr provides us with is a very good raster for analysing each single element in any given game, thus providing us with the still function of our cam. As he eloquently points out, a game needs to authenticate itself to its audience and one of the strategies for doing so, is to go historical. And what’s more, the modes and means it can use to do so are conditioned by its specific mediality, the game being a medium in its own right. In this focus on [M]ediality, he is joined by Marc Bonner, Adam Chapman and Simon Hassemer, while Lutz Schröder, Josef Köstlbauer, Stefan Donecker and René Schallegger remind us that games are of course always a matter of [C]onstruction, and that we need to take heed of the parameters and balances built into the game as well as of its patterns of interaction and narration. Not that a game is a construction – that is trivial – but how and why it is constructed the way it is, forms a crucial issue that any study of either single elements of games or games as a whole must address. If larger parts of games or even whole games are chosen as elements of analysis, Angela Schwarz, as is pointed out below in greater detail, provides a guide of how the narration of games can be tracked as it unfolds around the player, consisting of the interplay of the various elements and factors mentioned previously, thus providing us with the sequence function of the cam. For each video game element featuring history singled out for analysis, the GameCAM procedure therefore suggests that: 1st Step [C]: the overall construction of the game be investigated and the place and function of the element in the context of the game made clear. 2nd Step [A]: the game’s particular strategies for authentication be identified and how and why the element contributes to it or is necessitated by it. 3rd Step [M]: the contribution of the element to the qualities and functions of the game as a medium be regarded and the restrictions imposed by them on the element properly addressed. This is of course not to say that each and every chapter of this volume follows this procedure or addresses all the questions arising from these three steps. Yet it is what, as we hope, the volume in its entirety shows in its many facets that will prove to be effort well spent. But take this as warning and encouragement – one of the specific difficulties of video game research that Tom Chatfield speaks of in the Prelude, is that this procedure is not the end of analysis but only the start. It is nothing but the

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preparation of the material in a way so as to make further scientific historical inquiry feasible.

IV How to handle this book: Section 2 With several million copies sold, one of the most successful game series in recent years was ASSASSIN’S CREED. This so called “action adventure” by the Canadian game developer UBI Soft leads the player back to the time of the Crusades, to the Renaissance and the Colonial Period. Embedded in a realistic and sometimes historically relatively accurate game world and many real-life historical figures, the game tells us a completely fictional story. This makes it an ideal candidate for testing some of the considerations discussed in the first part of this book on one concrete example. In her chapter, Angela Schwarz (Siegen) underlines the importance of narration and (master) narrative in video games, which are key factors for the success of this medium, and in combination with history also an interesting research subject for historians. Computer Games use patterns different from those of the academic world to deal with history, e.g. as a rough framework, in combination with fictitious plots and actors or with a claim to historical truth. Based on two examples, AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE WAR CHIEFS and ASSASSIN’S CREED III, Schwarz analyses, as well as questions, the meaning of narration in video games and shows the surprising complexity of this medium. Design plays an important role for narration in particular and for video games in general. In his chapter, Gernot Hausar (Vienna) asks which differentiating function the game design in ASSASSIN’S CREED has: the design of the virtual world is necessary to create something like historical "accuracy", but also central for the immersion, the interaction, the game experience and for the fun. Hauser clearly shows that elements of game design such as the architecture and artifacts (weapons, clothes, artwork et cetera) are more than only "passive historical elements" and thereby a major point of discussion for future research. The "aura of historicity" in ASSASSIN’S CREED is also a central issue in Simon Huber’s (Vienna) reflections about authenticity in video games. Elements like time travel and the possibility of discovering a historical city with a high degree of freedom of movement are some of the success factors in creating a "historical" game. Furthermore, Huber points out the

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relevance of remediation in this game. In this context, ASSASSIN’S CREED closely relates to movie models like MATRIX, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN or BATMAN, making it essential not to lose sight of these cross-media lines of development. One particularly exciting access strategy to video games is chosen by Andreas Fischer (Munich) in his essay. He analyses the phenomenon of "Games within in the Game" by the example of the carnival games held in the Renaissance city of Venice as depicted in ASSASSIN’S CREED II. This perspective focuses on a most remarkable topic: the history of playing in the context of video games and the experience of alteration as an aspect of historical construction. Against this background, Fischer deals with some interesting elements like rules, manipulation and cheating, by using theoretical concepts from theatre studies. Based on ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS, Martin Isaac Weis (Davis, California) highlights some essential considerations about certain aspects of time and their use in video games. He figures out that the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, as well as other similar games, not only works with different time lines, but also with the phenomenon of repetition and, connected thereto, the possibility of a re-playable past. Weis’ reflections show clearly that this perspective may provide us with interesting insight into the video game as a medium, the role of the player as an agent of history and, relative to the narration, the circumstance that video games continually produce an alternative, and in many respects, counterfactual history.

V What is this all about now? “Science fiction isn’t about the future” wrote Ursula K. LeGuin, herself an award-winning Science Fiction writer, in the 1976 preface to “The Left Hand of Darkness”, itself a prized Science Fiction novel.4 She claimed SF to be distinctly about the present.5 Let us take as proof the genre’s relation to video games, which is one of total neglect. Neither Wells nor Verne dreamed up something even remotely like ASSASSIN’S CREED, not even like TETRIS or PONG. The otherwise prolific Philipp K. Dick also failed to imagine that we would spend countless hours hooked on EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR or CIVILIZATION V, or write books about what being hooked on games for countless hours means to us.

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We as historians are going to finally send you off to the ensuing chapters with the same kind of bold statement now. History is not about the past. It is distinctly about the present. It is about what the memories of events we think of as past mean to us now; why we are interested, fascinated, enthralled or disappointed by them, and why we try to puzzle out a coherent picture from the scraps and leftovers of the past strewn around us. And as we are trying to do this, it is to video games that we now turn, because they are a rapidly growing part of the wide array of media that are meddling in this, our historian’s, business. They form pictures of the past, and present them to their audience in a way that, judging by sales figures (cf. Schwarz’s chapter, 163, 167), condemnations of loving parents and defenders of High Culture alike, as well as growing numbers of addicts, not only appeals to their audience but reaches out far wider then academic history ever can. Fittingly, as the processing of history in universities is not about the past, the processing of history in video games is not, either (cf. Nohr’s chapter, 18). “Here again, what is at stake is the interplay between historicity 1 and historicity 2, between what happened and that which is said to have happened.” (Trouillot 2013).6 Video games seem to be exclusively concerned with historicity 2 as what is said can be said again, or even better, played anew ever after. And if we, as academic historians are honest, what we deal with is nothing else. Historicity 1 may be somewhere out there – as Truth, Justice, or God may be – but to say that we provide more than an approximation towards it, or that we know the past as it has happened, would be preposterous to the extreme. This can of course not be taken to mean that what video games and historians do with history is the same, as everyone who has ever played a game will instantly be aware of while reading this book. What we want to say is that both kinds of interaction with history are not mutually exclusive, though many would perhaps like this to be so; they are complementary. Another aspect you will become aware of in reading this book – though perhaps not instantly – is that, in contradiction to its own title, it seems not to be exclusively about video games and early modernity. Why for instance did we incorporate those two chapters about World War II shooters by Adam Chapman and Tim Raupach? Well, one of the advantages of holding the conference, information about the proceedings of which you are holding in your hands, was that, as Rolf Nohr articulates, “the history of AGE OF EMPIRES III, for example, is not the history of discoveries or inventions but the seamless history of modernity” (his chapter, 23). Viewed from a historicity 1 perspective, a game featuring

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early modernity is not about early modernity. It is about what history, in this case early modernity, means to us (given that our post- or maybe postpostmodern age is still part of modernity), and about how games deal with this. The necessary prerequisite of trying to understand how the historicity 2 construction of early modernity in games works is the attempt to understand how any kind of history is processed in video games to narrow the focus afterwards. Thus the more methodologically arranged section 1 of this book is followed by the thematically assembled section 2 focusing on the particular and heavily early modern themed (cf. Hassemer’s chapter, 59) ASSASSIN’S CREED series from different angles of investigation. Common to all the chapters is one overarching aim: We have to try to figure out how video games interact with history, use history, construct historicity, and what our role as professional guardians of the past can be towards them. “We all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom – not the history classrooms, anyway. They are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts”.7

What exactly is contained in those lessons we learn from video games is not in this history book, alas. To research this will be up to each and every one of you, upon completion of reading.

Notes 1

Tom Chatfield: Fun Inc. Why games are the twenty-first century’s most serious business, London: Virgin Books 2011. 2 See for instance: Jane McGonigal: Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world, New York: Penguin Press 2011. 3 Chatfield, Fun Inc (2011), xiii. 4 Ursula Kroeber Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness. A new and never-beforepublished introductory essay by the author commissioned especially for this edition, 13th print, New York: Ace Books 1985, [v]. 5 Ibid, [iii]. 6 Michel-Rolph Trouillot: An Unthinkable History. The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event. Excerpts, in: Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (ed.), Haitian History. New Perspectives, New York/London: Routledge 2013, pp. 33 – 54, here p. 50. 7 Ibid., 34.

PRELUDE SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES, SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES TOM CHATFIELD

The idea of difficulty is built into video games, and in a different sense than for any other medium. A film may be difficult, conceptually or in terms of its subject matter; it may be extremely difficult to understand, or to enjoy. Yet all you have to do if you wish to view the entirety of its material is to sit there watching and listening until it is finished. Written words can be still more difficult: for these, you may need a formidable mastery of a language, concepts and context; you must construct the meaning of the text itself as you go along. Still, the raw materials are all there for you to work with. You do not have to pass a tricky test in order to access materials beyond the first chapter, or find yourself sent back to the start of the book again and again if you fail this test. You do not have to practice the act of turning pages at precise moments in order to be granted access to the author’s conclusion. Yet this is precisely what the difficulty of many video games embodies: a journey that the majority of players will not complete, filled with trials, tribulations and inexorable repetitions. There’s no one agreed-upon definition of a video game, or indeed a game, but Bernard Suits’s phrase “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” captures a good deal of what’s significant within them. A player contends with obstacles according to a set of limiting rules – and does so, in the case of a video game, by entering a virtual realm that itself embodies those rules. A “good” game is one that is rewarding to play; where the journey of challenge and discovery and incremental

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mastery is balanced between excessive frustration and simplicity. There may be many incidental delights, but without some measure of difficulty and repetition there is no heart to the game: no “mechanic” inviting iterative exploration or breeding the complex satisfactions of play. Video games are not only difficult to play, of course. They are also difficult to write about and to study, and for related reasons. For a start, they embrace aspects of many other media and disciplines: static images, video, sound, music, text and speech, architecture and design, animation and modelling, interface and interaction design, community design and artificial intelligence. This brings a bewildering – and rich – load of baggage to a field that has only existed for around half a century, and whose canons and critical discourse are still being fabricated on the fly. Like players themselves, the would-be investigator of video games is often running in order to stay still – and will discover that time is of the essence when it comes to understanding video games’ particular difficulties. Even the most difficult works of literature or philosophy tend to take at most tens of hours to read through once. Yet far simpler games can demand a hundred hours or more of play if they are to be exhaustively explored. Some online games – Massively Multiplayer Online games like WORLD OF WARCRAFT, or the far more demanding EVE ONLINE – not only need hundreds of hours of play if they are to be appreciated at an expert level, but consist of a steadily updated game world and evolving social context. What does it mean to maintain a high level understanding of such a virtual world? What, moreover, does it mean to aspire towards any system of critical editions or reference, such as is found throughout the academic study of the arts, when it comes to games? In many MMO studies, authors are more like anthropologists reporting from the boundaries of a brave new world than critics dissecting a work of fiction. Their data is fieldwork, their analysis mixed with reportage, while the digital ground under their feet is constantly shifting. Speaking to academics studying and teaching game design and studies across Europe, I’m always struck by the huge difficulty of keeping up with even a small number of releases in a field so diverse, time-consuming, hardware-dependent and costly. Specialisation within genres is a vital skill for survival and academic integrity – yet it’s also a challenge in itself, given the pace of technological change. Are aging games to be studied in emulated form, or on original systems? What is worth preserving, and how

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should this best be done? What does it mean to play a game outside its original community and context, or to link the experience of play to research in other arts and other discourses? This last question touches on the central fact of interactivity, and what it means to communicate interaction. Discussing any game in depth with another person demands that they “get” it, which means that they’ve either played this game or something like it at sufficiently high level. Gaming itself is the art of experience as much as it is the experience of art – something, that is, that needs to be done (and done well) in order to grasped, and that can be understood only by those who have given themselves sufficiently to it. Within all these difficulties, there’s a central irony. Play precedes civilisation. Indeed, play precedes language and even humanity on an evolutionary scale – and while games are a highly developed kind of play, even the most challenging aspire to a satisfaction whose measure trumps language and logic. Like humour, the fun of a game is something to which we either assent, or not (albeit, sometimes, at the end of much laborious practice and mastery: the game is not always worth the candle). Indeed, the best video games can touch us sufficiently deeply to be labelled an addictive hazard by some – and to suggest an special species of reverse-engineering in their design, in which systems expressly designed to challenge, delight, enthral and engage us become an extraordinarily concentrated chunk of experience. In video games, we immerse ourselves not only as an audience, but as actors and adventurers – and in doing so we potentially reveal a great deal about human preference and behaviour, not to mention the increasingly important field of researching humans’ interactions with (and within) automated systems. Difficulty and opportunity, as ever, are closely entwined – as this book and its essays ably explore. One last danger, though, remains: that we study everything about a game, except that which makes it a game. We may talk about its art, its politics, its script, its music, its sounds, its making, its impact, its legacy, its appropriation of techniques and elements from other arts, its sociological significance. But we must not forget the fundamental contract every game seeks to forge with its players: accept this world and these obstacles in the name of experience, and make of them what you will. The play’s the thing.

SECTION ONE: METHODOLOGY AND THEORY

CHAPTER ONE THE GAME IS A MEDIUM: THE GAME IS A MESSAGE ROLF F. NOHR

The title of this chapter specifies a couple of unambiguous designations. First, I will discuss questions of mediality; second, I will deal with the question of meaning; and third: I will not deal with history. At least, not in terms of approaching the paradigmatically and epistemically organized discipline ’science of history‘ from the perspective of media studies. Neither can I nor do I want to reflect on the operational dimension of the representation or the presentability of history within media. And the following thoughts are neither going to discuss the methods of science of history. This chapter will (rather plainly) try to reflect on the positions that the ’discursive object history‘ can take in relation to media (especially video games). More precisely, it will give some thought to the question how to deal with the ‘(re)presentation of history‘ in terms of mediality research and critical discourse analysis from the perspective of media studies. Media studies are, at least in my understanding, no discipline of interpretation or hermeneutic analysis of media content, of searching for arcane or obvious messages. Media studies rather deal with the definition of mediality. Reasoning about the function of history in regard to mediality leads us not to ASSASSINS CREED in the first instance.

The concept of media Thus, in my reflexion on how video games and history affect one another, I would like to choose a different access point to the subject. I will briefly give some thought to the question in how far the opening sequence of Steven Spielberg‘s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN can be seen as a ’medium of history‘. Spielberg’s 1998 movie begins with a sequence of

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about 20 minutes that shows the Normandy landings. The sequence of the landings at Omaha Beach is mainly filmed with a hand-held camera by Janusz KamiĔski and is characterized by a narrow and dynamic cinematography, fast cuts, many pyrotechnical effects, explicit violence and a very expressive sound design. In short: the opening sequence of this movie strives towards a ’realistic‘, ’authentic‘ (re)presentation. This fact would not be worth talking about, if the contemporary film critics would not have emphasized the naturalism and the ’realness‘ of this sequence explicitly and emphatically so many times.1 Now, my simple initial question is, whether this film ’shows history‘, ’is history‘ or in which way the opening sequence of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN can be approached in terms of history and mediality.

Figure 1: Still from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Steven Spielberg, USA 1998)

From the perspective of a historian one could probably ask if SAVING PRIVATE RYAN can be seen as a ’source‘ or as an ’authority‘ – and if so, for what? Does the movie as a historical source tell something about an incident in the past? Can the discussion of a distinct historic event like the Normandy landings profit under the premise of scientific historiography when Spielberg’s film is being consulted as an additional authority? Hardly anyone would be keen enough to argue that the Diaries of the Supreme Command or the files of the Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander would only be interpretable reasonably – or even to be ’written anew‘ – by the additional reference to a Hollywood movie. The movie becomes more interesting by the recourse to the technique of the ’historical charge‘ of the movie as it is being practiced by Spielberg himself. The impression of authenticity that the movie strives for (and that it also partly accomplishes by this special technique), is guaranteed by the

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Section One Chapter One

paratextual connection of the movie with eye witnesses.2 In the second step, I will address the fact that we can also conceptualize such a ’paratextual connection‘ as a discourse connection or as an inter-discourse in a productive way. In terms of being a ’source‘ SAVING PRIVATE RYAN might rather be in line with a project of the (subjective) historiography via oral history and eye witnesses due to the perspective of the contemporary witness. So, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN becomes a project that does not only count on the subjectively biased memory of an individual, but that also tries to accomplish a subjective-objective writing of history by the accumulation of statements and the visualization of ’remembrance‘. The idea of connecting the movie with contemporary witnesses, of “auratizing” it so to say resp. ’realizing‘ it by adding an authorized source (the eye witness) to a fictional visual narration is a technique that is typical for various film projects (not least by Spielberg): It can be found anywhere from SCHINDLER‘S LIST (USA 1993) to BAND OF BROTHERS (HBO 2001), for example.3 Though, a different approach to the conceptualization of the movie as a source is to describe it not as an authority on history but as an authority on reflecting history. Seen in this way, the movie SAVING PRIVATE RYAN does not refer to the history of WWII but to the history of the 20th century and our contemporary understanding of dealing with WWII at a certain point in time and in a certain cultural and social constellation. In these terms the movie is a source for mediality research and for approaches based on discourse theory that try to reconstruct the discourses of history and the perception of history by analyzing fragments of statements. A third way of conceptualizing SAVING PRIVATE RYAN as a source is to just see it as a source for the history of film itself. That means, to understand it as a source for certain articulations of film industry in terms of production, narration and formal aspects. But when we address the movie from the heart of mediality research, the question about the ’source‘ SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is no longer relevant at all. From this perspective, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was just an exposed example for the fact that cinema is a cultural technique. Cultural techniques are integrated into discursive fields and they can be reconstructed in terms of genealogy and archeology. In reference to Paul Virilio or Friedrich Kittler, it would be quite easy to conceptualize SAVING PRIVATE RYAN as a military technology. Especially the opening sequence seems to strive for being seen this way due to its visual aggressiveness, its will to total visibility or the machismo fantasy of overwhelming. If, as

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Friedrich Kittler pointed out, “Rock music is the misuse of army equipment” [“Rockmusik ist der Missbrauch von Heeresgerät”] (1991) then SAVING PRIVATE RYAN might be the misuse of amphibious landing operations. In order to avoid being suspected of technical determinism, I would like to qualify the last sentence immediately. In fact, I do assume that media technologies are cultural techniques, but I do not assume that the development and the cultural meaning of any medium can be traced back to a military technology. Though, it seems important to spend some thought on the idea that media (as cultural techniques) gain their specific meaning rather due to their discoursive and technical constitution than due to their – however qualified – content. And it seems also important to me to understand media not only as neutral carriers of content, but also and especially as specific and material actors within the process of communication. Media tend to invisibilise this specific quality and the specific meaning of media technology itself is rarely visible: but in our example SAVING PRIVATE RYAN it is, indeed. In figure 1 we see that drops of water and blood have been spattered on the camera lens. On the one hand, this constitutes a breach of the conventions of fictional narration as the recording technology becomes present due to this ’mistake‘. On the other hand, this constitutes an operation on the level of the meaning of mediality: the streaks and blood spatters on the camera lens are symbolic marks that are supposed to suggest the movie’s relation to history to be a pseudo-documentary one. But what is the reason for this introduction, for such recourse on film theory? It seems obvious to me that the problem of the concept of the historical source can be made clear much easier by using film as an example than by using video games, at the moment. AGE OF EMPIRES III seems to be a good example for elaborating on the question of the constitution of video games‘ dimension of meaning in terms of history. It is obvious that scarcely anybody or even anyone at all would raise the question of sound representation of history in respect to the narration of this game. AGE OF EMPIRES III rather appears to be related to alternate history, science fiction, conspiracy theory, Karl May novels or similar, rather ’lurid‘ formats that take avail of historic fragments. Though, the game is – although in a strange, ’comic-like‘ way – ’imprinted by history‘. History is a kind of ’background noise‘ upon which the actual narration and the mediality of the matter are established. At the same time, it has to

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be seen as a state of the art of a specific game concept (the strategic construction and management simulation). Hence, we can ask in analogy to the film example, whether AGE OF EMPIRES is a source. The answer seems to be nearby: not really. From a reasonable perspective, AGE OF EMPIRES can only be used as an object of the history of (playing) video games itself. But the game is not like a ’written record‘ for historic events in the past at all: the historic constellations (from the colonization of Northern America to the War of Independence) only serve as blurry basic parameters of the in-game narration. No explicit symbolic operations can be identified that evoke an authenticated or pseudo-documentary representation of history.4 AGE OF EMPIRES could rather be seen as a source for a cultural history of the contemporary reflection on history – but even in this case, the concept of source would have to be problematized. The video game is per se incompatible to a rigid concept of source, due to its specific medial dynamics. A video game is not least constituted by the interaction between the acting player and the written code with defined decision trees and determined options and sequences. A video game is not a fixed, static and unchangeable text. In terms of the representation of history, this specific medial quality becomes a problem: history unfolds in linear ways – actions in gameplay tend to unfold in ’non-linear‘ ways that are tailored to the position of an acting subject: the player (see also Schwarz 2012). In this case, history does not serve as the meaningful dimension of the video game, but as a narrative attachment or framing. Yet history seems to be constitutive for the game. The whole ’genre‘ of construction simulations is characterized by a frequent reference to, and variation of historic themes: especially the AGE OF EMPIRES series, but also the ANNO or CIVILIZATION series, for example, are not imaginable without the integration of the game mechanics into a vaguely historic setting – at least their enormous success seems to be dependent on these historic references in a diffuse way. The specific character of the representation of history in video games as a cultural technique – that is my thesis – unfolds exactly within this very ambivalence. History is being attached to the video game as a ’pseudoauthenticating momentum‘. Within construction simulations, the equivalent to the blood spatters on the camera lens in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is history itself.

The Game is a Medium: The Game is a Message

7

Transparency of Media The main problem in this debate is the strange fact that we are concerned with a medium in terms of the video game and the computer. The main problem for any media studies scholar is the fact that he or she can only provide a highly incomplete and insufficient proposition of what a medium actually is, and how it can be defined. Hence, I will fall back on the “basic theorems” of Hartmut Winkler (2004) that constitute a keyword-like roundup and, thus, induce a certain evidence – although they are (and Winkler himself admits this explicitly; ibid., 9) incommensurable on the whole. According to Winkler, media are first of all communicative and, thus, machines for societal integration. Secondly, they stand out due to their symbolic character. “Media differ from other mechanisms of societal integration – e.g. the commodity economy, division of labour, politics, sex or violence – by their symbolic character.” (ibid., 9; own transl.) Third, media are always techn(olog)ical and impose – fourthly – a specific form on the content that they communicate. Hence, media imply an ambivalence of form and content. Fifthly, media overcome space and time; they are messengers and archives at once. Now, for our argument Winkler’s sixth dictum is most crucial: the invisibility of media. “The more naturally we use media, the more they tend to disappear. The use of media is unconscious to a large extent.“ (ibid., 10; own transl.) I will only elaborate upon the transparency thesis now as it addresses one of the most constitutive functions of media. It is typical for all media to invisibilise or neutralize their artificiality, their factitiousness, and most of all: their arbitrariness. Media tend to become invisible in their usage. Media work like window glasses. The more transparent they remain, the less noticeable they stay below the threshold of our perception, the better they fulfil its purpose. Only within the noise, that means in the disturbance or even in the collapse of their smooth service, the medium commemorates itself. The undisturbed message, on the other hand, makes the medium almost invisible. (Krämer 1998, 74; own transl.)

One of the ’first‘ media is surely language. Language is an artificial, negotiated, regulated system of intersubjective ›transmission‹, societal integration and coding that is pervaded by power structures and effects. Though, we use it in terms of being a natural thing. Language seems transparent to us in its factitiousness – the insight in its artificiality and

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factitiousness leads to the partial collapse of its functionality.5 By this, the main problem of all (also: technical) media is addressed: the ambivalence between usage and structure. That leads to a pragmatic problem: “Though, the assumption that media are not just a vehicle but also a source of meaning does create a problem. It conflicts with our everyday experience of dealing with media.” (Krämer 1998, 74; own transl.) This puts us in the media-theoretically remarkably strange position to assume that anything we say, know, and percept about the world has run through media. Yet we assume, at the same time, that media are not carriers but discrete and ideologically affected and formalized framings of circulation. And as if that weren’t bad enough, we also realize that all we just said about media is also true for signs, in one word, everything symbolic! It is essential: “Media […] remain the blind spot in media usage” (ibid.; own transl.). Just as with cinema (with its high impression of realism and the complex of problems concerning realism that comes with it) we quintessentially have to assume such effects of naturalization for video games, too. The problem of such an effect of naturalization in respect to video games can be made clear with a simple example: anyone who installs a single player game on a computer and gets forced to reconfigure the graphics adapter, to search for patch files and to shut down conflicting processes due to the omnipresent crudity of the beta-like products sees the medium computer in a rather denaturalized form. But just in the very moment the game finally runs and the opening screen and the first moves and actions establish the immersion of the game, the medium naturalizes itself almost completely. The medium becomes invisible (see also Nohr 2008). Yet naively – and this plainly means: in our everyday and functional actions – we conceptualize media under the conditions of the transport metaphor. An enunciation – according to Shannons theory of communication (Shannon 1948) – gets coded, transported neutrally via a medium and gets decoded at its point of reception. The most dramatic thing that might happen to the content is the jamming of the transmission. Apart from that, the medium has no influence on the content at all. In this model, the medium itself becomes a neutral transmitter. The Canadian School of Communication has attacked this naïve conceptualization already since the 1950s and 1960s. The works of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, for example, explicitly try to analyse the function of

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mediality as a discrete actor and technology within situations of communication. McLuhan’s dictum of the “medium that is a message for its own” (1962) is probably the most common argument in this context – and has become a kind of a buzz word. The entire media theory in the aftermath can basically be described as an effort to re-write this radical dictum of the loss of content for the benefit of form. For the question about the concept of source concerning the video game, this dictum is also crucial. How could the video game be conceptualized as a ’medium of history‘ when, in the end, the mediality of the video game is only defined by its form? If we want to sketch an operational and functional dimension of the content of the video game we – latently – have to overcome the radicalness of this methodological dictum. At the same time, we have to appreciate that the idea of the form/content distinction can be applied to media in a substantial and paradigmatic way. Media, one could say in short, are of twofold character: their technical formal factitiousness and, at the same time, the compensation of this factitiousness by the category of content as a dimension of meaning. Additionally, we have to keep the tendency to invisibilise in mind that we mentioned earlier. So, we have to ask how the game as something ’artificial‘ and ’produced‘ can make itself invisible and be an instance that constitutes meaning at the same time. Or said in a more pointed way: how does the representation of a beach in the Normandy in CALL OF DUTY or of the Battle of Hastings in MEDIEVAL accomplish to reconcile me in my own action with the technology of my computer and to make it appear as a ’window‘ (to space, into history)? And even more crucial: what dimension of meaning unfolds in that process? Concerning this ambivalence we can take recourse to a debate in film studies in the 1970s: the French film theory and the apparatus debate.6 At this point, one has to pose the question to which extent the cinema’s impression of realness is also a matter of meaning or content, and if so: how does this dimension of content and meaning contribute to the functional mediality of the cinema? The main thesis of the apparatus debate in particular is that the dimension of content is above all working on veiling the formal dimension, when it comes to film. In an almost painful reduction of the debate one could summarize: the impression of realism in cinema allows for the ideologically inscribed apparatus of cinema (that is essentially based on an enhanced concept of technology) to

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naturalize itself and, thus, become the ’gateway‘ for ideology. The one that leans back in cinema and exposes him- or herself to the “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 1907, 6) adapts (with pleasure) to an ideological complex. The apparatus of cinema is designed to be forgotten by the audience. Being geared to Althusser’s concept of ideology, the apparatus debate conceptualizes the basic apparatus of cinema in the mode of concealment. The factitiousness of the images actually becomes only visible in the mode of disturbance. But the problem of the concept of apparatus theory is that it primarily argues on the basis of the technological aspects of media. Hence, it deals most of all with the disappearance of the screen, the projection or the assumed naturalization of the central perspective as an ideological form. Yet the symbolic, the semiotic, or the discursive does not play an emphasized role in those argumentations. The recent media theory has submitted a couple of proposals for solving this problem. Those proposals (in the context of German media theory, this can be traced back to the work of Hartmut Winkler (2004b) or Sibylle Krämer (2008)) are essentially based on the purpose to conceptualize media, technological apparatuses and signs as separate aspects. In such systematics, meaning evolves as a ’surplus‘ of the conventionalized semantics. The sign’s dimension of meaning exceeds the mere referentiality of the sign.7 What becomes ’visible‘ in media is the trace of the signs. Hence, not the sign itself inscribes itself into a medium – the meaning leaves traces: 'The medium is not just the message; the trace of the medium preserves itself in the message”. (Krämer 1998, 81; own transl.) The transport metaphor of Shannon’s model transforms into the idea of the medium as a messenger.8

’Dimension of Content Revisited‘ – Critical Discourse Analysis Though, especially the (enhanced) concept of form gives us an opportunity to make room, room for the McLuhanian impulse of rejecting analysis of content or representation on the one hand and for abrogating the radicalness of an exclusive focus on the form of the medium on the other hand. How can the dimension of meaning of the cultural object video game be described? In order to work on this question, we have to clarify in the first instance what the object video game actually is. A video game is no distinct object (that means a DVD or the code of a program, for example). In the first instance, it is a practice, a form of action that is constituted medially and technically, that is obviously provided with a

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visual representation and that is partially integrated into communicative acts (for example, in terms of multiplayer). But video games are no selfcontained media objects nor texts that can be interpreted by its reader / player. The dimension of meaning of the video game arises – and that is its specific characteristic – within action, within performance. That is also true for other media objects, but the specific action-bound character of the video clearly singles it out within the field of media. The consequence of such a de-limitation of the object is that the theoretical instrument that has to be chosen for the analysis does not only have to consider the specific inherent laws of the medium. It also has to be capable of comprising dislimited and paratextual complexes of enunciations and statements. In my opinion, such an instrument is given in the critical discourse analysis (CDA) – especially in terms of argumentation established by Jürgen Link.9 Based on Foucault’s concept of discourse, the CDA tries to analyse discursive formations as intersubjective articulations within a framework of public knowledge-power-connections. In this concept, discourses are seen as “regulated, tentatively institutionalized ways of speech, as spaces for possible enunciations, inasmuch as they are linked to actions and therefore constitute effects of power” (Link 2005, 18; own transl.). In this understanding, the discourses are – totally in line with Foucault – essentially not only forms of articulation but first and foremost application concepts that ’blend‘ into the subjects and that are carriers of ’power of governance and order‘: “One could also understand discourses as societal means of production. They produce subjects and, mediated by them, conceptualized as ‘population’, societal reality” (Jäger/Zimmermann 2010, 14; own transl.). Although discourses are not simply identical with sciences, they are always in a more or less dependent relation to academic sciences. They share the concept of specializing to specific fields of knowledge: Now, discourses in the Foucauldian sense of spaces of knowledge and utterability constitute especially and first of all specifically historic objectivities and subjectivity: a) Objectivities in terms of social objects, themes, classifications, terms, arguments; b) Subjectivities in terms of legitimate positions of speech, perspectives, identities (gender, for example), roles, profiles of personality.

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Section One Chapter One In other words, the discourses constitute simultaneously and inseparably from each other both the worlds and the Is, objects and gazes, bodies and souls. (Link 2013, 9; own transl.)

The effort of the CDA is to extend the definition of discourse – based on the simple observation that places and times of the enunciation constitute themselves by clear and obvious differences, and that discourses are homogenous but are internally stratified and fragmented. This understanding of the order of discourse starts with the assumption that modern societies are characterized by functional differentiation. That means, by the development of delimitable and particular domains of practice and knowledge that constitute their particular enunciative structures in form of specific knowledge-discourses: “In course of the social evolution to a more and more differentiated division of labor, one can state a tendency towards a growing specialization of discourses” (Link/Parr 1997, 123; own transl.). Hence, discourses consist of an (unclear) amount of different and polyvalent articulations. Different factors of differentiation structure, build and stabilize different ’forms of speech‘, forms of enunciation and complexes of knowledge. These fields are dominated by specialized forms of speech of a subjective and intersubjective circulation of knowledge – so called special discourses. The modes of distinction of the special discourses (from one another and from the common sense discourses in fields of ’popular culture‘) are supported by “mechanisms of discourse integration” (ibid.; own transl.) that link them to one another in a quasi “compensative” way. Such interdiscourses do already appear in Foucault’s work and describe the horizontal relations between single discursive formations or discourses within an identical episteme in this context (Link 2013, 9). All discourse elements, discourse parcels and discourse complexes that are not linked to one or more special discourses but are rather circulating with variable and flexible meaning in a number of special discourses and also first and foremost in general, e.g. so called ‘everyday discourses’ (I speak of elementary discourses) will be called inter-discursive. (ibid. 9; own transl.)

Thus, the readability of such inter-discourses evolves by a kind of twofold coding. The articulation has to be ’readable‘ in each of the two discourses. The price of this twofold coding is a twofold deficit: to the special discourse the inter-discourse always seems to be reductive, from the perspective of the common sense (or in more precise terms of discourse theory: the elementary discourse) the inter-discourse always

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tends to be seen as enclosed as the special discourse. But the interdiscourse has – especially as far as popular cultures are concerned – an eminently important function. It provides the ’translation‘ or ’transcription‘ of separated fields of knowledge into the fields of a common social production of meaning. Now, a second inter-discursive level evolves by the fact that separate and institutionalized discourses develop based on the inter-discursive material of the first level which have the partial symbolic integration of knowledge as a main function. These particular discourses that, so to say, make the non-specialty their specialty, shall be called inter-discourses in the narrower sense. The most common examples in the modern age are popular religion, popular philosophy, popular science, medio politics, medio entertainment and the modern literature (resp. also other narrative forms of art like film). Now, I add for this occasion: further the popular history. (Link 2013, 10; own transl.)

Thus, the approach Link proposes here, conceptualizes history, for example, as a special-discursive deep structure, whose inter-discursive mediatisation has to be reconstructed. In this way, an inter- discursive idea of history does not inscribe itself into the video game exclusively, but culminates in a ’discursive throng‘ of most diverse inter-discursive functions and practices. As any popular text and any popular articulation, the video game is characterized by the fact that an unclear amount of interdiscursive formations are (re)actualized in it. Hence, from the perspective of CDA it is not nearby to approach a game like AGE OF EMPIRES exclusively in terms of the question of its inter-discursive production of history. The method rather aims at seeking a preferably large ensemble of discursive formations within the ‘(para-)text-action-cluster‘ video game, and to work on their interrelations and dependent productions of meaning. Hence, it is reasonable that the analysis of the representation of history has to go hand in hand with a reconstruction of the discursive formations and traces that other special discourses leave in the given game. Of course, it seems reasonable from a pragmatic perspective to focus especially on dominant inter-discursive configurations: but as construction simulations like AGE OF EMPIRES, for example, are also significantly affected by discursive elements concerning theories of power, economy or geopolitics, for example10, an extensive analysis of such a game would always have to be done in the ensemble of these discursive elements. Thus, a game like AGE OF EMPIRES, at least within a framework of discourse theory, could be described as a kind of ’discursive black box‘.

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The game would be supplied by a discursive context that could be understood as an input (knowledge, moral values and texts of an ’author‘ as well as societal formations of knowledge in terms of a discourse the author is involved in). Then, this game would generate a kind of (ludic) output in terms of a visually-representational and discursive formation that is being read resp. appropriated in action by the player and recipient. The ’level of meaning‘ could be assumed as a twofold one: on the one hand, in formations of knowledge that find their way into the game and, on the other hand, in formations of knowledge that are transmitted from within the game to the player. Hence, historicity would only be one of a larger number of discursive momentums that would slip into this ’process of transmission‘. Formulated a little more directly, one could also say that on the side of production a kind of world model is being conceptualized that is being offered to the player for reading or appropriating by a technology of action (the game mechanic). The emphasis on the discourse would partially contradict the deficits of a plain sender-receiver model or a container model in terms of transmission, just by addressing not only intended and explicit moral values and structures of meaning but (what is actually quite similarly foreshadowed in Stuart Hall’s encoding-decodingmodel) also unconscious, invisible and naturalized ones are transmitted, too. But, such an understanding is too reductive by nature. Such a black box model can neither be seen as functional from the perspective of model theory, nor can such a simple model of transmission do justice to the concept of discourse from the perspective of discourse theory. By a conceptualization that reductive we would, for example concerning the representation of history, come to the conclusion that the producers of AGE OF EMPIRES are not interested in the representation of history but rather use history as a kind of design element or narrative substitute. And in consequence would have to assume that players also would (at least in terms of an accomplished communication) percept history only in terms of the effect of ’noise‘, ’theming‘ or a ’history wallpaper’. But in order to leave the rather ’fragile‘ metaphor of the black box now, I want to propose to describe the relation of (enunciatorically projected) narrative knowledge and ludic knowledge (produced subjectively and by playful action) as a discursive interconnection (see fig. 2). It is crucial to understand the reformulation of the black box model to emphasize the concept of knowledge itself. Cultural knowledge is no sound reservoir of distinct, communicable or even unambiguously

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definable and addressable entities. Cultural knowledge does not exist in an unambiguously definable and addressable and decisively specifiable place or part of society. Cultural knowledge is always a process, cultural knowledge meanders between subject, society and inter-subjective negotiation, cultural knowledge is a technology of order.

Method: Representation of History as Inter-Discourse Analysis After taking the long way via media theory and CDA it becomes clear what – at least in my reading – has already been established in parts of the science of history long ago. That is the awareness that history itself is a construct that eludes an unambiguous, objective, rationally logical or positivistic access and fixation. History is much more – at least according to a couple of poststructuralist theorists like Philipp Sarasin (2010), for example – always mediated by sign systems and in this respect always a symbolic construct that appears only in the mode of representation. Hence, historic events, structures and processes are inevitably bound to their historically constituted representations. From this point of view, an apriority of history is mandatory, but the analysis and interpretation can only refer to the representations of history and the structures and processes it has been produced by (White 1990).

Fig. 2: Model of inter-discursive interconnection

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Video games are involved also and especially in this respect as many other media products of meaning in continuing, formatting and transforming such modes of representation. Thus, video games have (at least) to be understood as a part of a discursive operation in which a society provides itself which a concept of history. In a radical abbreviation, such a position could be reduced pointedly to this: the historiography-discourse comes down to a reconfiguration and restructuring of the past in the light of the present. This restructuring follows rules that naturalize themselves on a discursive level and that are based on specific concepts of reality. On a factual discursive level, though, they employ rules that are not derived from the discursive concept of history but rather from narrative concepts. With the model of discursive interconnection, the more functional level of this transformation, in which different types of knowledge are ’lined together‘, shall be clarified. From now on, I will rely on the concept of inter- discursive interconnection as used in the context of CDA in order to approach the complexity of this ’knowledge meander’. Up to this point, the connection between historical knowledge and the subject could be summarized like this: The game uses a series of available special discourses (in which the special discourse of history was just one – though a privileged one – amongst others) and superimposes its specific knowledge as a ’proposal‘ in form of a knowledge-‘algorithm‘ that is decidedly directed to the communication and active appropriation through the player. In the moment of playing this consistent knowledge transforms through a connotative negotiation between the subject and a (ludic) interdiscourse that is – in its openness – pervaded by optional readings and reshapes. According to the different ludic actions, the historical special knowledge can become a ’different‘ type of knowledge that is ’polluted‘ by knowledge from other discourses. In this, it is crucial to understand that the game – that means the ’texts‘ of the game itself in terms of a markedoff and material symbolic ’technology‘ – as an inter-special-discourse is not only the ’arena‘ for this transmission from special discourse to interdiscourse, from narration to ludus and from author to subject. It is also involved in making invisible the ’hegemonic‘ type of knowledge that is constituted by the special discourse. Hence, the game as a black box could be seen as a discursive technology, in which signs become reduced, processed and decontextualized in an operational model. This reductive process implies a general knowledge of a (potential or / and assumed) general possibility to transfer the original knowledge into a model. Thus,

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the inter-special-discourse as a ’black box‘ is much more a ’complex of simplification‘ than a complex of rationalization. But knowledge that is perceived as evident or natural can only unfold on the basis of such a ’framework for rationalization‘. Knowledge that is implemented in the system of discursive exchange ’slips‘ on the symbolic level ’below‘ the threshold of suspicion concerning its ’factitiousness‘ and normalizes itself by appearing as knowledge that is (ostensibly) based on experience. Therefore, it is the ’playful game‘ itself that leads to the ’de-nomination‘ of the original object of knowledge. The societal ’relevance‘ of this game of discourses finally unfolds on the level of the common sense, respectively on the interaction of all the types of discourses that have been introduced up till now. The different discourse formations affect the elementary discourses or everyday discourses – those concepts describe elementary structures of articulation on a social-cultural level; they represent, what is generally referred to as the common sense (Link 1998, 51) – in their historic and genealogic range. At this point, the intrinsic idea of discourse theory becomes obvious: the elementary discourses are ’transversal‘ to all types of discourses and, therefore, constitute a pattern in which the types of discourses can orient themselves within the constellation of discourses. Hence, also the special discourses are being affected by the elementary discourses. In consequence, a ’discursive loop‘ is being established, in which an intersubjective complex of knowledge variegates and, at the same time, stabilizes itself (in a kind of circulatory gesture) within a form of society. Of course, such a structural model of the circulation of knowledge within the game (as it is shortened and summarized in fig. 2) can only have a propositional character. But how can we connect the two main lines of the argumentation? How does the formal aspect of media go together with the ’discourse oscillation‘ of the video game? To my mind, the key concept for this is the idea (and the process) of naturalization. In an overall view of the video game as a medial phenomenon, we can identify a tendency towards the naturalization of the computer as the ’underlying‘ technical system that can be seen to be analog to the ’work of transparency‘ (Comolli 1986; own transl.) of the cinema as an ideological system. In the same way that the technical disposition of projection, movie theatre and screen naturalizes itself in terms of a ’window on the world‘ that makes the ’factitiousness‘ of the filmic invisible, the video game works on the invisiblisation of its – first of all – technical ’factitiousness‘. This does not refer to the neglect of

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the fact that we interact playfully with a machine. It does not only mean that we neglect the artificiality and arbitrariness of the visual representations and symbolic codes while interacting with them. This ’invisiblisation of the factitiousness‘ rather means that any playing makes the ’working equipment‘ computer more familiar to us, accustoms us to the processing of texts and images in terms of a process of work, adapts our response time and dexterity to the machines and, therefore, totally reconciles work and leisure in terms of ’production economy‘. Hence, the video game is a technological medium that is ideological and produced by and for conditions of economic production. And this medium offers a number of aspects that reconcile us with its artificiality and naturalize it.11 Yet, this tendency towards invisibility also applies to the concept of action itself. Acting within a video game is based on a kind of a twofold coding as well. I press the keys W-A-S-D or the arrow keys and say: “my character is running forward”. I press the left mouse button and conceptualize shooting an AK 47. Hence, I want to propose to understand the action within the video game as a form of increased experience. This form of action contributes to a constellation in which we do not see what we do as acting with a technical device or a medium as a symbolic action anymore, but transform it to an awkward kind of factual action. Though, all these naturalizations – that is my thesis – do lead to a totality of naturalization in respect to the video game which can no longer be described with the concepts of the apparatus debate, but which has to be seen as a much stronger one that could be described more adequately by theories and methods of discourse analysis. As a consequence of this theoretical-analytical enhancement we have to deal with the aftermath of a twofold naturalization at the same time. That media naturalize their functionality has already become clear – now the additional problem of discourse arises as discourses also tend to veil the rules and dimensions of meaning that constitute them.12 In my opinion, all those tendencies towards naturalization sketched above lead to the production of different experiences of immediacy in the game. Quintessentially, this can be seen as an experience of “symbolization”. Abstract knowledge about regulation, kinds of technical media, various modes of action, patterns of perception and the production of meaning amalgamate to an experience of participation and immediacy in the video game. This makes it so highly difficult to speak of video games under the conditions of their mediality. The video game as a cultural technique is a

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technology that is in multiple ways naturalized and invisibilised.13 It is significantly resident within the universe of the symbolic and the universe of action, but transformed into a form of the narration of content by its multiple naturalization and invisibilisations. The various different forms of knowledge, ways of speaking, actions and surrounding discursive formations become invisible. In this context I do assume – just like the French apparatus theory – that what becomes invisible in this constellation is nothing innocent or marginal. It is not just the technical apparatus that disappears or the arbitrariness of the symbolic that is not co-present. It is the entire hegemonic power, the ideological or political aspects of the things that affect us when we play a video game. What might – at a first glance – appear like an update of critical theory or another critique of ideology in the sense of Horkheimer and Adorno has to be relativized, though. I am not aiming at deducing a general alienation tendency from the concept of naturalization. I rather want to point out in reference to Foucault how tremendously difficult it is to recognize the discourses we operate in and to name the forms of the ›in-forming‹ force that those discourses unfold – especially within media constellations. Such a position is more than difficult, particularly in the field of media and especially in terms of the video game. Too easily might the hint at underlying ideological effects of the basic apparatus sound like the wellknown cultural-conservative and technology-pessimist murmur of the also well-known critics of the video game. I rather like to point out that video games do have a dimension of meaning, but that they are at the same time ideologically ’inscribed‘. A reasonable analysis of any video game can only be based on acknowledgement of this conflict between the obviously represented and the underlying naturalized technologies and discourses. This is also a definite statement that the obvious use of semantics, patterns and formal systems of the representation of history may not lead to an approach that asks in how far video games translate the special discourse of history into an inter-discourse in a ’right‘ or ’wrong‘ way.

“History is the message” But how can we “answer” the question about the representation of history in media and the video game in particular? Let us summarize all theses of this argumentation:

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1. Media (and particularly video games) do not have a genuine dimension of meaning that is not determined by their formal conception (“the medium is the message”). 2. Media (and particularly video games) tend to conceal their factitiousness (window metaphor). 3. Media (and particularly video games) are discourse machines that permanently work on the differentiation and the dedifferentiation of negotiated knowledge inventories. 4. The naturalization within video games is not only a discursive effect but also an effect of the dimension of action (immediacy). When we take a look at all these aspects it becomes clear that both the mode of mediatisation and the mode of history becomes a matter of impossibility in terms of the question about the ’mediatisation of history‘ in video games. Just like media always establish their very particular technologies, processes and episteme of ’mediatisation‘, they also establish their very particular (discursive) mode of ’history‘. It is hardly surprising that video games do not fundamentally differ from other media in this. Other technical mass media like television or cinema are obviously saturated with representation of history, too. The dialectic we have to withstand here is the difference in the particular structural-functional implementation of the modality of history in each of the particular mass media.14 Video games (like construction and strategy games, for example) do not represent history as a linear or non-linear, causal or non-causal series of events, but align history with other rationalities. The history of AGE OF EMPIRES III, for example, is not the history of discoveries or inventions but the seamless history of modernity: the question of resources, empowerment, the political configuration of knowledge as a factor of power and as a part of circulation of goods and so forth. Thus, actually only one ’age‘ exists within strategy games: the modern age resp. the modern age as a history of the invention of the “entrepreneurial self” (Bröckling 2007; own transl.).15 Hence, the question that we can address to video games (and by this ’we‘ both, the science of history and media studies are being addressed) is not whether they represent the Battle of Hastings, the landing at Omaha Beach or the colonization of Northern America ’historically correct‘ in any way. The question that we can address to video games is rather how such a game is integrated into the process of constructing representations of

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genealogic and archaeological politics of history. We can reasonably speculate to which extent history can be seen as a mode of providing the functionality of media. We can ask how certain discursive constellations of history transform themselves in media to create an impression of natural truth, hence, how they (spoken with Foucault) negotiate ’temporarily valid truths‘. We can ask how certain historical political concepts (like geopolitics, for example) become reactivated, re-articulated and transformed into inter-discursive or even elementary-discursive knowledge within certain types of games. Hence, history as a ’background noise‘ within such discursive formations can (also) be understood as an effect within dynamics of discursive interconnections that leads to a legitimation of the video game dispositive. Therefore, the connection of a construction simulation to a discourse of history can also be seen as a technique for ensuring the validity of the dimension of meaning within video games. Thus, we can (not least) ask in a very fundamental way, if the formal concept of history is – totally in line with McLuhan – the intrinsic dimension of meaning of the game in certain segments of video games: ’the history is the message‘ – inasmuch as ’popular history‘ operates as a “partial symbolic integration of knowledge” (Link 2013, 10; own transl.) that ensures the fundamental validity of the discursive system by reducing the complex bundle of naturalized ideological aspects of the video game to an obviously trivial articulation. That is: blood spatters on the lens. Translated by Andreas Weich

Notes 1

Cf. e.g. “‘Ryan’ Ends Vets’ Years of Silence”, Los Angeles Times, 6.8.1998; online: [http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/06/news/mn-10608]; last access 5.4.2013. 2 The perspective of the eye witness is explicitly implemented in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN by the opening sequence in which the matured protagonist Private Ryan is shown during a visit at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-mer. By this, the connection to the memorial culture of the subject in history is being accomplished. 3 Such a technique might be better known to the German audience from the work of Guido Knopp – though the diversity of voices resp. statements of eye witnesses seems more or less to be reduced to the statements of Traudl Junge concerning all matters of the NS regime.

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See for general thoughts in the concept of source in relation to video games Gunnar Sandkühler, “Der Historiker und Silent Hill. Prospektives Quellenstudium”, In Britta Neitzel, Rolf F. Nohr, Matthias Bopp (ed.): ›See? I'm real…‹. Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel von 'Silent Hill'. Münster: Lit-Verl. (Medien'Welten, 4), 2004. 5 What can – beyond the subjective experience – lead to the societal experience of the so called ’language crisis’. 6 Within this debate especially the construction of the filmic space is the common example for the concept of an ideological and seemingly naturalized concept of mediality. 7 If you argue on a semiotic basis, this means that the arbitrary and produced sign becomes nature. Roland Barthes deals with a similar question in his Mythologies (1972). Barthes, too, assumes that the relation that connects the concept of myth to the concept of meaning is a relation of ’formation‘. Barthes’ ideologically critical concept aims at pointing out that deeper levels of intersubjectively negotiated meaning hide behind the obvious dimension of meaning (that are closely linked to signs) and are being naturalized and concealed by the presence of the sign on the first level. This short excursus into the French structuralism and poststructuralism shows that the relation between surface and the deep structure of signs and meaning, of content and form of media constitute a complex system based on invisibilizations. Thus, asking about the content of a medium is naïve. The content of a (new) medium is a(n old) medium; the form of a medium is not conceivable without the dimension of meaning – although those dimensions of meaning are not “readable” in a naïve understanding of the term. 8 ”Within the idea of the messenger the phenomenon of the secession of sense and sensuality from text and texture, from form and content gains a palpable form.” (Krämer 2008, 117; own transl.) 9 Of course on could refer to a number of other projects of discourse analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis (e. g. Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodack), the linguistic semantic of discourse [linguistische Diskurssemantik] (e. g. Michel Pêcheux, Rainer Diaz-Bone) or the discourse analysis (e.g. Teun van Dijk) (see more detailed: Keller 2004). 10 See e.g. Nohr 2010; Reichert 2008; Miklaucic 2003. 11 The most significant ’site‘ of such a reconcilement is the graphic user interface that is commonly used by both the game and the computer as work equipment. In its archaeological and genealogical differentiation it has significantly contributed to a disappearance of the ’machine‘ (cf. e.g. Manovic 2001, 214f.). 12 At this point – as an excursus – I would like to refer to the fact that also the act of playing itself constitutes naturalization. The concept of ’trial action‘ that is often used in respect to the dimension of medial action (cf. e.g. Winkler 2004, 198ff.) has to be seen as equally ambiguous. In reference to Gregory Bateson (2000), for example, one can state that the assumed lack of consequences of play (regularly illustrated by referring to playing puppies) can, of course, only count as lacking consequence by the means of a specific framework resp. from a specific perspective. In fact, also the playing puppy trains for actions with consequences:

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the hierarchy fights of the pack. Only due to a narrowed, decontextualized view of the actual ball of fur, the playing puppy can be seen as acting in a tryout. In fact, its action is always bound to consequences. Yet those consequences naturalize themselves in the game (cf. more detailed Nohr 2010b). 13 “The modeling of history in computer code, even using [Sid] Meiers’ sophisticated algorithms, can only ever be a reductive exercise of capture and transcoding. So ‘history’ in CIVILIZATION is precisely the opposite of history, not because the game fetishizes the imperial perspective, but because the diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the synchronic homogeneity of code pure and simple” (Galloway 2006, 103). 14 The thoughts on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN in the introduction of this article already made clear that the qualities of a technical medium and the qualities of the representation of history are very specific and particular. Cinema – which has to be understood in respect to its characteristics of screening, immersion its dream-like situation of reception, the absolute will to attraction and its fundamentally fragile relation to reality – uses history much more as an argument for narrative selfassurance that television does, for example. A fundamental contrast to television is already given by the fact that television is mostly a medium of up-to-dateness in terms of the representation of history. History in television is in most cases arranged in the mode of intermediation and report. Of course, also this mode is just ostensible – also in this case naturalized practices, forms of action and most of all discoursive configurations operate in the background. Where television can be characterized by being up-to-date and by its concept of program, cinema can be characterized by its performative character, its specific situation of reception and its unique representational quality (cf. e.g. Keilbach 2008). 15 See for such an analysis in more detail e.g. Nohr 2008.

CHAPTER TWO DO COMPUTERS PLAY HISTORY? JOSEF KÖSTLBAUER

During the last decade digital media platforms have been rapidly converging, creating increasingly tightly integrated media environs. Within these, contents flow and percolate ever more freely, dissolving, eroding, and shifting traditional boundaries in media, culture, or science, like those between producers and consumers of media, popular and scientific media, or delineations between scientific disciplines. These processes pose challenges to the historical sciences as well. This especially holds true for digital games1 as subject of historical enquiry, play and games generally having been far removed from the focus of historical enquiry for a long time. This essay explores hitherto little appreciated connections between digital games and early modern play and thought. To this end I am going to look at the field of military simulation games and their historical significance as places where notions of reality are negotiated and changes in the concept of play become manifest. The reasons for focusing on the rather constricted field of military simulations are simple enough: To begin with, military simulations provide a promising subject because a significant part of simulation games are of a distinctly military character. Secondly, the development of simulations for training and planning purposes and their appropriation for the distinctly non-utilitarian world of play are historically co-dependent. Thirdly, military simulations originally were devised as scientific attempts to create models of war and combat that could be used to train military leaders; as such they were serious attempts to recreate slices of reality. By necessity this also includes visions or interpretations of history. And finally, military simulations far predate the computer. The modern military simulation dates back to at least 1812, when Georg Leopold von Reisswitz presented his Kriegsspiel to the Prussian King. Its antecedents are to be dated even further back into the early modern period.2

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Before progressing any further it will be necessary to more thoroughly define ’simulation‘. After all, in popular usage the term is used rather indiscriminately. Quite heterogeneous games are lumped together under the same rubric, especially in order to satisfy the video game industry’s perceived need for broad categories. Many ’simulation games‘ either purport to depict ’reality‘ or they merely assume an air of authenticity for marketing purposes, because, and that is interesting in itself, authenticity/realism seems to be eminently marketable. So the label ’simulation games‘ encompasses titles ranging from to extremely realistic vehicle or battlefield simulations such as the DIGITAL COMBAT SIMULATOR3 or ARMED ASSAULT II (ARMA II)4 to more fanciful games like SIM CITY or THE SIMS.5 One has to wonder whether the latter are simulations in anything but the loosest sense of the word or whether they are better understood as warped representations of the dreams and fears harboured by a contemporary American middle class. They are simulations of something that does not exist at all, something that might best be described as “simulacra”, a term coined by sociologist Jean Baudrillard.6 Therefore, to explore the way simulations deal with reality and their significance for conceptions of reality, a more specific definition is required. Thus I define simulations as attempts to represent reality (or an aspect of reality) as faithfully as possible. This basic premise applies to utilitarian simulations, such as used for training or scientific purposes, as well as to a vast number of simulation games which are produced for (or by) gamers interested in truthful simulations of reality. Such games include both traditional map-based games as well as digital games.7 Obviously, this definition of simulation knowingly excludes easily playable games designed for maximum consumer satisfaction and broad appeal, where the simulation aspect is subordinated to these aspects or merely being a convenient if misleading marketing label. To complicate matters, the term ’game‘ or ’play‘ serves to confuse rather than clarify the matter at hand. Quite easily, play is equated with doing something fun, something to spend one’s leisure time. But didactically motivated simulations, like those used to build decision making skills, are games, they are intended to be played – not read, watched, or listened to. This is not surprising, the didactic potential of play and games having been obvious to scholars and teachers throughout the ages. Basically, there is no neat distinction between (digital) simulation games on the one hand – played for fun and recreation – and utilitarian

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simulation games on the other hand. The play-element is permeating both spheres. So, after looking at the meanings of simulation and its changes throughout history, I am going to take a historical perspective on military simulations from the eighteenth century onwards, and discuss the ways in which utilitarian simulation and non-utilitarian play have become entwined. In a second step I will discuss simulations as representations of reality in a wider context of game worlds and their implications for conceptions of history and historiography. Also, the relative paucity of representations of the early modern period in simulation games will be touched upon briefly.

Changing meanings The meaning and usage of the term ’simulation‘ itself has changed considerably over time. But from which circumstances has the contemporaneous meaning of the term arisen? General definitions as given in current encyclopaedias broadly define simulation as techniques to analyse systems which are too complex or too expensive to study in reality. Instead a model is used to gain knowledge about the real system.8 Simulations in this sense basically are heuristic instruments. One could also turn this definition on the head and explain simulations as attempts to control aspects of reality through the use of models. Neither play nor computers are necessary prerequisites for creating simulations. And yet, for obvious reasons, it has become unthinkable to explain simulations without at least mentioning computers.9 Simulation and games already stood at the computer’s cradle: John von Neumann not only built one of the first working computers but this pioneering achievement can only be understood in the context of his ground-breaking work on game theory (together with Oskar Morgenstern).10 Equally obvious is the fact that interaction with simulations always contains a basic play element. A simulation is not ’real‘, rather it ’plays out‘ or is ’played‘ in a clearly delineated space governed by deliberately chosen rules. So we are confronted with a triad of simulation, game and computer, historically intertwined and mutually dependent.

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But an enquiry into the history of the term ’simulation‘ reveals markedly different meanings. A superficial look at the usage of the term in printed English and German publications over the past centuries shows a substantial increase from the middle of the 20th century onwards. Obviously, this indicates both the diffusion of applied mathematics and the onset of the digital age. But it also signifies a very profound change in the term’s meaning: Up to the twentieth century, simulation or simulatio was an expression of moral judgement and burdened by distinctly negative connotations. It basically meant pretending something to exist that does not exist, a form of disguise, even hypocrisy. At least that was the explanation given by the well-known Universal-Lexicon published by Johann Heinrich Zedler between 1732 and 1754 in Leipzig11, and a Scottish Lexicon of English Synonyms carefully distinguished between simulation and its sibling dissimulation: “The learned make a difference between simulation and dissimulation. Simulation is a pretence of what is not; and dissimulation is a concealment of what is.”12 This last statement is rather interesting when considered in the light of our computerized world. After all, our mundane interactions with digital media are made possible only by increasingly perfect techniques of dissimulation/disguise/pretence: The graphical user interface, which has been the prime enabling factor in turning computers from specialist scientific and military equipment into ubiquitous technical companions, whose presence pervades almost all aspects of our professional and private lives. Today’s glossy interfaces imbue visualized abstractions like desktop icons with a treacherous aspect of materiality. It is pure make-believe, a shiny array of non-existent buttons, sliders and spaces. It deftly conceals the mathematical world of algorithms and the banal flip-flop/yes-no of energy levels, the structures and ontology of the software. Simulation and Dissimulation form the very essence of the computer. The interface has become the place of the cyborg, fusing man and machine, software and brain. These instances of simulatio are rarely reflected upon, since they have become so much part of our lives. Related to the early moral and social discourse was a fascinating discussion of simulation/dissimulation as techniques employed by early modern statesmen and courtiers. Partly philosophical, partly didactic in nature, it sought to explain as well as to judge the culture of secrecy and disguise, which was perceived as permeating European courts.13

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The strong moral bias concerning simulation expressed in the early modern period changed somewhat during the nineteenth century as the term entered into the vocabularies of medicine and psychology. But the negative bias remained, maybe most tangibly expressed in disciplinarian notions of simulation as a strategy employed by malingerers trying to avoid military service or work. That concern acquired unprecedented urgency in World War I when the maelstrom of its battlefields led to enormous efforts by European states to mobilize their populations for warfare and productions.14 But in the second half of the twentieth century the semantics of mathematics completely usurped the term and all but superseded its former meanings. As part of an emerging language of computers, digitality, and virtuality, the term then entered popular culture, which quickly led to universal acceptance. The former meanings may not have been erased but undoubtedly they have been relegated to a peripheral position. As the next section of this essay will show, the lineage of simulation games reaches back into the early modern period. What needs to be kept in mind is that these past models and games, which perfectly fit our understanding of simulation, were named and understood quite differently by the people inventing and using them, because to them simulation meant something quite different. The question why names and meanings change points us to instances of both historical continuity and discontinuity, to shifting paradigms and perspectives.

A short genealogy of military simulations As has been mentioned before, military simulations far predate the computer. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of various systems devised to represent the hurly-burly of the battlefield within the safe confines of a game. The intention was to provide for education, cheap training, and evaluation of tactics, strategies, and techniques. Many authors regard chess as an obvious antecedent of later simulations of war. This is highly problematic. Chess is not a simulation. It is a highly abstract allegory of agonistic struggle between two equal opposites and of hierarchical society. As such it undoubtedly provides a ready metaphor. For a long time it was known as ’The Game of Kings‘, an idea that even found expression in the title of the first German chess book published by the learned Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburg, August II., under

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the pseudonym Gustavus Selenus (Das Schach oder Königsspiel, 1616).15 But simulations go way beyond that. In fact, because they are intended to recreate a very specific aspect of reality, they offer very little metaphorical value. The importance that sometimes is being attributed to chess in the history of simulations games probably derives from the fact that many early modern game designers themselves tried to take it as their starting point. Chess and its well established allegorical representation of conflict apparently held such sway over the imagination of early modern scholars that they found it hard to conceptualize war games without reference to chess. A well-known example of a wargame based on chess was produced by Christian Ludwig Hellwig, court mathematician to the duke of Brunswick, as late as 1780. Hellwig’s intent was to create a didactic game for the pages of the ducal court. The game was to be played on a map divided into quadratic fields and showing varied topography. Game pieces derived from chess represented the common troop types of the day and like chess pieces they could capture opposing pieces as they move. They represented military units, but troop strength was not taken into account, and fire effects were important only for the artillery. In contrast to chess the facing of the pieces was of great significance, which must have made manoeuvring on the board a rather complicated affair. Furthermore the game used a rather confined game-board, which led to a skewed relation between the strategic and tactical level.16 There were not many simulations published before the late eighteenth century but already throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries soldiers and scholars perceived a need for simulating warfare for the purpose of training and educating officers. Moritz and Willem Lodewijk of Nassau used tin soldiers and a tabletop when researching tactics and drills for their ambitious project of military reform in the Netherlands.17 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who showed great interest in games, speculated on a war game (neü erfundenes Kriegsspiel) for the education of officers in his notes on a universal German Defense Organisation.18 A telling albeit purely fictitious example is provided by Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Here we find described in great detail the military pastimes of the main protagonist’s uncle Toby and his servant Trim. This single minded pair of veterans uses the kitchen garden as an

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impromptu sandbox to replay in minute detail the sieges taking place in Flanders during the War of the Spanish Succession. The necessary information is provided to them through gazettes arriving from the continent. When the packet ship is delayed, they attempt to anticipate possible courses of events - thus arriving at true simulation.19 This whimsical literary episode shows that in Georgian England, too, the idea of sandbox games, or rather „kitchen garden“-simulations, of war was not beyond imagination. But it was a game invented in war-torn Prussia during the Napoleonic era, which introduced a far more professional tone. It was the seminal Taktisches Kriegsspiel (tactical war-game), devised by the Kriegsrat (war councilor) Georg Leopold von Reisswitz (1760-1828) and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz (1794-1827). 20 The Kriegsspiel was presented to King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1812. It consisted of a large wooden cabinet with a huge rectangular tabletop divided into a numerated quadratic field of fifteen by eighteen squares. With painted rectangular terrain pieces, varied landscapes could be created. This allowed for a great variation of battlefield conditions and tactical moves. All mechanical representations of war were left behind. Now the outcome of engagements was determined by throwing dice against odds derived from the type and size of units, as well as various other conditions. In this way, chance and unpredictability, the imponderables of war, entered into the game. 21 Later Reisswitz’s son, a junior officer in a Prussian guards regiment, turned his father’s game into a full-fledged simulation of military staff work and successfully propagated its use as a training tool throughout the army.22 Reisswitz strove to capture the unknown and the fundamental openness of warfare, true to Clausewitz’s fundamental tenet: “in war all is undetermined, and the calculation has always to be made with varying quantities.”23 On each of the opposing sides a commander and several officers represented a rudimentary staff; the tabletop was done away with, instead the game was played on topographic maps, which became available in increasing quantities due to the energetic efforts of the Prussian general staff. Unit markers were moved across specific distances determined by map information and estimated unit speed and players did not act in turns but in parallel sequences. The dispositions of the enemy remained hidden to each participant and were only revealed when forces came into contact. An umpire or referee controlled the conditions of the

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game and the information available to players. In a further step toward scientification of the Kriegsspiel, Reisswitz and Scharnhorst systematically test-fired weapons fielded by contemporaneous European troops and used the data to model the effects of fire and their variability in his game.24 The game had become a true simulation which allowed military staffs to test scenarios and tactics within two-dimensional representations of actual landscapes.25 In the course of the nineteenth century various types of war games became a popular pastime among civilians too. Such games modeled warfare with varying degrees of realism. A well-known example is H. G. Wells’s “Little Wars” (first published in 1913) – its subtitle makes clear that it was intended more for fun than for understanding war: “a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and book.”26 Writer Robert Louis Stevenson played a similar game with his stepson and the eminent British historian G. M. Trevelyan fondly recounted the elaborate game he knew as “soldiers” and which he used to play together with his three brothers “till well after we were all grown men.”27 There is much to be said of the impact of the Prussian war game on military science throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. But in all the increasingly sophisticated military simulations the interconnectedness of simulation, play, and science is firmly established. The world had ceased to be ruled by rules, and had turned into a product of chance. This was the pre-condition for mathematics that turned the world into calculable and computable problems. With increasing proliferation of personal computers in households and the rise of an electronic game industry, the war game quickly found its way into the digital realm. In some ways, it was a logical step to transfer commercial tabletop simulations from the proverbial kitchen table onto the computer screen. But right from the beginning in simulation game developments there also has been an overlap of the military and commercial spheres. These spheres nowadays have all but fused, commercial companies marketing their software to the military as well as to the gaming public.28 The games industry as a whole has merged with Hollywood and the Pentagon to form a strange and as of yet little understood military-entertainment complex, which effectively is creating new aesthetics of war, politics, and history.29

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But these developments far exceed the scope of this chapter. The question, that arises when surmising the field of realistic military simulations, is why there are next to no games set in the early modern period. The Napoleonic Wars seem to be the only exception.30 Dominating the thematic spectrum are simulations of World War II tactics and strategy like the COMBAT MISSION SERIES31, followed by simulations of modern warfare.32 Going further back along the timeline we find a slate of American Civil War simulations, like the seminal SID MEIER’S GETTYSBURG (1996) or recently the SCOURGE OF WAR SERIES.33 The latter can be considered a real successor the Prussian staff war games since it closely replicates the command and communication structures of nineteenth century armies. In fact, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College decided to add the game to its suite of training simulations.34 The three parts of the EUROPA UNIVERSALIS SERIES published by Paradox Interactive cover the early modern period but they are more strategic simulations on the state level than military simulations.35 But surely the campaigns of Marlborough or Frederick the Great merit some consideration? After all, these are still studied in military history, same as Napoleon’s campaigns? Part of the answer surely lies in national narratives. The Civil War continues to occupy an important place in American consciousness and continues to interest game developers as well as gamers throughout the world. The latter holds true for the Napoleonic wars. And of course World War II evokes strong and well established memories and visions throughout the world, making it both a point of interest for military themed games and an easily marketable theme.

Challenges to historians: virtual histories Utilitarian and non-utilitarian simulations share one essential characteristic with other types of video games, especially with sandbox type games (like MINECRAFT), open world games (like SKYRIM), or multiplayer online games (like WORLD OF WARCRAFT): By recreating slices of reality, they create virtual worlds or virtual spaces in the true sense of the word. And those are historical places as well as places having their own history.36 Let’s start with the first assumption, which is rather straightforward: Evidently video games are historical phenomena. They are products of certain cultural contexts; they exist within discreet societal, economic, and political frames. As such they are important sources to late twentieth and

Do Computers Play History?

early twenty-first century cultures and transformation of ideas, memes, and icons.

to

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the

circulation

and

Now, to the second assumption, video games as places experiencing their own cycles of history, generating their own histories: Within greater historical contexts every game is a discreet event situated in historical context and moving along its own chronological trajectory from conception to oblivion. Video games start out as ideas and concepts. But they also are promises: promises of realizing something not yet existing; promises to transgress current limits of technology and imagination, as video games are inextricably tied to in a discourse of everlasting technological progress. In the expression of fans waiting for the release of game, eagerly scrutinizing development updates, screenshots, previews, rumors and gossip, this sometimes seems to border on dreams of utopia. Game worlds become promised lands, flowing with milk and honey. And once opened to the gaming public, pioneers stream into those lands, exploring and settling its expanses, discovering its secrets and adventures. Usually publishers further develop gaming worlds by the opening of new modules, servers, or expansions. But at least as important are developments, which are not or only partially laid down in game mechanics and publishing strategies: the creation of political and social structures in player communities like clans, the creating of player and gaming cultures, the rise of mythologies and heroes and the branching out of a game’s culture(s) from the game world into surrounding media like forums, chatrooms, or blogs. Then, as new products or sequels make their appearance, there follows depopulation, abandonment, and the shutdown, sometimes followed by salvage operation conducted by community members or attempts at rebuilding. So in the end there is either perdition or some kind of metamorphosis. These are histories alright, histories that in many cases remain to be written. The objection that these are not real worlds but “merely” fictitious ones is easily refuted. Very real people spend hours playing them and living through real experience. The same charge could be brought forth against movies or literature, and today nobody would deem them unworthy of scholarly attention. But there is yet another dimension of history in virtual worlds. They typically come with a prefabricated past, be it the history of Azeroth in WORLD OF WARCRAFT or the spectre of post-communist disintegration in Bohemia Interactive’s ARMED ASSAULT 2. Visions of a fictional past can

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be integrated into a game by means of a deeply anchored narrative like in WORLD OF WARCRAFT. But even without such an effort it is next to impossible to invent a world without any vestiges of history. The result would be unimaginably bland. So in ARMA 2 the quaint villages and rusty industrial centers of the fictional Black Sea country Chernarus do not need elaborate explanations on the part of the developer – although those can be found on the game’s website: countryside, buildings and topographical names closely conform to Western visions of the Caucasian region. Traversing this landscape the player intuitively ’reads‘ the land and puts it in the context of contemporary history. Two circumstances have served to increase this effect: First, ARMA 2 was released in May 2009, less than a year after the war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. So this setting was still relatively fresh in people’s minds. Second, a fairly realistic tactical combat simulation like ARMA 2 serves a small segment of the gaming population, which contains a fair share of persons with a more than average knowledge of geo-politics, military affairs, and history in general. Discussions in community forums support this assumption. But still it remains that a fictional Chernarus steps up next to a ’real‘ Black Sea region and medialised visions of geographies, societies, cultures in a very subtle way dissolve the always unstable borders between fact and fiction, game and reality. Seizing on a well-established trope of fantasy literature, virtual fantasy worlds provide the player with a plethora of ’historical sources‘ scattered throughout the world. Ancient tomes, ruins, historical artifacts inform on past conflicts, lost states, and natural or magic catastrophes. Players entering these worlds step right into the illusion of history taking its course. While this may be associated with the allure of counterfactuality and may give players the power to influence the course of events, in other cases players may find themselves moving through chronological sequences which are well known and cannot be changed. For example Players of MIDDLE EARTH ONLINE find themselves governed by a virtual history whose beginning and end is well known – if not to in-game characters, then to players familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien’s work: The War of the Rings, the destruction of the one ring and the end of the Third Age.37 All these different layers of histories are valid. Without plunging into a moot discussion of reality vs. virtuality, I want to point out that both real and imagined histories are worth being studied. First of all, as cultural products they can tell us something about our culture, our societies, our

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politics, and economies. But to me, the more intriguing point is that historians are uniquely equipped to deal with the histories present in games and the apparent need of games for history: Not only are historians well suited to trace and record multiple layers of history; they can also bring their professional insights into the domain of game development itself. Another, and probably more serious challenge to history, is fundamental to simulation games as defined at the beginning of this essay: Their sincere claim to ’reproduce‘ reality begs troubling questions when used in conjunction with the past. Most historians will readily point out that the past cannot be relived, after all, and the question of reality used in conjunction with history is a problematic one at the best of times. Worst case examples would be games that use an aura of scientific endeavor and historic research to propagate a nationalist, colonialist, racist, sexist [insert your favorite -ism] vision of history. The only answer to this problem lies in a transparent model of simulating the past. Up to now respectable representatives of the genre seem to have managed this astonishingly well through close relations to their gaming communities. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable communities of gamers take apart each game, studying photographs, maps, technical manuals and historical accounts, ever ready to discuss, criticize, and point out historical inaccuracies or dubious assertions. Where such (self-) regulatory mechanisms are lacking and where the basic game model and conditions of an simulation remain hermetic, there might arise the case that the computer takes over from humanity: by playing history the machine starts to create history.

Notes 1

I will be using the term “digital game” because these games represent a genuinely digital medium: As German philosopher Dieter Mersch has pointed out, this medium owes its very existence to the logics and potentialities of digitality. See Mersch, Dieter. “Logik und Medialität des Computerspiels,“ in Game Over!? Perspektiven des Computerspiels, edited by Jan Distelmeyer, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008, 19-41, 21. 2 Hilgers, Philipp von. War Games: A History of War on Paper, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 14-18, mentions Praissac de Braissac, Wilhelm Ludwig of Nassau and Everard van Reyd, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 3 Eagle Dynamics, DIGITAL COMBAT SIMULATOR, 2008. 4 Bohemia Interactive, ARMA II, 2009.

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5 See for example SIMCITY SOCIETIES 2007; THE SIMS 3 2009. Budra, John Vincent. “American Justice and the First Person Shooter“, in Canadian Review of American Studies 34 (2004): 1-12, 4, describes THE SIMS as simulation games. But the author fails to define his specific understanding of simulation. 6 See Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation, Paris: Èditions Galilée, 1981. 7 For brief but succinct definitions of different game categories see Sabin, Philip. Simulating War: Studying conflict through simulation games. London et al.: Continuum, 2012, xviii-xix. 8 See Encyclopedia Britannica: "Simulation", 2013. 9 Telling examples are the entries regarding simulation in the English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation) and German Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation), the English Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simulation) as well as the above cited entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 10 Levi 1998, 937-944; Hilgers 2008, 175-179. 11 Zedler, Johann Heinrich (founder), Ludovici, Carl Günther (ed.). Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste Vol. 47, Leipzig and Halle, 1746, 1042-1046. 12 Crabb George M.A. English Synonyms, with copious illustrations and explanations drawn from the Best Writers. A New Edition enlarged, New York Harpers & Brothers, 1837, 178, 520. 13 See Snyder, Jon R. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 14 Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry Into “Shell Shock”. First published 1922. (Imperial War Museum: London, 2004) 141-144; Hirschfeld, Gerhard, Krumeich, Gerd, Renz, Irina: Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg. Aktualisierte und erweiterte Studienausgabe, Paderborn: Schöningh UTB, 2009, 216; Michl, Susanne. Im Dienste des “Volkskörpers”: deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007, 185, 187, 193, 194, 218. 15 Selenus, Gustavus. Das Schach- oder Königs-Spiel. In vier unterschiedenen Bücher mit besonderem Fleiß gründ- und ordentlich abgefasset, Leipzig: Groß, 1616. 16 Hellwig, Johann Georg Ludwig. Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel gebaueten taktischen Spiels: von zwey oder mehrern Personen zu spielen, Leipzig: S.L. Crusius, 1780. For a discussion of Hellwig’s game see Rolf F. Nohr. “Die Natürlichkeit des Spielens. Vom Verschwinden des Gemachten im Computerspiel.“ Münster: Lit, 2008, 75-7, and Gunnar Sandkühler. “Die Philanthropische Versinnlichung. Hellwigs Kriegsspiel als pädagogisches und immersives Erziehungsmodell”, in Strategie Spielen. Medialität, Geschichte und Politik des Strategiespiels, edited by Rolf F. Nohr and Serjoscha Wiemer (eds.): Münster: Lit , 2008, pp. 69-85. 17 Hilgers 2008, 29-30; Jähns 1890, 881. 18 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Gedanken zum Entwurf einer teutschen Kriegsverfassung“ in Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe,

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37

4. Series, Vol. 2, ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Berlin, 1986, 577– 593. 19 Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. 6, London: Becket and Dehont, 1763, 399-410. 20 There are several variations in spelling: Reißwitz, Reisswitz, Reiswitz. 21 Hilgers 2008, 43-48; Reisswitz 1812. 22 Reisswitz, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von. Anleitung zur Darstellung militairischer Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegs-Spieles von B. Von Reisswitz, Berlin, 1824. 23 Clausewitz, Carl von. On War, trans. by Michael Howard, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007, 99. 24 Hilgers 2008, 48-53. 25 Ibid., 51-53. 26 Wells, Herbert G. Little Wars: A game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books, Whitefish: Kessinger, 2010. 27 Trevelyan, George Macaulay. An Autobiography and Other Essays, London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949, 3-4; on Stevenson see Osbourne, Lloyd. “Stevenson At Play”, Scribner’s Magazine (Dec. 1898): 711719. 28 An example is Bohemia Interactive, a Czech company which produces Vitual Battlespace Systems (VBS) for military customers and the ARMED ASSAULT (ARMA) series for private customers, both utilizing the same game engine. VBS1 2002/2004; ARMA 2007; VBS2 2007; ARMA II 2009. 29 Mark Mullen, “Review: Realism versus Reelism: The Scouring of Total War,” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 3 (2011): 159–165. 30 Com’And Play, HISTWAR: LES GROGNARDS, 2010. 31 Battlefront.com, COMBAT MISSION: BEYOND OVERLORD 2000; COMBAT MISSION 2: BARBAROSSA TO BERLIN 2002; COMBAT MISSION 3: AFRIKA CORPS 2003; COMBAT MISSION: BATTLE FOR NORMANDY 2011; COMBAT MISSION: FORTRESS ITALY 2012. 32 Examples are COMBAT MISSION: SHOCK FORCE 2007, STEEL BEASTS PRO PERSONAL EDITION 2008, and ARMA II 2009. 33 The first release was NorbSoftDev, SCOURGE OF WAR: GETTYSBURG in 2010, the most recent release was SCOURGE OF WAR: CHANCELLORSVILLE in 2012. 34 Timpko, Norb. “US Army Trains with 1863 US Army”, Dec. 29, 2011, Norbsoftdev, http://www.norbsoftdev.net/articles-mainmenu-59/news-mainmenu2/latest-news-mainmenu-57/161-2011-us-army-trains-with-1863-us-army2011 Accessed May 29, 2013. 35 Paradox Interactive, EUROPA UNIVERSALIS I 2000; EUROPA UNIVERSALIS II 2001; EUROPA UNIVERSALIS III 2007; EUROPA UNIVERSALIS: ROME 2008. 36 Mojang, MINECRAFT 2011; Bethesda Game Studios, THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM 2011; Blizzard Entertainment, WORLD OF WARCRAFT 2004. 37 Turbine/Inc, THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE: SHADOWS OF ANGMAR 2007.

CHAPTER THREE THE HISTORY BEYOND THE FRAME: OFF-SCREEN SPACE IN THE HISTORICAL FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER ADAM ROWAN CHAPMAN

Space is both a historical and a ludic issue in historical videogames. Virtual space constructs representations and functions as a tangible narrative structure but it is also integral to challenge and game-play. However, representations of space (and thus off-screen space) manifest distinctly differently between games. Here I will explore the importance of off-screen space in the historical first-person shooter (FPS) by analysing BROTHERS IN ARMS, a critically acclaimed tactical FPS set during WWII.1 Off-screen space is about more than just the game as an object and the “space of videogames is a conceptual one, constructed in the players mind as he manipulates the representational system that comprises a particular game”.2 This reminds us to be wary of dualist notions of virtual ‘space’ (these are representations) and highlights the importance of the exchanges between the modes of interactivity (“configurative ergodic traversal”3/doing and “orthodox meaning negotiation”4/reading) that are a part of engaging with all historical games as histories. Consequently, each information gathering configuration that the player produces through play can feed into their meaning-negotiation of the game-space. This can aid in constructing a meaningful and immersive world which may affect the player’s decision making. However, these internal constructions can also feedback into tactical considerations by building an understanding of the limits and nature of the game’s ‘3D’ space. What this implies is that there is a ‘space’ that is not contained on the screen and yet that is not a part of the real space of the player either. The most comprehensive account of these off-screen spaces in videogames can

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be found in Wolf’s taxonomy.5 By developing these ideas further, here I explore the idea that the suggestion of off-screen space affords us structured imagining of fictive historical spaces beyond, though related, to what is contained on the screen. I will also describe how in some historical games virtual space moves between on- and off-screen and how this dynamic is vital to their play. I propose that spatial historical representations in modern videogames work not only through coded virtual architecture but also in accordance with the Japanese concept of “ma”, what author Lian Hearn explains as “the space between that enables perception to occur.”6 Obviously, this is, at least partly, because historical games rely on complex exchanges between the player’s “polyvalent doing”7 (ergodic traversal) and polysemic reading (meaning negotiation). Off-screen spaces are a form of ‘ma’ that developers use to cue players into constructing vast and detailed worlds that cannot possibly be represented. However, they are also important rules that work to create challenges that contain implicit arguments about the historical experiences and/or processes they aim to represent. This concept of space for perception also relates to the Gibsonian ecological psychology I have applied to historical videogames elsewhere.8 However, the analysis contained here is restricted to examining the relation between spaces that we, as players in a given moment, experience and those we are aware of or imagine but do not in a given moment (or perhaps any moment) actually directly audio-visually perceive. This is important to understanding historical representation in videogames. BROTHERS IN ARMS is a realist-reconstructionist simulation which seeks to represent events as the direct experience of agents and thus confronts us with its diegetic game-play space in particular ways.9 The most obvious of these is the effort to give the impression of a 3D environment looked upon from a first-person perspective. In line with the debt owed to cinematic realism, this involves using “the precedent set by the space represented in the classical Hollywood film.”10 Some of these precedents take on new significance in the videogame with the increase in audience agency, which, if we continue to talk in cinematic terms, tends to mean the game “provides players with an unbroken exploration of space allowing them to pan, tilt, track and dolly through the space”.11 This agency means that game environments must in some regards be more complete illusions than those of cinema because the camera movement, in the player’s hands, is much less predictable. Thus, as in BROTHERS IN ARMS, we often end up with relatively complex 3D models. Unlike in

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cinema where the filming of real world objects or location makes much of the basic spatial perspectives inherent, in games many of these must be programmed, for instance, to give the appearance of distance and of motion parallax.12 Accordingly, a sense of space is created not just through the construction of virtual spaces themselves but through the illusions of perspective in relation to these spaces that the player is given by the environments reaction to their movements.13 This combined with the movements and scope of vision allowed, is an idea that is integral to the experience of ‘3D’ virtual environments and particularly the issues surrounding off-screen spaces, as discussed below. In historical strategy games such as SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION, player navigation of space tends to be relatively easy.14 However, in BROTHERS IN ARMS not only learning which spaces can be navigated but actually doing so, is an implicit challenge of the game due to the features of the terrain which may impede us and also the complexity of typical first-person controls.15 Accordingly, in first-person historical games players must learn to negotiate their perspective on the game space. It is also useful to note at this point that BIA is linear and players travel through a broad ‘corridor’ of space, normally uni-directionally. Each player will take roughly the same path and encounter the same contained spaces in a particular order.16 Because of this and the vast virtual distances such a spatial formation entails, the player is actually situated in a relatively small part of the overall game space at any one time. This linear spatial formation means that there is often a great degree of play time and ‘distance’ between spaces in the game.17 Spaces are broken into sublocations. This means that the game uses “spatial segmentation”.18 This is also combined with a form of challenge segmentation, whereby “subunits are presented as self-contained challenges to be negotiated by the player with successive challenges implying greater difficulty.”19 As such, in BROTHERS IN ARMS the player must progress through the linear space and to do so they must overcome the challenges provided by enemies.20 However, this is also in combination with particular implicit challenges of space and perception. This linear spatial format is different to historical strategy games, in which we typically cannot travel to other sublocations, only explore the one established at the beginning of play. As such, playing games such as CIVILIZATION involves navigating a fixed map-like space for the entire

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duration of play. Generally, the 3D model, perspective, visual scope, allowed movements and broad spatial format of BROTHERS IN ARMS means players are supposed to feel as though they are on a journey travelling through a historical world as a member of it. Conversely in games like CIVILIZATION these design structures are supposed to make players feel as though they look down upon a world and command elements of it. Each helps communicate the game’s focus to the player and enables them to engage with both its ludic and historical functions aspects and yet each is also very different.

Off-Screen Space and Challenge The first-person perspective of BROTHERS IN ARMS means that the virtual field of view is restricted, the player’s avatar is rooted to the virtual floor and the draw distance imitates the limitations of the human eye.21 These restrictions mean that though there is good spatial agency within the boundaries of the level, we cannot see the whole of the virtual space at once no matter what position we occupy. Accordingly, most of the virtual representation of space tends to be off-screen in any given game-play moment.22 Obviously, the partial purpose of this is to give a degree of perceptual similarity between the information available to the historical agent and that of the player, increasing the believability of the game’s realist simulation. However, this also serves an action-led representative function as it works as an information rule that means without player action much information about the environment is unavailable. There is then a kind of “exploratory challenge” implicit in this first person perspective and the off-screen space it entails, that represents some of the challenges that faced the historical agent.23 The player (like the original soldier) must constantly take action to gain visual information about the (virtual) environment if they are to be successful in combat ‘within’ it.24 Of course, the player has to use additional control pad movements as well as turning their heads and looking with their eyes and the movements are obviously hugely different between player and soldier. Still, the importance of the perception of and usage of space in combat is made clear and a particular representation of frontline WWII combat is constructed. Naturally, the audio design of any game like this quickly becomes more than a cursory part of the representation and has a direct tactical value in that it can allow us to understand what may be happening in these

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off-screen spaces even when we cannot see them and thereby strengthens the representation by doing so. Not only knowing and understanding the affordances of the environment but constantly having to remain vigilant for changes in it that occur outside of our perception is an aspect of combat that is represented through this ‘spatial’ challenge.25 If anything in fact the lack of “ambient vision”26 for the player (this of course being filled with the information beyond the screen in the room in which the player is sat) puts the player at a disadvantage in terms of their field of view.27 Of course it is also true that the consequences for not gathering this spatial information could not be more disparate in the senses that they apply to player or soldier respectively. Nonetheless, the first-person perspective, which ensures that large portions of the game space remain off-screen at any one moment, is at the core of the game’s tactical challenges. It is this that allows the game to represent WWII combat effectively and is at the core of the game’s representation of some of the challenges of perception that also faced soldiers. Because of this chosen perspective and realist style, terrain, characters and objects can also block visual information and thus create off-screen space. Accordingly, the challenges of the game include the need for the player to constantly negotiate their perspective in relation to such objects. Good players will quickly become aware that behind every such impediment to their sight enemies could be lying in wait. Accordingly, the player is made cautious of any off-screen space and must command their teams, not only for the purposes of overt aggression, but also to extend their own awareness of the spatial situation, whilst simultaneously trying to minimise the harm to their avatar and allies. Remaining in off-screen space (according to the enemy’s implied line of sight) protects us, and they are protected from our gunfire by remaining off-screen, either behind cover or by moving beyond our perspective. Clearly, the lessons about WWII tactics that BROTHERS IN ARMS offers are highly dependent on offscreen space. Indeed, in the game, flanking as a tactic can be understood as the attempt to uncover off-screen space. Similarly, many of the games’ arguments surrounding the importance of technology in warfare rely on negotiating off-screen space. Certain forms of cover can be shot through using certain weapons and in particular, the explosive effects of bazookas, tank armaments and grenades mean that they can be understood as tools to negate the protection of off-screen space. Similarly, in the latest game in the series (HELL’S HIGHWAY) some forms of cover (such as fencing) are

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also destructible if too much firepower hits them and so off-screen space is neither reliably fixed nor unchanging; something that can work to both our advantage and disadvantage. Each of these examples takes off-screen space as a core resource and/or challenge and each in doing so makes particular ludic arguments about the challenges of WWII combat. Accordingly, off-screen space is a natural source of ludic anxiety for players and the games often punish those who do not obtain information about this before taking significant actions. Nonetheless, these games will also often force players, like the commanders of WWII, to make decisions about these unperceivable spaces without information. This emphasizes the uncertainty that often faced officers and represents a few of the exploratory challenges of command, as well as arguing that space was an important tactical commodity. Similarly this also argues that, despite various knowledge tools (some of which we have access to in-game, for example an aerial map and compass), even in relatively modern combat, information for officers was often still reliant upon and also limited by the natural restrictions of embodied human perception. In the various roles described here, off-screen space is used in BROTHERS IN ARMS to emphasize that (like and as game-play) “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”28

Off-Screen Space and the Fictive World As we know from Goffman’s “Fun in Games”29 essay and Huizinga’s (admittedly contentious) “magic circle”30 concept, play is often contained and somewhat separated from the wider world. Often this is most obvious through some kind of spatial demarcation. Of course because videogames are screen-based games this spatial separation is intrinsic. However, just as the football pitch or the chess board work as boundaries beyond which certain game actions cannot be taken, so too must the virtual game-space have a virtual edge that cannot be acted beyond and these are not necessarily always marked by the edge of the screen. For example, The relationship between game space and world space becomes more interesting in games with more elaborate fictional worlds, where the end of the game space has to be marked in more subtle ways than by using a white line or a wall.31

Thus, “boundaries are also given plausible motivation, as far as possible, to avoid impressions of arbitrariness that are likely to reduce the

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immersive qualities of the game”.32 In realist simulations such as BROTHERS IN ARMS this means using diegetic boundaries. However, just because these boundaries are diegetic does not necessarily mean they are always believable. Indeed, Aarseth notes this problem with the two historical FPS’ (CALL DUTY and BROTHERS IN ARMS) that are probably the most popular.33 “Both games direct their users within a very narrow quest corridor, with almost ridiculously unnatural boundaries for the player-character’s movements (e.g. three feet tall fences that are impossible to cross).”34 These unfeasible restrictions in the capabilities of the avatar, which is otherwise implied to not only have normal human spatial skills but also to be highly physically trained, can obviously be a rather jarring dissonance in the games’ realist representation.35 So too, the very presence of these insurmountable boundaries and restrictions on spatial agency, can be jarring because “the fiction gives no clue that the world ends, but for no apparent reason, the game space ends.”36 Therefore, “The promise of continuous space is negated by what turns out to be a strict topology.”37 Other first-person games have perhaps dealt with this need for boundaries better than the un-crossable fences and hedges of BROTHERS IN ARMS. For example, as Juul notes, in BATTLEFIELD 1942 if the player strays too far from the intended play area then they are told that they must turn back because “deserters will be shot”.38 If they continue, then the player character dies. This is a more believable diegetic boundary and yet it is not visually characterised as overtly spatial but is labelled more as a consequence of the represented historical social system which the player’s avatar is depicted as part of. OF

These boundaries and the fictional/historical incoherencies they cause are somewhat negated by the inclusion of suggested space beyond our access and this suggestion of off-screen space is important to the games representation. Particularly if, as Bogost notes, “Both mental modelling and cognitive mapping show how the interpretation of a game relies as much or more on what the simulation excludes or leaves ambiguous that [sic] on what it includes.”39 Certainly, developers go to considerable lengths to ensure that the illusion of further space beyond the boundaries of the play space is maintained. As Wolf notes, this is a development choice that can be traced back to the simple arcade games of the past, now as then, “although this off-screen space was not actually used (objects leaving the screen were not seen again) its presence was implied in either case.”40

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Similarly in BROTHERS IN ARMS, bullets that we fire do not hit the edge of the level but (we are meant to assume) fly off into distant places we cannot go but which the uninterrupted path of the bullet suggests are there. Furthermore, we can see into the far distance of the spaces beyond the boundaries which mark the edge of the spaces in which we can actually experience agency within. Aesthetic events reinforce this sense, such as planes flying overhead, which move through and beyond the limits of the space in which we find our avatar, maintaining the appropriate representations of perspective as they fade into specks on the horizon. Faraway noises, the sources of which are well beyond our sight, can also often be heard. All this is to cue us into imagining the historical spaces that the developer/historian could not really include representations of and yet in which they want us to situate the events of the game.41 Thus, we have the space within the boundaries in which we can move, the space we can see beyond this but which remains inaccessible and finally the space which, though we cannot actually see, cued by the game’s representation, we imagine exists beyond the representations of the screen. All of these spaces contribute to making a full fictive world. Of course such imaginings are particularly important in a game like BROTHERS IN ARMS because of the relatively heavy realist emphasis on diegesis, but also because this takes some steps towards situating the local events, both geographically and in terms of their relation to the larger world and historical discourses that we know or accept. The assumed existence of this off-screen space allows an acknowledgment of the events of the game to be represented as part of a wider conflict (from which the streams of enemies and allies which we encounter are assumed to enter). Often allies support this by reporting to us about other parts of the conflict in relation to ours, recounting their own accounts of the same battles but drawn from different spaces that are nonetheless supposed to be part of the same continuous fictive whole. Similarly, such games often contain maps (in both cut-scenes and menus) that attempt to give us the same sense of our local conflicts being part of a larger one by showing us the broader movements of forces (including ourselves) over large scale spaces that we cannot experience directly in play. This sense of the larger fictive space and conflict is necessary to understand the environments that may already have evidence of fighting when we arrive or if we “return to a familiar space later in the game and discover it has been transformed by subsequent (off-screen) events.”42 In return, such devastation emphasises the tangibility of the historical off-

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screen space. Lastly, this expansive fictional world space is also the assumed route for the avatar and other characters when the passing of unplayable time (and thus space) is indicated and helps the player to resolve this inconsistency, cued not only by the cinematic conventions to indicate this (and their own sophistication as a viewer) but also the suggested off-screen spatiality that the game’s representation makes apparent in these described ways. In fact this skipping of time (and space) may even, in turn, increase the sense of meaningful off-screen space (through the sense of continuity) as well as being enabled by it. Thus, often when these breaks occur “the player perceives he or she is participating in a virtual space larger than it’s on screen representation and that this space is traversed in parts.”43 This transition is aided through information contained within the narrative (or in the/as the game space) or sometimes by using extra-ludic means, such as a cutscene. However such a design badly handled could also possibly come at the expense of “losing the necessary spatial relationship between the spatial segments”44 and therefore disturb the sense of spatial (and therefore temporal) continuity. Accordingly this sense of the wider conflict and fictive historical world help to create a much more impressive sense of drama and helps to combat the games’ narrow historical focus (typical of the realist simulation). Subsequently, this cued superset of off-screen fictive space is important because it extends the story/content boundaries of the (hi)story space beyond the boundaries of the actually playable space and because it helps to suture the events of the game into the wider historical narrative. Furthermore, this creates a sense in the player of their (and thus, individual WWII units) relatively small role in the large-scale conflicts fought. This, combined with Brothers in Arms restriction to fairly minor and historically typical characters and scenarios helps to combat the “great man”45 rhetoric which can often creep into other WWII games through the wish to empower players both in form and in content.46 Such a structure also helps to reinforce the ideas, which are integral to the games narrative structure; that the player is a small part in a broader trend of events that they cannot change. And that for the most part the player’s aim, as at a basic level it was for soldiers, is not to engage morally or politically with the larger context of the war but only to fight to survive (and move forward).

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Conclusion Whether in the form of accessible or viewable space that is unavailable because of player movements and the limitations of perspective and/or terrain, or in terms of the off-screen space that is suggested by the game but exists only as part of our interpretative construction of the fictive historical world, the off-screen space of BROTHERS IN ARMS is important to the game’s historical representation. Off- screen space works as both an information rule vital to the games representation and challenges (particularly its lessons about WWII combat tactics) and also has a vital role in constructing a wider fictive historical world. This analysis has shown that the historical representation and challenges of (particularly combat focused) FPS realist simulations like BROTHERS IN ARMS are almost as dependent on the off-screen spaces that are not shown in a (or indeed perhaps any) game-play moment as those that are. Games clearly force players to understand the limitations and significance of virtual spaces if they are to play well when facing spatial challenges, however, this by no means guarantee that this understanding will always transfer to an understanding of the historical spaces that they imitate or that players will predictably engage in the creation of a shared fictional world. These are only opportunities that exist within the text, through which historian/developers clearly try to cue players into engaging with the past. Nonetheless clearly off-screen space plays an important role in the attempt to represent the past in videogame form, in terms of the suggestion of its existence and role in the construction of fictional spaces through the player’s meaning negotiation, and through its role as a ludic pressure and resource. In terms of space (at the very least) this analysis suggests that historical videogames and their representations are made up of more than that which the developer actually constructs. Accordingly, off-screen space is also an important issue in that it allows us to see that history in the videogame form is also made up off that which developer/historians hint at, cue us to construct, downright exclude or make sometimes unavailable: digital “ma”, the spaces in between that enable perception to occur.

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Notes 1

Gearbox Software, BROTHERS IN ARMS: ROAD TO HILL 30/EARNED IN BLOOD/HELL’S HIGHWAY (Ubisoft, 2005/2005/2008) [Xbox 360]. 2 Bogost, Ian. ”Persuasion and Gamespace” in Space Time Play, edited by F. Von Borries et al. (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 2007), 306. 3 Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1. 4 Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 14. 5 Wolf, Mark J. P. ”Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Videogames”, Film Quarterly 51, 1 (1997): 11-23. 6 Hearn, Lian. ”On Writing Across the Nightingale Floor”, blog (2008), accessed at http://www.lianhearn.com/lianhearn_htmlsite/across_the_nightingale.html In Hearn’s work this manifests (as in much Japanese style literature) as a use of ‘silence’, i.e. she deliberately omits details in order to force the reader to perceive and fill the gaps. 7 Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 105. 8 For example, see Chapman, Adam. ”Affording History: Civilization and the Ecological Approach” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Andrew Elliot & Matthew Kappell (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986. 9 Though there are considerable nuances to my historical simulation categories of ‘realist’ and ‘conceptual’ that I have explored elsewhere, here it is enough to note that the realist simulation represents the past by claiming to show it ‘as it was’ through high fidelity audio-visual techniques that invoke ‘realism’. ‘Reconstructionist’ here refers to the epistemological approach that such a simulation style (combined with the games wider claims) naturally infers. For more on such epistemologies see Munslow, Alun. Narrative and History Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 10-15. In opposition to realist simulations I propose the category of conceptual simulations. Such simulations are characterised by abstract audio-visual styles and instead the aesthetics of historical description mostly operate through the ludic aspect (rules and action) whereby most of the data is found and the historical representation is constructed. Accordingly, these simulations work at a more discursive level and thus tell us about the past without purporting to directly show it. 10 Wolf, ”Inventing Space”, 20. 11 Ibid, 20. 12 What we actually observe is a flat screen that produces representations of space. This constructed aspect to the player’s perspective of course has further interesting and sometimes significant connotations for the fidelity of the games perceptual information. This differs between titles however introduces a whole new layer of

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subjectivity to the realist simulation in videogame form. Some of these subjectivities, however, remain the same as in cinema such as the decided upon FOV or ‘field of view’. 13 Of course because this space does not exist independent of the ‘perspectives’ of the camera anyway such a distinction is in some ways arbitrary, at least in design terms. However, because these perspectives, in the historical videogame at least, have a representative relationship to real experiences of space it is useful to talk in these terms. 14 Microprose, Firaxis Games, SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION I/II/III/IV/V ( Microprose, Infogrames, 2K Games, 1991/1996/2001/2005/2010). For my analysis of off-screen space in SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION instead of BROTHERS IN ARMS, please see the German companion volume to this one. 15 In the terminology of Linderoth’s interpretation of the ecological approach we would say that CIVILIZATION’S space does not produce a performatory challenge whereas this is a key aspect of the challenge of BROTHERS IN ARMS i.e. actually moving the avatar/player-perspective around the space is a challenge. For more on the ecological approach to games see Linderoth, Jonas. ”Beyond the Digital Divide: An Ecological Approach to Gameplay”, Proceedings of DiGRA 2011 Conference: Think, Design, Play 4 (2011): 1-15. 16 The player of course retains agency at the local level and can choose their exact path through the spaces they are presented with but they cannot change the broader path of their journey, there are no alternately bound spaces from which to choose. 17 For example, the spaces at the beginning of Brothers in Arms may be seven or eight hours of play time and virtual travel away from the spaces towards the end. 18 Zagal, José P., Fernandez-Vara, Clara, Mateas, Michael. ”Rounds, levels, and waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation”, Games and Culture, 3, 2 (2008): 175-198, 178. 19 Ibid, 178. 20 More specifically the series (particular in its later iterations) uses an hourglass spatial formation “a series of combat encounters that go from narrow to wide to narrow, corridor combat to bowl combat to corridor combat, with change-ups and variations” (Bissell, T. The Art and Design of Gears of War. Epic Games, 2011). This ensures that there is an increase in spatial agency in complex moments of combat that allows for tactical use of space. 21 Thus, what the game affords us is determined by the desire to create a fun to play products and the capabilities of implied player and game-play technology but also by historical reference. 22 This is the case for the vast majority of the game-play in the series. However, there are some moments in HELL’S HIGHWAY where these strict restrictions are relaxed. These include when the player makes use of the new cover system during which the camera switches to third-person perspective so the player could still see beyond the cover. Similarly, when the player is ‘driving’ the tanks from the turret, the camera again swaps. In these moments the game loses some coherency between the restrictions that the viewpoint entails and the challenges that faced the

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historical agents. This is symptomatic of HELL’S HIGHWAY’S sacrifices in terms of historical representation to try and make game-play more accessible. 23 Games that focus on exploratory challenges are therefore those where “it is a challenge for the assumed player to know what action to take but executing the action is more or less trivial” (Linderoth 2011, 10). Games such as chess, poker and MONOPOLY emphasise this type of challenge. In the case of BROTHERS IN ARMS perspective this challenge is exploratory in the sense that the player must uncover information about the environment which relates to knowing what move to make. Of course in this case there is of course also a performatory challenge (where actually taking the action is difficult) in the sense that especially given the complex and precise controls, negotiating the terrain and efficiently moving the camera under pressure can be quite challenging. However the actions involved in most of these manoeuvres by the player are not coherent with the performatory actions we assume were taken by the agent. Thus, the important aspect of this in terms of historical representation is the information the game encourages players to learn about what the terrain affords them in terms of particular actions as encouraged by the exploratory challenges of the environment and perspective. 24 For example, when the player engages in combat they quickly learn to continually check around them (‘sweeping’ the representation, in large arcs) because the importance of off-screen space, where enemies can flank us or creep up on us takes on huge tactical significance. 25 The game also allows the player a map to aid in their conceptualisation of the game space. It is difficult to say whether this is more detailed than the often extremely detailed maps that commanders in WWII received in major offensives. Certainly, however, the real-time updating of the virtual map that occurs in BROTHERS IN ARMS is a distinct advantage in helping the player understand the relative values of areas of the game space that would be unavailable to the historical agents. 26 Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986. 27 We really experience a form of ‘aperture vision’ (Gibson, 1986) in our perception of the games historical representation. This is one of the many ways in which perceptual information is compromised in the representative world of the modern videogame. 28 Clausewitz, Carl von. On War, edited and translated by Michael E. Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, 101. This is commonly attributed as the source of the idea and phrase ‘fog of war’ a description of the uncertain nature of warfare and combat but also a key information rule used in historical strategy games such as CIVILIZATION. For more on this see my chapter in the aforementioned companion volume to this one. 29 Goffman, Erving. ”Fun in Games” in Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, edited by Robert McGinnis, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1961, 15-81. 30 Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955, 10.

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31 Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Videogames Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Massachusett: MIT Press, 2005, 165. 32 Krzywinska, Tanya. ”Gamescapes: Exploration and Virtual Presence in Gameworlds” in Tomb Raider and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts, edited by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2006, 111. 33 For example see, Infinity Ward, CALL OF DUTY 2 (Activision, 2005). 34 Aarseth, Espen. ”Doors and Perception: Fiction vs Simulation in Games”, Intermedialites. Histoire et Theorie des Arts, des Lettres et des Techniques, 9 (2007): 36. 35 And yet as gamers that have become used to such genre conventions we tend to accept the unreality of this as we accept the jumps in space and time of cinema, merely because we are used to its tropes. In fact it is not until these barriers are removed (for instance, with the increasing capability and popularity of open-world games) that this really becomes a particular issue in game design. 36 Juul, Half Real, 165. 37 Aarseth, Espen. ”Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Videogames” in Space Time Play, edited by Borries, Friedrich von, et al., Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 2007, 168. 38 Digital Illusions CE, BATTLEFIELD 1942 (Electronic Arts, 2002). Juul, Half Real, 165. 39 Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006, 105. 40 Wolf, ”Inventing Space”, 14. 41 Also note that sometimes the space beyond the boundaries will soon be traversable and such information hints at what might be coming in the next subsection. This can be as simple as giving us a taste of what lies beyond the immediate space in which we find ourselves and makes the journey feel like one through a larger continuous world (hiding the segmentation) or it can also serve the purpose of preparing us for the next challenging environment. 42 Jenkins, Henry. ”Game Design as Narrative Architecture” in First-person: New Media as Story, Performance, Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 127. 43 Zagal, ”Rounds, Levels and Waves”, 182. 44 Ibid, 183. 45 The great man theory is most widely associated with Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, New York: Cosimo Inc, [1840] 2010. 46 Such as the missions for the Office of Strategic Services to change the tide of the war in the early games of the MEDAL OF HONOR series. For example, see: EA LA, MEDAL OF HONOR: FRONTLINE (EA Games, 2002).

CHAPTER FOUR HOMO EX MACHINA? – CYBER-RENAISSANCE AND TRANSHUMANISM IN DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION RENÉ SCHALLEGGER

Deus Ex: Human Revolution In 2010, Canada overtook the UK and became home to the third largest population of video game designers after the US and Japan (GamePolitics 2010). At the moment, Canadian games are world leaders in terms of design and cultural relevance, as is the case with series such as BioWare’s MASS EFFECT (2007–2012) and DRAGON AGE (2009–2012), or Ubisoft’s ASSASSIN’S CREED (2007–2012). In 2011, a new studio joined this highly successful group when Eidos Montréal released DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION (published by the Japanese company Square Enix of FINAL FANTASY fame). The game is a prequel to DEUS EX, designed in 2000 by Ion Storm and considered to be a masterful achievement in the history of video gaming, and the less convincing DEUS EX: INVISIBLE WAR (2003). In its most recent incarnation, the IP has not only switched developers (from Ion Storm in the US to Eidos Montréal in Canada), but has also opened up genre-wise to become a complex hybrid of RPG, stealth, FPS, and TPS elements. The general design premise of DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION (or DXHR for short) could be summed up as: “Play the game your way!” The review in Edge magazine called it “a game about player choice above all things” (Edge 2011, 108) and concluded: Human Revolution opens into a world of scintillating possibility in which your actions’ significance reaches far into the future. And with something

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like that difficult future approaching fast, [it] achieves a rare accolade: It’s not just a great game, it’s a timely one. (Edge 2011, 110)

The entire game design is predicated on this central concept of player decision-making. It pervades the diegetic level of narrative and themes where, as lead writer Mary de Lorle explains, “Everything is about choice and consequences. […] Why do we do the things that we do?” (Eidos Montreal 2011c), and filters into the formal level of mechanics when players can freely shift their preferred focus between different aspects of the genre hybrid - with the unfortunate exception of the boss fights at the end of chapters whose inevitability is most possibly related to structural expectations of the Japanese mainstream audience. The setting of DXHR is 2027, a fast approaching future of human augmentation (cybernetics) that has recently been introduced to society and is now at the verge of a mass-market breakthrough. The main character (and the player’s avatar) in the game is Adam Jensen, a security agent who is unwillingly augmented after an incident to safe his life, replacing the majority of his body with technological components. He is thrown into a complex web of conspiracies that are all trying to control this essential moment in human evolution that raises fundamental personal, social and political questions about the human condition and the definition of humanity in the first place. Following Henry Jenkins’s understanding of video games as narrative architectures (c.f. Jenkins 2004), i.e. virtual spaces created by a convergence of game mechanics, aesthetics, and disseminated narrative information, it is the player’s task to navigate through these spaces by ergodic process (c.f. Aarseth 1997), engaging in what Eric Zimmerman defined as explicit interactivity (Zimmerman 2004, 158). Unlike printed text, game narratives are therefore dynamic, not static. For DXHR this means that the player will reach one of twelve possible endings in a personal play-through. Most surprisingly for the average gamer, none of the twelve endings will provide them with a traditional and heroic happy ending. As with all narrative media, meaning in video games is not only inherent in the content represented, it is also to be located in the way this content is conveyed on a formal level. Critics from Hayden White to the EXTRA CREDITS series of online videos have remarked upon this idea of the “content of the form” (c.f. White 1990), or “mechanics as metaphor”

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(c.f. Portnow 2012a), and how it affects our understanding of discourse regardless of the medium used. When the player approaches the ending of DXHR they have to first confront the guardian of the return threshold, to borrow Joseph Campbell’s terminology (Campbell 1973, 217). The extradiegetic on-screen mission marker explains to the player what is expected of them, “Decide which ‘Truth’ to broadcast” (Eidos Montreal 2011a), and the way this is formulated already tells the attentive player what Adam (like his ‘puppeteer’, the player) is supposed to have learned about the nature of truth while playing the game: There is no singular, metaphysical Truth available, only interpretations of reality, or ‘truths’. The nature of the guardian herself reinforces this idea and triggers a whole chain of intermedial references: Adam is welcomed by an AI called Eliza to make his final choice in the game. From the ELIZA computer programme (1963-66) used for natural language processing that was able to imitate human interaction without any understanding of human thought or emotion, the connection spans to G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), the story of a working-class girl who creates a new, respectable identity for herself by adopting the language of the middle class; and through Shaw the educated player eventually reaches Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of the Greek sculptor Pygmalion falling in love with his creation that is then brought to life because of his affection. Eliza’s final question reinforces the central thematic and philosophical issue of DXHR: “Do you believe you have the wisdom to choose an appropriate future for mankind? Or do you trust mankind to find the answers on its own?”, she asks (Eidos Montreal 2011a). Thus primed, the player then goes on to make their final, fateful choice what story to tell humanity about the conspiracies that they have uncovered. There are four possibilities, and together they form the first dimension that decides which of the twelve endings the player will be shown in a short video. There are the three dogmatic endings, as I would like to call them. Here Adam (i.e. the player) chooses for humanity, and the effects are shown in a rather negative light: You can choose a proaugmentation stance and let corporations rule unfettered, or an antiaugmentation one and see the human-racists take over, or you choose to expose all conspiracies and ‘tell the truth’, but then humanity rejects all technology in an emotional backlash. Why do I call these endings dogmatic? Because Adam decides for humanity, and they are given no choice other than to submit to his will and to believe in his version of the

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events. Eliza even marks these endings as dogmatic when she confirms the player’s decision with a curt “So be it then” (Eidos Montreal, 2011a) that translates into the “Amen” familiar from religious discourse. But there is also the fourth option, and to make it less obvious and to require some extra effort from the player, this one can only be triggered in a smaller side room. It is what I would like to term the undogmatic ending, since Adam (and the player) here choose not to choose for humanity. Instead, Adam takes all of the leading conspirators, including himself, out of the equation by destroying the underwater base they are all congregated in: He commits murder-suicide, and humanity is left to decide on their own what to believe. The extraordinary choice Eidos Montréal have provided the player with here is the death of the hero, a choice that is still highly problematic in mainstream AAA video gaming, but one that Canadian designers show a great fondness of (c.f. DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS 2009, or MASS EFFECT 3 2012). The absence of heroes in Canadian culture and how it connects to this phenomenon is something left to explore in future papers, but still the utter deconstruction of the hero-myth by this ending’s video is baffling. After killing himself, Adam’s voice-over in the final video comments on his way to this point in the narrative and the effects his last action will have: He does not assume the right to make choices for others, or define and dispense ‘justice’ (deconstructing the vigilante hero), he takes himself out of the picture and lets ordinary people decide the fate of humanity (deconstructing the extraordinary nature of the hero), and he admits that he does not even know whether humanity will make it through this critical moment in its evolution after all, so his sacrifice might well be in vain (deconstructing the myth of the noble sacrifice). While the designers seem to have chosen to make this option the most difficult to actualise in the game, by placing its trigger in an adjacent room and having Eliza issue a last warning (“If you do this, the world will be left with questions, and may never reach a consensus.”, Eidos Montréal 2011a), they have also marked it in a way that I would argue indicates their preference for this choice. Unlike the short and factual reply to the three dogmatic choices, Eliza’s reaction to the suicide option is decidedly positive: “And might I say, it has been a pleasure.” (ibid.). The dogmatic aspect of the easy options is here replaced with the difficult choice of what Keats termed ‘negative capability’, the ability to live with uncertainty and contradiction and to transcend and revise the context.

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There is also a second dimension to which one of the twelve endings a player will experience, and unlike the first one (choosing what story to tell), this one seems more absolute in its moral and ethical frame of reference: It is the player’s use of violence in a given play-through. The less violence a player resorts to in order to get through the game, the “better” his ending will be, falling into three categories called “good”, “neutral”, or “evil” endings respectively by the gaming community. Violence is thereby inherently represented as “evil”, a stark contrast to the moral ambiguity of the choices in the other dimension. There is even an achievement (an extradiegetic reward to certain pre-defined in-game behaviours) called Pacifist for a completely non-lethal play-through. The exceptions to this intriguing design choice are again the unfortunate bossfights at the end of every chapter that will not count towards the achievement, a clear indication of a fundamental disconnect between them and the rest of the game. (They were designed by a different studio specialised on shooters, so actually DXHR could be argued to be “twogames-in-one”.) This built-in refusal of violence seems to be the only non-negotiable constant in the designed options, while all endings (including the marked suicide option) confront the player with the long-term effects of their decisions, questioning their processes of decision-making on ethical and moral grounds. It is thus that DXHR emerges as a highly complex and challenging interactive discussion of the human condition on the verge of a fundamental change. But how are Cyber-Renaissance and Transhumanism part of this equation?

Cyber-Renaissance The designers themselves identify thematic connections between the cyberpunk setting of their game and the Renaissance era. For lead artist Jonathan Jacques-Belletête (or JJB) it was a time of great openmindedness after what he calls the ”dark era of the medieval period” (Eidos Montréal 2011b), one where humanity was for the first time placed into a natural context and no longer a spiritual one (Gamespot 2010). In philosophy, belief and religious dogma were slowly replaced with inquiry and the scientific method: “It was about learning how the system functioned. […] The Renaissance was the first step, like a stepping stone to a transhumanist era” (ibid.). Several visual points of reference are used to establish this link on an aesthetic level: The look of the physical augmentations in the game is based on Leonardo’s anatomical studies

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(ibid.), the usual cold cyberpunk colour palette of black and blue is replaced by black and gold where, according to JJB, “the gold […] represents the Golden Era, the Renaissance, and this whole idea of humanity and humanism” (Gametrailers 2011). A visual leitmotif of geometrical patterns and triangles is a direct reference to Renaissance painting and how it was dominated by the Golden Ratio and the discovery of perspective (Eidos Montréal 2011d). JJB draws a picture of the Renaissance as a time when humanity was beginning to take control of the human body and the human condition through Humanism, and for him this is echoed in the game as, on the eve of a truly Transhumanist era, humanity is struggling to take control of the very definition of what it means to be human and of human evolution. Another philosophical and aesthetic connection between the Renaissance and the cyberpunk world of DXHR can be identified in the obsession with machinery and machination. Jessica Wolfe talks about how during the Renaissance concepts of instrumentality and artifice were reflected upon, and how mechanics and politics were perceived to be “sister arts both involving the effectual use of instruments” (Wolfe 2004, 3). Machines created an awareness of the unreliability of the human sensory apparatus and the unavailability of Truth as they highlighted the opacity of all mediation, go-betweens negotiating both “the external world and the subjective experience of the human intellect or the senses” (ibid., 4). Going beyond these philosophical and subjective effects, Renaissance machinery also contributed to effectively ending the primacy of the warrior nobility established during the Middle Ages, leading to political and social “reversals of power” (ibid., 10). The general optimism concerning machines is, however, not unbroken: Francis Bacon, in his De Sapientia Veterum (1609), cautions that the “[m]echanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy, and they have in a manner power both to loose and bind themselves” (Wolfe 2004, 13). Bacon’s reservations might well be the result of the negative experiences England had with the philosophy of political instrumentality (of Robert Dudley, or Henry Percy) during the Elizabethan era, but the author also extolls the machinistic virtues of prudence and flexibility in his works, developing the concept of viability to replace Truth, where the validity of a theory “depends upon its ability to account for the ever-changing circumstances of the material world” (ibid., 25).

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All of these thematic and conceptual correspondences between Renaissance machinery and DXHR must not be mistaken for belief in a (somewhat later) Cartesian, mechanistic universe or body: Wolfe clearly differentiates here between the “embodied mechanisms” of the Renaissance that “denote monstrous hybridity, deviance, and passionate excess” (2004, 240) and the clear-cut, classical mechanisms of Descartes. DXHR, in its way of representing the socio-politics of machinery in interaction with humanity, is much closer to Wolfe’s Renaissance machines: [T]hey have the power to both arrange and disarrange the neat rows of dualisms – reason and passion, art and nature, humanity and inhumanity – that confer order upon the mental world of the Renaissance. (Wolfe 2004, 241)

The echoes of the Renaissance in DXHR are therefore echoes of the creative/destructive chaos the turn towards mechanisation caused in the seemingly ordered conceptual world inherited from the late Middle Ages. Dichotomies are deconstructed and opened up to variation and interpretation. The very definition of humanity is no longer based on metaphysical truth-claims and religious dogma, but subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific mind, debate, and the viability of theory (or lack thereof). Susanne Scholz argues that this is the essential epistemological shift of the Renaissance era: a turn away from metaphysical Truth and God as source of all meaning and signification towards an internalisation of meaning (2000, 2). As the human body is now object to the scientific gaze, a modern notion of subjectivity also emerges where bodies are no longer part of the human self, but possessed by it. Identity is now defined in a “reciprocity of social and somatic formation” (ibid., 10), and the traditional static body image becomes fluid, a creation of intersecting cultural and social discourses allowing for “a certain degree of agency even if the discourses […] have always already determined the options available” (ibid. 12). The body is no longer God’s immutable creation, but it becomes a dynamic creation, akin to an ergodic navigation through a narrative architecture of physicality. This moment is one of the clearest instances of the Cyber-Renaissance in DXHR: As humanity is about to leave the restrictions of the human body behind, Adam is struggling for an understanding of what that will do to our conception of humanity. The stakes are high: The game is about nothing less than the creation of a new narrative architecture that defines what is human and what is not, and it asks the player to take an active

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stance and make a decision what story to tell. This element of individual agency in determining the dominant socio-cultural and political discourses forms a bridge between the Renaissance, Transhumanism, and DXHR. Nick Bostrom, one of the leading thinkers of the Transhumanist movement, quotes the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) at the very beginning of his “History of Transhumanist Thought”: “Man does not have a ready-made form and is responsible for shaping himself” (2005, 2). This sense of personal responsibility is at the heart of how Transhumanist ideas figure in DXHR.

Transhumanism JJB acknowledges the direct influence of Transhumanism on the design and aesthetics of the game with its central idea of “letting go of taboos and try[ing] to take control of our own evolution” (Eidos Montréal 2011b). Similarly, in his review of DXHR for EXTRA CREDITS, James Portnow identifies the central questions the game is raising as follows: As technology continues to augment our capabilities more and more, access to and ability with that technology will become an even greater differentiator. How do we solve this problem? […] And that’s the question that Human Revolution raises, and leaves open for us to answer […]. That coupled with the less fleshed out questions of social tensions, media control, and corporate independence all make [it] a very present game. (Portnow 2012b)

While these themes are treated with a certain amount of optimism by Eidos Montréal, another visual leitmotif that the audience already encountered in the first trailers for DXHR adds a cautionary dimension to the transhumanist debate: “And then we read the myth of Icarus, and it seemed to make so much sense. […] [I]t’s like all the dangers of getting too much into Transhumanism and modifying your body” (JJB in Gamespot 2010). Establishing a link to the fate of Icarus for a game on Transhumanism echoes nicely in Bostrom’s own search for the beginnings of Transhumanis thought in Renaissance Humanism, especially the Rational Humanism of Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), himself rather ambiguous about the emergence of machinery and machination as dominating socio-cultural forces. As modern humanity learned to rely on their own powers of observation and judgment, leaving the unquestioned and unquestionable authority of religious dogma behind, increasingly “empirical science and critical reason” were seen as “ways of learning

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about the natural world and our place within it and of providing grounding for morality” (Bostrom 2005, 3). The next decisive step was Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859) that added a dynamic, procedural quality to the definition of humanity with its “view of the current version of humanity not as endpoint of evolution but rather as an early phase” (ibid.). In a nutshell, the foundations of Transhumanist thinking are therefore its Enlightenment roots, and a strong emphasis on individual liberties in combination with a “humanistic concern for the welfare of all humans (and other sentient beings)” (ibid., 4). The theoretical framework of Transhumanism developed rapidly during the early 20th century, fuelled initially by an academic dispute between J.B.S. Haldane and Bertrand Russell. While Haldane proposed in his Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923) that the scientific control of genetics and society would have beneficial effects, Russell refuted all such claims in “Icarus: The Future of Science” (1924), and it was his belief that “technological power would mainly serve to increase our ability to harm one another” (Bostrom 2005, 5). The use of Icarus in both cases – Russell’s article and DXHR – to address the darker aspects of science is notable. The term ‘transhumanism’ according to Bostrom was first used by Julian Huxley in Religion Without Revelation (1927) for the possibility of a collective transcension of humanity through technology the author believed possible, “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature” (in Bostrom 2005, 7). Ironically, the most influential counter-text to Huxley’s was his brother Aldous’s well-known Brave New World (1932) that is often perceived (and read) as a sister text to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Bostrom’s comment on Brave New World can easily be extended to Orwell’s masterpiece as well, when it is described as “an emblem of the dehumanizing potential of the use of technology to promote social conformism and shallow contentment” (Bostrom 2005, 6). The latter half of the 20th century sees a shift of the Transhumanist debate across the Atlantic from the UK where it originated to the US. John von Neumann’s singularity hypothesis of 1958 quickly became a central concept to how Transhumanists expected societies to change: Exponential growth in scientific development would lead to a state where “human affairs, as we know them, could not continue” (Bostrom 2005, 8), and the inevitable result would be a profound transformation of the human condition into something inconceivable at the moment. This moment of unpredictable change is what von Neumann termed a ‘singularity’. A first

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taste of the rapidity and profound nature of socio-cultural and political change through technology was provided by the rise of the internet that within a couple of years after its commercialisation in 1995 utterly changed the way of life in western societies and has since even affected political change in several countries the world over. The internet also proved an important breeding ground for Transhumanism, and in 1998 the World Transhumanist Association was founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. In 2002 the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ v1.0 were uploaded. Following James Hughes’s argument, Transhumanism quickly spread from a purely academic endeavour and reconfigured the political landscape of western societies. Whereas during the 20th century, there were only two basic dimensions to the political localisation of groups and individuals, economic and cultural politics, that could be differentiated on the basis of more conservative or more progressive positions, the 21st century took politics into the third dimension (Hughes 2004: 68-69). Biopolitics entered the political arena, making seemingly odd alliances between traditionally left and right groups possible. The new political space was no longer only about being “left” or “right”, conservative or progressive, the new central question that differentiated between Transhumanists on the one hand and Bio-Luddites on the other was “whether citizenship should be tied to psychological personhood or genetic humanness” (ibid., 71). The personhood-based cyborg citizenship preferred by Transhumanists clashed with the genetics-based humanracism of the Bio-Luddites, and within these groups, stances towards economic and cultural policies differentiated subgroups such as Libertarian (“conservative”) and Democratic (“progressive”) Transhumanists, or Left and Right Bio-Luddites. This then is the political landscape that provides the context for a full appreciation and understanding of DXHR. Old political differences are blurred, new alliances and collaborations emerge. As two-dimensional static dichotomies turn into three- or even multi-dimensional dynamic processes, the central demands of Transhumanism, resulting from a radicalisation of the widely (but not universally) accepted Human Rights established on the basis of Enlightenment philosophy, pervade DHXR, making it a deeply Transhumanist game: What Transhumanists and DXHR demand is therefore to “[d]efend the rights of all beings oppressed because of their bodies”, and to “[g]uarantee the right of all persons to

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control their own bodies and minds” (Hughes 2004, 261). So, is the new DEUS EX then truly a HUMAN REVOLUTION?

DEUS EX: A Human Revolution? Seen in context with its references to (Cyber-)Renaissance and Transhumanism, DXHR overcomes the monolithic and destructive dichotomy of the Modern and the Anti-Modern and suspends it in a constructive, unresolved dialectic mirrored in its visual leitmotif of the triangle. Following the markers I have identified in design and philosophical underpinnings, the HUMAN REVOLUTION of the title seems to have the emphasis more on the “human” than the “revolution”: The game advocates for a humane revolution, or rather a transhuman evolution to transform our societies. In the only marked ending, Adam Jensen also refuses to choose for humanity. The resulting (literal and metaphorical) death of the Hero reinstates the personal responsibility of the individual for the community, something that the socio-political mass-movements of Late-Modernism with their abstract collectives (like political parties or ideologies) mostly eclipsed. Video games are the perfect medium for such a statement, since the require active participation in an ergodic process within a designed narrative architecture and therefore implicitly teach the player to constantly negotiate and renegotiate between freedom and constraints. This perfectly mirrors the development of humanistic ideas in western societies. Renaissance Humanism put the individual at the centre of its world-view, the “well-rounded person, one how is highly developed scientifically, morally, culturally, and spiritually” (Bostrom 2005, 2), replacing the gods of pre-modern times as measure of all things. The mass ideologies of the late 19th and the 20th century then de-humanised western thought and perverted the basic ideas of Modernity until the depths of depravity of the Third Reich or Stalinism were reached. Transhumanism and Postmodernism since the end of the previous century have constantly questioned the notion of Truth and what it means to be human, reinstating the individual within the community, the text within the context, demanding a renaissance of a sense of personal responsibility for the collective.

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DXHR also transforms Humanism into Transhumanism by the choice of its medium. Whereas reading is the cultural technique of the individual, the monad, is interpretative and introspective, gaming is the cultural technique of the cyborg, the hybrid, predominantly configurative and interactive in nature. As a Transhumanist video game, it is a triple encoding of the cybernetic idea, the human/machine interface: The recipient/participant finds the cyborg on the level of the content, with Jensen and his augmentations, on the level of the interaction with the game (when the player interfaces with the technological platform), and on the level of the form, since all “story-games” depend on a human/machine or individual/collective interface, constantly oscillating between player freedom and narrative or formal restrictions. As video games are defined by the sense of immersion and agency they offer, they focus on the individual within the system. Questions of choices and consequences become central issues, like when Jensen ends his police career the moment he refuses a shoot-to-kill order. But this also means that there are no longer any answers available for the player, nor certainty, and only questions remain. The clear morality and ethics of the true/false-, good/bad-, yes/no-, or the digital 1/0- dichotomy of High Modernism is suspended in the fuzzy logic of the triangle the player encounters all over the secondary reality DXHR creates: “delta” for change, for difference. As the machine and the computer are the metaphors for Modernism, Transhumanism attempts a synthesis of human and machine, putting the human back into the machine to overcome the philosophical, social, and political fault-lines of the 20th century. It is thus that DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION becomes a quintessentially Transhumanist text on both levels, content and form. It involves the player in a differentiated and complex deliberation on the right of all persons to control their bodies and minds within the boundaries of communal responsibility. Through the death of its Hero – named Adam, which translates into “humankind” – it reinstates both individual choice and personal responsibility, echoed in the player’s agency within the designed system of the game. But in these postmodern, borderlinetranshuman times, guarantees for success cannot be given: To play is to fail, and reload; to live is to fail, and retry. The Cyber-Renaissance of DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION therefore creates a truly Transhuman/-ist homo ex machina in its player.

CHAPTER FIVE DOES HISTORY PLAY THE ROLE OF STORYLINE? HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PERIODIZATION AS THEME IN VIDEO GAME SERIES SIMON MARIA HASSEMER

Introduction A commercially successful video game has high chances to be continued in a series. Games in a historical setting follow conventions of design, which are orientated to metanarratives of historiographical periodisation. The sequels of the real-time strategy game AGE OF EMPIRES (Microsoft 1997) for example, designed in a setting of tribes and cultures of Antiquity, are settled in the medieval (AGE OF EMPIRES II: THE AGE OF KINGS, Microsoft 1999) and early modern period (AGE OF EMPIRES III, Microsoft 2005). Albeit the video game is not a narrative medium, the “principles of narrative succession and causality”1 of the popular culture phenomenon series are held together by macro-historical meta-narratives, which design the semiotic system of a game through a theme.2 It is not necessarily a teleological, narratives of progress including way of historical thinking, subdividing world history in the three ages antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity3, which inspires the design. The historical gameworlds of the ASSASSIN’S CREED series are the Holy Land of the crusades (ASSASSIN’S CREED, UbiSoft 2007), Renaissance Italy (ASSASSIN’S CREED II, UbiSoft 2009; ASSASSIN’S CREED: BROTHERHOOD, UbiSoft 2010; ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS, UbiSoft 2011), America during its Revolutionary War (ASSASSIN’S CREED III, UbiSoft 2012), and the Caribbean of a more or less mytho-historical ‘pirate age’ (ASSASSIN’S CREED IV, UbiSoft 2013), in which the series gains continuity due to its hero figure and frame narrative. In contrast, the games of the TOTAL WAR

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series stand for themselves, respectively. Sharing the same game principles such as rules and gameplay, they differ in regard to their diverse historical thematisation, branded already in the particular title: MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR (Sega 2006), EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR (Sega 2007), NAPOLEON: TOTAL WAR (Sega 2010), TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2 (Sega 2010), TOTAL WAR: ROME 2 (Sega 2013), just to mention a few. There is a methodological advantage in this sample when asking questions on historical culture. Because the mentioned games in a series have a very similar ruleset and gameplay, they form ludological minimal pairs. But the game’s semiotic system – its theme – is different due to the chosen historical setting. Considering the whole series of historically themed video games, the specific epochal (here we will focus especially on the Early Modernity) can be deconstructed. Thus I ask here how Early Modernity and history in general are represented in a video game, both in terms of content and form. I will also discuss the significance of historical metanarratives such as periodisation throughout a series, picking up a quote from Espen Aarseth saying that in “god-games such as CIVILIZATION, history itself plays the role of storyline.”4 We will ask if this might also be applicable for a game series, where a single title does not treat with (a possible) universal history of mankind but only with a specific epoch like Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. Basis for this qualitative study are screen recordings of video game plays. This approach drives the non-linearity of the medium to a firm syntagma, which is compulsory for quoting. I have uploaded the resulting videographies on YouTube and will quote these with the time code of the videos. Since we are still at an experimental stage with this method, I would like to focus on various key aspects concerning the form of the videographies, although I do not mix these forms within an examined game series to preserve comparability. When playing the games of the AGE OF EMPIRES-series, I have recorded not only the game but also myself as its player. Due to the important role of the player, who has in comparison to other media such as films or novels not only an active but an interactive participation and by thus is creating first of all a game’s syntagma, regard of the players interaction with the game is justified when setting up an experiment appropriate to the very medium. To evaluate the usefulness of this setup, I have left out any visual or acoustical monitoring of the player while playing three games of the TOTAL WAR-series. Since a videography of a video game is nothing else but a Let’s Play without a player's live commentary, I will try to use an existing Let’s Play of

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ASSASSIN’S CREED III on YouTube to quote the game and also enter the player’s comment into the analysis.

Genre trouble There is a semantic difficulty in analysing video games as a part of historical culture because the genre term “historical video game” forms a hotbed for misunderstanding. “Historical” in this reading could also mean that the video games themselves are part of the historiographical genealogy of the medium, for example games like SPACEWAR, PONG or TETRIS. Heinze’s generally solid definition of a video game wrestles with the same problem: „A video game is a historical video game if a functional relevant amount of its game elements redirects to meanings constructed by a historical discourse and are corresponding to a collective knowledge on history.”5

The task is to term the stock of video games which are the objects of study for historical culture studies. These are games which present history, but are at this stage not part of the approximately 50 years old history of the medium. Therefore it is quite useful to categorize the vast diversity of different video games into genres. Unlike literature or film, the genre of a video game is not defined by its narrative or diegesis, but rather and primarily by its gameplay, which I define as the play-specific interaction of the player with the game and its rules. Whether it requires dexterity and quick response or rather tactics and consideration to fulfill the goal rule constitutes a leading aspect of the game’s genre. Most action or sport games – games of skill in general – require quick reflexes, whereas in strategy, adventures and role-playing games reflection instead of reflexes is demanded to solve problems, riddles, and the elaboration of solutions.6 In accordance to Aarseth every game consists of three elements: „(1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game.“7

Using the example of archetypical game of chess this can be – and often was, e.g. by Järvinen8 – clarified: for the rules it is irrelevant whether chess is played with gaming pieces designed as queen, bishop and rook, or as Marge, Bart and Lisa Simpson or as Princess Leia, Chewbacca and an X-Wing-Fighter, or even as shot glasses filled with different-coloured

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liquors. It stays the same strategy game – the genre does not change. The semiotic system of the game simply needs to indicate the differently permitted movements set by the rules. One token may move any number of vacant squares vertically or horizontally, another only in diagonal directions, and yet another may move diagonally, horizontally, or vertically and so forth. How these gaming pieces are designed is not restricted by the game rules. Aki Järvinen labeled such semiotic designs, which are not relevant for the rules as themes. A theme is defined as the visual, acoustic and narrative design of a game, whereas none of the three is stringently required for a game. With the help of the theme-concept the annotated terminological problem can be solved adequately: the genre of a game is always defined by its rules and its intended gameplay as a strategy, adventure or first person shooter game and so forth. The theme can be used attributively and thus describe the setting of the game world: a cyberpunk-themed first person shooter, a fantasy-themed action-adventure, or likewise a historically-themed strategy game. It becomes obvious that when asking questions on historical culture, especially the semiotic system is of peculiar interest because it is the only element of a game that can mediate history – thereby history becomes design.

Ludological minimal pairs To analyse the relevance of the semiotic system for a game, a comparative approach seems useful in which games with a similar, almost identical ruleset and gameplay are compared against each other. WARCRAFT II (Blizzard 1995) and STARCRAFT (Blizzard 1998) for instance are both real-time strategy games by the same developer. Rules, gameplay, interface and controls are almost identical yet very similar: the player looks down from aerial perspective on an isometric board, in both cases a battlefield, builds a base, collects resources, trains units and tries to defeat his opponent with military power. In these basic principles the two games do not differ. So what does it matter to the game and the player that WARCRAFT is settled in a fantasy world, in which orcs and humans are at war with one another, and STARCRAFT takes place in a science-fiction world, where Terrans, Protoss and Zerg are the conflicting parties? It again becomes obvious that genre description solely with reference to themes (WARCRAFT as fantasy game, STARCRAFT as science-fiction game) would classify the given game and its common structure insufficiently. Another descriptive example is the ludological minimal pair INDIANA JONES AND

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THE LAST CRUSADE: THE GRAPHIC ADVENTURE (Lucasfilm Games, 1989) and THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND (Lucasfilm Games, 1990). The variations in both games are solely located in the semiotic system: narratives, visual and acoustic designs in INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE are borrowed from the film of the same name, whereby MONKEY ISLAND is settled in a more comic-like game world in the Caribbean with pirates, cannibals and voodoo ghosts. As the game as such does not change because of unvaried ruleset and broadly similar gameplay, the conditions for reception are different because of the different themes.

In the following I will analyse the minimal pairs within the mentioned three series of historically themed video games. The focus will be on historical implications within the semiotic system but since research on video games must not disregard the other two constitutive elements rules and gameplay, those will be always kept in mind. But the major question is which historical themes are chosen as game worlds, how they are represented by the game’s semiotic system, and which meta-narrative implications a whole series of historically themed video games holds.

Analysis I: Age of Empires-series AGE OF EMPIRES is a video game series developed by Ensemble Studios and distributed by Microsoft, consisting of three main titles, four add-ons and three spin-offs like AGE OF MYTHOLOGY (2002, which has in contrast to the main series a mythological rather than historical setting) and a browser game. While the first part from 1997 and its add-on THE RISE OF ROME (1998) treat the history of mankind in terms of civilization from the Stone Age to Late Antiquity, AGE OF EMPIRES 2: THE AGE OF KINGS is settled in the Middle Ages. The third game AGE OF EMPIRES III with its two add-ons (2005 – 2007) takes place in Early Modernity. None of the games is structurally Eurocentric; despite the epochal periodisations there are always campaigns that deal with Asian and (since the add-on AGE OF EMPIRES 2: THE CONQUERORS) American advanced civilizations. The series set new standards for the genre of real-time strategy and was also commercially successful. AGE OF EMPIRES 2: AGE OF KINGS gained together with AGE OF EMPIRES III the highest selling value (about 2 million copies each). In contrast to AGE OF EMPIRES III, the specialised press rated AGE OF KINGS much better (average of 92%, whereas the successor gained an average of 82%). The browser game AGE OF EMPIRES ONLINE (2012), which stands because of its platform and visual comic-like aesthetics somewhat apart, will be disregarded in the following.

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To compare the three main titles of AGE OF EMPIRES to one another, I have played and recorded sessions of each game in the random map mode, which is said to be “the primary game mode throughout the games of the AGE OF EMPIRES series.”9 In AGE OF EMPIRES the player has to bring forth one of twelve Stone Age civilizations from a fistful of hunter-gatherers through to a prosperous empire of the Iron Age. As genre convention in real-time strategy games, he has to gather resources, train new units, raise buildings and develop new technologies. To enable this, he must ascend in four stages, thematically defined as four periods of ancient history: Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. This is mandatory. Who persists in the Paleolithic Stone Age cannot win the game. This is impressively shown by the computer opponent who already advanced to the Iron Age and finishes me with a single hoplite and a scorpion, while my Bronze Age archers have nothing on them.10 The civilizational progress defined by the theme is thus an absolute condition to go on with the game. Another goal rule states that the game can be won by building a wonder of the world, which happens in my example one minute later.11 The depiction of history and Antiquity in AGE OF EMPIRES is a progressive respectively monumental one. The teleological perspective on history pervades the entire series. In AGE OF EMPIRES II: THE AGE OF KINGS, that uses the same engine as its predecessor, the player must rise from the Dark Ages through the feudal and chivalry to the Imperial Age to produce correspondingly strong (advanced) units and buildings which the game can be won with. The most striking difference to AGE OF EMPIRES consists in the semiotic system: instead of temples with ionic columns the graphic now depicts churches with gothic stained-glass windows, timber framework houses instead of clay huts, a castle and knights instead of an academy and hoplites. Also, the monumentality is preserved, though the Colossus of Rhodos lookalike of the Greek civilization in AGE OF EMPIRES has changed to a cathedral vaguely in the shape of the Palace of Aix-la-Chapelle of the Britons in AGE OF EMPIRES II.12 Even a brief glance at both videographies shows the similar gameplay of the two games. In this respect the specific epoch appears only as a graphical externality embedded in the surrounding metanarrative of a progress-optimistic, though mainly military history of mankind. But both eras, Antiquity and the Middle Ages, are presented as an epic struggle of different civilizations for resources, progress, power and the glorious survival of the fittest.

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Does this archaic view on history change with the depiction of Early Modernity in AGE OF EMPIRES III (in the game about 1492-1850)? Published six years after AGE OF EMPIRES II, not only the semiotic system has been altered but there have also been some changes in the gameplay, for example by adding role-play elements (such as the mentioned characters called ‘heroes’ individualized and distinguished by special abilities and an experience point system), which do not interfere with the basic gameplay of the real-time strategy genre. The stages are again thematically defined as ages: the player begins in the Age of Discovery and evolves through the Colonial Age, Fortress Age and Industrial Age to the Imperial Age. The three-part campaign in AGE OF EMPIRES III refers only very roughly to historiographical templates. The plot of the Black family and the opposing Circle of Ossus, who compete in search for the Fountain of Youth, testifies to the increasing role of fictional elements. This marks a first contrast to the two predecessors, where the templates for the campaign mode are the rise of ancient cultures (in AGE OF EMPIRES) or constructed around great men and women of medieval history (in AGE OF EMPIRES II). In the random map mode however, the new fictional impact is of little consequence since there is no plot to be told and the only character with a personal name (the hero) functions merely as a unit.13 The modern age in AGE OF EMPIRES III plays almost exclusively on the North American continent, where the player’s colonies are connected with the European home town of a respective party (one of eight civilizations) that can send supplies in accordance with gathered experience points. In comparison to its two predecessors, AGE OF EMPIRES III is characterised by a somewhat different picture of its themed era. Thus, for example, the goal rule to win the game in random map mode by building and maintaining a world wonder is axed. Instead, new aspects come into play, such as the discovery of treasures, the hiring of indigenous fighters, or the setup of trading posts, which can be improved by the invention of the railroad in the Industrial Age.14 The depiction of the chosen era in AGE OF EMPIRES III is less monumental than in its two predecessors, and the focus on the colonization of America (leaving out the expansion pack AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE ASIAN DYNASTIES (Microsoft 2007)) swaps the epic world history of competing empires with a scramble for America of European nations. Significant for all three main titles of the AGE OF EMPIRES series is the theming of historical progress of civilization. It must have been easy for the game designers to find new zero nodes for the second and third part, where the player can begin to build his civilization. AGE OF EMPIRES II

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begins in the Dark Ages after the collapse of the ancient European empires. In AGE OF EMPIRES III the player starts in North America in the Age of Discovery with only a handful of settlers and may develop over the industrialization to eventually become a new world power. The metanarrative of the tripartite periodisation of world history with its civilizational collapses is thus exactly represented in the AGE OF EMPIRES series. The closer it draws near to the present, the smaller but more detailed the chosen periods become. The series nevertheless mediates a picture of history as a teleological progress (with two notches where one game ends and the following begins) and military conflicts.

Analysis II: Total War-series All games of the Total War-series combine turn-based strategic policy tactics with real-time mass battles in a historical setting. Although the somewhat unfortunate title suggests otherwise, the respective historical themes in the games are not entirely reduced to a military component, i.e. armed conflicts. The series began with SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR (2000), an adaptation of a board game of the same name from 1986. The successor to MEDIEVAL: TOTAL WAR (2002) gained an even higher success, possibly because it moved the setting to medieval Europe and North Africa 10871453 and thus gained a stronger appeal to the Western audience than Shogun which is set in feudal Japan. A new element in MEDIEVAL: TOTAL WAR is the factor ‘religion’, which is also an important one in MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR (2006). Another game in the series is ROME: TOTAL WAR (2004), whose engine was even used for the staging of mass battles in television documentaries (the History Channel). Two games of the series are situated in Early Modernity: EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR (2009), which includes historiographical events such as the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution or the colonization of India,15 and NAPOLEON: TOTAL WAR (2010). After SHOGUN 2: TOTAL WAR (2011), the last part of the series for now, TOTAL WAR: ROME 2 (2013), will be published in September 2013. In the eight titles the European Middle Ages, the early modern period, feudal Japan and ancient Rome are equally represented in the series. As a brief glance at the three videographies shows, rules and gameplay follow the same principles, although few changes to the controls have been established. The tutorials of ROME: TOTAL WAR as well as MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR start with an introduction to the turn-based strategy in which two tactical battles (a small skirmish and an occupation) are embedded.16

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In NAPOLEON: TOTAL WAR the (maybe experienced TOTAL WAR-) player can choose to play a tutorial for the geopolitical campaign, for land battles or for naval battles.17 Naval battles in 3D mode were first possible in EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR and have been a permanent feature in games of the series since then. Also new is that the player now slips into the role of a prominent figure of historiography – Napoleon Bonaparte. As we take a closer look at the semiotic system, we make the same observations like in AGE OF EMPIRES: the visuals and also the music are adapted to the respective depicted epoch. Whether these signs are designed accordingly to the current historical and archaeological discourse does not matter. Important is that these signs are convincing. The recipient (the player) must recognize them as typical Roman antique, as medieval or likewise as early modern. Therefore also the background music in the games’ menus has to be appropriate to the specific ‘feeling’ of the given epoch. We hear Gregorian chants in MEDIEVAL 2: TOTAL WAR, film score-like tracks with ethnic instruments similar to the soundtrack of AGE OF EMPIRES in ROME: TOTAL WAR and classical music in the intro of NAPOLEON: TOTAL WAR that recalls Mozart’s “Lacrimosa”.18

Analysis III: Assassin’s Creed-series ASSASSIN'S CREED is a very successful series of 3rd-person actionadventure games. The first part was published by UbiSoft in November 2007 for Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft X-Box 360. Trade press ratings were almost entirely positive, and the game won several awards. According to UbiSoft ASSASSIN'S CREED sold over 8 million copies in the period from November 2007 to April 2009. By now six major titles have been released as well as numerous spin-offs, even in other media such as novels, comics and short films. The entire series is held together by a futuristic frame story in style of a Dan Brown novel, fully equipped with Templars and Assassins scrambling for powerful artifacts. The main character Desmond can use an “animus” called apparatus to relive the genetically inherited memories of his ancestors. These are the Assassins Altaïr, living during the time of the crusades (ASSASSIN'S CREED), the Italian patrician Ezio Auditore da Firenze during the Renaissance (ASSASSIN'S CREED II, ASSASSIN'S CREED: BROTHERHOOD, ASSASSIN'S CREED: REVELATIONS), and the half-Mohawk Ratonhnhaké:ton/Connor in the time of the American Revolution. As mentioned before I want to try out a given Let’s Play instead of a self-recorded videography as basis for this study. Its advantage is that in

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this way it is possible to document statements on history triggered by the game’s theme. Concerning Early Modernity, the player reflects the semiotic system and thereby gives insights in his historical consciousness, for example when he links the dialog of his avatar Haytham Kenway to the ship’s doctor with his (the player’s) knowledge about historical medicine, including bloodletting and field hospital practices in World War I.19 Later in the game he uses the depiction of some Redcoats as an opportunity to talk to his viewers about the French and Indian War.20 Those reflections of a historical consciousness show that the semiotic system of the game works and the historical theme provides more than a mere design if the recipient reacts to it. As in its predecessors the missions of ASSASSIN'S CREED III are on open maps, this time in 18th century Boston and New York instead of metropoleis of the old world. New in addition to the shift of the game world to the North American continent are the much more extensive wilderness areas and sea battles. In contrast to the previously discussed strategy games, the action-adventures of the ASSASSIN'S CREED series have a much stronger focus on plot and characters. The narratives of all parts repeatedly tie into their conspiratorial secret history historiographical passed down figures like Richard Lionheart, Rodrigo Borgia, and in the third part which focuses on the American Revolution, George Washington. The picture of history that ASSASSIN’S CREED mediates is on one hand that of political intrigues, political murder and large-scale conspiracy by secret brotherhoods and grey eminences, although the depiction of great men (less women) of history is not restricted to politicians; with the appearance of famous innovators like Leonardo da Vinci in ASSASSIN’S CREED II and Benjamin Franklin in ASSASSIN’S CREED III, the series takes a share in the depiction of history as progressive process.

Results We started with two questions: does history play the role of storyline throughout a series of historically themed video games? And: when may one speak of a video game based in the early modern period, i.e. when does a historically themed video game become an early modern-themed video game? The latter is easy to answer: any game whose signs within the semiotic system corresponds to enouncements of the public discourse about Early Modernity and thereby indicates the game world set up in this period. In contrasting comparison to historically themed video game worlds set up in other historical epochs, this was shown quite easily. This

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presupposes of course that the recognizing subject has a share in this public discourse which everyone with a historical consciousness has. As the Let’s Play videos have shown, the historical yet epochal theme has been recognized and reflected upon by the player. With the exception of the games of the Total War series, Early Modernity in the mentioned video games solely takes place on the American continent: the Conquista, the American Revolution and the early history of the United States as well as American advanced and indigenous cultures. This is perhaps accounted for by the North American origin of the developing companies (UbiSoft Montreal and Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios located in Texas, whereas the Total War series is developed by an English company). In all mentioned video games, Early Modernity and history in general means struggle and conflict, but also development and progress. The former is not only caused by the obstinacy of the still strong understanding of history as a political history of conflicts. The addressing of historical military conflicts in historically themed video games is rather due to the fact that a game is always focused on competition. Similar like a narrative needs a problem or a conflict to motivate the plot, games need a rival initial situation to operate as a game. Concerning the question if history plays the role of storyline throughout a series of historically themed video games, we can summarise that this only holds true for the AGE OF EMPIRES-series because the three games follow each other in chronological order, starting with AGE OF EMPIRES in Antiquity and ending with AGE OF EMPIRES III in Early Modernity, whereas this is not the case in the TOTAL WAR series. A true principle of narrative succession is maintained only in the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, but in this case it is not history which forms the storyline but the futuristic background story wherefrom the embedded narratives in different historical epochs is told in the form of a secret history. Ludologically working historical culture studies should generally focus on history as design because the question of the specific epochal periodisation yielded no new insights: neither it helped to better understand the video game as a medium, nor did it show new images of a historical period that do not already exist as enouncements in given discourses. Historical culture studies are rather required to explore how the experience of history via gaming manifests itself in the historical consciousness of the player. Therein lies their future tasks.

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Notes 1

Hickethier, Knut. “Serie” in Handbuch populäre Kultur, edited by Hans-Otto Hügel, 397. Stuttgart Metzler, 2003. Translation by the author. 2 Järvinen, Aki. Games without frontiers: Theories and Methods for Game Studies and Design PhD diss.: University of Tampere, 2008, 77-78. 3 i.e. Alexander, Michael. Medievalism: The Middle Ages in modern England, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, xxvii-xxviii. 4 Aarseth, Espen. “Genre Trouble,” electronic book review, Accessed May 29 2013, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant. 5 Heinze, Carl. Mittelalter Computer Spiele: Zur Darstellung und Modellierung von Geschichte im populären Computerspiel. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, 77. Translation by the author. 6 See Hartmann, Bernd. Literatur, Film und das Computerspiel Münster: LIT, 2004. 7 Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies: Year One,” Game Studies, Accessed May 29, 2013, http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. 8 Järvinen, “Games without frontiers”, pp. 77-81. 9 “Random Map,” Age of Empires Wikia, accessed May 29 2013, http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Map. 10 http://youtu.be/8T-2hyOGMqA TC: 38:32. 11 http://youtu.be/8T-2hyOGMqA TC: 39:36-39:52. 12 http://youtu.be/8T-2hyOGMqA TC: 39:44; http://youtu.be/gGX8CmiAIg8 TC: 1:19:38. 13 See the Explorer unit named Hugh Kingsley in our example of AoE III here: http://youtu.be/u4teE9lBvSY. 14 http://youtu.be/u4teE9lBvSYTC: 31:57/32:57. 15 See the article of Lutz Schröder in this volume. 16 http://youtu.be/G7v9B4u0pGA; http://youtu.be/fpIg1lMKTkk. 17 http://youtu.be/QxaVhgGmwXA, TC: 0:02:10. 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpIg1lMKTkk, TC: 0:01:55–0:02:55; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7v9B4u0pGA, TC: 2:22–3:05; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxaVhgGmwXA, TC: 0:00:11 – 0:01:36. 19 SarazarLP, “Let's Play Assassin's Creed 3 #003 - Schlechte Stimmung auf Hoher See”, accessed May 29, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKH94au3BM0, TC: 02:10–02:45. 20 SarazarLP, “Let's Play Assassin's Creed 3 #006 – Der nächste auf der Liste”, accessed May 29, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K9a7AwF8s4, TC: 00:32–01:42.

CHAPTER SIX RESEARCH THE SPINNING JENNY, GAIN +8% WEALTH BY TEXTILE INDUSTRIES: THE TRANSFORMATION OF HISTORICAL TECHNOLOGIES INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR LUTZ SCHRÖDER

Europe 1765 AD. Proudly indeed, I am looking at the screen in front of me: A huge kingdom spanning from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the Ural. Economy prospers, people are content and the relations to my remaining neighbours have been peaceful for over a decade now. Trade agreements have not only established sound finances but also created markets for import goods from America, Africa and the East Indies, as well as for the products from the factories of my European homelands. Even the military of Prussia, though not tested for a long time, stands ready to defend people and the king with only a few mouse clicks. Half a century earlier, the world in the strategy game EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR (EMPIRE, Sega 2009) looked quite different. Prussia stood with its back against the wall–or the coast of the Baltic Sea respectively–and had trouble fending off its enraged neighbours, as they were not in great favour of its growing power after a couple of short wars. With their mighty armies and allied major powers like France, Great Britain, Russia or Austria, they could have easily overrun the geographically small Prussia. Additionally, the recently defeated Saxons were on the brink of open revolt, which made a strong local military presence necessary. To make matters worse, the Kingdom of Prussia was nearly bankrupt due to a much too rapidly increased number of troops. How could an early defeat and therefore ‘game over’ be averted? By describing central elements of the game mechanics of EMPIRE, and how they depend on each other, I will try

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to offer an insight into the game’s mechanics. To keep the descriptions as specific as possible, I will focus on the importance of money, which I see as one of the main ludological elements of the game that regulates decisions of the player. Using the example of the ’Spinning Jenny’, a spinning machine developed 1764 in England that can be researched in the game, I will try to show how the interplay of simulated finances, economy and research works. Though the main focus in EMPIRE, like in strategy games in general, lies on the efficient management and deployment of troops, which tends to use up most of the playtime as well, I specifically decided to look at this aspect of the game rather than at the most obvious, since the usual concentration on military matters easily tends to underestimate the importance of basic elements of the game play. Even though large military conflicts are undoubtedly an important part of the game, they remain basically only the latest step of a wide variety of other developments, which the player has to understand and influence till the end of the game. To understand all of these connections, it is essential to look at them from within the context of the game. Therefore, my goal is to draw a picture as complete as possible of EMPIRE beyond the use of military forces, which includes historical topics and their simulation into a virtual gaming environment.

Fig. 1: Example for the distribution of prestige points in the late phase of a match. The relevance of research in ideas of enlightenment can be seen clearly. (Screenshot EMPIRE. Published by: Sega. Developed by: The Creative Assembly, 2009)

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Objectives of the Game For a long time, digital strategy games, whether with a fantasy, sciencefiction or historical setting, have been offering more than the simple recruitment and deployment of armed forces, but rather a complex interplay of various game elements. In the selected example, these are especially economics and diplomacy, but also scientific and population development. Long before large battles can be fought, these four elements function as important pillars for the process of play. The classical aim in the TOTAL WAR series, the control of a certain number of regions through military conquest, remains the same with EMPIRE and is in line with common conventions for the strategy game genre.1 After selecting the most common play mode, the „grand campaign“, the player has to choose a known nation of the 18th century,2 whose destiny he will control for the entire duration of the campaign. Playing against his computer controlled competitors he has then to meet the initially selected conditions for victory to win the game. Depending on the play mode–selectable are short and long campaign, world domination and prestige victory–the playersǥ time is limited by the winter of 1750 or 1799. To differentiate the goals, each nation not only has to conquer a certain number of regions but several specifically named ones as well. The prestige victory was a new condition of victory in the TOTAL WAR series and not as focused on military conquest as the others.3 In this one, the player has to acquire the most prestige points which function as an indicator to evaluate his success, too. They are awarded for several actions like constructing prestigious buildings, like the Brandenburg Gate or the Hofburg, and scientific endeavours in the area of enlightenment. Besides those, the successful use of armed forced and the economic power of a nation are rated prestigious as well. Figure 1 from a late phase of the game shows this very clearly.

Researching history strategy games While experienced players are most certainly well aware of the overall concept behind strategy games, the question remains how historians can approach the fact that digital games simulate virtual worlds that reconstruct past times and allow their players counter-factual developments most of the time. This question seems especially important since history games,4 like many other popular media before them, intrude

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into the profession of historical sciences. Possible consequences of these presentations and interpretations of the past have not been empirically validated yet, which renders statements about a possible influence of history games on conceptions of and specific knowledge about history speculative.5 Nonetheless, Stefan Baur, Waldemar Grosch, Rainer Pöppinghege, among others, keep repeating statements that imply specific effects. The dominance of military history is regularly criticized and accompanied by claims that it helps to solidify one-sided or falsified images of the past or that at least such a danger exists. The authenticity of digital depictions of the past has been questioned multiple times as well, usually by historians and didactics. Related to this topic in general is the explicitly formulated requirement that games should simulate all aspects of the past. Therefore a game that depicts World War II for instance is supposed to show not only military matters, but the suffering of the civilians and the Holocaust, too.6 All those sceptical approaches have in common that they limit themselves mostly on the audio-visual aspects of digital games, while disregarding its rules, ludologic elements, narrative architecture and the significance of the engagement of the player in immersive virtual worlds. As stated by Steffen Bender, these approaches ignore especially typical characteristics of the genre and requirements of the game narratives, what in turn leads to expectations that games are unable to meet due to their built-in limitations.7 Such a restricted approach therefore leads to a distorted view on games, in which unreachable expectations are formulated on the one hand, while many important aspects of games are left unattended on the other. Hence the following descriptions will focus on the ludologic structure and rule-based mechanics of EMPIRE using a specific historical technology. The question of authenticity and possible mistakes in this simulation of the past will not be addressed, because it is considered irrelevant in this context. Since EMPIRE only has a rudimentary narration8 the analysis of the game will not broach this particular aspect either.

The ludological structure of EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR The basic goal seems fairly simple: ’Capture and hold 25 regions‘. The word ’capture’ already gives a general idea of the focus of the game play in EMPIRE, too. What this instruction fail to do however, is to offer advice which actions the player has to take during the 200 turns between 1700

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and 17999 to see the final cut-scene in which he is congratulated for his victory by an off-screen-commentator–if he has been successful, that is. Since the player controls the fate of a nation, his tasks are not limited to the recruitment and deployment of armed forces, but include many more matters like public order,10 diplomacy and economy. Because EMPIRE is a strategy game and not a construction or business simulation, the playersǥ options to exercise influence on many matters remains rather basic, but there are still a couple of tools available to generate income and to keep ’his‘ subjects happy. Before I will begin to describe the economy in EMPIRE, at first I shall talk about the relevance of public order for the game play. The happiness of the population is the most important indicator of public order in the various regions. It is calculated by Fig. 2: Central information tab for the management subtracting all factors that of a region (here: Brandenburg). From above: lower happiness from Happiness, finances growth, total population and those which generate it. confession (Screenshot EMPIRE. Published by: Sega. Next to the occupation by Developed by: The Creative Assembly, 2009) a foreign power, high taxation and desire for reforms are the most powerful negative factors.11 Less important factors for example are incompetent members of the rulersǥ cabinet or the poor course of an on-going war.12 Positive effects on the other hand come from the type of government,13 the construction of public administration and cultural buildings, a sufficiently large garrison and some minor factors.

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While taxes are one of the main sources for unhappiness, they are also the most import source of income besides trade. Since the level of taxgenerated unhappiness is directly related to the level of taxation, it cannot be raised toohigh, provided that the player does not want to risk uprisings on a regular basis. This makes money an important ludological element14, because the player has to find a balance between unhappiness and the need for income. This balance becomes even more important in later times of the game when taxes can only cover a part of the quickly increasing costs.15 Since money remains a very limited commodity through long parts of the game, the player is forced to constantly evaluate short- and longterm consequences of his actions. In an early phase of the game this usually means the decision between the recruitment of troops that can protect the borders but require money for their recruitment and upkeep or the expansion of trade and the improvement of the infrastructure, which increases income in the longer run. In a later phase of the game the focus changes to prioritising the improvement of the infrastructure of a constantly growing empire, and the dissolution of troops no longer needed, to save money. Before describing the trading system of EMPIRE, taxation as the basis of the playerǥs income demands attention first. Taxes are raised on the so called wealth of a region, which is mostly generated by the population of a region, industrial and agricultural production and, if present, mining and port industries Fig 3: Breakdown of the total taxation, (e.g. fishing). To simplify, it can be visible as a pop-up.(Screenshot said, that all associated buildings EMPIRE. Published by: Sega. have predefined wealth values, that Developed by: The Creative Assembly, the player can – and has to – 2009) influence to increase the available income. While improving farms and fishing ports does only marginally increase a region’s wealth, it does secure the food supply of the population, leading to a larger growth per turn. Improving metal and textile industries on the other hand, as well as mines, increases wealth not only directly but also much stronger.16 That this requires more expensive structures is the downside, though. The actual income that goes into the coffers for free spending is generated by applying the overall tax-rate to the total wealth of a region. For a long-term enhancement of the income it

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is therefore wise to invest into infrastructure, which leads to increased wealth.17 Trade on the other hand requires an agreement on trade between the player and a competitor. Land routes are established automatically afterwards, if both parties share the same borders, while trading by sea requires the construction of trade ports first. Traded goods come from local industries as well as colonies and long distance trade with overseas trading centres in South America, Africa or the East Indies. Negotiations with local powers, month-long travels and other historically verified elements are not necessary though.18 While trade can become very profitable in short time, trade routes as well as the anchored ships are commonly targeted during war times, making strong escorts for the trading vessels mandatory. Since those are expensive to build and create new upkeep costs, it is up to the player to decide how powerful an escort can be without using up all the income generated by the trading vessels. At the end of each turn, the total expenses are subtracted from trade and tax income, offering the player a pretty conclusive idea how much money he can spend in the following turn. Beside the trade agreements diplomacy offers many more possibilities for play. Peace accords, non-aggression pacts and alliances are the most important agreements. Offerings and exchanges are helpful for a general improvement of relations and allow the acquisition of regions, technologies and money. Very important for foreign relations are alliances in which both parties promise each other support in case of an attack by a third party or if one attacks a third party themselves. While all treaties are made bilateral, almost all nations make alliances with a variety of other nations in the first couple of in-game decades. Since alliances are generally honoured,19 a war between just two nations therefore becomes a lot larger when all allies declare their support and enter the conflict, even if they do not actively join the fighting themselves. If such a large conflict between many nations has occurred, it is very difficult to end via a peace treaty because a state of war has a very strong influence on the diplomatic relations of two nations, just like territorial expansion. Since the actual negotiations are done automatically, the player is limited to making suggestions which may sway to other party to agree to his propositions. This increases the importance of specific material gestures to make a proposition ’tasty‘. Besides territorial concessions, financial offerings have proven to be an effective tool for this. Making

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generous offers possible generates yet another need for secure income for the player, in addition to the construction projects, recruitment and upkeep of troops previously mentioned.

The simulation of research The last of the major game elements of EMPIRE does not require money at all–with the exception of the construction of buildings–but has a strong influence on the game mechanics. Beside politics and economy, the game world is designed to be dynamic in the area of scientific research, too. Due to the requirements of game mechanics, science is not focused on gaining greater insight into nature or making social progress, but in specific calculable developments. This includes the power of the various educational facilities, which not only create desires for reform, but generate research points as well. Therefore, a player has to decide if he intends to increase the research speed, even if this may decrease public order to a point of open revolts, as mentioned before.20 All researchable technologies and philosophical ideas have in common that they have specific attributes assigned that change the internal parameters of the game. The development of the steam engine, for example, not only grants a 12% bonus on wealth generated by industrial buildings but also unlocks the construction of the most modern types of buildings, like the steam dry dock or the steam-driven cloth mill. If the player decides to develop explosive shells though, he will be able to construct mortars and howitzers as new types of artillery, which can fire these shells in a high arc over fortification walls, and the bomb ketch as a new type of ship.21 The title-giving ‘Spinning Jenny’ however, a spinning machine developed by the Englishman James Hargreaves, does not unlock any new constructions and does only increase wealth generated by textile industries by 8%. This poor increase surprises at first. According to Robert Allen, the construction of the ’jenny‘ is regarded as one of the most important developments in the 18th century textile industry and the starting point of the industrial revolution in this trade.22 The historical model led to a heavy increase in productivity since spinners were no longer limited to the use of a single spindle, as they had commonly been by spinning wheels before. Using a ’jenny‘ a worker could use twelve spindles at first, later, with improved models, even up to 80 or 120 spindles–depending on the worker’s skills. Although wages in the textile industry were higher in

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England than in other countries at the time23 and even spinning machines had to be bought at first, the production costs of yarn decreased due to the now higher productivity. While this is certainly a major economic advantage, Allen tells of only a limited distribution of the spinning jenny in countries like France and India for a long time due to the much lower wages. Therefore, the production of yarn without modern machines remained profitable there.24 National differences like those mentioned above cannot be recognized in EMPIRE, since the level of national specialities is not simulated. The same can be said about the history of development of machines, hence the several destructions of Hargreaves invention by enraged spinners who feared for their jobs are not implemented whether ludologically nor narratively. His difficulties of profiting from his invention are mentioned on the other hand but only on a very basic level. While Allen reports a troublesome search for funding and several relocations, only Hargreaves problems with the English patent laws are mentioned, if the player opens the information tab for the spinning jenny by right-clicking on its icon in the research window. There it says: The device is usually credited to James Hargreaves (1720-1778), a weaver and carpenter from Lancashire in England. While his invention was clever, he was not a businessman or lawyer, and he suffered much lost income as a result of not using patent laws properly.25

Similar descriptions, often with small anecdotes, are offered for many technologies and ideas. Compared to the necessities of the game mechanics these descriptions are completely useless, since it is unimportant how the historical spinning jenny worked or who designed it. Instead only its effect on the parameters of the game mechanics is relevant, namely the increase of wealth generated by textile industries. In the analysis scheme suggested by the game researchers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman this effect corresponds with the constitutive rules which control the mathematically defined characteristics of the underlying structure26 of the game without making any demands to the user on how to play EMPIRE, since any ingame research remains completely voluntarily.27 This calculability of developments remains one of the central requirements for the rule system of strategy games since rules are not just supposed to be applicable to different situations but have to be valid for all participating parties, no matter if theyǥre human or computer-controlled. This necessity for fairness is described in the implicit rules by Salen and

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Zimmerman, which they characterize especially with “etiquette“ and “good sportsmanship“.28 If the constitutive and implicit rules are applied to the example of the spinning jenny, the player is not just informed by the associated tab of the exact effects of what will happen if the machine is developed. Furthermore, he will have expectations towards EMPIRE that it will recognise the promised changes if it calculates wealth generated by his textile industry after research on the ’jenny‘ has been completed.29 Being told what will happen allows the player to plan the approach ’his‘ nation may take, even if the actions of the computer controlled competitors remain unknown due to a lack of information for the player. Nonetheless he will expect that they are bound by the implicit rules as well. Would the described historical difficulties in the development process of the spinning jenny, like destructions, financing or differences of its use in various nations be integrated into the game, this would counteract the principle of predictability and especially fairness. If the player would become a victim of vandalism like Hargreaves or had to micromanage the distribution and usage of spinning machines in detail, progress in EMPIRE would likely become random and therefore counteract predictability. Further the player would have to use play-time and several turns to manage many small details in a complex world, which would distract him from the actual objectives of the game, namely the conquest of regions. Further, the different distribution would lead to a great imbalance of the income of rivalling nations on the campaign map, if only a few of them could profit of the development of the ’jenny‘, since income remains one of the central forces over the entire course of the game that regulates actions and makes careful planning a necessity. This helps to explain the minor increase in productivity compared to the historical model, because a sudden major increase in income would hurt the balance of the game severely, hence the aforementioned necessity to decide between short and long-term gains would become mostly obsolete and make the game boring in the process.30

Conclusion To summarize, it can be said that EMPIRE: TOTAL WAR is set in the 18th century, but does not present the actual pre-modern history like a history book or a historian would. Instead, it focuses on the regulation of many ludological elements, which the player has to influence in accordance with current events and possible future necessities. Interpreting this use of the

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past as a case of simple staffage would be wrong, though. The usage of known elements like politics, technologies, military tactics as well as tiny details like different kinds of bayonets already proves that EMPIRE focuses on a specific period of time. Since all technologies and ideas with few exceptions31 are accounted for the 18th century and become unlocked only if the player has researched all prior elements successfully, the game recreates period-specific developments that cannot be found in other times. To measure these depictions only against the question of historical authenticity would be a foreshortened approach, though, because this would apply demands to the game, which it cannot meet due to genrespecific, ludological and narrative requirements. To explain this, I have described central elements of the game like administration, finance, diplomacy and scientific research and have shown how they are linked to each other. This was followed by an overview of how specific historical elements are simulated in a virtual world and which ludological relevance they have using the example of the spinning jenny. It could be shown that historical economic developments in EMPIRE remain limited to their transformation into mathematically calculable effects. This is caused by the necessity to give all nations the same chance for success and to leave the course of a match much more open. On the other hand it helps to focus the player’s attention more easily on the actual aims of the game without being diverted by the management of minor details that have no real meaning for the objectives. Historians are entitled to describe this usage of the past as superficial. At the same time though, the fact remains that simplifications in video games, such as EMPIRE, are not just necessary due to specifics of the genre of the strategy game but also very helpful. They facilitate easy access to topics and game play without having to study manuals and other guides for an extended period of time. Where full-fledged vehicle simulations like SILENT HUNTER III (Ubisoft 2005) or IL-2 STURMOVIK: CLIFFS OF DOVER (Ubisoft 2011) can only be played properly if the player studies all important technical aspects of the respective vehicle in depth, completing objectives despite all limitations imposed on the game play becomes the major challenge. Even though there are many limitations in EMPIRE as well, they are a mere shadow of those in the aforementioned vehicle simulations. While the openness of games like EMPIRE allows many counter-factual developments, it also offers increased possibilities for play, which makes a ’grand campaign‘ not just less predictable, but increases

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the replayability as well. Since the player is offered the chance to start at a certain year and then proceed according to his own ideas, he is not forced to repeat history ’as it has been‘, knowing in advance what will happen from turn one. If this openness and limited freedoms of a management-heavy game play motivate players to do their own research into 18th century history still demands comprehensive empirical studies. The same holds true for the identification of defects in the depiction of this period of time as well as of completely missing aspects by the players and the creation of images of the past or the construction of specific memories through playing. However, what already can be acknowledged is that at least some players are aware of defects of this playable past, since many modification projects for history games aim specifically for the improvement of realism and historical accuracy.32 This is just one of the many possible research topics, though. Many more remain, that are most certainly at least as versatile as the wide variety of scenarios found in history games.

Notes 1

Insides into earlier strategy games from offers Malte Stamm in the German proceedings volume. See Kerschbaumer, Florian, Winnerling, Tobias (eds.): Frühe Neuzeit im Videospiel. –Geschichtswissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Bielefeld: Transcript, forthcoming 2014. 2 Selectable are: Austria, Great Britain, Maratha Confederacy, Ottoman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, United Provinces, United States, and Spain. To make the United States playable, the player has to successfully finish the single-player campaign “Road to Independence“ first, which shows the creation of the United States from the early landing of British settlers till the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain in several short missions with a more pronounced narration that the main game. 3 The player has to control the same regions as in the short campaign, but instead of 1750 he has till 1799. 4 A term derived from the German “Historienspiele“, which is used by historian Angela Schwarz to describe games that portrait events, developments or topics from the past in general. For its use see: Schwarz, Angela. “Wollen Sie wirklich nicht weiter versuchen, diese Welt zu dominieren. Geschichte im Computerspiel.“ in History goes Pop. Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres, edited by Barbara Korte, Sylvia Paletschek (Eds.): Bielefeld: transcript 2009, 313–340. 5 A good overview into history games can be found in: Bender. Steffen. Virtuelles Erinnern. Kriege des 20. Jahrhunderts in Computerspielen Bielefeld 2012.;Heinze, Carl. Mittelalter Computer Spiele. Zur Darstellung und Modellierung von

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Geschichte im populären Computerspiel. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012; Schut, Kevin. “Strategic Simulations and Our Past The Bias of Computer Games in the Presentation of History”, In Games and Culture 2, No. 3 (2007):213-235; Schwarz, Angela (ed.). „Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf ihre Gegner werfen?“ Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annäherung an Geschichte im Computerspiel. Münster: LIT 2012; and Wesener, Stefan. “Geschichte in Bildschirmspielen. Bildschirmspiele mit historischem Inhalt“ in Computerspiele und Politik: zur Konstruktion von Politik und Gesellschaft in Computerspielen, edited by Tobias Bevc, Berlin: LIT, 2007,141–164. In the anthology of Schwarz, a survey of released history games and their distribution into genres and historical periods can be found. 6 Baur, Stefan. “Historie in Computerspielen: ‘Anno 1602 - Erschaffung einer neuen Welt‘“. in WerkstattGeschichte 23 (1999):83–91; Grosch, Waldemar. Computerspiele im Geschichtsunterricht. Wochenschau-Verlag, 2002; Pöppinghege, Rainer. “Pedanterie im Cyberspace. Zum Geschichtsbewusstsein von Computerspielen.“ in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 62 (7/8): 2011, 459–468; —. “Ballern für den Führer. Der Zweite Weltkrieg im Computerspiel.“ in Vergessenes Erinnern. Medien von Erinnerungskultur und kollektivem Gedächtnis, edited by Swen Steinberg, Stefan Meißner, and Daniel Trepsdorf, Berlin: wvb Wiss. Verlag, 2009, 105–120. 7 About the limitations of various genres: Bender, Steffen. Virtuelles Erinnern. Kriege des 20. Jahrhunderts in Computerspielen. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012, 2556; about the transfer of World War II into narrative structures: ibid., 123-152. 8 Narration is mainly limited to the beginning of the game when the female advisor gives some historical background information and makes suggestions for actions in the first few turns. This can be seen and heard in „Let's Play: Empire: Total War Prussia Campaign [HD] - Part 1“ of the YouTube user Tsigetarts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unq16GK55B0 (11.01.2013). During the campaign the advisor gives more information about backgrounds and possible strategies which are mostly related to an ongoing situation. Her male counterpart on the battlefield does the same. 9 One year in EMPIRE corresponds in two turns. The game offers two levels of play: the turn-based campaign map where all management takes place, and the battlefield mode in which combat is played in real-time. 10 Public order can exist in three stages: happy, disgruntled and rebellious. If a disgruntled population is not appeased soon, like by lowering taxes, it will take up arms and rebel against the ruling class. Only in the capital region, a rebellion is synonymous to a revolution that, if successful, changes the system of government. 11 Desire for reforms is generated by all educational facilities. The better the facility in a region is (a university has a larger effect that schools or colleges), the more powerful desire will be. The game offers no explanation about the kind of reforms that are requested, though. 12 Specific consequences on productivity or similar topics could not be verified, which leads to the conclusion that war-weariness only leads to a general unhappiness.

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13 Available are: Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy and republic. Main differences are public order, research rate and income. While order in monarchies is higher due to a more effective oppression, research rate and income are better in a republic. 14 An overview about the differences between narratology and ludology offer: Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ludology meets narratology. Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative.” (1999) Ludology.org. Accessed May 31, 2013. http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm; — “Simulation versus Narrative. Introduction to Ludology.” in The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Wolf, Mark J. P., Perron, Bernard, 2 Vol.. New York: Routledge (Bd. 1), 2003,221–235. and Kücklich, Julian. “Invaded Spaces. Anmerkungen zur interdisziplinären Entwicklung der Game Studies.“ in SPIEL 23 2, (2004):, 285–303. 15 The only costs listed are army and naval upkeep and costs for the town watch. The different kinds of income are no more detailed either and list only taxes, trade and ’other’. 16 Due to a limited number of predefined places to build, it is impossible to construct an unlimited number of factories. This adds another factor to the overall necessity to plan ahead. 17 As shown in greater detail later, scientific improvements can increase the basic wealth value of a building further. 18 This shows the simplification of the economic system very clearly, since trade vessels remain constantly at the trading centres but still import goods. An explanation is not offered by the game. 19 If support is rejected, it weighs heavily on further diplomatic relations. 20 Another factor that influences research are the gentlemen, a type of agents in Empire, that gather specific traits in their lifetime that improve the speed of research in general or in certain areas, like industry or military. 21 This is basically a swimming mortar platform which was used historically for coastal attacks. Since this is impossible in Empire, bomb vessels can be used in regular fleet engagements and are able to cause very heavy damage and fires aboard even to the largest warships, the first rate ship-of-the-line. On naval warfare in the 18th century: Willis: Fighting at Sea. 22 See: Allen, Robert C. “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature. The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India”, In The Journal of Economic History 69, 4 (2009): 901–927. 23 Young tells of 9 Sous per day for an French spinner, while an English spinner earned 6,25 Pence (converted 12,5 Sous). This made wages 40% higher in England than in France in this trade. Young, Arthur. Travels during the years 1787, 1788 and 1789. Undertaken more particularly with a view of ascertaining the cultivation, wealth, resources, and national prosperity of the Kingdom of France. 2. ed. London 1794. New York: AMS Pr. quoted from: ibid,910. Nonetheless, wages in this trade remained low. 24 Ibid, 904–909.

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25 Quoted from: Tab for the technology 'spinning jenny“. Tabs are in general similarly designed and offer clearly arranged information for their respective content in a mask-like structure. Further examples are figures 1 and 3. 26 Salen, Katie, Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of play. Game design fundamentals. 6th ed. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004,130. 27 Though it must be added that the player will suffer hard times if he goes without research and foregoes its gains since his competitors will definitely try to improve their level of technology. 28 Salen, Zimmerman: Rules of Play, 130. 29 If this would not happen, the player would feel deceived because of the game cheating him out of promised gains–no matter if through a deliberate decision of the developers or a programming bug. 30 For the consequences of an imbalanced game, see my contribution about modifications for the TOTAL WAR series in the German version of the conference proceedings. Schröder, Lutz. “Modding als Indikator für die kreative und kritische Auseinandersetzung von Fans mit Historienspielen.“ in Frühe Neuzeit und Videospiele. –Geschichtswissenschaftliche Perspektiven, edited by Florian Kerschbaumer, Tobias Winnerling, Bielefeld: transcript, forthcoming 2014. 31 James Russel, lead designer of EMPIRE, explains this: “We wouldn‘t want to put a fixed end point where we stop the player from continuing, and we have included some 19th century technologies that can be researched. We always want the player to be able to take history in a different direction, and we have to allow for the possibility that the player will drive tech research faster than happened in reality.“ Quoted from: Butts: Empire: Total War Interview, online: http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/04/18/empire-total-war-interview (11.01.2013) 32 See: Schröder: Modding.

CHAPTER SEVEN CONSTRUCTION AS A CONDITION TO WIN: DEPICTION AND FUNCTION OF EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN LANDSCAPES IN STRATEGY AND ECONOMIC SIMULATION GAMES MARC BONNER

Identically produced patrician houses and cannon foundries? A stylized palace of Versailles which, as a destillation of sovereign architecture, brings victory? Ancient civilizations that use technologies of the Early Modern Age? Can virtual, Early Modern architecture be architecture parlante and clone architecture at the same time as defined by Jean Baudrillard and thus negate a paradox? Is the historical architecture authentically depicted? This chapter aims to clarify these questions within the context of strategy and economic simulation games. Both genres are mainly made for computers due to the required controls: keyboard and mouse are more effective to use with a bird’s eye view than the gamepad. Attempts to make those genres available for game consoles often fail because of the aforementioned reasons (Koch, 2010; Creative Assembly: Strategiespiele auf Konsole machbar, 2010). Before presenting detailed examples, some aspects and terms with regards to architecture in digital games need to be explained.

Terms, Aspects and Theories – An Introduction In earlier studies, analyses of the mediality of architecture and the correlation between built reality and digital buildings have already been presented (Bonner, 2012; Bonner 2013). Those results will now be applied to the area of strategy games and economic simulation games.

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Digital architecture in computer and video games, through its archetypal pictorial quality, generates spatial experience and therefore communicates with the player. Hence the volumes and styles of the virtual buildings convey values that represent the intrinsic context of the game. These refer to the player’s selection of a nation or fraction and also embody the function of a building as well as the goods produced by it. Examples of this are the architectural styles of both fractions in WARCRAFT II: TIDES OF DARKNESS (1995): While the barracks that produce human soldiers are made of symmetrical castles fortified with pinnacles, the Orcs’ barracks are a skin-made tent with thorns and bones. A second example is provided by the farms needed to increase the forces capacity. The human farms have thatched roofs and kitchen gardens whereas the Orcs dwell in stumps with farmlands aside. Generally, the light colours of the human masoned buildings are in contrast to the Orcs earthy shaded housings made of animal and plant objects whose seemingly temporary nature embodies a certain barbarism and aggressiveness just like the Orcs’ character. Consequently, digital buildings can be understood as architecture parlante, a term which was coined during the 18th century by architects like Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée. In 1784, Boullée drew the showpiece of architecture parlante with Cenotaphe à Newton – showing the utopian, virtual character of the majority of these projects. Within this context, Umberto Eco’s theory of the iconic code is equally important. Eco points out that architecture can be perceived and understood as communication if the encoded can be decoded by already known or modified forms. As an example, he cites the fork whose function it is to transport food to the mouth thus turning it into a symbol for eating (Eco, 1997, 182, 183 and 186). As early as 1852, Friedrich Theodor Vischer described architecture as symbolic art not capable to explicitly define itself (Vischer, 1852, 202). As a consequence, an intellectual interaction is not only required of the observers of symbols and the users of architecture but also of players of video games. Finally, the ideas of architecture parlante and iconic code indirectly correspond with the widely known definition of digital game architecture as narrative architecture which is a result of the strong influence that literary studies have on media and game studies. As a result of this momentum, Henry Jenkins defines game designers as narrative architects and video games as “spatial stories“ (Jenkins, 2004).

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With regard to buildings in digital game worlds, Jean Baudrillard discussed in 1999 an equally important aspect in the context of contemporary real buildings. He applies the idea of virtual architecture to buildings, whose scenic space is lost. They rob cities of the dramaturgy of illusion and solely embody their pure function with technical feasibility. In this context, Baudrillard uses the term of clone architecture, whose impression of emptiness does not allow it to refer beyond itself.1 For him the 1995 Guggenheim Bilbao museum by Frank O. Gehry exemplifies such a virtual building because its formal vocabulary can be modified for multiple building types (Baudrillard, 1999, 12, 20, 24, 25, 26 and 34). Considering later projects by Gehry such as the Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and the Hotel Marqués de Riscal in Elciego (Spain) Baudrillards criticism becomes obvious. The terms of virtual and clone architecture can be applied to the genres of strategy and economic simulation games. The digital buildings cannot be entered due to the bird’s eye view; thus they are only created as bitmaps or hollow polygons without any interior. However, the term clone architecture can only be fully applied if the gamer erects certain buildings multiple times to increase military and economic effectiveness and to secure the own settlements. Dozens of the same farms and barracks are constructed to increase capacity and accelerate production of forces. Therefore, these settlements look like uniform English 19th century working-class neighbourhoods or 20th century prefabricated houses in the vein of Walter Gropius rather than an organically grown medieval or Early Modern town. Not only are the buildings identical but even whole settlements of one player on the same level (or map) can be almost indistinguishable, too. On the one hand, archetypal pictorial quality allows the player to directly recognise and to use mining and production facilities. On the other hand, the cloned buildings are a result of low computing power and limited source codes as it was typical of both genres in their early 1990s inception. The limitations of productive and fortifying functions as well as the copy and paste aesthetics are in line with Baudrillards term of virtual architecture. Only in economic simulation games like the ANNO (since 1998) or the SIM CITY (since 1989) series, the developers have tried to counteract these negative aspects by including different styles for residential buildings. The source code seems to select randomly from the repertoire. However, main infrastructure buildings like marketplaces, churches or schools always look the same. Baudrillard’s term of virtual architecture fits in two aspects: Firstly, digital game architecture, whether in video games or in architectural construction

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software, is as virtual as other depictions of architecture such as graphics and photographs. Secondly, the serial uniform limitations of the designs refer to the shortcomings of the built reality as described by Baudrillard. Eventually, the gamer’s conscious production of clone architecture is necessary in order to persist in the bellicose and economic contest to pave the way for victory. In some cases one single piece of architecture is the prerequisite for victory. Consequently, digital game architecture can be considered as architecture parlante as well as virtual architecture as defined by Baudrillard. In built reality both subjects naturally constitute a paradox but in digital game-worlds they can indeed coexist because the real world’s constraints and physical laws do not apply in virtual gamespace. Further deviations of digital architecture in strategy and economic simulations games in comparison to build reality are: proportions between basic units such as soldiers and workers and the buildings are often inaccurate for functional reasons. If buildings and the people were true to scale the latter would either be too small to be clicked with the cursor or the architecture would be so large that it could not be seen on the screen as a whole thus creating an ineffective isometric view. The player should be able to easily overlook and use as many buildings and units as possible. As a consequence, scales must be distorted to enable a smooth and effective gameplay, leading to the fact that a pikeman is almost as tall or taller as a building’s storey. Very few video games like the economic simulation SIM CITY (2013) show buildings, people and vehicles true to scale.2 On the basis of its archetypal pictorial quality, its nonexistent interior and its distorted scale, digital game architecture shares its characteristics with theater and movie settings and can also be compared with buildings in Japanese theme parks. These, according to Jürgen H. Gleiter, were often created during the 1980s as Dutch, Spanish and Bavarian settlements. While the façades are authentically replicated, the interiors, as Gleiter writes, are not historically consistent (Gleiter, 1998, 37 and 39). Instead of living rooms and bedrooms they contain facilities and restaurants. Historical references are therefore limited to the architectural appearance and convey a pre-modern European idyll to the visitors. Gleiter understands the theme park architecture as a pars pro toto of Amsterdam, Utrecht and other European cities (ibid.). Like digital game architecture, these buildings can be described both as architecture parlante and as virtual architecture. Common characteristics are stage-likeness, lack of

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coherence between exterior and interior and an archetypal pictorial quality.3 With regard to perspective, space, and gameplay in strategy games, Felix Raczkowski notices that the user has a cursor instead of a directly controlled avatar to command the buildings, vehicles and soldiers. This peripheral point of action corresponds with the distant perspective between game space and the player (Raczkowski, 2009, 123). Raczkowski points out that the player’s bird’s eye view suggests almightiness which they actually do not have. The author says that despite the important role of buildings spatial experience is not as significant as in other genres. Only the different speed of troop movement and the strategically beneficial positions of hills and passes are of relevance (ibid., 128, 131). The fact that spatial experience in games with third- or first-person perspective is disproportionately higher is not negotiable. However, Raczkowski does not attribute enough meaning to the spatial experience of strategy games. Although the distant point of view can produce low immersion, the exploration of the map, of the enemy territories is still important for the momentum of the game. New resources, secret paths, special places and enemy settlements are not only discovered but the players are openly encouraged to make discoveries themselves because in a majority of strategy games the fog of war will keep the map in the dark. Only after the level has been explored and additional settlements have been erected the territory will be fully revealed. More often, however, greyish haze covers already explored areas, forcing the player to send troops to patrol or control enemy movement at important junctions. Exploring the map and a limited view of the territory create suspense and increase the drama of the game. Michael Nitsche points out that the building of a structure and adding it to the landscape represents a dramatic and central function. According to Nitsche, the player himself defines places and how to interact with the landscape (Nitsche, 2009, 197). Consequently, a dense atmosphere is created by a dramatic contextualization. The aforementioned interactions are essential elements of the game which are experienced and initiated in spatial dimensions even though they are perceived from a distance. Nitsche concludes that the user immerses in the digital game-world rather through the gameplay than through the limited spatiality (ibid., 204). The spatial experience in strategy and economic simulation games can therefore be compared with a game of chess.

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The Pre-modern Past – On the Coalescence of the Ages and the History as Scenery “Populäre literarische und filmische Genres wie Science-Fiction, Western oder Abenteuergeschichten verwandeln sich im Kontext von Videospielen in Genre-Settings, die als Kulisse und Zeichensystem für die ludischen Ereignisse dienen.“ (Rauscher, 2012, 19.) With his argument that traditional genres like science fiction, western and adventure stories are transformed into settings for video games which are used as symbols for ludic events, Andreas Rauscher introduces a central momentum of video games with historical background stories. He adds that historical strategy games just simulate initial situations of conflicts whereas the progress of the campaigns depends on the player and his tactical proficiency (ibid., 67). An example for such a simulation is the strategy game TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2 (2011) which is set in the sengoku-era of 16th century Japan. This was an era that lasted for almost a hundred years and was affected by over 300 warring Daimyos. The gamer can select from ten authentic clans who initially own their documented land. With whom the player joins forces or which provinces he conquers is beyond historical facts and completely his choice. Carl Heinze calls Rauscher’s system of backdrops and symbols defined as ”Genre-Setting“, a collective repository of knowledge that generates an adequate reference to the past (Heinze, 2012, 83). Furthermore, he deems video games unscientific. Instead, their character is generated in reference to widely accepted historical knowledge (ibid., 91). Saying this Heinze refers to Ernst Voltmers term of „freischwebendes Mittelalter“ (Voltmer, 1987, 210) which does not possess any particular time reference except being in the past and in general medieval (Heinze, 2012, 152). Before Heinze, Thomas Martin Buck already mentioned that medieval and modern history in public perception often is melted into one unspecified pre-modern past (Buck, 2011, 49). This distorted perspective becomes apparent in the display of material culture. As an example, Heinze cites the depiction of residential buildings: the frame house has become one of the most popular codes for the Middle Ages in video games (Heinze, 2012, 153). These explanations have once again shown that Baudrillard’s term of virtual architecture and Eco’s system of iconic codes can be applied to digital game architecture.

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Anachronisms, Mashups and Structural Abstractions – Early Modern Architecture in Strategy and Economic Simulation Games The issue of distorted and diffuse depiction of the medieval era as a pre-modern past can also be found in video games with an Early Modern background story. This amalgamation of different ages into one mixture is used for the design of the digital buildings in both genres in order to create a historical atmosphere. These anachronisms and mashups are in accordance with the popular image of the past. In strategy games, built architecture has five main functions: the production of soldiers and armoury, which in an Early Modern context spans from pike men to mortars to galleons; the mining and processing of raw materials; the expansion of the forces’ capacity; the improvement of weapons and armoury; and defence against the enemy. Not all of these functions are used in one game. However, the digital buildings always depict their supporting function and are crucial for victory – losing them might lead to defeat. The player erects defence walls and towers to limit the enemy’s troop movements at certain locations on the map. At the same time, enemy buildings and forces represent the foe and thus play an active part in preventing the player from winning. The settlements or bases in these game genres shall depict urban structures but in fact they are only fragments of towns that are required for production of raw materials and warfare. If anything, they can be compared best with the closed microcosms of military outposts or camps as used by the Romans to secure their boundaries north of the Alps. In this chapter the detailed studies of strategy games will be limited to two games developed by Big Huge Games: RISE OF NATIONS (2003) and RISE OF NATIONS: RISE OF LEGENDS (2006). RISE OF NATIONS is advertised on the official website as a historical real time strategy game in which six thousand years of human history can be experienced, from Antiquity to the Information Age. In the beginning, the player has to choose one of eighteen nations among others the Aztecs, the Dutch, the British, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the French, the Germans or the Romans. This assortment of nations contains two historically wrong aspects: some of them can’t be considered as nations. Furthermore, it is chronologically impossible that ’nations‘ like the Maya or the Japanese, can campaign against the Romans or the Russians since these civilisations bloomed and consolidated at different times.4 Consequently, in digital

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gamespace extraordinary battles can occur between historically disparate factions like the Romans and the Japanese. Game designers try to solve these anachronistic problems by creating what-if units. Aztecs, for example, are able to build the so called jaguar infantry by the year of 1936. It is the fastest infantry unit in the whole game and can be used in the Modern Age and Information Age respectively (http://www.microsoft. com/games/ riseofnations/nations.aspx, 2012). Opting for the Romans, the player also can use a soldier unit which is fit for action in the 20th century: The tank killer is effective against tanks such as the Germans can build from the industrial age onwards (http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseof nations/nations_germans.aspx; http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/ nations_romans.aspx, 2012). In the context of Early Modernity, both eras, the Gunpowder Age and the Age of Enlightenment, are relevant though disputable in their lapses of time because the Medieval Age already ends by the year 1299. In contrast to this, the simplified and generalised display of military concepts is historically almost correct: defence walls and towers remain important securing elements until the end of the Middle Ages, while with the Gunpowder Age mortars and dragoons benefit the attacking forces (http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/ages. aspx, 2012). This surreal combination of fiction, historical fact, and collective knowledge is mirrored in the digital game architecture. In RISE OF NATIONS, the player can explore the ressource “architecture“ which permits shorter construction periods, more resistant buildings, and an increased reach of fortifications (http://www.microsoft. com/games/riseofnations/technologies_architecture.aspx, 2012). During the game the user can built one or several wonders of the world which bring distinct advantages. These are larger than the other game architecture but also need more time to be built. In addition, the Wonders are an essential precondition to win. The real Palace of Versaille is a spacious complex that was built over the centuries but in RISE OF NATIONS it has been shrunken to a compact, small residence. The façade and the U-shaped complex of the three wings create a distilled image of the core castle which encloses the Cour de Marbre and was built under Louis XIII. between 1631 and 1634 by Philibert Le Roy. The baroque architectural style is characterized by brick walls that are structured and framed by sandstone. The fragmental game architecture of the wonder of the world shows these material qualities by its chromaticity and its adaption of the balustrades that circulate the kerb roof. The designer followed the structure and forms of the built reality

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rather loosely: both wings that flank the Cour de Marbre have a baroque gable with a clock while this architectural design in the real world is reserved to the risalit of the central wing. Furthermore, the Cour de Marbre is degenerated to a backyard-style space as known from dense urban opposing structures that create the cityscapes of New York or Chicago. With the Taj Mahal the game designers chose another wonder of the world which was constructed in Early Modernity. In the real world Sha Jahan built this mausoleum for his deceased wife Mumtaz Mahal between 1632 and 1643. As in the case of The Palace of Versaille the representation of the building complex and the gardens is reduced to the central core architecture. In fact, only the core structure of the Taj Mahal is widely known, which is also a result of its curtailed depiction in the media. The digital game architecture does not live up to the type of the manorial mausoleum of the Mughal era. Like Versailles, the game architecture appears to be plump with the proportions of the constructive volumes not matching. Also, the marble base construction does not leave space between the mausoleum and the four minarets. In reality, the latter are erected with a certain distance and lean slightly outward so as not to damage the domed structure in case of collapse. Additionally, the dome loses the dematerialised floating impression of the built reality and also the consistency with the other parts of the building. The qualities of these materials are again imitated by coloured textures: the white marble as well as the masterly intarsia made of coral, black marble, jasper and nacre are designed as delicate lines. However, the bitmap of the Taj Mahal can neither reproduce the reflecting surface nor the material qualities of the original. Regarding the game intrinsic wonders of the world there is a shift in historical reality. When commanding the Inca the player can construct The Palace of Versailles as well as the Space Program which consists of a launch pad and the Saturn V rocket to secure his victory. It is possible to build all fourteen wonders of the world with every ’nation‘. In this case one can speak of a collective heritage of man which in its diffuse and unhistorical form corresponds with Buck’s description of an indifferent pre-modern past. In every basis construction the gamer starts with a town whose graphical depiction matches the chosen ’nation‘ and the current era. At first it is a pile of wood and clay huts on a square plain. In the Gunpowder

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Age they become frame houses or stone buildings while in the Industrial Age they are replaced with concrete architecture and skyscrapers. Like in the real world the later ages allow the player to enlarge the urban structures to large and major cities. Along with that, the city boundaries, the building ground, and the population are expanded. Around this iconic code of a city the user can arbitrarily erect production and mining facilities creating a loose structure of isolated buildings. The eighteen ’nations‘ have to share a limited repertoire of graphic skins and digital building styles: The Persians and the Indians use the very same graphics which resemble the architecture of the Mughal age while the Egyptians, the Nubians and the Turks share an Islamic, Moorish style. Depending on the zenith of a ’nation‘ the architectural textures can be individualised. Consequently, several ’nations‘ have to share the same digital buildings: The English, French, Dutch, German and Russians have to build for example the identical neo-Gothic senate whose clock tower resembles Big Ben. So without exception all European fractions use an adaption of the Palace of Westminster which is widely known as the landmark of London. One exception is the nation of the USA which has been released in a later upgrade: although nonexistent before 1776, the user can play the campaign of the USA through all the game’s intrinsic ages. It has its own graphic-set which contains colonial-style architecture made of brick walls, porches, and neo-classical elements. The digital game-world of RISE OF NATIONS: RISE OF LEGENDS is an entanglement of science fiction, steampunk and fantasy. The player can select one of three fractions (the Vinci, the Alin and the Cuotl) whose mashup of architectural styles and inventive construction of bases or settlements will now briefly be described. While the Alin produce their forces in romanticised castles that refer to palaces of Arabian Nights and hover above the desert sand, the Cuotl erect supremacist adaptions of Aztec and Mayan temples on steep heights mingled with the futuristic aesthetic of the movie STARGATE (1994). The game architectures and technologies of the Vinci need further examination. They live in warring city states, a situation dominating Northern Italy’s politics during the Renaissance. The eponymous uomo universale Leonardo da Vinci invented armoured vehicles and flying apparatus that were not possible until the dawn of the Industrial Age. According to executive producer Tim Train the drawings and blueprints of Da Vinci were especially important to the game’s designers. “The designs were light years ahead of their time. [...] One of our most successful units involved borrowing heavily from Da Vinci’s corkscrew helicopter design.“ (Rausch, 2005). In addition, digital

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buildings were also influenced by Hayao Miyazakis design of the moving castle in his 2004 anime of Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle, a children’s book published in 1986 (RISE OF NATIONS: RISE OF LEGENDS. We got some info on Big Huge Games’ trip into steampunk fantasy, 2005). This all results in an architectural mashup of neo-classical temple porticos, gearwheels, steam engines, and big chimneys. The architectural language of the 19th century, in particular the art of civil engineering, blends with allegedly neo-classical building volumes into a steampunk-style chimaera. The references to Leonardo da Vinci and ancient structures point to a generalized pre-modern past of thinkers and inventors, while the other parts of the façades resemble heavy industry furnaces. This historically wrong metamorphosis of two epochs is continued in the design of the forces: soldiers of the Vinci wear Renaissance-style armour and helmets. A pre-modern construction of cable pulleys emulates hydraulic systems and gearwheels that both increase the bearer’s mobility. The helmets are equipped with lenses and visors like those of today’s soldiers. As mentioned before, RISE OF NATIONS: RISE OF LEGENDS impresses with its inventive basis construction: around the main palace, districts are directly connected by bridges and bracings. They increase the forces’ capacity, increase the storage facilities and enable the production of specific troops and expansions. Functions of the game architecture remain the same. However, the urban structure appears more organically grown as the player creates a seemingly unmanageable cityscape with a coherent structure that swings up to the multiple, expandable, urban centre. Only defense and mining buildings are erected separately in the gamespace. In RISE OF NATIONS: RISE OF LEGENDS the towns or settlements become supremacist, compressed megastructures which grow vertically rather than horizontally and therefore resemble furnaces, medieval abbeys, mountain villages or set-like theme park architecture like Mont-Saint-Michel, Vejer de la Frontera or Disney’s Cinderella Castle. Thanks to the avoidance of loose urban structures, the construction of bases takes a visually exceptional position among the genre of strategy games. However, to talk about towns, cities or settlements is misleading because they are only fragmental images of a town which feature neither the infrastructure nor the sociocultural complexity of an urban structure built in reality. These digital game architectures are mainly production facilities, virtual buildings as defined by Baudrillard and not only are they

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iconic codes of manufactured goods but also together they form a setting based on the collective knowledge of a pre-modern town. The game architecture of economic simulation games has similar characteristics which will be described using the example of ANNO 1404 (2009). In the context of the Middle Ages, given the framework of video games, Heinze has already pointed out the central aspects of these mechanics of economic simulation games (Heinze, 2012, 211-249). As these aspects also apply to the schematic of Early Modern civilisations in video games, they will be explained below. Primarily, Heinze writes that the historical momentum only merges tightly with the ludical momentum if the representation and mechanics of a game are designed according to historical facts. For him, this has been realized in the simulation of medieval societies like in DIE SIEDLER – AUFSTIEG EINES KÖNIGREICHS (2007) and ANNO 1404 (ibid., 211). In contrast to strategy games the focus lies on construction and administration of towns and settlements. Instead of producing military units and goods, the virtual game architecture here serves to satisfy the citizen’s needs (ibid., 213). Consequently, historical production facilities are copied. The peasant farming and the civic artisans are simplified and distorted from the historical facts. According to Heinze, the game intrinsic staples are fish and meat, whereas in reality these were grains (ibid., 218 and 224). Furthermore, he notes that trading systems, climate zones and ocean lanes (ANNO 1404), refer to the age of the Hanseatic League as well as the Early Modern age (ibid., 232). Similar to the epochs in RISE OF NATIONS the citizens can upgrade to several civilization levels, transforming a simple farm house step by step into a Bürger-, Patrizier- and Adligenhaus. Heinze also notices that the advancement of all citizens is possible, which is useful for the gameplay, but turns the social pyramid upside down, resulting in more rich than poor citizens. Heinze emphasises further of the simulation of the pre-modern city. Not until the Patrician-level can bread be obtained (ibid., 234). In conclusion, Heinze draws an analogy by comparing utopian digital game worlds such as ANNO with the realms of model railways, both limited and defined by sharp edges (ibid., 247). In contradiction to strategy games economic simulation games like ANNO require a structured assembling of the digital cityscape. In order to accelerate the transport of raw materials to their processing in other buildings, paved streets and dirty roads enforce a grid of rectangular blocks. Furthermore, churches and schools have to be placed all over the

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urban space because they only have a certain range. Residential houses dominate the cityscape and therefore the game’s designers created five different models for each civilization level. Despite this graphical diversity the urban structure quickly turns out to be unreal and overstylised because of repetitive archetypal form and loud colours. The typical alignment of the gable towards the street is historically correct as is the homogeneity of the constructing volumes. Tall residential and store houses dominated the urban structure until the 19th century because of consistent requirements and building materials and techniques. Additionally, aged buildings in medieval town centers were mainly reconstructed or expanded. Production facilities are dependent on other facilities that supply raw materials that continue processing. Basically, they refer to the goods they produce and only exist through their depicted façades. For example, the furnace and loom of Waffenschmiede (armoury, blacksmith) and Seidenweberei (silk weaving mill) are illogically displayed on the outside of the buildings in order to inform the player about their activity. The Moorish style of the Kaffeerösterei (coffee roasters) refers to the origin of coffee. After all, the depiction and function of digital game architecture in economic simulation games is similar to that in strategy games. The buildings serve to immerse the player into the historical atmosphere and the production of goods. They also uncover the inner production steps to illustrate the stages of production and to delight with kinetic objects. Moreover, there are anachronisms and mashups in the elaborated structures of economic simulation games. For example in ANNO 1401, the monument Sultanmoschee with its six minarets is modelled on the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul which was built between 1609 and 1616.

Conclusion Unlike the majority of European cities, the settlements or bases in strategy and economic simulation games are not historically and organically grown sprawls of complex alleys and curved streets but isolated buildings grouped loosely or grid-like, around core architectures such as churches, marketplaces or so called town centres. Idealized forms and archetypal graphic qualities decorate an architectural shell which shows its function by building volumes and the display of production steps. In this context mashups of architectural styles

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are used that refer to a common cultural perception of a pre-modern past. Architectures in strategy and economic simulation games are first and foremost production facilities erected in a serial manner in order to gain military and economic victory over the enemy. It is certain that digital game architecture due to its game intrinsic requirements can not only be understood as virtual architecture as defined by Baudrillard but also as architectur parlante which in built reality is a paradox. Thus they are codified, fragmental images of built reality which do not have to obey physical laws. Nevertheless, game designers strive for a certain degree of authenticity to enable the player’s immersion into the historical setting. Thereby they can profit from the gamers ”willing suspension of disbelief“ (Coleridge, 1817, 91), coating over the most striking shortcomings of historical video games.5

Notes 1

Hence the term clone architecture is diametrically opposed to the term architecture parlante. 2 This only seems to be possible if the player is able to arbitrarily zoom in and out of digital urban structures and to freely choose the view. 3 A generalized comparison between digital game worlds and theme parks is found in Nitsche (2008, 13). 4 The eight epochs in RISE OF NATIONS are: Ancient Age (2000 B.C.); Classical Age (1999 B.C. - 500 A.D.); Medieval Age (501 A.D. - 1299 A.D.); Gunpowder Age (1300 A.D. - 1715 A.D.); Enlightenment Age (1716 A.D. - 1880 AD.); Industrial Age (1881 A.D. - 1935 A.D.); Modern Age (1936 A.D. - 1968 A.D.) and Information Age (1969 A.D. – future). Available at: http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/ages.aspx (Accessed: 13 December 2012). 5 With the ”willing suspension of disbelief“ in 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about the disposition of the reader or observer who temporarily and without critical analysis accepts a work of fiction.

CHAPTER EIGHT PHARAOH MAO ZEDONG AND THE MUSKETEERS OF BABYLON: THE CIVILIZATION SERIES BETWEEN PRIMORDIALIST NATIONALISM AND SUBVERSIVE PARODY STEFAN DONECKER

In 1991, MicroProse released SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION, one of the most successful and influential video games ever produced, challenging players to “build an empire to stand the test of time”. During the subsequent years, countless gamers have watched their precious civilizations grow and prosper, raised pyramids and Eiffel Towers and all the other Wonders of the World, and enjoyed the satisfaction of finally seeing their colonists leave Earth for Alpha Centauri and a future in space. CIVILIZATION defined a new genre of tun-based global strategy games that became subsequently known as 4X games.1 As the current incarnation, CIVILIZATION V (2010), proves, the game has not lost its appeal more than twenty years after its initial release. It seems that Sid Meier has indeed created a game to stand the test of time. The CIVILIZATION franchise has entertained, but also influenced, two generations of gamers, and its impact on popular concepts of history can hardly be underestimated. Accordingly, numerous scholars have discussed the political and ideological background of the series (Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010; Reichert 2008; Weiß 2007; Douglas 2005; Lammes 2003; Chen 2003; Pobáocki 2002, cf. Mäyrä 2008, 98–99) and identified various problematic and objectionable aspects: CIVILIZATION has been labeled as Eurocentric (Voorhees 2009, 255), imperialist (King and Krzywinska 2006, 189–190; Pobáocki 2002, 175) and genocidal (Douglas 2005, 56). Researchers have interpreted the game as a Christian parable

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(Chen 2003, 104), they have commented on the masculine bias and the gender imbalance (Schut 2007, 220–223), as well as on the CIVILIZATION'S uncritical faith in progress and its technological determinism (Ghys 2012; Sigl 2005). The most outspoken among the critics of the CIVILIZATION series, Kacper Pobáocki, denounced the game as a – somewhat camouflaged – manifestation of the master narrative of American modernity and liberalism.2 “[T]he fetish-object of Meier's fantasies is the ‘ultimate empire’, the state that resembles most the end product of all human advancement, namely the United States of America“ (Pobáocki 2002, 167).

To Stand the Test of Time: Continuity in Civilization In this paper, however, I would like to shift the analytic emphasis to another topic: the issue of national continuity and primordial concepts of nationhood that underpin the CIVILIZATION series3 (cf. Whelchel 2007, 13–14; Sigl 2005; Friedman 1999, 146): The player assumes control of a particular civilisation in 4.000 BC and leads it throughout the centuries up to the Space Age. In the course of the game, the civilisation develops and improves; it discovers new technologies and introduces new forms of government.4 Yet despite all technological and societal advances, the concept of the game presumes that the civilisation, as an historical actor, remains the same: As soon as the very first city is founded, usually in the first turn of the game, the nascent civilization is labelled with the ethnonym the player chose – be it ’Babylonian‘, ’Egyptian‘ or ’American‘. It retains this identifier throughout the game: 6.000 years and many turns later, the player's civilization, most likely, encompasses a vast territory and boasts countless technological and cultural marvels, an enormous industrial capacity and an effective army. Yet this advanced state still bears the name – and, implicitly, the identity – of the very first settlers. There are no discontinuities, no restructuring of identities, and no shifts in the selfperception among the player's virtual subjects. In the words of American scholar Ted Friedman (1999, 146): “Playing a single, unchanging entity from the Stone Age to space colonization turns the often slippery formation of nationhood into a kind of immutable racial destiny.” This notion of continuity was reinforced by the system of ’traits‘ introduced in CIVILIZATION III (2001). Each civilisation available to the players is characterized by two features that convey certain advances in the game (Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010, 226–257; Galloway 2006, 97–

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99; Chen 2003, 101–102): The English, for example, are ’expansionist‘ and ’commercial‘, while the Japanese are ’militaristic‘ and ’religious‘. Such traits are little more than a manifestation of common stereotypes and clichés, and they are presented as inherent characteristics of the respective civilization that do not change during the game. “[T]he English, regardless of whether they are Dark Age Anglo-Saxon invaders, Elizabethan renaissance men, Victorian imperialist of Thatcherian cold warriors, are always expansionist and commercial” (Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010, 257).5

Modernists and Ethno-Symbolists: Theoretical Approaches to Nations and Nationalism From the concept of historical scholarship, this assumption of continuity from the agricultural revolution to the present – and even to the near future – is very problematic. Since the 1980s, academic research has thoroughly refuted primordialist assumptions which viewed nations as unchanging, eternal constants in human history.6 Contrarily, the nation has been explained as the result of particular developments in social and intellectual history. According to the definition suggested by one of the most important theorists, the British-Czech anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner, nations are “artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities“, depending on the subjective, voluntary commitment of the individual members. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation (Gellner 1983, 7).

Ernest Renan, one of the eminent French intellectuals of the 19th century, had famously expressed this thought in a 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, when he described the nation as “un plébiscite de tous les jours“, a daily plebiscite: A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly

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Section One Chapter Eight expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite (Renan 1996, 53).

This social constructivist understanding of nationhood is, by now, generally acknowledged by the vast majority of researchers, and the primordialist theories which had flourished in the 19th century, conceiving the nation as a meta-historical given, based on ’objective‘ criteria such as biological descent, culture and language, have been thoroughly marginalized in the scholarly community. But if neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances, as Gellner (1983, 6) emphasized, the issue of periodization gains an enormous importance: When, and under which historical circumstances, did the idea of the nation emerge, and when did it attain its current status as the preeminent category in the organization of human society? In this key question, no consensus has been reached among scholars – and the early modern period has been in the focus of these debates. The leading theorists of the 1980s, most notably Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, argued that the existence of nations is a fairly recent phenomenon (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1990; Gellner 1983). The emergence of nationalism and the subsequent formation of national identities depended on and resulted from a set of economic, cultural and social factors which did not exist before the late 18th and the 19th centuries.7 According to this so-called ’modernist school‘ of nationalism theory, the usage of terms like ’nation‘ or ’nationalism‘ to describe patterns of identity in the early modern period is conceptually misleading, since the existence of nations does not predate the French Revolution. During the last two decades, however, the validity of these modernist interpretations has been increasingly questioned. The “ethnic continuationist” or “ethno-symbolist” approach favoured by British sociologist Anthony D. Smith and his associates emphasizes the close ties between the modern nation and pre-modern ethnic entities which provided a set of memories, values, myths and symbols upon which national sentiments rest (Smith 1986; Smith 1998). Accordingly, the focus of research has shifted towards the analysis and interpretation older patterns of identity – a development that had noticeable consequences for medieval and early modern studies (cf. Smith 2005). Especially in German speaking academia, recent publications have reintroduced the concept of the nation to the 16th and 17th century. The

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most outspoken proponent of this trend is the Swiss historian Caspar Hirschi (2005; 2012), who explicitly and vehemently challenged the core assumption of the modernist school: He argues that nations and nationalism are no exclusive feature of the modern era and tries to assert the existence of national identities in the early modern period, particularly in Renaissance humanism, thus implying a continuity of nationalism from the late 15th to the 20th century (Hirschi 2005: 501). Hirschi's arguments have not been met with unequivocal acclaim by the scholarly community, Reviewers' assessments of his principal 2005 monograph Wettkampf der Nationen have ranged from “stupendously knowledgeable“ and “impressively skillful“ (Sittig 2007) to “very problematic“ and “quite unconvincing“ (Sperber 2006). However, Hirschi's all-out attack on the modernist school can certainly be credited with invigorating the debate on the existence of early modern nations yet again – a debate that is likely to keep historians engaged for years to come. The public perception of nationhood, however, remains far detached from academic debates. The nuanced discussions between modernists and ethno-symbolists on the age of the nation and the applicability of this concept to early modern studies seem insignificant as long as the general public does not even acknowledge the very basic tenets of the social constructivist theory of the nation. In everyday discourses, nations are often still envisioned as primordial, immutable communities whose perpetual existence is taken for granted – a lack of reflection that supports and confirms nationalist and even xenophobic sentiments. The dissemination of scholarly insights on the discontinuous, socially construed and – in a macro-historical perspective – almost ephemeral character of nations has proven difficult and is counteracted by nationalist ideologues and rightist populists both in Europe and the United States. Against the backdrop of obstinate nationalist sentiments in the public discourse, the CIVILIZATION game series appears in a rather dubious light. Is the most successful historical video game of all times8 promoting a primordialist understanding of immutable nationhood that is completely incompatible with historical facts? Has CIVILIZATION been discreetly influencing innumerable gamers with thinly disguised nationalist ideology? And, if so, how should game designers and academic scholars react to this challenge?

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’Civilisations‘ or ’Nations‘? Conceptual Approaches To address these questions, it is, in the first place, necessary to determine whether the collective entities in the CIVILIZATION games are to be deemed ’nations' at all. The game designers have tended to avoid terms like ’nation‘ or ’nationality‘ and preferred to speak of ’civilisations‘ or ’empires‘. Several commentators (Wagner 2013, 256; Reichert 2008, 206; Pobáocki 2002, 171–173) have linked the CIVILIZATION series to Samuel Huntington's famous and controversial ’Clash of Civilizations‘ hypothesis, first published in a Foreign Affairs essay in 1993, two years after the game's first edition was released. At first glance, such a connection seems indeed plausible: Huntington predicted that future political conflicts would no longer be motivated by ideological or economical motives, but would result from the antagonism between civilisations – coherent and selfcontained entities based around a set of values and philosophical principles. Sid Meier's game is not merely entitled CIVILIZATION, it is also centred on the military, economical, technological and cultural rivalry between entities that seem to correspond to Huntington's model. However, I believe that Huntington's concept and the “civilizations” presented in the game share little more than the name. A civilisation, as envisioned by Huntington (1993, 24), usually consists of several states (he mentions the Chinese and the Japanese civilisations as exceptions). Contrarily, each “civilization” in the game is depicted as a state of its own. Huntington's multi-state civilisations could not possibly be represented within the framework of CIVILIZATION'S rules. Huntington (1993, 25) singled out religion as the most important among the factors (history, language, culture, tradition) that differentiate civilisations from each other. Again, the game differs markedly from the Huntingtonian model: Religion has played a very marginal role in the CIVILIZATION series. Up to CIVILIZATION III, it was only implicitly referenced by some available buildings such as temples or cathedrals, or included as a discoverable ’technology‘, among many others, in the tech tree. CIVILIZATION IV hesitantly introduced seven religions, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Taoism. To avoid offending religious sentiments, there were no differences between these seven faiths when it comes to gameplay, and their effect on the game was rather limited.

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Even more importantly, Huntington characterizes the “clash of civilizations” as a recent phenomenon, “the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world” (Huntington 1993, 22). According to his somewhat simplistic model, previous conflicts had occurred between fundamentally different historical actors: monarchs in the early modern period, nation states in the 19th century and rivalling ideologies in the 20th century (Huntington 1993, 22–23). Huntington (1993, 24–25) does argue that civilisations, as he conceives them, are very old entities, whose importance has been superseded for a few centuries by European princes, nations and ideologies, and which have now reclaimed their dominant position in global politics. Nevertheless, his ’clash of civilization‘ theory is unmistakeably modelled on the Post-Cold War era and can hardly be applied in a meaningful way to other periods of history. Sid Meier's civilisations, on the other hand, are not restricted to a particular epoch: they are meant “to stand the test of time”, and the gameplay depends on the premise that they are the dominant political actors in each and every historical setting from the Agricultural Revolution to the Space Age.

Fig. 1: Bulletin from Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION (MicroProse 1991)

Thus, Sid Meier's CIVILIZATION and Samuel Huntington's civilisations have, after closer scrutiny, very little in common. The ethno-political entities in the game do, however, show all the criteria commonly associated with nations: Researchers have pointed out that nationalist

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ideologies claim the precedence of national identity over other layers of identity such as religion, class and gender. This tendency is apparent in the game, where religion is marginalized, gender and class are hardly represented at all (cf. Stephenson 1999), and the player's realm consists of a homogenous mass of loyal virtual citizens with no other affiliation than to their civilisation. Another defining feature of the modern nation, the close connection between ethnicity and statehood, is likewise implemented in the game. Each ’civilisation‘ is a self-contained political entity with a particular system of governance – in this case, the god-like despotism of the player – , thus corresponding to one single state. Other historical forms of political organization, such as the ancient Greek polis, the early medieval gens and countless others, are occasionally mentioned in the game, but never represented by the rules.9 For example, the manual of CIVILIZATION I states that a player who chooses “The Republic” as the system of government for his or her nation rules “over the assembly of city-states formed from the cities that your civilisation has established. Each city is an autonomous state, yet also is part of the republic that you rule” (Milligan and Murphy 1991, 44). The decentralized character of this government, however, has absolutely no influence on the game. The autonomous cities do not pursue any political agenda of their own, and unless he or she consults the manual, the player will not be aware that he or she is at the head of a republic of semi-independent cities. In the CIVILIZATION series, there is but one state for each ‘civilisation’. One of the key elements of nationhood that had been missing from the game's first two editions was introduced in CIVILIZATION III (2001): national borders and national territory (cf. Douglas 2005, 54; Pobáocki 2002, 170). In CIVILIZATION and CIVILIZATION II, the player's civilisation does not have a border as such: it consists of several cities that farm and mine the neighbouring squares, but do not claim a territory beyond their immediate surroundings. In CIVILIZATION III and all subsequent editions, each civilisation controls a larger area that expands beyond the squares that are worked by the cities, a territory demarcated by distinct, colorcoded borders. With the introduction of this new element, the CIVILIZATION series now conforms to the common, generic visual representation of nations: the color-coded area on a map, delineated by clearly defined borders (cf. Anderson 1991, 170 –178). CIVILIZATION III was also the first game in the series10 that explicitly included ’nationality‘ as a factor in its game mechanics (Valdre 2007: 66–

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67): Each citizen in a city has a ’nationality‘, depending on the civilization where he was ’born‘. If, for example, the Aztec Empire captures a Roman city, its inhabitants will retain their Roman nationality and will behave rebellious as long as the Aztecs remain at war with the Romans. To improve the city's loyalty, the player has to attempt to assimilate his Roman subjects into the Aztec culture. In this aspect, CIVILIZATION is almost blatantly nationalistic: Ethnic plurality is a deficiency that has to be amended as quickly as possible. The perfectly plausible assumption that a Roman minority might, in this example, prove culturally enriching to the Aztec society is strictly ruled out by the game mechanics. CIVILIZATION has no place for multiculturalism, there is no creolisation, no hybridity, no diaspora (Galloway 2006, 98; Friedman 1999, 146), only a mono-ethnic national state. Lastly, the CIVILIZATION series implies that its ’civilisations‘ are social entities based on biological ties – an idea repeatedly refuted by academic scholars, but cherished by nationalists. Biological reproduction is a key element in the game (cf. Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010, 257): The player is well advised to keep his or her subjects well-fed and happy, so that they reproduce constantly and keep the civilisation growing. Immigration, as another key factor in population growth, is ominously missing from the game. So, to sum it up, CIVILIZATION presents a very problematic image of its eponymous civilisations: Mono-ethnic nation states that exist since the dawn of time, immutable and perennial, based on biological blood ties. It's an image that appears like a nationalist's dream come true, and an image that is certain to infuriate any serious scholarly theorist of nations and nationalism.

Banal Nationalism Although the nationalist subtext of the CIVILIZATION series seems apparent, it is disputable if this problematic component has a particularly strong impact on the gamers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004, 102–104) defined three categories for the analysis of games: rules, the intrinsic mathematical structures of the game; play, the player's interaction with the game and with other players; and culture, the contexts into which any game is embedded. Recently, researchers have increasingly begun to criticize their colleagues' “tendency to focus on [a] game's rules and pseudo-historical guise, at the expense of its more playful, less

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quantifiable aspects” (Carr 2007, 222). In a 2012 paper, Adam Chapman suggested that “academic work on historical videogames [should] move beyond the examination of the particular historical content of each game (i.e., historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) and to adopt an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e., how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to playfully explore/configure discourse about the past)” (Chapman 2012). David Myers, one of the leading proponents of such a ludological approach, has questioned the relevance of ’backstories‘ to video game play. Veteran players tend to eschew written rules and instructions and judge a game's components primarily in terms of their ludic attributes, i. e. the function they have within the game's economy. Referring to the controversial game GRAND THEFT AUTO, Myers argues that “gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games – They don’t see ‘get a blowjob from a hooker, then run her over.’ They see a power-up.” (Myers 2010, 112; quoting Koster 2005) Similarly, experienced CIVILIZATION players appreciate barbarian encampments as ’goody huts‘ that confer benefits, such as technological advances, upon the explorer, and do not reflect on the imperialist backstory of barbarian tribes that are eradicated by expanding civilisations (Myers 2010, 110; Douglas 2005, 51). Myers acknowledges that players might be unconsciously indoctrinated by a game's ideological backstory, but he argues that this effect is diminished by frequent gaming: “After extended and recursive play within a game, game object values and meanings increasingly narrow into values and meanings that are more functionally valid (instrumental), more completely realized, and more definitively determined by the game system and code than by the culture in which the game play and player reside”. Thus, “frequent and dedicated players of computer strategy games will be, over time, increasingly less likely to interpret or be affected by games as cultural statements, either consciously or unconsciously” (Myers 2010, 115; cf. Carr 2007, 227). If one follows Myers' assessment, CIVILIZATION'S primordialist backstory is unlikely to have a strong influence on public perceptions of nationhood. However, it might not be appropriate to disregard it altogether: In his seminal monograph Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig (1995) emphasizes the importance of unspectacular, everyday practices that continuously reinforce and reproduce national identity. He draws attention to all the subtle, but omnipresent reminders of nationhood: the abundance of flags in public

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spaces, on buildings but also on consumer goods and other items, for example, or the frequent usage of seemingly innocuous pronouns like ’we‘ or ’us‘ in politics and journalism, which imply the existence of a collective identity that encompasses speaker and addressee (Billig 1995, 38–41, 106). To Billig, the dissemination of nationalism depends primarily on these “banal” aspects: In so many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building” (Billig 1995, 8).

In the context of Billig's understanding of banal nationalism, the nationalist subtext of games like CIVILIZATION is far from irrelevant. Even if a veteran gamer focuses on gameplay and rarely pays attention to the backstory, as Myers argues, he or she is, nevertheless, constantly confronted with a reaffirmation of national continuity. The nationalist foundation of CIVILIZATION is not restricted to a superficial backstory, but also pertains to the game mechanics. As the player develops and expands his/her civilization, competes with the opposition and reaps the in-game rewards for methodical, well-planned technological, cultural, military and demographic progress, he or she internalizes continuity and thereby enacts the grand narrative of the primordial nation. It seems indeed plausible that CIVILIZATION is commercially successful because it corresponds to the national sentiments of the 21st century. Researchers have noted that gamers appreciate if the fictional protagonists of purportedly ’historical‘ video games behave like contemporary people, because they want to implement their own knowledge and strategies for problem solving, and they expect that their 21st-century approach is rewarded by the game. To think and act like an early modern nobleman or a Roman emperor might be an interesting perspective for historians and role-players, but the majority of casual gamers prefers if ’historical‘ characters stick to the norms of behaviour that they, themselves, are familiar with (Grosch 2002, 76–77). CIVILIZATION implies that all people, from 4.000 BC to the present, have lived according to the same national paradigm that the players are used to (cf. Kubetzky 2012, 93). As such, it might appeal to casual video gamers who are reluctant to immerse themselves in historical modes of identity formation.

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The Weird and the Wonderful The preceding considerations raise the question whether it is possible to reconcile the CIVILIZATION series and the genre of 4X games with a scholarly approach to nationality. It is unquestionable that the concept of CIVILIZATION is based on an uncritical and problematic understanding of nationhood. Yet it would be pointless simply to denounce the game as an expression of a ’wrong‘ concept of history. CIVILIZATION was never meant to be an educational tool that teaches players a correct view of human history (cf. Kee et al. 2009, 305), if there even is such a thing as ’correct‘ history. It is, after all, primarily a video game designed to be entertaining – and, as the last twenty years have shown, it is a very good video game indeed. A Canadian team of researchers recently admitted: “Games that have been designed by academics, with little grounding in theories of good gaming, are typically of the boring drill-and-response type. As researchers, we run the risk of ruining what makes a good game if we do not consult professional game designers” (Kee et al. 2009, 306). Academic criticism of CIVILIZATION'S nationalist subtext might be valid, but the criticism must not result in an – undoubtedly futile – attempt to ruin a good game. On the contrary, it seems expedient to consider and respect the traditions and genre conventions of global strategy games, and try to reach a synthesis between historical authenticity, socio-political responsibility and enjoyable gameplay. A quick glance at the strategy games published during the last decade shows that some of them have avoided CIVILIZATION'S fallacy and eschewed inappropriate notions of national continuity. Paradox Interactive, a Swedish game publisher, has, for example, developed a series of strategy games that follow world history from antiquity to the 20th century (cf. Brendel 2012). Contrary to CIVILIZATION, each game is devoted to a particular historical era: EUROPA UNIVERSALIS: ROME (2008) is set in classic antiquity, CRUSADER KINGS (2004) covers the Middle Ages, EUROPA UNIVERSALIS (2000) the early modern period, VICTORIA: AN EMPIRE UNDER THE SUN (2003) deals with 19th century imperialism and HEARTS OF IRON (2002) with the Second World War. Each game attempts to highlight patterns of identity and forms of government that are typical for the respective periods: feudalism and dynastic ties in CRUSADER KINGS, denominational differences in EUROPA UNIVERSALIS, national and class identities in VICTORIA and political ideologies (fascism,

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communism, liberalism) in HEARTS OF IRON. Together, the games cover a timeframe that rivals CIVILIZATION'S grand scale, but they avoid the illusion of perennial, unchanging nations. However, the titles in the EUROPA UNIVERSALIS series are usually considered specialist games (Brendel 2012, 124–126) that cater to a very limited audience of ’hardcore wargamers‘ who appreciate the high complexity and the historical accuracy. When it comes to commercial success and societal impact, they are far from challenging the CIVILIZATION series. Even if the CIVILIZATION designers were willing to follow academics' suggestions, it would be meaningless to impose EUROPA UNIVERSALIS-style discontinuities upon the game. CIVILIZATION'S gameplay, and its appeal to its players, is based on the notion of continuity, ahistorical as that might be. I believe that it would be far more feasible to stress elements that have been an intrinsic part of the game since its first incarnation in 1991. SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION, in its original form, had a high potential for parodic and even subversive play. The game deliberately toyed with ironic images: In diplomatic negotiations with computer-controlled civilisations, a player would be confronted with the portrait of the opposing leader, against a background determined by the civilisation's current form of government. If computer-controlled China happened to be a monarchy, for example, a player would be greeted by Mao Zedong standing in front of the pyramids, flanked by advisers in Pharaonic Egyptian attire. A democratic Russia would be even more bizarre (and possibly provocative to American players): In this case Stalin would be surrounded by the Founding Fathers. A player's own cabinet was also represented by clichéd caricatures of ’typical‘ representatives of the chosen form of government, without any ties to the historical period. Despotic ministers, for example, invariable looked like a stereotypical Latin American junta, even if they happened to govern Ancient Greece. “The effect,” William Stephenson (1999) wrote, “is equivalent to an absurd but fascinating masked carnival of governments, in which the High Priest Mao Tse Tung might rub shoulders with Comrade Abraham Lincoln.“

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Fig. 2: Diplomatic Interaction Menu from Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION (MicroProse 1991)

But this sense of anachronistic irony (cf. Atkins 2005, 78–81) was not restricted to the visual representation of leaders; it was also reflected in the game mechanics. The absurdity of ahistorical combat units became an iconic feature of the CIVILIZATION series. In Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco (1989, 74) had introduced “Aztec Equitation” as an utterly useless course for the School of Comparative Irrelevance. CIVILIZATION allowed players to lead not only Aztec cavalry, but also Babylonian musketeers, Mongolian submarines and countless other improbable units. The parodist element was further emphasized by the way these military formations performed in combat: “Players of CIVILIZATION were occasionally disconcerted when a ‘lucky’ veteran Phalanx unit, fortified in an enemy city, destroyed an attacking Battleship unit. Mathematically it was possible, but the image conjured up just didn’t sit right. How could ancient spearmen take out a modern steel warship?“ (Reynolds 1996, 32). Between 1991 and 2010, designers gradually toned down the satirical and farcical elements of CIVILIZATION and tried to make the game appear more “realistic” (cf. Fogu 2009, 118–119; Valdre 2007, 66).11 Firaxis Games, the developer that took over the CIVILIZATION franchise in 2001, currently hosts an “Educator's Exchange” section on their website (Firaxis 2013) that promotes the use of CIVILIZATION in historical education at schools and universities. Academic researchers, most notably Kurt Squire

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at the University of Wisconsin, have also published extensively on the usability of CIVILIZATION as a tool for teaching (cf. Squire 2004). The claim to historical authenticity has become a major component in the promotion of CIVILIZATION (Kubetzky 2012, 84–92; Glitz 2010, 163; Valdre 2007, 69). Accordingly, civilisation leaders are now represented in appropriate settings, with a visual background that corresponds to their factual historical origins – i.e., Roman architecture for Augustus or an Aztec temple for Montezuma. Changes in the combat mechanics addressed the ’spearman vs. tank‘ dilemma outlined above, which had been heavily criticized by players, and drastically reduced the chances of a technologically inferior unit defeating an advanced opponent. The improbable units in the vein of Babylonian musketeers and Aztec horsemen remain, but they are supplemented by civilisation-specific units (cf. Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010, 257): If the player chooses to play the German civilisation, he can, for example, build Panzers which are more effective than normal tanks. In the same way, Roman legionaries replace generic swordsmen; Russia may recruit Cossacks that are superior to ordinary cavalry etc. Thus, each civilization receives its trademark units and the game appears to be more ’historically accurate‘, since players are now able to recreate Cossack raids and armoured blitzkrieg with the appropriate units. But as Elijah Meeks (2009, 4) has pointed out, such an attempt at superficial authenticity has, ultimately, absurd consequences: a “rather simplistic representation of ethnicity […] that envisioned a people statically destined to produce Panzers regardless of their particular dynamic history, […] as if the knowledge of high-quality armored warfare vehicles was somehow imprinted on the Teutonic genome.“

In many respects, the attempts to increase the ’historical realism‘ of the CIVILIZATION games had the opposite effect. In the older versions of the game, the player could hardly believe that he or she was playing ’real history‘. After diplomatic negotiations with Pharaoh Mao, and after seeing battle tanks shot to pieces by medieval archers, he or she had to realize that CIVILIZATION was merely a “caricatured adaptation of the world history” (Mäyrä 2008, 99). The elements of parodist and even farcical play allowed the game to subvert its own ideological subtext. “It is at these moments that the game can turn into parody or pastiche and ideology is de-naturalized” (Lammes 2003, 127). With regard to the problematic concept of immutable nations that underpins the CIVILIZATION concept,

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the paradoxical elements of the game – in its early editions – ensured that players would not take the assumption of national continuity at face value. But the image of CIVILIZATION has changed (cf. Chen 2003, 105–106). Now, with its increasing pretensions of historical realism and its purported educational value, the respectable CIVILIZATION series (Glitz 2010, 163) is no longer immediately recognizable as an entertaining pseudo-historical farce. Compared to the original 1991 game, players of CIVILIZATION V might be more inclined to believe that the game allows them to experience the way how civilisations and nations truly develop. And even if they do not consciously believe CIVILIZATION'S story of primordial national continuity, they might still internalize its assumptions in a textbook example of “banal nationalism”.

Fig. 3: Diplomatic Interaction Menu from Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION (MicroProse 1991)

Conclusion If Firaxis Games and the CIVILIZATION developers are truly interested in the educational value of their game, they should probably rethink their claim to historical realism. Instead of implying that Civilization is somehow historically accurate, and thereby promoting a dangerous nationalist narrative, they would be well advised to return to the merits of

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the original 1991 game and acknowledge CIVILIZATION'S satirical potential – in the visual presentation, in the texts as well as in the rules and game mechanics. If the Weird and the Wonderful, the paradoxical, contradictory and nonsensical elements regained their place in CIVILIZATION, the game could again become a “cathartic pastiche” (Lammes 2003, 128), that ironizes and subverts the nationalist narrative. If the primordial, immutable nation is represented by Pharaoh Mao Zedong and a bunch of Babylonian musketeers, it is difficult to take it seriously.

Notes 1

Players eXplore unknown worlds, eXpand their domain to form vast empires, eXploit resources and eXterminate opposing civilizations. The term was coined in 1993 by game critic Alan Emrich to describe the science fiction game MASTER OF ORION (Brendel 2012, 129). 2 The conservative American bias inherent to the CIVILIZATION series has been noted by other critics as well. Players are encouraged to expand their realms into unclaimed territories, and the aboriginal barbarians encountered in these virgin lands are merely obstacles to the progress of civilisation – essentially, a video game adaptation of the American mythology of the Western Frontier, envisioned by Fredrick Jackson Turner in the late 19th century (Kee et al. 2009, 305; Douglas 2005, 52; Kapell 2002). 3 This chapter's observations will be restricted to the five games in the main series. Other elements of the franchise like the spinoffs SID MEIER’S COLONIZATION (1994), SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTAURI (1999) and the short-lived online game CIVILIZATION WORLD (2011), the modding community (cf. Owens 2011) and the open source project FREECIV (1996) are beyond the scope of this paper. 4 For a detailed description of CIVILIZATION, its gameplay and mechanics see, for example, Kubetzky 2012, 78–83. 5 Other editions of CIVILIZATION tried to avoid this implementation of national cliches by assigning similar traits to the civilisations' leaders. In CIVILIZATION IV (2005), for example, the English are ’expansionist‘ and ’financial‘ when led by Elizabeth I., and ’charismatic‘ and ’protective‘ under Winston Churchill. Whether this shift from racial to personal traits makes any difference for the players' perception of the game's civilisations is rather doubtful (Kaindel and Steffelbauer 2010, 258). 6 For an overview of the theoretical approaches to nations and nationalism, see, for example ÖzkÕrÕmlÕ 2010; Llobera 1999; Hutchinson 1994, 3–9. 7 Benedict Anderson (1991) pointed out that the emergence of national identities depended, on the one hand, on the supersession of religiously privileged languages like Latin by vernacular idioms, as well as, on the other hand, on the dissemination of information through ’print-capitalism‘, i. e. effective networks for the distribution of printed texts, in particular popular media like novels and newspapers. These conditions originated in the early modern period, but were fully

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developed no earlier than the 19th century. Hobsbawm (1990) and Gellner (1983), emphasized the close ties between the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the modern nation. Through its centralised education system, the national state creates a supra-regional language and culture which, in turn, ensures the high social mobility of the individual citizens that is a necessity for a growth-oriented industrial society. Furthermore, it is capable of providing the juridical and monetary framework for the establishment of a capitalist economy. 8 CIVILIZATION emphatically presents itself as “historical“, as a way to make and experience history. Advertising slogans, graphics, soundtracks and game mechanics abound with familiar historical references (Glitz 2010, 163; Douglas 2005, 62; cf. Chapman 2013). Myers (2010) and Galloway (2006, 102–103) have, however, denied that CIVILIZATION is to be understood as a historical game, arguing that it “retained the trappings of a historical simulation only in the most superficial and nominative sense” (Myers 2010, 107). In the context of this chapter it is important that CIVILIZATION is presented by its designers as a historical game and is acknowledged as such by the general public. 9 City states where introduced in CIVILIZATION V, but they are always computercontrolled ’minor powers‘ and not a political option for the player's own civilization. 10 CIVILIZATION IV retained a similar implementation of ’nationality‘, but it was largely removed from CIVILIZATION V. 11 In the latest editions of CIVILIZATION, satirical elements are largely restricted to occasional humorous statements in the leaders' dialogue during diplomatic negotiations.

CHAPTER NINE TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIES OF AUTHENTICITY PRODUCTION IN WORLD WAR II FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER GAMES TIM RAUPACH

Summary The historical cultures of media societies of the 21st century are substantially influenced by the spread and appropriation of video games. In particular the range of ’history‘ games available has experienced a remarkable expansion over the last five years, with the sector dominated by games that enact the subjects concerning the Second World War. With this new high-tech medium the overwhelmingly adolescent players are given the possibility of immediately rising to assume the role of actors with a military position in a seemingly authentic past. For this target group the popular game series of so-called ’World War II First-Person Shooter‘, or ’World War Shooter‘ for short, have advanced to become the decisive moderation spaces of the historic agenda prescribed in terms of content as well as aesthetics by the key medium of television. One can assume that, to a significant degree, precisely these post-war generations appropriate their ’historical knowledge‘ about the Second World War through their gaming experiences. Based on the aesthetic design of World War shooters, criteria will be introduced regarding how these games present historic settings, how they evoke the attribute of ’authentic‘ – and which meaning the simulated subjective ’experience of history‘ the player has through their seemingly direct participation in warfare. For this reason, the subsequent considerations regarding possible analysis categories for strategies of authentication and attribution of

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authenticity of and through World War shooters as an example of transmedial appropriation of history will be carried out in a perspective which combines historical and media studies.

War Games as a Subject of Historical Scholarship 5 April, 1943, 7:35: Foreign Minister Joseph Goebbels reports that Stalin has decided to sign the ceasefire offered after the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, which involved heavy losses, and to enter into negotiations regarding the ‘bitter peace’. After German atomic U-boats had finally cut off the British Isles from the supply convoys and Great Britain was half reduced to rubble, Prime Minister Winston Churchill resigned his positions. Shortly thereafter the British General Staff and Admiralty surrendered unconditionally – after seven years of war. The German Reich and its allies, the United States of America, have won the Second World War ” (Schwarz 2012, 4).

This is the personal account of a general who participated in the campaign against the Soviet Union. Admittedly, these reported experiences come from a simulated war and from simulated world affairs: the general participated as a player in the strategic video game HEARTS OF IRON III – FOR THE MOTHERLAND (Paradox Interactive 2009). Such historicising video games make it possible for their participants to undergo a wide number of variants of ‘history’ – and even experience themselves as immediate actors in the events. In doing so this not only involves a scholarship-based academic discourse about a parallel history(ies) or literary alternative history(ies) (in keeping with Salewski 1999), but also highly emotionalised imaginations of an active and direct participation in the events of the Second World war: today’s players as the general, or perhaps soldier, of yesterday. The question arises as to whether the experience horizons of such video games possibly create ‘contemporary witnesses’ of an entirely new kind. For this reason, our attention must be directed to the clarification of message and appropriation qualities of these very directly experienced forms of medial communication of history, in the context of the examination of the interaction of individual authenticity strategies of military games with historic settings. Although these war games are based to a significant degree on previously established, popular historical movies, they have still developed into an independent medial socialisation factor with a specific aesthetic in

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the last few decades. Therefore the fundamental question can be posed here as to whether, and if so to which extent, war games based on real historical conflict scenarios serve as areas of historical communication, above all for younger generations. Since historical and historicising formats, ‘histotainment’ for short, have successfully conquered the prime time slots of television entertainment, historical scholarship is obliged to get to grips with this largely unprecedented depiction of history (cf. Korte/Paletscheck 2009; Assmann 2007). In contrast to popular movies1 as well as further forms of expressing historical worlds of experience, for instance living history formats2, video games with historical content have hardly been noticed to date (cf. Horn 2007, 215ff.; Rosenfelder 2008, 109ff.). However, it is precisely the World War shooters that seem particularly predestined, in the sense of a dialogue between media and historical studies, to provoke the question of which images are offered in games with which means and from which game communities they are accessed and appropriated with which gratification. Moreover, in the last decade a clear trend is detected in relation to the content-based orientation of the games: the 19th and 20th century dominates with 63.5 per cent of all games, before antiquity with ten per cent, early modernity with 8.4 per cent, as well as the Middle Ages with just eight per cent. For their part, the majority of the games with contemporary historical backgrounds were dedicated to topics and scenarios from the history of the Second World War (55 per cent) (cf. Schwarz 2010, 14ff.) and therefore precisely our underlying historical experience horizon. From a hermeneutic media-studies perspective this can be scrutinised for textual, structural and medial-aesthetic strategies of authenticity production in World War shooters. The examination of aesthetic strategies and forms of depictions for World War shooters can be easily connected to the question of reception and appropriation. For example, the question following the authenticity problematic could be: how do game plots focused on the scenes of the Second World War influence the individual and collective memory of subsequent generations, bearing in mind the horizon reference of the World Wide Web? How do game producers and game communities in different societies handle respectively different experience horizons and possibly different identification needs? In which transnational and national, in which political and cultural coordination

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systems are which memory formations negotiated, driven and continued? Which confrontations and compromises can be identified in this European, even global field of interaction? Does the international transfer and worldwide use of video games possibly lead to convergence in terms of the interpretation of the past? Examining these problem areas of media studies, communication studies and historical scholarship in an interdisciplinary way is, virtually an absolute necessity, above all in view of the high sales numbers and the extraordinary acceptance of first-person shooters with historical settings in the early 21st century (cf. Klein 2010, 69ff.).

Remediation in Video Games The media mix inherent to video games with historical settings represents a particularly relevant subject for the processes of remediation that are currently being discussed so controversially. With these processes it should be assumed that they do not at all concern a battle by the new media to drive out the old but rather that both sides profitably exchange and adapt elements (cf. Bolter 2001; Bolter/Grusin 2002; Buckingham 2006). The phenomenon of remediation can be examined perfectly at the very interface of reality and virtuality in video games (cf. Schlüter 2008, 317ff.; cf. Müller 2009, 273ff.; cf. Sandkühler 2009, 55ff.). According to the remediation approach, the claim to authenticity can be understood precisely with ‘historical’ settings as a visual strategy of evidence establishment, as the creation of ‘credibility’, ‘veracity’, or ‘genuineness’ of what is being depicted. In this way the familiar narratives from ‘old’ media such as movies and televisions are appropriated and adapted to the new format (cf. Crawford 2003; Burn 2006). The way in which such elements handed down from formats from the central medium of television find their way into video games, and the effects these possibly familiar narratives have on the reception of the players, has still not been answered by scholarship. In terms of research politics, my chapter pleads for interdisciplinary research between historical and media scholarship. However, media studies do not appear as a supplement or an auxiliary discipline to historical research, but rather it comprehends how to emphasise the problems of handling history, to the extent that it sharpens the consciousness that our knowledge of the past is fundamentally based on its medial communication. Under these auspices, World War shooters advance to significant “media of history” (Peters 2009, 82).

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’Remediation‘ is currently experiencing much attention in academic media discourses. Especially for video games with a historic setting, the phenomenon of remediation opens an innovative research perspective which is able to contextualise the question of the authenticity of the depiction of history in games towards intermediality. The concept of remediation as “mediation of mediation” (Müller 2009, 273) aims at processes that take place between media and media networks. For the development of media, the American media scholars David Bolter and Richard Grusin refer to the tendency of media contents and media use to appear ‘immediate’. This means that from the perspective of users, new media always attempt to negate their mediality for the sake of the illusion of direct spatial and temporal participation in the events, in short: so that their content affects an illusion of realism (cf. Bolter/Grusin 2002, 21ff.). Based on the inseparability of ‘mediation’ and ‘reality’ and on the claim to new design by remediation, there exists a double logic of realism illusion as an oscillation between immediacy and hypermediacy. For this reason, previously discussed aspects of remediation must be expanded to a fundamental category in reference to the area of game studies: regarding the question of genre patterns between games, movies, and television. Type patterns or rather ‘genres’ have a decisive role in the forms and possibilities of the immersion of players in the virtual reality of games. Their plot, reception, and narrative patterns are not solely based upon the logic of the games, but rather also centrally on the genre-specific preknowledge and the memories of the player. Moreover, with this categorical expansion of the remediation concept further productive connecting factors are made possible between individual media formats through the shared genre patterns and categories of video games, movies and TV.

Types and Genres The approaches of “text as action” (Müller 2009, 274) developed by the scholarly literary research in the 1970s and 1980s have made it clear which role genre-specific assumptions and characteristic elements of historic knowledge play for the steering of literary and medial production. Against this backdrop, genre and genre categories should be understood as central elements, which decisively influence these action processes (cf. 2009, 275ff.).

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As an example of such a transfer (of knowledge based on a certain genre imported into a game) the opening of the video game MEDAL OF HONOR: FRONTLINE (EA 2002) can be introduced: The first sequence relies in many details on the movie scene depicting the landing on Omaha Beach from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (USA 1998) and therefore indirectly suggests the linear, narrative plot pattern. The remediation of the war movie increases the chance that the player, starting with the player’s experience with the movie scene, immediately recognises opponents and levels and instinctively follows the linear course of the game narration without encountering the limits of the game and thus destroying their immersion. With regard to genre discussion, one glance at the research situation is enough to find numerous publications in the area of literary scholarship, film and media studies which aim at the functions of genre for the production and perception in regard to the reception of old and new media under theoretic and/or historic premises (cf. Altman 1998, Fiske 1988). Genres apparently provide useful frameworks for medial action, which are gladly assumed by producers and users looking to ‘find their bearings’. They are subject to a historical change influenced by the genre, social and economic-technological factors, but also of factors of the history of mentalities. Because of their historical flexibility, even today genres continue to develop their function and effect for the user in many medial products (including digital ones). Although there are indications of the meaning of specific styles, for instance of cinema (cf. Bolter and Grusin 2002, 42ff.) in studies of remediation, the interaction of this stylistic form with specific genre functions and ‘memories’ of this genre is often acknowledged only implicitly. Regarding this blank space in research, one understands that genres and type patterns recommend strongly the consideration of their remediation processes in military games with historic settings if one wants to see what about them seems ’authentic’. The concept of authenticity serves as the essential instrument for selecting suitable objects of study, here the introduced example being World War shooters.3 The concept appears with a double meaning: on the one hand as a depiction of an ‘authentic’ witness in the sense of historical

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scholarship, and on the other as the depiction of an ‘authentic’ (game) experience in the sense of game studies. The strategies of authentic depiction in World War shooters include, for instance, techniques of simulation of corporeality or also the reference to technical-aesthetic parameters of framework media (for instance film material from the 1940s or syntagmata from news formats) whose evoked logic of depiction connotes what is shown. Those strategies of authentic depiction can be expressed, for example, in the form of loud whistling noises and optical blurring effects, which should suggest the immediate threat of bodily harm from nearby explosions, as well as with preliminary meetings for military missions that lean on the aesthetic of historical newsreel reports and therefore would like to produce effects of authenticity.

Four Strategies of Authenticity Production When World War shooters stage contemporary history, they tie ‘historical images’ virulent in societies with knowledge acquired by research and with collective and individual memory traces of the players. Thus they establish an apparently immediate connection between the narrated reference time and the present. They use immersion effects to enable a vast array of feelings and thoughts that come with a subjectively felt participation and complicity in the suggested historic events. Moreover, they can provide apparent evidence of how the past “really was” and in the sense of a “persuasive game” (cf. Bogost 2007) attempt to convince the player of a ‘historical reality’. The complex phenomenon of apparent evidence and emotional involvement gives rise to the supposition (and preliminary investigations support this assumption) that fictional images and experience horizons generated in video games are likely more impressive and stay with the user longer than purely historiographical media products. And this is independent of which concrete images of the production are remembered, whether archive, film, or computer images.4 What is decisive for the process of player memory is initially that the attribution of authenticity is immediately and medially tied to experienced events and actions of remediation processes. Thus authentic depiction can be re-construed as a complex of intermedia references to genres and type patterns. The power of authenticity of the medially offered images and experience worlds proves itself in that these do not appear as ontologically set entities but rather as typically linguistic and medial action patterns that

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develop in specific historic connections. Types, or rather the memory of familiar type patterns, live on in the digital age in this way. Taking up the authenticity of their depiction as a question of staging strategies demands that this question is interpreted not only historically but also concretely in regard to media aspects. In the area of game studies, for instance, Staffan Bjork and Jussi Holopainen speak of so-called ”game design patterns” that are designed via the interrelationship between narrative and regularity to stage the respective contents as authentic (Bjork and Holopainen 2005, 410). A similar concept can also be found in JeanLouis Comolli under the concept of “reality effects”. Comolli refers to the ideological dimension of reality production on the part of industrial organisation of cinema and its technical equipment (Comolli 1980, 121). Fundamental approaches can also be found in Roland Barthes’ “effect de réel”5 which were also conceived in regard to early medial formats but, if modified, could also be applied for the examination of World War shooters (Barthes 1982, 81). In addition, the underlying concept here of authentication strategies has to be compared to selected game-analytic approaches. Among these are the works of Eva Kingseep regarding authenticity, for instance, as well as specific topics for the aspect of the communication of history, for instance the construction of the image of National Socialist Germany in films and video games (Kingsepp 2008). Alexander Galloway’s realism concept represents an additional fruitful research foundation for the given topic upon which the further development of authentication strategies can be conceptually oriented (Galloway 2006). If one resolves to choose ’realism illusion‘ as a broader term for different strategies of producing ‘authentic’ (moving) images, then it appears sensible, with regard to the examination of World War shooters, to initially theoretically divide individual strategies of authenticity production and attempt a kind of artificial separation of tightly-woven ingame strategies. Very different illusions of referentiality, which admittedly work together closely in the praxis of video games, are strived for in the digital scenarios of video games. In this way, as regards the appropriation of video games, two things are important: Firstly, the players of such historicising games may experience much stronger immersion effects than the viewer of history shows on television. In video games the user mutates to become the soldier, an active participant in the events, who can act immediately and influence the

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course of the game and therefore history. The playing field is experienced as a battlefield, player experiences might possibly develop into historical and life experiences. For this reason it may be assumed that these parahistorical experiences are appropriated more quickly, intensively and deeply than historical or historicising experiences with other audio-visual media. Secondly, it should be taken into account that the players not only (inter-) act with the settings of the video games on a content level, but moreover on an information level as well: the process operations of the computer defined by the programming also defines its action and therefore experience spaces. Behind the apparent level of what is audio-visually perceptible, the code of the game dictates the dimensions of “historical experiences” by representing historical processes with the help of computer processes in the form of a “procedural rhetoric” and thus makes these actively tangible for the players (cf. Bogost 2007, 1ff.). In this way history can be forcibly brought near to the player – but also as a system of connected variables with the connected configuration requirements, similar to how Hayden White, for example, characterised an “organicist” form of historiography (cf. White 1973, 16-17). Thus a success of the content level of the games is always accompanied by the successful appropriation of the game system – presumably, both factors together determine the experience horizons of the players in regard to the implied historic connections (cf. Galloway 2006, 90-91). For this reason, the connecting communication of players in online forums via audio-visual design means of video games as well as via successful playing strategies apparently also revolves around not only the discussion of historical detail questions and contexts but also the extent to which these are consistent with the ‘inner’ information rule systems and represented realistically.6 However, the design of the fundamental game processes is not in the service of producing authenticity, but rather aims at entertaining and consistent player experiences that immersively integrate the player in the course of the game and should make them ignore any mistakes in the realism illusion as well as distracting external influences.7 In this context, in addition to authenticity production the remediation of ‘old’ formats serves both the audio-visual support of procedural rhetoric as well as the covering of missing free spaces of the player as an actor within linearly designed game systems.

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Authenticity as Depiction In the area of aesthetic communication, the attribution of authenticity is to be understood as the form, result or the effect of medial depiction that only experiences a discursive appreciation in the referential horizon of the reception when, as a technical method, it is associated with a particular capacity for truth, credibility and reality (cf. Wortmann 2003, 155-156). Starting from this premise, the question of the authenticity of the depiction in video games with historical settings has less to do with certain unchangeable parameters than with whether the connections to familiar staging strategies and depictive principles (e.g. genres or type patterns) and established game mechanics or informational codes can be established. For this reason, four basic forms of ’authenticity creation‘ can be differentiated: a) Authentication via Realism of Depiction and Movement The first access concentrates on the illusions of realism. It is assumed that the moving images of video games refer to aspects of reality. At the same time two additional areas of reality can be differentiated: on the one hand the visible aspects and phenomena of the real, which are transformed into form, material, and surface-realistic illusions, and on the other hand the invisible structures and laws of the real. Because computer animation involves a concept of moving images, these structural strategies also belong to the illusion of natural moving processes and patterns (movement reality) (cf. Maulko 2008, 28ff.). Applied to the area of World War shooters, this differentiation makes it possible to take the Second World War into account as a game setting as amply as possible on multiple historical levels. This initially refers to the depiction of uniforms, weapons, vehicles and scenes, which should depict the historical reality in detail as well as in individual motion sequences (e.g. of soldiers and military vehicles) as precisely as possible. Correspondingly, the realism of the military simulation appears as a realism of technical details.8 This in part impressive, detailed remodelling of historical paragons frequently serves as a signal of authenticity and represents a central aspect for the developers of the re-enactment of historical events. Other elements one could expect from a depiction of war aiming for realism (e.g. victims, wounded people, rape, ethnic cleansing, streams of

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refugees) are seldom or even never depicted (cf. Nagenborg 2009, 270ff.). On the one hand, the integration of war crimes and presentations of losses would lead to a significant brutalisation of the events, and on the other it would make the horrors of war and its lasting effects much more clear. As noted, they do not appear as design elements in the majority of World War shooters. The equation of fine-grained depiction with realism is an association which, although it seems to refer mainly to the historical backdrop of theatres of war including military arsenals with the insinuated limitations, is apparently accepted and carried by the players of World War shooters. In a 2005 survey of about 2,900 players concerning first-person shooter usage patterns, the current representatives of the series CALL OF DUTY and MEDAL OF HONOR received the by far the highest rating for the factor ‘realism’ (cf. Lehmann 2008, 249-250). b) Authentication via Patterns of Perception and Experience The second general claim of authentic depiction in video games with historical settings refers to the illusion that photorealistic computer images reference the filmic-photographic. This aesthetic construction is divided into two image types that can be used to suggest the greatest possible authenticity: on the one hand the (moving) images from the past (e.g. documentary film material and archive images) and on the other hand fictive images from popular feature films. In this way in particular, the methods of depiction and perspectives as well as the “look” of the filmic are synthetically remodelled to refer to conventional patterns of perception and skim off certain illusions and effect potentials of the analogue paragon and role model (cf. Wiesing 2005, 120ff.). The motifs of this remodelling are apparent: a traditional perception standard was intended to gain acceptance and raise the illusionist effect of the machine images. In the familiar look of ‘filmic materiality’ it is also fundamentally easier for computer images to evoke certain experience patterns, experience qualities and expectations among players who have firmly associated these with the analogous role models and their conventions of depiction in the course of their medial socialisation. By now the illusion strategies of the filmicphotographic achieve such qualitatively high results that the character of the computer image as an artificial machine artefact increasingly recedes into the background. Instead, synthetic images display illusion potential and experience qualities in an increased extent, which could also be attributed to conventional image types (cf. Richter 2008, 171ff.). Equipped

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with this new influential power, computer animations are capable of making recourse to image-medial core areas from other artistic and popular media and ‘copying’ certain, already established historical image offers into their own circulation of use. Thus the first mission in MEDAL OF HONOR: RISING SUN (EA 2003), for instance, is closely based on the attack sequence from the feature film PEARL HARBOR (USA 2001). Additionally, there is a mission with the title “The Bridge on the River Kwai”; it is modelled on the 1957 feature film of the same name by David Lean. Here the game character assumes the tasks of destroying the bridge. These kinds of references to war movies can be identified in nearly all World War shooters. Thus World War shooters successfully carry out a secondary use of time-honoured depictions of history, in which it should be simultaneously assumed that it can also change ’historical knowledge.’9 The interaction between strategies of authentication and processes of remediation makes it necessary to analyse World War shooters against the backdrop of fictive and factual television formats (feature film / docudrama / documentary) and in this way find out how already established strategies of authentication are carried on or changed in video games. c) Authentication with the Help of Contemporary Witnesses In advertisements for World War shooters with trailers, the claim of authenticity in the depiction of historic settings is not only aimed at through an imitation of the filmic ’look‘ of war movies or perhaps a direct reference to certain plots from the genre, but also through the fact that in their structure and image composition these trailers should be reminiscent of a documentary. Remarking upon combat operations experienced personally, statements by contemporary witnesses are spliced with game sequences and historic film and audio material. In a trailer for MEDAL OF HONOR: PACIFIC ASSAULT (EA 2004), five US veterans recall their battles against Japanese troops in the Pacific theatre. Their statements are followed by selected excerpts from the game that are intended to visually portray what has been said (cf. Schmidt 2005, 85ff.). The staging of contemporary witnesses is only one form among many of telling a seemingly biographical story. In this way, the eyewitness possibly fulfils a dual function: on the one hand with his appearance the witness certifies the pact, tacitly agreed upon between the producer and the consumer, of the authenticity of what is depicted – and, furthermore, the

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witness certifies the historical message of the entire format. This impression is further strengthened by the fact that the interplay of eyewitness accounts and the historical film and audio recordings convey the impression of a coherent authenticity of historical depiction with the images of the game, which is intended to be transferred from the documentary images and audio to the game.10 For this reason, the integration of eyewitnesses in World War shooters must be examined as an ‘indirect’ strategy of authentication for their staging strategies and effect potentials. This pertains to the numerous possibilities of staging and self-dramatization of eyewitnesses and their statements in the game (context). d) Authentication via the Ego Perspective In addition to the efforts displayed in which the games attempt to grant seeming historical exactness through the means of richly-detailed audiovisual elements, an endeavour can be perceived whereby the player is brought as close as possible to the war experiences of individual soldiers in the Second World War.11 The ego perspective opens up the possibility of simulating an individualised view of the action – the players share a virtual fate as millions of soldiers could have actually experienced during the Second World War. Thus World War shooters as a subgenre of firstperson shooters place the highest demand on their immersive effects. On the screen the events are seen almost exclusively from the perspective of a player or the player’s character, the avatar. The perspective and the segment of the outside world is limited by the movements of the player in the tight cut of the subjective camera, the player’s field of vision, usually augmented by the avatar’s hands, in which the weapon is held (cf. Sandkühler 2009, 59ff.). In contrast to strategy games, for instance, in which the player directs entire armies from a bird’s-eye view and sends them into battle from a virtual commander’s hill, first-person shooters convey a seemingly individual view on the state of play: aside from the framing cut scenes, the plot progresses in real time, the player’s decisions have immediate consequences for the course of the game. The distance between them and the action is – compared to movies or television, for instance – not only extremely shortened by the proximity to the monitor producing the image. However, above all the limitation to the individual game character might possibly produce the subjective experience of an immediate participation in the fighting, which through the ego perspective can be perceived as existential and authentic in its interactive impact on the player character.

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Summary Once it has been agreed that not only an objectively determinable ‘truth’ but also the category of ‘credibility’ has prominent importance for the decision of whether a game is awarded authenticity in its (historicising) depiction or not, here the schematically different strategies of authentication connect its intention of bringing what is being conveyed figuratively in proximity to an immediately authentic discourse. The question of the formal characteristics of computer simulations in certain discursive practices behind this could be called an infinite process of convergence of simulative depiction processes to an ideal that must remain unreachable, but the authentic discourse can never be the issue itself. Rather, this discourse must be examined from a historical perspective for the cultural appreciation and depreciation of technical depiction processes in regard to their credibility. Which depiction processes are chosen must therefore be derived from discursive practices which, for their part, must be reconstructed from the so-called authentication processes in video games precisely due to the ontological openness of computers, which do not refer (or at least do not refer very much) to an intermedia perspective.

Notes 1

Nowadays, history can be viewed in German and Austrian television in new nonfictional, documentary as well as fictional, dramatized modes. Historical television formats have proved to be prime-time capable since the 1980s and occasionally achieve audience figures of up to 13 million viewers (cf. Lersch, Viehoff 2007, 119ff.). 2 According to Christian Hißnauer, under “living-history formats” one could understand historical games as well as games set in the present historicising games as well as TV formats reflecting contemporary situations. In this way the simulation of the past serves as a kind of breaching experiment: “Missing everyday routines in the historical setting reveal the naturalness of our current everyday lives. Within living-history formats both aspects are connected for the protagonists because the formats take place in an extraordinary environment and situation of historical daily life. However, through the detour of the game above all our current reality is told.” (Hißnauer 2009, 120-121). 3 The confusing wealth of concepts from the circle of semantic relatives to ‘authenticity’ seems to be too large that either etymology or the determination of a content-based core meaning could be able to crystallise the contour of the concept. In this context Christian Strub refers to at least three sources that should be mentioned: philosophy (authentic texts), theatre (authentic expression), morality/ethics (authentic existence). Strub goes on to assume that the historical

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flaw of linguistic and content-based determination explains, on the other hand, why not only no consensus has been achieved in all previous attempt to define the term, but rather that the impression often arose that not even the same problem area was meant (cf. Strub 1997, 7ff.). 4 In this way documentary photographs and videos can/should transfer fictive stories onto the movie screen, as for instance Woody Allen’s ZELIG (USA 1983) or tell the supposedly ‘authentic’ life stories staged with photos and videos on the internet. The audience has learned to read photographs, or to put it more generally ‘iconic images’, as news and real. This central cultural technique of Western media culture of attributing a certain authenticity to photorealistic witnesses as one would to certificates, official protocols or excerpts from official registers, functions as a perceptual programme of genre und type patterns even in the field of digital media, i.e. even in video games with a historical setting (cf. Bruns 2008, 162ff.). Although these represent medial, genre and form crosses in their game concepts in the sense of remediation processes, this hybrid mode of history does not automatically diminish its effectualness with regard to its claim to authenticity. 5 The illusion that a documentary content and image character of specific historic facts sticks to objects does not deceive us, according to Barthes, that the “effects of the real” only deny the artificial character of the medium. As Barthes emphasises, reality is always contingent and not eternally valid (cf. Barthes 1982, 81). 6 In this way, critical comments could be found in a thread of an unofficial forum about video games of the distributor PARADOX INTERACTIVE, for instance, regarding historical realism of the statistical battle and lost relationships in the strategy game HEARTS OF IRON III – FOR THE MOTHERLAND. Here it became clear that players were directly grappling with the historical dimension of informational rule systems and, on the other hand, that they appear to have internalised a statistical-configurative understanding of history conveyed through the video game. The complete forum thread is dedicated to a modification of the game developed by players, which promises improved realism in contrast to the original by transferring statistical data to the game variants considered deficient. However, at the same time this proceeded very selectively because “not all transfer of reality is sensible for balancing.” See: http://www.heartsofiron.de/interaktiv/php BB2/viewtopic.php?f=338&t=26115 (1.3.2012). 7 The flow theory developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, which assumes that a simultaneously challenging activity can shift an individual into a state of optimal experience and is accompanied by intensive emotions, is often consulted for explaining the ‘blossoming’ of the players in the video game (cf. Csíkszentmihályi 1990). 8 When advertising their World War shooters, distributors are fond of referring to the effort taken to achieve these authentic reproductions of real paragons, even in marginal detail issues. For example, for the production of MEDAL OF HONOR: AIRBORNE (EA 2007) a historic and airworthy C47 was organised, i.e. a specimen of the type of aircraft that was actually very frequently utilised to bring US airborne units to their site of operation; sound engineers then recorded the motor and flyover noises for the game (cf. Bender 2010, 128ff.). As with the production

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of numerous World War shooters, authentic loading and shooting sounds were also utilised from the weapons used in the game CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR (Treyarch 2008). These were also recorded with the help of original weapons from the Second World War. 9 As Claus Leggewie confirmed, ionisation determines the known and “synchronises the audience in the world. What we know about them we famously know from mass media […] in which icons are in circulation and quote each other reciprocally. In this way they also assume political and ideological functions, serve as key frames for epochs and caesura, and divide historical narratives and generations. With that icons are a currency of visual mass communication where they often appear in a multimedial and transmedial way” (Leggewie 2009, 10). 10 In addition, the graphical quality games have now reached makes it difficult to differentiate at first glance between historic film material and game sequences. 11 Claims regarding the immersive effects of these games go correspondingly far. Producers and game developers of World War shooters advertise that these shooters are more than mere games. Through the depiction of a historic setting the games claim to be able to offer an authentic and historical ‘war experience’ (cf. Bender 2010, 123ff.; Sandkühler 2009, 59ff.).

SECTION TWO: CASE STUDIES

CHAPTER ONE NARRATION AND NARRATIVE: (HI-)STORY TELLING IN VIDEO GAMES ANGELA SCHWARZ

Introduction Video games have become an accepted and popular way for people to spend their free time. This fact can be seen all around us, and there are hard numbers to back it up too. The Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE), which represents the interests of video games publishers, published a survey in November 2012 that said around 20 million people1 in the UK, or 40 percent of the population between the ages of 6 and 64, play computer or video games.2 The same year nearly 26 million people in Germany, or one third of the population, said they regularly play these kinds of games in their spare time.3 For many years these products were designed almost exclusively by men for a mainly male audience, but now nearly half of the people playing games in the UK, Germany and other important European markets are female.4 And contrary to the stillwidespread cliché, these females are interested in more than just FARMVILLE and BARBIE BEAUTY BOUTIQUE. What is it that makes these games so popular? For one thing, they are fascinating and exciting diversions that offer challenges, rewards and interactive immersion. You don’t need to be a nerd or a hardcore gamer to get caught up in a well-made game. Engaging gameplay, i.e. the structural design and audiovisuals play a critical role in this. Like a movie,5 the images, video, music and sounds in a game create an immersive atmosphere for players. A third structural element of video games and another similarity with movies is narration. Except for titles like PONG, games have always had a fairly strong narrative or story at their heart. Games have a beginning, they develop via a sequence of specific elements, and they have an end – even if it is just ’game over‘ or finishing

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the last level. This was true in the early eighties when players were getting chased by ghosts as Pac Man and rescuing the princess as Mario all the way through to today, when they lead seemingly realistic armies across the battlefields of world history and follow complex plot threads involving multiple characters and time lines. Games with historical content contain two additional levels that normally serve to supplement purely fictional narratives:  the concept of historical reality, which the games reference in various ways,  a distinctive way of dealing with history that includes both narrating an event and the concept of historical narration. According to Jörn Rüsen, historical narration brings past events into present, it is a form of remembering. For games, this means that the way in which they portray past events – regardless of how accurately or inaccurately they do so – creates an image or a construct of those events. Narration that brings history into the present creates meaning. As a result, narration can very quickly become a narrative. If that narrative brings together patterns of interpreting certain events or processes that prevail in a nation or culture, it mirrors so-called master narratives. The fact that these master narratives can find their way into the popular medium of video games not only shows how important they are in this specific medium but how common they are in popular culture in general. This chapter analyses their importance in video games and the mechanisms for creating and conveying history in video game narration. How do history and narration behave in relation to one another? What remains of history when it is incorporated into a plot into which a gamer is supposed to be immersed? What happens when the past, which usually seems so distant and abstract, becomes something that players can touch and experience through a game’s main character? And how does a game’s interpretation of history relate to other common interpretations found in a society? Before I undertake a closer analysis of this phenomenon using two examples with an identical historical setting, I will present several patterns of historical narration that appear in video games.

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Foundations and patterns of narration in historical games Narrative structure was one of the characteristics of video games that scholars first focused on when they began to deal with the young medium. In particular, those in literary studies wanted to know how narration is arranged and how it functions in this interactive digital medium.6 Yet history as a subject of systematic research did not play a role in these attempts. One reason for this was that the extent to which this narration exploited history was not important for analysing narrative structure or explaining why it captured the interest of the primarily adolescent audiences that played video games at the time. Another was that historians did not consider the things that the games depicted as history to be serious presentations of history. For most historians, this kind of history was nothing more than marginal popularization and instrumentalisation for economic purposes. One of the many reasons why historians still show little interest in the narrative patterns of games is that the way in which games narrate history brings in the additional levels described in section one, which creates additional complexity. Using history as the subject of the plot is more complicated for game producers too insofar as people already know how the story ends. This makes it more difficult to build up suspense when the narrative is based solely on the familiar chain of events. To sidestep this problem, producers opt for different ways of using narration, of which some of the most common are described below. Titles with counterfactual scenarios would comprise yet another pattern, which I will not discuss. As with other popular media and formats, video games vary a great deal in terms of how closely the depicted events and the narration are based on actual history. Depending on the degree of historical accuracy, striking differences and recurring patterns can be identified. Three such patterns underpin the majority of games: 1. Many games only use history as a rough framework for a relatively fixed sequence of genre-specific game activities such as building cities and civilizations or killing enemies. The rules of the game are simply transferred to different periods and given different images and a few other historical details. Strategy games ANNO 1404 and ANNO 2070 are good examples of how easy it is to transfer to different periods in the past and the future basic narrative patterns that begin with a clean slate and move through building and development and on to an era of prosperity. Without a campaign,7 the narration is a result of the actual game-playing

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process and does not need narration in the narrow sense. Granted, the specific activities in the game, such as gathering resources, erecting buildings, developing technologies, exploring, fighting and killing, from which the gameplay generates a game’s narration, are indeed historical in a certain sense, since they could have taken place in that manner at that particular time. But the way in which they appear in games like ANNO 1404 or business simulation game CITIES IN MOTION8 can be considered to be so general – almost anthropological or structurally rooted in the economic system in question – that they hardly require specific historical events or an exact recreation of an epoch. More than being condensed, which any version of history inherently is, they appear to have been reduced a second time over, down to a suggestion of basic anthropological constants. The action in this type of game appears to be less historical than the atmosphere that is created around the action using visual and acoustic effects.9 Yet this atmosphere is often subject to the same stereotype as the narrative elements, whereby everything that seems historical is thought to be historical.10 It is interesting to note that this narration pattern makes history appear to be a structural process rather than a result of human decisions and actions. This kind of focus is not unknown in historical research; just think of the new social history that took shape during the 1960s and 1970s, for instance. But for players, the structures do not necessarily materialize as an archetype that is based on a certain interpretation of the past. The structures can vary from game to game, and resulting in more heterogeneous narration based on the gameplay.11 2. A second category of games features a fictitious plot with completely or mostly fictitious characters that are embedded in a historical period. This embedding in the narration consists of having historical figures, social groups, events and philosophies appear at various points in the action in an effort to make the story seem as historically authentic as possible. The player’s character interacts with Cleopatra, Leonardo da Vinci or George Washington in the context of battles or in seemingly everyday situations on the streets of Venice or New York. When the historical qualities are conveyed by something more than just the visualization and experience of the virtual space, they appear in specific elements of the plot threads, such as individual phases or conversations between the protagonists. Even if they only serve to tell players what needs to be done next, they may still contain and convey

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historical information in the form of facts or interpretations. The storytelling usually makes use of historical details at points where they can be easily integrated into the narration or the gameplay. Additional facts about the historical backdrop are provided in databases, pop-ups or overlays to avoid dragging out the plot unnecessarily. They are intended to add variety to the story and make it easier to understand the historical context, and most of all, to authenticate the story as a reflection of a period in the past. Players can use this additional information according to their needs and interests, or they can ignore it as superfluous to the action and goal of the game. The fiction, such as the story of Nathaniel Black in AGE OF EMPIRES III12 or Ezio Auditore in ASSASSIN’S CREED II, ASSASSIN’S CREED: BROTHERHOOD and ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS is historicized by means of a fictitious person, making it a realistic – but not accurate – reproduction of the past. The process is similar for shooter games. In particular, BROTHERS IN ARMS, a popular World War II series, attaches great importance to having a coherent and self-contained storyline involving a group of soldiers who are completely fictitious people but part of an actual historical unit in the US Army.13 Mixing fiction and facts and the possibility of immersion and seemingly close ties to a past reality can potentially have a very lasting effect on the story being told and on the historical images underlying it. 3. Games with narration that invites players to relive events, to literally re-play action that history says took place, promise an even more exact reproduction of the past – and they usually aim to offer the most visually accurate reconstruction as well. The most common manifestation involves battles from famous wars. Among them are the vehicle simulators, many of which are set during World War II, whose gameplay often consists of piloting painstaking reproductions of planes, submarines and other military vehicles though actual operations undertaken between 1939 and 1945, such as ’Adlertag‘ during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 or the sinking of the Ark Royal aircraft carrier by a German submarine in 1941, the objective of a mission in SILENT HUNTER 5. Strategy games are quite similar except that they deal with battles on a larger scale and often give players command over entire armies. It is not important to the narration of the battles whether the game puts them in round-based form, with stylized units that often still have precise, accurate information about the different armies’ troop numbers and combat strength, or in the form of a fully animated real-time battle with thousands of modelled soldiers in multiple regiments, as with the Battle of Waterloo14 in the game NAPOLEON: TOTAL WAR. The story being told

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normally consists of a kind of chronology of events that are relevant to the military, where the actual protagonist is the submarine, the plane or the abstracted regiment. The people recede into the background. Although pilots, crew members and soldiers frequently appear as part of these regiments, they tend to remain sketchy and barely perceptible as human beings, and they evidently do not have their own story to tell either.15 The story is entirely focused on the military side of events, leaving little or no room for human action, emotions or motives, which form a central part of the story in other media and genres such as literature and film, even those that treat the great battles of world history. If we take a step back and think about the patterns running through these basic considerations of history and narration in video games, we can see the following narration types: (1) Vaguely sketched ’history‘ as an exotic backdrop for what tend to be timeless activities (sowing, harvesting, killing) with no narration or story-telling in the narrow sense, which reduces the actors, whether they are groups or individuals, to simple schemata. (2) Carefully reconstructed history, which is repeatedly quoted as background information in narrative elements with the primary purpose of authenticating the events in which the player is immersed. In other words, it is a mostly fictitious story that has been historicised with factual details. (3) History that appears to have been very carefully reconstructed but which is limited to the events critical to the progression and outcome of a battle. The narration seems to closely follow historical sequences of events, but it leaves out important parts of the historian’s reconstruction such as multiple perspectives, motives, options and interests outside of military events. With all of these patterns, history has an open outcome to the extent that the actual historical events do not fix every aspect of the game. Even the vehicle simulators and strategy games and their re-enacted battles allow the present-day game to take a different course than the one it took in historical reality.16 This can be attributed to the fact that most players expect to enjoy the greatest possible freedom to act within the confines of the event and not to know how everything will turn out before they even begin playing.17 The next section takes a closer look at two examples in an effort to answer the question of how open-ended games can be when the story has already been written, how actual history and the history in a

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game are related, and whether narratives or to be more precise master narratives play a role in that relationship.

A closer look at the patterns Narration and narrative in AGE OF EMPIRES III Most strategy games are appealing to play again and again because they allow unrestricted play. This unrestricted play unfolds as preparation for a minimally historicized battle and its execution. This type of gaming belongs to the first of the narration categories described above, in which history only appears as a loose framework for the actual gameplay. Campaigns in which a certain chain of events is re-enacted and history is re-told have a different structure. This happens with the help of the same game elements found in unrestricted play, i.e. gathering resources, setting up bases, developing technologies – in essence, assembling forces and using them against enemy parties. The following example of such a campaign comes from the 2006 game AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE WAR CHIEFS, part of one of the world’s most successful strategy game series with over 20 million copies sold. It is set at the time of the American Revolutionary War and shows how history comes into play as a story in this type of genre. The game’s story is told from the point of view of character Amelia Black, who narrates her father Nathaniel Black’s experiences during the late 18th century from the mid19th century, where she is the protagonist of another part of the campaign. Both characters are fictional. The narrator’s point of view provides her with a close biographical connection to the main character and seems to authenticate the story in a very coherent way. The sequences involving the main character Nathaniel Black, which are normally inserted at the beginning or the end of each mission, start with shots angled up towards him, the flag of the American Revolution waving directly behind him. The image is accompanied by text and his daughter’s voice, which says her father was a hero of the American Revolution who was at all of the major battles and events of the war, such as Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga and Yorktown, which are brought to life as part of his biography. After a brief scene in which American revolutionaries under Black’s command push back attacking British troops, the story flashes back to events that took place six years earlier, to

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the time when the main part of the story begins and Nathaniel becomes involved in the revolution.18 In accordance with a present-day understanding of the equality of races – the game was released in 2006 – the developers of the game decided to make the character one half European and one half Native American. It is not by chance that Nathaniel Black is connected with one of the ethnic groups in the Iroquois League, at the time a powerful union of indigenous peoples in the North-Eastern section of North America. At the beginning of the campaign, he is shown in the Iroquois village where he grew up; speaking with his mother and uncle about how the indigenous population should respond to the conflict between the immigrants from Europe. Nathaniel explains that the tribes cannot remain passive but must take a side and defend themselves.19 This provides his involvement in the war with a very personal, straightforward motivation that transcends abstract political ideals. The narrative sequences that follow, which show the protagonist at important theatres in the war, develop out of this opening and embedding the protagonist’s biography in the historical framework that the setting provides. These scenes make repeated reference not only to the carnage of the war but to the hero and his own story and how time and again he is touched at a personal level and challenged to take direct action. A second plot thread deals with that element alongside the revolution. At the beginning of the second mission, the protagonist’s mother is kidnapped by Hessian mercenaries led by the fictional Colonel Kuechler.20 Although she is quickly freed,21 the antagonism between Nathaniel Black and Colonel Kuechler shapes the rest of the events in the game and leads to three more confrontations before our hero manages to defeat his foe. Helping to anchor the story in real history are the well-known locations just mentioned as well as interaction with several genuine historical figures, especially George Washington. Another noteworthy detail is the fact that the story’s protagonist addresses Washington as an equal – something that is not unimportant in helping players identify with Nathaniel Black, like a successful narrative with its arc of suspense. As if that were not enough, the Continental Army general (Washington) even goes so far as to call the captain of the militia (Black) a decisive figure in the war, effectively identifying him as someone who helped shape history.22 This gives Black (the fictional character in the game, who the rules of the strategy game genre say cannot be a marginal figure) and his claims to being a key figure in those historical events credibility and relevance and elevates his status. Nevertheless, the driving force remains

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the action that the player takes when playing the game, and the staged deeds of the characters and usually the action taken during famous battles continue to closely follow the game mechanics that typically exist in both campaigns and unrestricted play: namely, building and destroying settlements, fighting battles, securing supplies and disrupting enemy supply lines. The scope of action that players have is therefore limited by the options given to them, although the story being constructed around them suggests something else. So then what is the nature of the relationship between history and narration and between the American Revolution and the plot involving Nathaniel Black? Selected historical events and figures act as a script into which the individual game chapters are integrated. For example, Black helps Washington prepare to cross the Delaware to attack the Hessian camp in Trenton, as shown by the action that players carry out after the opening sequence to this fourth mission in the campaign.23 Judging by the events that actually took place, the script is incomplete. Even with regard to the theatre and the chain of events, it is limited to those aspects that can be implemented within the scope of the gameplay, i.e. mostly military events and their preparation. What remains of history as rendered here is a framework of facts and people that the game’s plot and the game itself have been fitted into. Applying the perspective of the narrator Amelia Black, who sees all of the events in hindsight from the 19th century, makes the framework appear to be large, but this is misleading. The narrative inserts are too short to allow a balanced picture to even begin to emerge. Her commentary only mentions in passing that Washington’s troops were not particularly well equipped before they crossed the Delaware and that they were facing a big challenge. The same is true two missions later in Valley Forge. In both cases, it is Nathaniel Black (i.e. the player) who turns the tables in favour of the revolutionaries. Thus, for AGE OF EMPIRES III, politics and war are not only the domain of the ’great men of history‘, of which George Washington is the most notable here. Instead, its fictional protagonist Nathaniel Black adds a certain amount of heterogeneity to the account. His view ’from below‘ personalises the typically depersonalized colossal battles in strategy games as well as the abstract history of events. The plot thus offers ways for players to identify with the character that are not unlike those found in historical role-playing and action adventure games but which have only just started to gain a foothold in strategy games. This approach makes the past as portrayed here both easier to understand and – as simplified and

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distorted as it is on account of the genre and the medium – observable as individual experience. In this way, through a fictional character in a virtual world who was present at important turning points in history, players who are immersed in the game’s plot can develop the feeling of having been there and taken part in events that they would have otherwise only been able to grasp in the abstract, as reports given by another person. That said, no answer has yet been given to the question of the extent to which players actually see identifying with a fictitious character in the plot as experiencing (or re-experiencing) history.24 This example also brings to light another attribute. In the events surrounding this character, narration (i.e. the narrative structure of the story) and the historical narrative overlap. In all his words and deeds, Nathaniel Black provides a textbook example of America’s master narrative of the desire and struggle for freedom that culminated when the country won its independence. As for the exploitation of indigenous peoples for a ’European war’, the loyalty that a large part of the colonial population felt toward their country of origin, not to mention the problem of constructing a ’national‘ identity and the great tragedies of the war – all of this is either ignored in America’s traditional understanding of the conflict or is pushed into the background as an inevitable by-product in the struggle for a great cause.25 AGE OF EMPIRES III reflects this fact very clearly. It comes as no surprise that the American development studio used this upbeat narrative for the game and this chapter of North American history. There are at least three key reasons for this. x First, it allowed them to draw on an arsenal of value systems and categorizations (e.g. friend-foe schemata) on the large home market to benefit the game’s plot – with Colonel Kuechler filling the classic role of the ’evil German.’ This may have made it easier for people to understand the events in the game and definitely improved the chance that the game would be a hit in the mass market. x Second, the game developers were reverting to an interpretation of the past that still prevails in the mainstream of popular representations of the nation’s history even though it may no longer be shared by the vast majority of the U.S. public in this simplified form. This phenomenon of conforming to the mainstream can be seen in a similar guise in productions for other mass media, and the newest medium, the video game, evidently has no problem reproducing it.

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x Third, given the decision to revert to the clean version of the revolutionary movement, we can infer a pattern in the strategy game genre – and perhaps for many historical games in general26 – where success narratives like the strategy game’s triumph of freedom and democracy or the economic simulation game’s expansion of industry and technology dominate as signs of progress. With victory as the goal and end of a game, historical success narratives have an easy time of becoming the subliminal guideline for events in the virtual world. Especially with productions from Western companies for a Western market, they hold the potential for identification that transcend the boundaries of the nation being referenced in the game and can hold appeal for other national contexts – in a Western, industrialized world. This in turn can be explained by the elements of international or perhaps even transnational cultural memory that they contain, which make it possible to understand the specific case of the American Revolution or the railroad era/industrialization in the Western world as shared history – at least in the West’s understanding of itself.

Narration and narrative: the story of Ratonhnhaketon, aka Connor Is the success narrative really so dominant in the video game medium? To further examine this question, I will now switch genres, although the historical event will stay the same. How do action adventures handle narratives when the player only controls a single character instead of hundreds or thousands of subordinates? The example I have chosen is part of the series ASSASSIN’S CREED, one of the most successful franchises of the past five years with 55 million games sold worldwide. Like AGE OF EMPIRES III, the latest game in the series, ASSASSIN’S CREED III (2012)27 revolves around events that took place in connection with the Revolutionary War in North America during the late 18th century. There is a protagonist who dominates the story and with it the majority of the time spent in single player mode. In fact, he plays an even more dominant role in the campaign than Nathaniel Black does in the strategy game AGE OF EMPIRES III. In theory, having a protagonist like this one lays the groundwork for the player to engage more deeply with the game and allows for more history to be integrated in the story, to the point where history and the story are nearly the same, with

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a balanced account of history emerging in the experiences of the main character. Of course, this would apply not only to particularly notable historical events but would also include structures in society and everyday life. What shape does this take in ASSASSIN’S CREED III? The story tells about selected moments during the American Revolution, as well as many other things, through the experiences of the protagonist. Those other things include how the character fits into the story of the Assassin Brotherhood (which forms the framework of the series) and what his own personal background is. Significantly, the story does not begin with the hero’s birth, as we would expect. Instead, it begins with the events that led his father, Haytham Kenway, to leave London for the British colonies in North America, where he would eventually meet the mother of his future son. The story therefore takes place at three points in time: an earlier one featuring Haytham Kenway (from 1754 to 1755), one that features the main character as an adult (from around 1770 to 1783) – after short peeks at his experiences as a young adult (around 1760 and 1769) – and the period of the frame story, set in the early 21st century (November and December 2012) with a character who featured in earlier games of the series, Desmond Miles.28 In this way, the narration brings the story of the fictional character and the fictional order of the Assassins into the present. While other games have taken up the motif of time travel in various forms, this series makes virtual reality of a new complexity in recounting history, a new level of reliving history and its connection to the present. Yet it does so not by having a present-day person travel back in time, but with the ingenious concept of having a modern person ’experience‘ a past reality through the memories saved in his ancestor’s DNA. The same complexity is also found in the rather elaborate tale surrounding the character and his background. This leads to the distinctive way in which ASSASSIN’S CREED III weaves together narration and narrative. The main character is Ratonhnhaketon, the son of an Englishman and a kanien’kehà:ka or Mohawk. Like Nathaniel Black, the protagonist in this game is also linked to an ethnic group in the Six Nations, aka the Iroquois League. And he stands for the indigenous population of North America, or more specifically his mother’s tribe, which he calls his people. Despite their many similarities, the two protagonists are fundamentally quite different. The hero in ASSASSIN’S CREED III has an Indian name and is only fighting for the welfare of his tribe, not because he is for or against the revolution on principle.29

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Nathaniel Black on the other hand, is always the son of his father, whom he never knew because he died before Nathaniel was born,30 and he has been fighting for the revolution on principle at least since his meeting with George Washington.31 Here we can already see the two different narratives that the producers of these games were aiming for. On one hand, we have the classical American master narrative of a team of US game designers and on the other, the slightly more critical and at times more multifaceted viewpoint of the multinational team of developers behind ASSASSIN’S CREED III. After his mother dies (around 1760), the teenage protagonist receives a new name from his African American mentor while training to become an Assassin. The scene in which this takes place, which I analyse in more detail below,32 begins when the young man takes his first steps in a large town. The game says exactly when and where this takes place: Boston, early March 1770. Until this time he has only known life in the countryside. Now, as he walks through the busy streets, he quickly notices and makes detailed comments about the differences he sees. Like other travellers during the late 18th century who first set foot in the largest city in Europe at the time, London, he too thinks he could spend days there and still not have seen half of its wonders.33 Yet this kind of account is more likely to have come from a typical European from a rural area or small town taking in the wonders of city life than from someone from an indigenous ethnic group in a town settled by European immigrants and their descendants. His mentor Achilles puts his enthusiasm about the many opportunities offered by urban life into perspective by saying they are only open to a select few. Could this be another allusion to the emerging country that would supposedly become the land of opportunity? In the next scene, Achilles tells Ratonhnhaketon that he needs a new name. When Achilles proposes the name Connor, it is not just for the sake of making the Mohawk character’s name easier for the colonials to understand. The new name is the first step in camouflaging the protagonist and transitioning him to a new identity that will conceal his true origins. On one hand, this is narration, because the Assassins in this series generally hide their true face and work in secret. But it also serves to bring something historical into the picture, which makes this scene with Achilles particularly interesting: namely, the hierarchy of ethnicities that characterized North American society prior to the emergence of any government or nation. In the eyes of the European settlers, most of which hailed from Great Britain, Spaniards and Italians were better than the

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indigenous peoples, and everyone was higher up than African Americans, even those such as Achilles who were not slaves.34 This detail is not necessarily important for the plot, especially considering that ethnicity does not become an issue anywhere in the story. Nor does ethnicity play any role in the events that take place in the game. Everyone in Achilles’ settlement admires him as well as the African American married couple that takes over the farm there. Connor’s origins never become a problem either; he can go anywhere he chooses and say whatever he likes, including to George Washington. The same is true when he attends the Second Continental Congress. The game design requires the character to have this kind of freedom to act, as does the narration. What is happening here with regard to a potential master narrative? The French publisher of the ASSASSIN’S CREED series and its leading Franco-Canadian development studio make players aware of the different groups, their circumstances and interests early on, at least in a basic form. Hierarchisation and stigmatization appear to explain that certain individuals are second or third class human beings before players are confronted with the concept of liberty that is central to the impending American Revolution. This scepticism appears again and again as the plot moves forward, such as during a conversation between Connor and Samuel Adams, a historical figure and founding father of the United States who helped organize the Boston Tea Party. Connor accuses Adams of owning slaves and only fighting for the freedom of white male colonists. Adams compares injustices done to the colonists by the British crown (such as the Quartering Acts) with the situation of a slave and a master but Connor counters him by saying the analogy is not valid – a convincing argument from today’s point of view.35 Thus the success narrative of being liberated from the yoke of the oppressor turns into the question of who is really being freed and who is just getting a new master. In both cases – the conversation with Achilles and with Adams – the perspective of the underprivileged penetrates the master narrative of U.S. history. Players in the 21st century, who are familiar with the rest of North American history, especially how the continent was settled, might even begin to doubt whether the help that the protagonist provides to the rebels is really capable of bringing the security that the Mohawk and other indigenous peoples were hoping for. Ultimately, Connor’s involvement seems to be useless no matter whether he is fighting for the revolutionaries or the crown, and something that at best is simply delaying impending injustice, a fact that Connor sees as a sign of his own failure at the end of the game. The complexity of the character and his interactions within the adventure

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thus enable a balanced portrayal that diverges from the narrative and the success narrative. Yet instead of adopting a stance that opposes injustice in general, Achilles, the Afro-American, only hints at it with his relatively cautious words, “everything is better than me.”36 In other words, the producers could have done much more to make this character denounce the discrimination and dehumanization of the African American population. In addition, the portrayal of George Washington also shows that the game’s creators were not trying to make a heroic epic out of the narrated story that remembers the American Revolution. Granted, as in AGE OF EMPIRES III, he does appear as a historical figure that elevates the status of the main character and ascribes an important role to him in the historical events. But he certainly does not emerge as a heroic leading light in the revolution the way he did in that older game. The general’s weaknesses and errors are mentioned at several points in the plot, which undermines the significance of Connor’s encounters with him. For evidence of how very little the multinational team of developers was concerned with having Washington come out as a heroic general in the revolution, consider a scene set in Valley Forge in 1779.37 It addresses almost word for word the commands Washington gave that led to the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition against four of the Six Nations in the Iroquois League. His commands speak of totally destroying the settlements and taking as many Indians prisoner as possible, no matter what their age or sex.38 The goal was to instil such great fear in the indigenous peoples that they would never again be able to hurt the newly emerging ’American‘ nation – to which they would not belong as a result of their offense. Yet not all of the members of the League that were hit by this punitive expedition had cooperated with the British. Some of them had in fact supported Washington’s troops just like the game’s fictional character Connor. This sequence in the game makes it clear how futile these activities of Connor’s are. Not only does the conversation mention the scorched earth command and the expedition almost verbatim, thereby introducing a more complex characterization of the general into the popular conception of history. Through Connor’s unsuccessful struggle to protect his people, it also lets players recognize the dilemma faced by the indigenous peoples. This part of the series thus makes all of Connor’s actions against evildoers and those identified as enemies of freedom seem strangely ambivalent to players – unlike earlier instalments, where the protagonists’

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motives emerged more clearly from the narration. As a result, more history shows up in ASSASSIN’S CREED III than in any of the earlier titles in the series, as none of the other games integrate so many events from history so tightly in the narration as this one, the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s Ride, the battles of Lexington and Concord, and Valley Forge being just a few examples. More importantly, ASSASSIN’S CREED III offers a more complex rendering of history than those earlier titles as well as a chance to change perspectives. This does not serve to supply an uncritical reproduction of the narrative by recalling elements of the success narrative of the road to freedom, as happened in a much more obvious way in the rendering of Nathaniel Black. Instead, the game opens up the possibility of considering lesser-known perspectives and even accommodating counter narratives at key places (e.g. in the main character) in mainstream products and the media of popular culture. ASSASSIN’S CREED III even goes a step further by having modern-day British game character Shaun Hastings explain and comment on events from the American Revolution, often from a highly critical point of view, in the game’s Animus Database. As to the current state of the medium as a whole, it can be said that narration structure, gameplay and audio-visuals have been continually evolving. The presentation of history in video games, taking the exceptional case of ASSASSIN’S CREED III as an indication, has reached a remarkably high level of sophistication for a popular medium.

Summary History is always subordinate to a video game’s narration since history is not the focus of the game. Instead, its purpose is to furnish more or less concrete, detailed elements for creating a setting that appears to be in the past and defining sequences of past processes for the narration. In line with the norms of the medium, which stipulate everything from its purpose as entertainment to game mechanics, history very often appears as a given, whether it involves biographies of individuals, certain sequences of events or the use of technologies. Other points of view typically do not play a significant role. In such cases, the game’s clear storyline is often paired with a narrative that is just as straightforward and that in light of the purpose of the game – winning – can be nothing but a success narrative. Critics would probably say that it does not come as a surprise to find a positivistic heap of facts with no sign of critical judgment, history instrumentalised. But this conclusion is only half true. A second look reveals that some games give a surprisingly complex treatment of history, something that is hardly needed for a well-made game to sell well. Why,

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for example, is the main character in the AGE OF EMPIRES III campaign I analysed half Iroquois? The narrative would have worked just as well if he had been the descendant of British immigrants. Why personalize him in this way when it plays no part in unrestricted play? A string of important battles would have made the campaign seem just as historical. Why does the game ultimately develop a menacing Hessian colonel into the main character’s direct adversary? It would have been enough to have Washington or Lord Cornwallis assume the stage as main rivals. These elements are not there to make players aware of the complexity of history, but they do speak against a very simple interpretation of the medium’s limits. There are a variety of reasons for representing history in this way. These include game designers’ assumption that players no longer want games to be set up according to simple black and white or good and evil schemata. Another reason involves the technical possibilities of the medium, including complex narration structures, complex gameplay and anything else to get players hooked on an entire series for the long term. In addition to this, the games permit other interpretations. The appearance of the league of indigenous peoples and its split during America’s war for independence can acquaint players with another story outside and inside the story being told, as can the Hessians’ role in the conflict. One can imagine players who are only moderately interested in history asking themselves how the Hessians ended up in North America and just how many of them fought. These types of elements in the narration therefore raise questions and potentially create a sense of distance from history while the game’s story, its narration, creates a sense of proximity. In such cases, even the narrative offered in the subtext does not necessarily need to appear that immutable. The 2012 title is significantly more flexible simply because of the structure of the series, but AGE OF EMPIRES III had already begun to explore new avenues for its own series in 2006 with a family story as an echo of early U.S. history. ASSASSIN’S CREED III, the newest product in the newer series, attains an even higher level of complexity while incorporating more history in the narration than ever seen before in the series. Instead of weaving history into the narration, it seems to have written the narration around history. The result is a bit like in FORREST GUMP, with the protagonist becoming an important part of practically every important event in the Revolutionary War including the Second Continental Congress.39 Critics may object and say that history is only

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being used as a mine for facts and ideas in this case too. But that is a completely inadequate characterization of the medium and especially of a title like ASSASSIN’S CREED III. The game provides a great amount of detail about the plot as well as a database full of other facts, after all.40 Yet these details are not everything – players also have numerous opportunities to change perspectives, both through the experiences and views of the protagonist and through the way in which information in the database in presented. This repeatedly casts doubt on the success narrative of the freedom fighters. With Ratonhnhaketon, history suddenly seems very different, which in turn causes 21st century players to see it differently. This is less a consequence of the genre – although the adventure genre does seem to offer more room to maneuvre than other genres – and more a result of an interest on the part of the developers and publishers to tell new stories and present new perspectives and settings. Companies can advertise these things along with new historical subjects as unique selling points that will eventually become something players want. As such, these games reflect an emerging, perhaps even globalizing, cultural memory. Then again, it may be more appropriate to speak of a developing set of global “narrative abbreviations”41 that can be recalled anywhere on Earth. That would be an exciting possibility to explore.

Notes 1 Cf. Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) (ed.): Videogames in Europe. European Summary Report. Great Britain, November 2012, URL: http://www.isfe.eu/sites/isfe.eu/files/attachments/euro_summary_-_isfe_consumer _study.pdf Accessed July 26, 2013, p. 53. Nearly one quarter of those surveyed (24 percent), or more than half of the people who play at all, even said they play video games every week. Cf. Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) (ed.): Videogames in Europe. Consumer Study. Great Britain, November 2012, URL: http://www.isfe.eu/sites/isfe.eu/files/attachments/great_britain_-_isfe_consumer_ study.pdf Accessed July 26, 2013, p. 8. 2 Cf. Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) (ed.): Videogames in Europe. Consumer Study. Great Britain, November 2012, URL: http://www.isfe.eu/sites/isfe.eu/files/attachments/great_britain_-_isfe_consumer_ study.pdf Accessed May 26, 2013, p. 7. 3 Cf. Bundesverband Interaktive Unterhaltungssoftware (BIU) (ed.): Gamer in Deutschland. Jeder dritte Deutsche spielt regelmäßig digitale Spiele, URL: http://www.biu-online.de/de/fakten/gamer-statistiken/gamer-in-deutschland.html Accessed July 26, 2013. 4 Cf. Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) (ed.): Videogames in Europe. Consumer Study. Great Britain, November 2012, URL:

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http://www.isfe.eu/sites/isfe.eu/files/attachments/great_britain_-_isfe_consumer_ study.pdf Accessed July 26, 2013, p. 5. Cf. Bundesverband Interaktive Unterhaltungssoftware (BIU) (ed.): Gamer in Deutschland. Jeder dritte Deutsche spielt regelmäßig digitale Spiele, URL: http://www.biu-online.de/de/fakten/gamerstatistiken/gamer-in-deutschland.html Accessed July 26, 2013. 5 There needs to be a minimal structure or minimal narrative in which the sequence of events comprises at least two components: a complicating action and its resolution. Cf. Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua. ”Erzählanalyse: mündliche Versionen persönlicher Erfahrung“, in Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, edited by Ihwe, Jens, Frankfurt am Main 1973, Vol. 2, 78-126. 6 Cf. Niesz, Anthony / Holland, Norman. “Interactive Fiction” in Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 110-129; Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, Mass. 1997. 7 A campaign can also be found in ANNO 1404 but it is completely fictional; any presumed historicity comes entirely from the game’s visual rendering. 8 This style is found in many games, especially where there are no campaigns or scenarios with a narrated story. As a result, games can unquestionably exhibit several patterns depending on whether one is analysing the single player mode or multiplayer mode. 9 It is worth investigating to what extent this also applies to other genres, such as shooters. Even world-war shooter series that were extremely popular at times, like CALL OF DUTY or MEDAL OF HONOR, which began with several titles set during World War II, have more recently released instalments set in the present or the future. But unlike strategy games and simulation games, the narration in these games is based much more closely on historical processes and structures than, say, the events in a simulation game. 10 Cf. Schwarz, Angela. ”Bunte Bilder – Geschichtsbilder? Zur Visualisierung von Geschichte im Medium des Computerspiels“, in “Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf Ihre Gegner werfen?” Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annäherung an Geschichte im Computerspiel, edited by Angela Schwarz, 2nd ed., Münster: LIT, 2012, 213-243. 11 Cf. Pasternak, Jan. ”500.000 Jahre an einem Tag. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Darstellung von Geschichte in epochenübergreifenden Echtzeitstrategiespielen“, in “Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf Ihre Gegner werfen?” Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annäherung an Geschichte im Computerspiel, edited by Angela Schwarz, 2nd ed., Münster: LIT, 2012, 35-73. 12 Cf. section 3.1 below. 13 Some reviews of the series offer indications that this approach can definitely create the impression of perceived authenticity. Cf. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. “Authentischer gehts nimmer”, in: GAME7, March 31, 2005, URL: http://www.game7.de/1603-brothers-in-arms-road/artikel/test-10748d3874.php. Accessed July 26, 2013. 14 I cite this battle simply as a paradigm, because it is one of those clashes very frequently featured in video games, as are the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Normandy. The game recreates all of the important battles of the Napoleonic era.

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Introducing a crew of individuals for the submarine in SILENT HUNTER 5 can be seen as an attempt to create a side story. But the game mechanics limit the possibility of doing so, with the result being that the submarine and technology remain the focus of the game. Cf. Schwarz, “Bunte Bilder – Geschichtsbilder?”, 226-231. 16 This can take various forms. With the specific historical mission in SILENT HUNTER 5 there is no other option but to complete the mission or fail. How one completes the mission, however, is open – players choose which weapons to use, how often to use them, how many times to attack, etc. Strategy games offer the option of winning battles a-historically, which has a fairly major effect on the virtual course of the war. Counterfactual scenarios enter the equation when players turn bona fide historical defeats into victories, thus creating a point of divergence. This type of counterfactual turn of events is often offered by games set during major wars or the Cold War. In PANZER GENERAL, for example, players can lead a German campaign to conquer the capital of the United States. 17 This can be executed in very different ways. TITANIC: ADVENTURE OUT OF TIME is a good example. This game has a relatively open plot and a story that offers seven different endings depending on how the player plays. Yet the historical event in which the ship sinks is unavoidable. 18 Cf. Microsoft Game Studios (pub.): AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE WAR CHIEFS. CAMPAIGN, Act 1: Fire. Mission 1: War Dance. Opening sequence (2006). 19 Cf. ibid. 20 Cf. Microsoft Game Studios (pub.): AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE WAR CHIEFS. CAMPAIGN, Act 1: Fire. Mission 2: The Rescue. Opening sequence (2006). 21 This is the goal of the second mission in the campaign. 22 Cf. Microsoft Game Studios (pub.): AGE OF EMPIRES III: THE WAR CHIEFS. CAMPAIGN, Act 1: Fire. Mission 4: Crossing the Delaware. Opening sequence (2006). 23 Cf. ibid. 24 There is now a long tradition of studies on the effects of video games. Cf. Fritz, Jürgen. ”Wie virtuelle Welten wirken: Über die Strukturen von Transfers aus der medialen in die reale Welt“, in Computerspiele: Virtuelle Spiel- und Lernwelten, edited by Fritz, Jürgen, Fehr, Wolfgang, Bonn 2003, (see CD); Fritz, Jürgen Fritz. ”Geschichtsverständnis via Computerspiel: Civilization 3 simuliert Grundstrukturen historischer Prozesse“, in Computerspiele: Virtuelle Spiel- und Lernwelten, edited by Fritz, Jürgen, Fehr, Wolfgang Fehr, Bonn 2003, (see CD).; Fritz, Jürgen. Wie Computerspieler ins Spiel kommen. Theorien und Modelle zur Nutzung und Wirkung virtueller Spielwelten, Berlin 2011; Penney, Joel. “No better way to experience World War II: Authenticity and Ideology in the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor Player Communities”, in Joystick soldiers. The politics of playing military video games, edited by Huntemann, Nina, Payne, Matthew T., New York 2010, 191-205. However, there has been very little research into the impact of the history in video games.

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Cf. Heideking, Jürgen, Fabre, Geneviève, Dreisbach, Kai (eds.). Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation. American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century, New York, Oxford 2001. 26 Subsequent analyses should look at the question of precisely what influence can be assigned to the game genre – whether shooters and strategy games, for example, revert more to master narratives than, say, adventures or hidden object games, and whether they convey them in a clearer form. 27 ASSASSIN’S CREED III was released on October 31, 2012. The release date for the follow-up ASSASSIN’S CREED IV: BLACK FLAG is October 31, 2013.There have been rumours that an ASSASSIN’S CREED V is in the planning stage, but this has not yet been officially confirmed. 28 This was a present-day setting when ASSASSIN’S CREED III was released. 29 He is normally on the side of the revolutionaries because they come closer to the ideal of freedom that the Assassins represent, but he never hesitates to criticize the rebels for not fighting for the freedom of all people. In the end he even concludes that they never intended for his people to have freedom. 30 This is part of another campaign in AGE OF EMPIRES III. 31 Before this it is not clear whether he sympathizes with the revolution; he only speaks out against the groups in the Iroquois League remaining neutral, since he fears that this would mean the events of the war would decide for them. 32 Cf. Ubisoft (pub.): ASSASSIN’S CREED III. Sequence 5, Part 2: A Trip to Boston. Opening sequence (2012). 33 Ibid. 34 Cf. ibid. 35 Cf. Ubisoft (pub.): ASSASSIN’S CREED III. Sequence 6, Part 1: On Johnson’s Trail. First sequence (2012). 36 Ubisoft (pub.): ASSASSIN’S CREED III. Sequence 5, Part 2: A Trip to Boston. Opening sequence (2012). 37 Cf. Ubisoft (pub.): ASSASSIN’S CREED III. Sequence 10, Part 2: Broken Trust. Opening sequence (2012). 38 “The expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the six nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total distruction [sic] and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. … I would recommd. that some post in the center of the Indian Country should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provision; whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner; that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. … But you will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. … Our future security will be in their inability to injure us; … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastizement [sic] they receive will inspire them.” “Instructions to Major General John Sullivan, Head-Quarters”, Middle Brook, May 31, 1779, in: Washington, George, 17321799. The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, URL:

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http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=WasFi15.xml&images=images/ modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=165&division=div 1 Accessed July 26, 2013. 39 AGE OF EMPIRES III operates in a similar way, but the protagonist never questions what is happening. Instead, he supports the exploits of his own accord. 40 Comparing this with the detailed manuals that were included with early games could provide interesting insights. 41 Rüsen, Jörn, Fröhlich, Klaus, Horstkötter, Hubert, Schmidt, Hans Günter. ”Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbewußtsein von Abiturienten im Ruhrgebiet“, in Geschichtsbewußtsein empirisch, edited by Rüsen, Jörn, Borries, Bodo von, Pandel, Hans-Jürgen Pfaffenweiler 1991, 221-344, here 231 (my translation).

CHAPTER TWO THE REMEDIATION OF HISTORY IN ASSASSIN’S CREED SIMON HUBER

Disclaimer When starting ASSASSIN’S CREED (Ubisoft 2008), the first thing we get to see is the following statement: Inspired by historical events. This work of fiction was designed developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and believes.

By this means, the program that claims its historical interpretation as fictitious degrades the serious historical significance as the pathetic outcome of a giddy game. This kind of science-fiction story with plots and intrigues like out of a Dan Brown thriller is meant to not to cause any harm to anyone. However, referring to historical events reminds us of another medium that tends to make great use of it: ’Based on a true story‘, as often displayed at the movies. The historical facts that were merged into this program are here to create awareness for the entertaining aspect of the product. Not only the critical religious approach is weakened, but the game gains an aura of historicity that had been initially incorporated into the creation of the game with the prior involvement of historians. Calling upon history and then denying it: this double bottom is the base of the framework, the plot and the story of the video game ASSASSIN'S CREED about game and historiography.

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Moreover, the disclaimer shows us how much the video game industry has obviously become aware of the fact that the designed virtual rooms and scenes create a background that becomes ideal scenery for serious topics, such as religious or cultural conflicts and concerns of history and thus, they call forth historians to come to terms with this matter. Chiefly, there are two things we can think of, as far as mingling history and video games: Firstly, approaching the cultural phenomenon with standard methods or the other way round, dealing with the game as it is and the transmission of historical information through other merchandise in a nutshell: history of video games1 and history in video games. The question referring to history in video games is closely related with the question whether generally speaking, games are basically able to tell stories and if so, whether historical authenticity can be simulated. The disclaimer hints precisely at this, namely through citing well known Hollywood-epic stories.

Time travel: Interface between Documents and Monuments If anyone starts playing ASSASSIN'S CREED from scratch, he may wonder why he cannot steer the main assassin displayed on the cover. The Avatar of the end users is Desmond Miles, a customary and contemporary barkeeper but also a descendant of Altaïr who once lived during the third crusade, way back in 1192. Therefore historical information is stored in Miles genes. The Templars, still existing as a secret circle, force him to calculate his own DNA so they can get an insight into the memories of his ancestor. This background story reflects exactly, what Claus Pias (2012, 307) postulates, namely: Computer games are not at all about cute japanese cartoons or blacklisted blood splatter, but rather about usability and thus referring to computer games as such.

Therefore, ASSASSIN'S CREED has little to do with crusades, Templars and assassins; the background story reflects far more the usability of historical information through the computer, dubbed Animus.2

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Animus does not only convey living history, but it animates it factually, as its name would suggest. What game designers and public are aiming at is finding back to the past but not to original historical sources or witnesses. This immediate sensational approach to history should be transmitted by mobilizing most of the senses. This expresses a wish to immerse the ’gamer‘ into the past like ”time travelers“ play-acting with fancy dress costumes medieval daily life (cf. Fenske 2003, 97-99). They hope to get a deeper insight into the past through accurate historical outfits, cooking recipes and old style verbalization as through methodical verification of sources and reconstruction, or interpretation of historical evidence (Ibid., 98). This is about a fictional medium that functions according to the same principles known as ”The double logic of remediation“ as coined by Richard Grusin and David Bolter (2001, 3-15). They fluctuate between hypermediacy, and immediacy. The first is some kind of flashy windowstyled self-referentiality and the second, the immediacy that conceals its mediality through creating an illusion of total transparency. Remediation processes are unsuccessful attempts of a medium to supplant other prior media; but the latter still remain however, refashioned and newly designed. So, now that fancy costumes have been replaced by digital textures, now that Animus is busy evicting former historical immersion patterns through evoking the evidence of unconscious and hidden information, it reshapes the time traveling behaviour in the framework of its own digital storage of virtual ages and eras. Unlike regular Middle Age games that display messages on a designed, antique scroll, the user interface of the ASSASSIN'S CREED stresses the anachronism via the fact that the display of Animus and all its game relevant messages are not supposed to be realistic. So did Patrice Désilets, creative art director of the game, describe the back story of ASSASSIN'S CREED that reflects the strategies of remediation: I was actually again trying to make everything somewhat understandable. I was actually aiming at creating something in which everything that actually distracts the gamer from the plot finds its place, something that would make this game more than just a game; this even includes all user interface messages. (Nickel 2009)

Here, the optimal immersion is achieved by contrary and unusual methods, i.e. hypermedia interfaces and messages stressing the anachronism interfering in Altaïr's life by means of hypertext links. ASSASSIN'S CREED

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remediates video gaming in a video game. Bolter and Grusin (2001, 5) give an explanation for this paradoxical longing for a so-called ’more‘: Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.

Animus' mediality fades away through its ostentatious presence; Bolter and Grusin (2001, 9) use the idea of the flight simulator to illustrate the idea: As in a real plane, the simulated cockpit is full of dials to read and switches to flip. As in a real plane, the experience of the game is that of working an interface, so that the immediacy of this experience is pure hypermediacy.

They are not trying to achieve the feeling of a journey through time; it is far more the gamer that should gain the feeling of running a timemachine. The attempt to reach this ’more’" of authenticity for this game leads to a Hollywood style background story starring a fictive video game. As usual for video games, transparency is achieved through interactivity (Bolter and Grusin 2001, 101). What they mean by interactivity, is the freedom of choice to navigate through the screen space to drive the story forward and activate specific events. This description is not far reaching enough as far as Assassin's Creed is concerned. It systematically transcribes the familiar messages know to us from the Hollywood-movies like disclaimers at the end of the movies, inserted cut scenes with modifiable camera settings. This is an interesting strategy which is worth some investigation, if the feeling of authenticity should be enhanced by means of Hollywood aesthetical practices and fictions. Looking at the illustrations of the game, in the blink of an eye you can already see the similarity with popular costume dramas and science-fiction productions. The following sections will thus investigate the remediation of history to account for how movies are remediated in video games.

Movie Models Movies cannot be only formally remediated in the new medium, but also their content through citing specific examples. This helps track back to an increasingly complex network of remediation processes resulting from the use of virtual reality to reinforce that, a medium that moreover refashions the film medium (Bolter and Grusin 2001, 163f.). Furthermore, movies create effective mass appeal through the use of deceptive mental

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pictures of the past that affect the perception. So the player tours around kingdoms that are nothing else but an historical concoction. There is a perfect vehicle to convey this to the members of the pop culture, namely the well-known superhero to be found in numerous comics.

Matrix Obviously, THE MATRIX directed by the Wachsowski-Brothers (1999) was an important source of inspiration to the producers. In this wellknown movie about virtual reality, people can immerse themselves in a dystopian future through plugging in a socket set into their central nervous system. It looks as if their actual bodies would have fallen asleep in a dentist's chair while their spirits are touring around the matrix, the latter simulating for them, unaware as they are of it, a normal world as we know it. Likewise, Desmond Miles lies himself down on the Animus, whose spine is edged with glowing spots. At the same time, a glass screen slides above his eyes from where you can select the levels, or sequences as they call it, from where the player can access the game. Here you do not access a matrix but in the historical ’reality‘ which is genetically coded in his body. The Wachowski brothers, in their movie, get caught in all sorts of confusion spread with illogical contents and philosophical misinterpretations of Baudrillard's theories concerning reality and simulation (Glasenapp 2002). In Assassin's Creed however, the Animus conveys to its story an own reality that becomes a virtual, autonomous world, projected out of Desmond Miles' inherited biological database. Slavoj Žižek (1999) analyses this conception of history in virtual realities as shown in THE MATRIX as follows: Till postmodernism, utopia was an endeavour to break out of the real of historical time into a timeless Otherness. With postmodern overlapping of the ,end of history’ with full disponibility of the past in digitalized memory, in this time where we LIVE the atemporal utopia as everyday ideological experience, utopia becomes the longing for the Real of History itself, for memory, for the traces of the real past, the attempt to break out of the closed dome into smell and decay of the raw reality. The Matrix gives the final twist to this reversal, combining utopia with dystopia: the very reality we live in, the atemporal utopia staged by the Matrix, is in place so

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that we can be effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries providing the Matrix with the energy.

From the film to the game, the jersey's colour that the heroes wear turns from black to white and likewise, the relation to reality is reversed in the game: thus the purpose of it is to avoid falling into dystopia; this is to be achieved through a cyber-war. The available past reality is literally rummaged through; funnily enough, this conveys more credibility to the ’violently‘ gained information, while one’s avatar is plunged into a medieval atmosphere of a virtual reality contaminated by simulated smell, decay and roughness. Therefore Žižek could actually be providing some kind of psychoanalytical explanation, whether the double logic of remediation would correspond to the two sides of perversion. The movie and the game have in common the message of reform that is inherent to every process of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2001, 54). This unaccustomed access to information, the gamer having to tread his way through overcoming obstacles as foreseen by the game, comes prior to the idea of a computerized history fully and freely accessible on the Internet. As to virtual reality, Bolter and Grusin also introduce the concept of a “Theology of Cyberspace”; some enthusiasts see the possibility of freely proliferating knowledge to all and thus anticipating a transcendence of a world accessing pure information beyond material or economical limitations (Bolter and Grusin 2001, 180-183). Apart from Bolter's and Grusin's well-founded objection, maintaining that the status quo is far away from having achieved such a goal (cf. ibid.), it is interesting to observe that within the cyberspace, hindrances and obstacles are being programmed to install anew the faulty but still authentic world of Matrix, or to recreate the Middle Ages with their filth, violence and cruelty.

Kingdoms In another movie-model — an historical epic — the sceneries that had been produced determined the authenticity. Movies about the Middle Ages cannot rely on any records, whether of cinematic or photographic nature, nor can they interview any witnesses; only artificially reconstructed scenes enable authenticity by transparency.3 KINGDOM OF HEAVEN was released in 2005, not quite two years before ASSASSIN'S CREED came out. In both, road scenes and panoramas show a strong similarity. The most obvious particularity is the color-filters typical for Ridley Scott's movies: Frankish,

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gloomy landscapes are shown in blue, whereas Oriental sceneries are held in a golden-sunbathed light (Slaniþka 2005). Likewise in ASSASSIN'S CREED, the cities occupied by Arabs, i.e. Damascus and Jerusalem, are displayed accordingly. However Acre's citadel, in Occidental hands, is depicted as foggy, gloomy, and tinged by bluish tones and hues. As well are the takes that show us the recent events, which the player sees through the recordings of a surveillance camera. In THE MATRIX the real world is a frosty, bluish counterpart to the reality simulated by the Matrix, which code is expressed in green alphanumerics, which are rubbing off on the images it produces. The introduction movie that was used as promotional teaser shows a public execution that resembles a scene from KINGDOM OF HEAVEN; this is to demonstrate the brutality practiced in the Middles Ages and is meant to penalize the Templars for their fanaticism. The medieval era is stereotyped by filth, unbridled violence and religious intolerance – patterns that have their own story of appearance in movies (Scharff 2007, 63-84). This is to make sure that we may be able to recognize the medieval landscape and atmosphere within a game. By the look of it, serious issues may be raised in KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. Simona Slaniþka (2005, 385) even perceives Scott's movie as a crusade against the G. W. Bush' war against Iraq, with its pointless brutality and destruction deriving from arrogance as well as religious intolerance. Prior to becoming Altaïr's victims, the people who get killed by the players in ASSASSIN’S CREED had been war profiteers. The players may feel that they are there to hinder more bloodshed through their action. ASSASSIN'S CREED conveys a political statement in a historical setup; this underscores conviction and confirms the player in a feeling of seriousness. Producer Jade Raymond (2007) describes this as one of the main goals in the course of the development: One of our main objectives was to — of course — make the art direction as realistic and as close to the historical references that we found; but the difficulty about — you know — having a subject where guys walk around in armor and look like knights and stuff like that is that it tends to be associated with fantasy and one of the important things to us was making sure, that the game and the feeling and the location was really relevant to people.

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Fearing that it would be mistakenly classified as Fantasy let the producers argue that in order to be relevant the historical scenery should be copied accurately. According to Vit Sisler (2009), this is why the reception of ASSASSIN'S CREED was very successful in the Middle East. The protagonists are essential to convey the political statement: Balian is of illegitimate and dubious descent, a figure that has a long history as mediator between cultures, not only between the Orient and the Occident but also among us, between our modern culture as represented by today’s gamers and the antiquated Middle Ages (Sisler 2009). Nor do we know much about Altaïr. All we know about him is that he is the son of a couple unifying two religions. He thus presents a similar possibility for identification, like the bastard character did in general in medieval epics. However, the producers have created a character that is more suitable for the common concepts of video games. He neither needs to give the right example nor does he have to proceed in a diplomatic way. This gives him the authority to kill.

Heroes These kinds of proceedings and Altaïr's appearance remind of valiant comic heroes that take the law into their hands (cf. Ballhausen and Krenn 2009): Ubisoft creates an ’Eagleman‘ whose image is now programmatic: a hero revolving over the roofs of the city like an eagle, diving down to perform individual assaults, to finally eliminate the "architects of the crusades“ (Raymond 2007). This procedure intends as little collateral damages as possible, no hurt to civilians; performing missions to hinder invasions on a large scale that would result in carnage among civilians. Desmond Miles, the barkeeper of the frame story, a typical average fellow, incarnates the alter ego of this super hero in fancy dress, and is meant to bridge him to the consumer (player). The assassin is neither soldier, like in World-War-Shooters with their classic first person perspective, nor is he general, as in strategy games the god-like look from above on the historical landscapes is usual. He only defines himself according to different modes of visibility behind enemy lines4 and in between innocent civilians and thus disregards loyalty. With every murder Altaïr realises more clearly that it is his main patron who is spinning the webs of intrigue. The next game of the series was expected to be less dreary. For this, the new protagonist, Ezio, has a sunnier character; he is to take over and

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lead the gamers through the Italian Renaissance. He is similar to modern heroes in the style of Bruce Wayne, alias Batman: Enlightened by the knowledge of Early Modernity, he is equipped with smart gadgets devised by Leonardo da Vinci, so his tours through Italy of the 16th century are more promising in terms of mobility. For instance, he can fly or swim, so he is free to move through the canals of Venice as well. To create a bridge between us and the virtual world, there is also an avatar, some sort of figure that moves in a very realistic way and that stands for the gamer in the virtual world. Leon Hunt (2002, 203) wrote about how martial art games integrate choreographies as we know them from Far East Kung-fu like movies, so that cineastes get the feeling of mastering the very same combat skills. [S]hock-dispensing joypads, fast-cut action replays and inevitable kinaesthetic identification may have set new challenges for film choreography, but the kinetic pleasures of fighting games remain rooted in remediated martial arts action and a cinematic construction of the authentic.

The recording of body movement, not narration, is the actual aim of cinematography, as media archaeologists tell us. The success of these games show us how this faithful visual reproduction of body movement at the touch of a button involves recipients up to now is important to copy the body expression from movie stars to create a feeling of authenticity — the aura, as Walter Benjamin calls it. “In the case of martial arts, at least, it is not just films and games that remediate one another, but, by necessity, technology and the body. The martial artist’s body may be extensively (re)mediated, but technology has yet to make it disappear.” (Hunt 2002, 204)

Urbanity and Archaeology How should we generalize those strategies to simulate historical authenticity, like applying them to other games, or other historical ages and eras? It seems important to make the limits of historical facts compatible with the available freedoms the game offers; these are basically freedom of virtual movement. Accessing another epoch actually means virtually discovering new cultural realms. The feeling of historical authenticity is thus to be located in the cities represented in ASSASSIN'S CREED.

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Before ASSASSIN'S CREED, the GTA-game series had implemented virtual mobility in an urban landscape; from the third instalment on the series even offered a 3D environment (Rockstar Games 2001). From then on, the gamer could likewise perform criminal actions within fictive USAmerican metropolises, which have been modelled after real cities. In the game, the player steals cars, drives them around town for a joyride ignoring the traffic code and it is left up to him whether he conforms with 5 the goals and targets he should fulfill or whether he just drives aimlessly around – digital cruising (Cf. Mitgutsch and Rosenstingl 2010). They found a similar option for ASSASSIN'S CREED, Parcour, working without any motorized vehicle and thus fitting into a medieval or early modern background. Parcour is an urban sport, a kind of acrobatics, in search for the shortest and most direct way at breakneck speed in a most impressive way, daringly jumping, leaping, or rolling over railings, banisters, fences, steps and walls. This playful exercise had become a model for the motion of the assassins (Raymond 2007). The next episode of the successful game did not take long to follow. Apart from the possibility to gain profit from the branding, here was also an opportunity to make up for past mistakes. As far as history was concerned, they had accurately tried to abide by the fact, but they had also allowed themselves some poetical license that had led to some embarrassment: For themselves, the producers had never even been to the Near East. No visiting of the original site of the game, no way to be able to account for the authenticity of the sites of the assassins. Therefore, for the production of ASSASSIN'S CREED II, the developers decided to visit Italy, the ideal background to stage the next series of murders taking place in a plot of political intrigue. The developers attended detailed guided tours and knew which houses already existed at the time in which this game takes place. They could therefore reproduce the scenes and fix animation spots around which they are striving to recreate the historical daily life. This perception of history gives the perfect example for a conflict that Wolfgang Ernst (2001, 249) in another context comments as follows: Hermeneutic empathy here clashes with pure data navigation: there is a world of difference between an archeology of knowledge and historical imagination, which seeks to replace positive evidence by an act of reanimation.

It would be advisable for the media-archaeologists not to succumb to the temptation in fantasizing about the abstract blanks left between the tangible remaining ruins that are all past and gone. To abide by Ernst's

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archaeographic method, you have to investigate into the pre-history of mass media, into conformity with technical aspects that the game is subjected to and that are not yet linked to the story; these don't have to reflect a sequence of events, as history for example. The developers can afford to ignore limiting rigid historical methods and theories through embedding their historical game into, and applying motifs out of science fiction. Actually, historicity and continuity already get lost through the virtual space of the action game and its background story. The reproduced historical images of our collective memory are randomly accessed and thus ’synchronized‘. Therefore, a game dealing with historical authenticity cannot reconstruct real history, but only its proper remediation. So the consumer/player might indulge in the illusion, to be actually involved in events and activities that have an impact on our present times.

The double logic The brand ASSASSIN'S CREED will therefore not only be ported to other platforms (PC, home computers, tablets, consoles, hand-helds, and so on.) But the game environment itself is remediated and takes the form of Animus in the first part of the series. The broad exploitation of the brand makes it difficult to perceive clearly, which media get remediated and how, which parts belong to hypermediacy and which to immediacy. It all depends on the arbitrary classification of new media as suggested by Bolter and Grusin. Finally, virtual reality is nothing else but a video game, since the user is busy with interactive feedback loops, however mediated by different interfaces. This also applies to ’ubiquitous computing‘. On the other hand, as far as data storage is concerned, ’old media‘ such as cinema and television don't make any difference. Only the display techniques may differ through the different means of transmission. Some appear to be rather hypermedia, but after all, moving images are nothing else but a series of pictures. Thus, tough we can isolate both factors: interactivity (hypermediacy) and cinematography (immediacy), linking them together should not be taken for granted: ASTEROIDS, TETRIS, PAC-MAN, SPACE INVADERS used to work with symbols that had no similarity with the real world and the narration, if there was any, limited itself to game prompts. However, they were successful. Therefore we can now nostalgically look back at these games of the past and call them cult games (Mitgutsch and Rosenstingl

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2010). The increasing similarity of a new aesthetic in films and games has already been noticed (Cf. King and Krzywinska 2002, Beil 2010), but it is being taken for granted. It is useful to historicise and give particular attention to this aspect of both converging media, to clarify the frontiers between two basically divergent media technologies.6 The critical comments from fan communities concerning historical accuracy just seem to be of amateur status. ”The developers stress the historical authenticity in ASSASSIN'S CREED, but they display the ’Dome of the Rock’ from Jerusalem with its current golden dome“, as you can read in a Wikipedia article7, that subsumes “historical correctness” under the section: “Gameplay”. Here,facts about the in-game architecture are recorded to make it available for time travellers when navigating through the avatars. Jan Diestelmeyer (2008, 133-156) explains on account of interactive DVD menus and their spatiality, how the “dispositif”, or mechanism, of video gaming has significantly revolutionised cinema. Also YouTube and internet streaming platforms can be quoted as an expression of a game mentality that classifies media and their content according to criteria referring to their usability. The remarks made so far, concerning the historicity as well as fictional models, are not necessarily complete. However, they build a foundation, a basic understanding about the impact of ASSASSIN'S CREED within its context. This complex network of cross-references of remediation does not have anything in common with nesting Russian dolls, it is far more a structure with a double bottom and ASSASSIN'S CREED is an exemplification of how video games anticipate a succession of new media out of films in the line of historical epics. History does not have a content status, it is not contained in the medium but it is rather historical consciousness, memorizing the past that is being staged while playing. This sort of historical correctness – some teasing details that do not really affect the game – is to be ascribed to the game designers, for the data format is merely meant to be an entertaining action game where history is only but a matter of scenery.

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Notes 1

This perspective is taken in my other submission in the German proceedings volume that deals with the history of cutscenes in the development of visual narrations in commercial video games. See Kerschbaumer, Florian, Winnerling, Tobias (eds.). Frühe Neuzeit und Videospiele. –Geschichtswissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Bielefeld: transcript, forthcoming 2014. 2 Maybe the name of the protagonist, Altaïr, even alludes to the early home computer of the 1970ies, the Altair 8800. 3 This genre finally belongs to the realm of cinema, that stresses a feeling of immediacy while documentaries tend to display different media sources next to each other and illustrate the flow of migrations and invasions on geographical maps by means of arrows: A case of hypermediacy, as remediated in the world war game series CALL OF DUTY - or through the game mechanics of strategy games. 4 Cf. the game of Replay Studios, VELVET ASSASSIN, released in 2009, deals with a female spy that operates behind enemy lines during world war II, she infiltrates Nazi-organizations to undermine their facilities. We also find third person perspectives there as well as historical figures (i.e. Violette Szabo), embedded in a frame story; this leads again to anachronisms. 5 GTA fits out the urban space with ’micro-game inserts‘ that the player can play alongside with the main plot: you can waste time like watching television for example - such actions that have no impact on the progress of the game. 6 This will be elaborated upon in my contribution to the German proceedings volume. 7 Wikipedia: Assassin’s Creed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed Accessed December 18, 2012.

CHAPTER THREE PLAYERS IN THE DIGITAL CITY: IMMERSION, HISTORY AND CITY ARCHITECTURE IN THE ASSASSIN’S CREED SERIES GERNOT HAUSAR1

Introduction What is a man but the sum of his memories? We are the stories we live! The tales we tell ourselves! – AC: REVELATIONS

Ubisoft’s award-winning ASSASSIN’S CREED series (AC) is a stealth third person role playing (RPG) adventure-sandbox with a rich singleplayer story and a multi-player arena mode. It is also a commercial success and shows that video games have become equally if not more important as a business sector than other forms of audio-visual entertainment. The popularity and wide distribution also underline the importance of historical game studies as a means to examine the popular use of ’history‘ and its impact. In ASSASSIN’S CREED, a variety of historical city-settings like Jerusalem, Florence, Rome, Constantinople, New York or Boston invite players to explore the sandbox while following the single-player storyline, which – as the intro states – s “based upon historical events”. This chapter looks at the different techniques the ASSASSIN’S CREED designers use to draw players into the game world – with a special emphasis on the role of ’history‘ and ’historical architecture’.2

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Alternate and (counter-) factual History in Games Nothing is true – everything is permitted. (But it) …is merely an observation on the nature of reality. To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile and that we must the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions and that we must live with our consequences, whether glorious or tragic. – AC: REVELATIONS

The first part of this quote from ASSASSINS CREED: REVELATIONS might well describe most of the uses of ’history‘ in popular culture: Everything is permitted and ’historical facts‘ will be readily adapted for the game. Video games are an interesting example of the phenomenon that e.g. Jörn Rüsen in the context of history education called “Geschichtskultur (history culture)”3, the increasing interconnection and equality of popular and scientific historical elements in our individual experiences to form and reinforce our popular understanding and narratives of what the past could have been like. While historical settings and artefacts are common elements of the stories told through popular media, they mostly are used as stage dressing, a ’themed set‘ for the narrative. This means that historical aspects, situations, places and persons are introduced but are changed by authors to fit the narrative and the game mechanics. This still keeps open a window into a virtual world with a lot of accurately depicted historical elements, but these (more or less) subtle but deliberate changes show an imagined past that only loosely corresponds and sometimes contradicts what scientists imagine the past to have been from the evidences that remain. Even scientific investigations into the past offer a variety of challenges that have to be considered: From the personal knowledge, experiences and background of the researchers, problems with accurate and reliable data and artefacts to missing links for evidence-based reasoning to back up theories, there are a lot of possibilities to ’go wrong‘, even when trying to use a scientific approach. This naturally hampers any attempts to ’realistically‘ depict the past in all its complexities. But the main differences between the two colourful pictures that sciences and humanities on one hand and popular media on the other attempt to draw are purposes and impacts:

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Academic researchers base their assumptions more upon evidence and – factoring in e.g. Rüsen’s4 synthesis of postmodernist input – produce narratives. Audiences are other academics and interested laypersons. The purpose is to advance understanding and knowledge of the past. Popular media uses cultural outlines and elements to supplement the story-telling. In the case of commercial enterprise, for example motion pictures, paperbacks, audio- and e-books or video games, it uses the settings to generate interest amongst the target customer groups. The purpose here is to offer and sell high-quality products for a more and more sophisticated mass market. Thus any attempt at historical ’accuracy‘ has to be seen in the light of catering to more knowledgeable audiences, who have not only been exposed to the popular depictions of history during their childhoods but also had access to more detailed information during their schooling years. As both approaches to the past are based upon people’s continuous interest in remembrance and the past, scientific and popular media interests can coincide. With the wide reach of popular media, history as a topic can be introduced and presented to a wide audience long before schools or universities can start to educate students on the past. The process of researching history in video games makes it necessary to accept that there will often be alternate and counterfactual historical elements. ASSASSIN’S CREED is a great example, as it (re)mixes science fiction-, fantasy- and (counter-)factual historical themes and motives in its narrative. A successful game uses its theme, its layouts, the game mechanics, music, force feedback and a variety of other aspects to draw players in – with the goal of helping the players immerse themselves in beating the game while exploring the world and theme they have chosen. To qualify as a ’history-themed game‘, the narrative in all its forms, sometimes through building layouts and level design, reconstructed architecture and artefacts, persons or events has to be researched more for the importance of historical elements in the process of immersion and the game mechanics than on historical accuracies in the reproduction of artefacts for the set. Questions on which elements of a specific game need ’history‘ as a prerequisite to fulfil their function are important to define a clear research focus. Specific approaches along those lines have for example been discussed in the German-speaking Game Studies Community by Carl Heinze5 or Angela Schwarz6.

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A practical approach to definitions on what constitutes a ’historical element’ is offered by Carl Heinze and is based upon thematic text analysis used in literary studies: A functionally relevant position in the narrative has to be founded in actual history and construed in its own historical discourse.7 (…) Historical Narration means (…) to tell a story that needs historical knowledge by recipients to be recognised and understood.8 (Further) …an element with fundamental importance to the fabric of the whole (story) has to be recognisable as historic.9

This approach is wide enough to allow for counterfactual and alternative narratives to be investigated together with fact-based narratives. It further concentrates on a gradual characterisation, which is desirable when confronted with a medium like (video) games, whose main purpose is to entertain and not to educate. And it can be adapted to all elements of a game, ranging from the game mechanics, level designs, music and layouts to digital representations of historic architectures.

Losing oneself in the digital City Maze Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination. – Rebecca Solnit10

This quote from Rebecca Solnit’s thoughtful ’History of Walking’ offers a lot of insight into the parallels between a physical space and its digital representation in a virtual game world modelled after our earth with close approximations concerning physics, weather and biosphere. The physical space evolved in a certain way through time: who dwelled, lived and worked there, how it could be accessed, what structures and layouts were accepted or discarded, which uses were intended and what unintended uses were discovered. In short, by rebuilding a physical space in a video game, one gains implicit information on how to best make use of it in the context of a game world simulation as well. This information, which will be collectively called ’passive historical elements‘ because they have to be individually discovered and integrated into each players gameplay, are as if not more pervasive than other factors of a (historical) setting. As it is only a passive factor in the narrative, it is also seldom

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changed as radical as other historical elements and therefore preserves more ’factual history‘ in games. By consulting historical research one can get more hints on how to best integrate this setting into the overall layout. This includes questions on how best to access this space, e.g. by walking, climbing or riding, the difficulty and limitations of certain paths through this setting and also what to expect in the context of adversity to be overcome by the player. It is here that ’historical elements‘ are presented most ’authentic‘. ASSASSIN’S CREED offers a variety of mostly preserved district layouts, generic building and landmark reconstructions as well as objects and artefacts, like carts, ships, costumes but also maps, artwork, armour and weapons that resemble their physical cousins. Gated districts, like the docks or the palace were common throughout history, as Rebecca Solnit points out: “Byzantine-era Constantinople had its ’street of harlots’, Tokyo from the seventeenth to the twentieth century had a gated pleasure district (...).11” Naturally there are limitations to the accuracy of the representations dictated by the gameplay, as in the case of the accuracy of guns, which would have astonished contemporary gunsmiths. The focus on the importance of passive thematic elements has sadly been mostly neglected by recent research. Carl Heinze summarises concerning the importance of historical building and setting reconstructions to the game logic of the initial ASSASSIN’S CREED, that even though the “reconstructions offer the illusion of authenticity (…) the (…) buildings have roughly the importance of boxes with varying protrusions.”12 This strict division between the perceived and actual authenticity of the simulation, often grounded in financial and technical reasons, as well as the vehemence in the conclusion seems astonishing, as even a rudimentary layout where only the exterior of a building and the neighbouring streets are preserved, confronts players with actual problems of access and decision-making that offer insights into why a specific historical space – and in the later AC parts also reconstructions of building interiors - evolved in a certain way. Even if only the external layout and territory are preserved, one might still be able to gain valuable insight into the evolved space and its characteristics, as depictions of military tacticians crouched over their (virtual) sand-tables from the past to the present seem to imply.

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While creating the game, part of the creative team of AC: REVELATIONS went location scouting in Istanbul.13 The confrontation with the city lead to a variety of changes: Falco Poiker recalls how some missions were changed as the actual objects, like the grand bazaar, offered new and not easily apparent navigational opportunities for the game character. Raphael Lacoste points out that part of the tiles had to be redone as they did not resemble the real sites close enough. Further Istanbul offers a very distinct building and street layout that should also be recognisable in the virtual representation. Together those interviews paint a more interconnected picture of the development process. The historical setting also shapes how the player will be able to interact through the game mechanics. In a historic first person RPG like ASSASSIN’S CREED, the player will most likely walk or climb through the small and winding streets of Constantinople. The layout of streets and rooftops, which has been chosen to make districts better defendable, also has to be factored into the player approach to certain missions. Infrastructure, like sewers, walls or wells, can be used in a similar fashion. All of these similarities however do not explain the abundance of haystacks throughout the city.

Image 1: Leap of Faith from Galata tower with a view on the rooftops, the Hagia Sofia and other landmarks in the background. ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS. Reproduced with kind permission from Ubisoft Austria.

The lead writer Gary McDevitt points out, that the landmarks are more than just background. They are designed to help players get their bearings while navigating the rooftops of AC: REVELATIONS: As for example the

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Hagia Sofia is clearly visible throughout the city, this and other landmarks “serve as a focal point for exploring the city, getting your sense of space and you bearings” 14 (see image 1). Players often internalise these layouts as part of their attempts at beating the missions of the ASSASSIN’S CREED series. The internalisation seems to go so far that some players recognise and compare the real sites during a visit to Istanbul to the landmarks in the game in fan-made videos.15 This is a great example on how ’historical information‘ is transported and transformed from factual research to a virtual game world and back again to reality. It also shows how fragile a clear division between popular history and professional historical research is in the eyes of the general populace and the individual perception of ’history’.

Immersion…. or not? Immersion itself is not tied to a replication or mimesis of reality. For example, one can get immersed in Tetris. Therefore, immersion into game play seems at least as important as immersion in a game’s representational space. - Gorfinkel16

Immersion in the context of game studies refers to player’s perception of entering the virtual game world through their own imagination. A similar phenomenon, titled “(tele)presence”17 has been described 1980 by Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, with regard to the identification of operators with their remote-operated machinery. But Janet Murray was one of the first to appropriate the term “immersion” in the context of game studies: The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air that takes over all our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.18

This appropriation of a pre-existing term for the process of playermachine interaction has not remained undisputed, with critics arguing that there is no such thing as total immersion in video games, going so far as to call it the “immersive fallacy” in the case of Salen and Zimmermann.19

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Luckily, for the scope of this article, the grade of immersion is not the primary focus. Instead, players’ own accounts of how ASSASSIN’S CREED makes them feel like travelling back to the past, like ’being there‘ while at the same time “learning more about history through playing the game than in school”20 are examined as to how the identification with the game narrative influences the perception of the past. These comments offer some evidence that some grade of immersion with regard to the historical setting is perceived through the imagination of individual players. It further underlines the importance of historical themes in games and other entertainment content in partly shaping the popular perception of ’history’.

Architecture and Coercion Leaders will always find ways to make others obey them. And that is what makes them leaders. When words fail, they turn to coin. When that won't do, they resort to baser things - bribes, threats and other types of trickery. - ASSASSIN’S CREED

In ASSASSIN’S CREED, the main limitations for players in the city simulation are introduced through architecture and at the edges of the map in the context of an animus disconnect. As it is an open world, where players can choose their paths, architecture is the single most important tool for level and mission designers to shape the path of players. Other tools to point players in a certain direction include mission path design or overwhelming adversity. From the players’ perspectives, architecture in single player video games, both in the sense of game world layout and as environment/building design, is unexplored and virgin. Players are explorers, cartographers and pioneers. In ASSASSIN'S CREED they can make the explored space their own after synchronising on top of historical ’landmark‘-buildings like the Galata-Tower in Constantinople. The stunning visuals of the 360 degree synchronisation-animation help with a certain grade of immersion and are a promise and invitation to the player of ASSASSIN'S CREED to liberate the district and bring it under assassin's control. Landmarks in other districts can be seen from synchronisation points as a reminder of further goals for exploration. It is thus that the history of this counterfactual historical space is written by each player anew. The player actions, his interaction with the simulated open city, his individual progress, his ’epic wins and fails‘ but also any real life occurrences from the phone call in the wrong moment to

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the low battery on the game controller, that lets players stare at the screen helpless while their in-game figure gets mercilessly slaughtered – those are the defining elements of how players will remember their progress into the game-space. As each player experience is thus unique, there is a new alternate history written with each new game. One player can therefore write various histories that coexist. The web outside of the game-world is the place where most of those interactions are chronicled by being showcased in videos, walkthroughs and exchanges between players on comparing their individual experiences. But as pointed out above, architecture in open world games is designed with a certain purpose in mind. It complements other design choices like in-game sounds, effects and music, camera perspectives, light/darkness or predefined occurrences in the game narration to point players in a certain direction, bait them to follow a certain path, so that the story can continue. The ’Eagle View‘, a sort of thermal image with the mission goal as the hottest point, is an example for a tool to ’lead‘ players. Another good example is the emergence of the in-game map in open world games: While in early video-games players had to draw their own physical maps with pen and paper, the minimaps and displays during play and the large world maps in pauses of ASSASSIN’S CREED show markers, arrows or distance to a point of ’interest‘ not defined by the player but the game designer. So we have identified the way players are influenced to take a certain path as one of the peculiarities of open world simulations. Where linear games lead players on a prearranged path through rooms simply by limiting the possibilities of interaction with architecture on a formal level, in open spaces players have to be coerced by narrative elements, thus making the audio-visual set, including architecture, artefacts and other content of a game important as a tool to manipulate the players desires through all possible means available. Historical narrative is an especially useful tool in this regard: on the one hand, the player possibly knows about the real world events the game is based upon and acts accordingly - on the other hand, a player will perhaps try to ’outwit‘ the game by trying to change the ’perceived‘ predefined outcome. Players who don't know much about the historical events used in the game are ’informed‘ through in-game cinematics, cutscenes, information databases like the Animus in ASSASSIN'S CREED or additional materials in printed or electronic manuals and online gameportals. This embedding helps players get immersed by correlating player

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action with history but also opens a way to ’coerce‘ players by telling them how a game situation should play out. From the game designers’ perspective, adherence to historical accuracy is a welcome self-imposed limiting factor for the freedom of designers – another example of how there is a strong the interconnection between narration, game mechanics, player experience and the historically themed game world that goes beyond a mere interchangeable ’setting’. By reproducing historical layouts and buildings in their sets another aspect has to be considered that can only be mentioned in passing in the context of this paper: mayor cities like Constantinople were to a high degree as much planned spaces as any virtual game world. Not only the historical narrative but also the space itself ’manipulates’ players: In the real world, citizens and visitors were exposed to the political messages inherent in the city space through (political) city planning and representative buildings. By digital reproduction with a high degree of realism, game designers unwittingly or on purpose also incorporated these messages into their game worlds and thus - to a certain degree - into the individual histories of their players.21 In-game, space and architecture are used by game-designers to drive the story. This means that some areas of the digital city in ASSASSIN'S CREED are not accessible until certain storyline criteria are met by players. In ASSASSIN'S CREED we find three different storylines woven together that are also represented through a certain architectural style: x x x

the game present with modern tech-architecture with a lot of glass and concrete, the timeline of Desmond Miles the Animus as an abstract digital meta-world in the player's computers, where the player avatar might even be a geometrical form during the mini-games historical episodes with reconstructions based upon real-life buildings, layouts and artefacts, through Desmond's relatives like Ezzio Auditore.

The combination of these three storylines helps players start in Desmond's present as a place that feels similar to the ’real‘ world and slowly explains and establishes the techno-magic of the Animus as a plausible in-game reason for the historical episodes.

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Cut scenes rendered in the game-engine visually support the illusion of a persistent city simulation. By rendering clips and cut-scenes – as parts of the game where the player is mostly degraded to a passive spectator – n the same engine the actual game is played, obvious and easily perceived barriers are lowered. This is a further example of a technique that supports partial player immersion. To conclude, this section has shown some ways architecture is used in the ASSASSIN’S CREED series as a tool to lead players on predefined paths through an open world simulation. It has further established some insight into the importance of the interconnection of (historical) themes and the inner workings of games.

Architecture, Artefacts and History A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us. – Janet Murray22

As argued above, architecture as a ’passive historical element‘ in the ASSASSIN’S CREED games is important both for game and level designers and in the development of the players’ individual narrative. This offers possible insights into the importance of settings as the binding and confining element, both in the design and development and the playing of video games. Besides architecture one finds a variety of other elements designed to ’draw players in‘ and coerce them into following the designed path in an open world game. There are persons and artefacts throughout the game that are designed in accordance with the general theme. Lore can also be considered as part of ’passive historical elements‘, as it is available through the Animus database. To read or ignore the Animus database entries is an individual decision by players, as is the importance of this background information as part of the overall enjoyment of the game narrative. In the case of ASSASSIN’S CREED, lore and artefacts are modelled after actual historical things from the historical setting: cloths, weapons, armour, artwork, maps, battlements, events and persons will seem familiar to players interested in history. Architecture is also integrated in visual and contextual elements of the narrative, e.g. when one has to sneak into Topkapi palace or incite a riot to break open the gate to the docks.

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In general ASSASSIN’S CREED uses the historical storyline and plays with its factual elements to shape player response: On the one hand, some events, like the outcome of a battle, are predestined – especially to players educated in history. On the other hand, players are encouraged to try changing the outcome in counterfactual and alternate historical scenarios, where the player can ’choose‘ to alter ’official‘ history if certain conditions are met, as it is the case with the downloadable additional content (DLC) to ASSASSIN’S CREED III. There an alternative historical scenario features a George Washington who foregoes presidency and rules as a ’tyrannical king‘. The game thus offers both narrative paths to the player: while the ’official‘ game follows history as we know it, the DLC grants the opportunity to explore alternative historical scenarios in the same game world. Both narratives are driven by the player’s interest in factual history – in the case of the DLC, the opportunity to ’alter‘ history and experience alternative paths not taken is indeed the main selling point. So where does this leave us? Game studies and especially historical game studies are still a relatively young field of interest and it shows in the tools and methods available. World simulation games, who try to use the computing power of the gaming platforms to simulate a complex world, are a good example, as they try to simulate a ’living‘ biosphere with seasons, weather, animals and rudimentary human civilisation as a backdrop for the actual story. In case of historical world simulations, there are thousands of little decisions to consider for the game researcher to offer more than a superficial analysis. Ubisoft has over 6000 employees and most have been working on ASSASSIN’S CREED at some point. Tracking their decisions, some based upon preference others upon necessity, commercial or narrative rationales, would have to be the first step towards a detailed analysis. Artwork, the information on factual history available, the interpretation in the media and the changes between different stages of the development process would have to be taken into account as well. But this is only one side of a game. Players shape games through their individual decisions while playing the game. This also has to be taken into account and connected to the individual experiences during and after playing the game. This includes observation of the game character as well as the player himself during play, but also out of game experience reports that can be traced through posts, discussions and audio-visual media.

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For historians a third element has to be considered through reflection on the methods and evidence that form the actual state of our scientific knowledge of the past. The deliberate acts of developers that lead to choosing a certain scientific historical narrative that weaves together the individual puzzle pieces is in itself difficult but necessary to research. While there has been shown some anecdotal evidence as well as approaches that might merit further study, a lot of questions still have to remain partly unanswered at the end of this article: How to deal with the sheer scale of information? Which methods to use? How to measure the importance of the interconnection between specific content, developers, players and game mechanics? How do popular representations of history in games influence our perception of the past? And how can historical game studies challenge and contribute to established scientific discourse?

Notes 1

Mag Gernot Hausar, Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria. Ideas and Feedback welcome: [email protected]. 2 A complementary chapter deals with thoughts on the psychological impact of reconstructing historical spaces. See: Hausar, Gernot. “Der Stadt ihre Spieler: Historische Metropolen als Teil von Städtesimulationen in der Assassin’s Creed„Serie“, in the German proceedings volume: Frühe Neuzeit im Videospiel. Geschichtswissenschaftliche Perspektiven, edited by Florian Kerschbaumer and Tobias Winnerling. Bielefeld: transcript, forthcoming 2014. 3 Rüsen, Jörn. “Was ist Geschichtskultur? Überlegungen zu einer neuen Art, über Geschichte nachzudenken“ in Historische Faszination. Geschichtskultur heute, edited by Klaus Füßmann, Heinrich T. Grütter, and Jörn Rüsen, Köln: Böhlau, 1994, 3–26. 4 See for an overview in the form of essays: Rüsen, Jörn. Geschichte im Kulturprozeß. Köln: Böhlau, 2002. 5 Heinze, Carl. Mittelalter Computer Spiele: Zur Darstellung und Modellierung von Geschichte im populären Computerspiel.Bielefeld: transcript,77-101, 155-174. 6 Schwarz, Angela (ed.). "Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf ihre Gegner werfen?": Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annährung an Geschichte im Computerspiel. Medienwelten: Vol. 13. Münster: LIT, 2010, 7-28. 7 Geppert, Hans Vilmar. Der Historische Roman: Geschichte umerzählt - von Walter Scott bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen: Francke, 2009, 159. 8 Aust. Hugo. Der historische Roman. Sammlung Metzler: Vol. 278. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994, 17. 9 Quoted from: Heinze (2012), 82 (free translation based upon the German text). 10 Solnit, Rebbecca. Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York: Viking, 2000, 171.

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Ibid. 182. Quoted from: Heinze(2012), 183 (free translation based upon the German text). 13 Hanson, Ben. Assassin's Creed Revelations - Scouting Istanbul. Retrieved from http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/05/20/assassin-39-s-creedrevelations-scouting-istanbul.aspx (2011). 14 x360aNews, Assassin's Creed Revelations Tour of Constantinople and Istanbul. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ifKc0BFg8 (2011). 15 TotiloStephen. See The Real Places You'll Go in the Next Assassin's Creed. Retrieved from http://kotaku.com/5840188/see-the-real-places-youll-go-in-thenext-assassins-creed. (2011); See also: Jodi Mullen, Assassin’s Creed Revelations Tour of Istanbul. Retrieved from http://thoughtsofabeardedgent.com/assassinscreed-revelations-tour-of-istanbul/. (2012) 16 Gorfinkel, quoted in: Salen, Katie, Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003, 450-452. 17 Minsky, Marvin. “Telepresence”, In OMNI magazine. 1980, 44-52. 18 Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998, 98-100. 19 Salen, & Zimmerman, Rules of play, 450-452. 20 See e.g. comment section of this article: Brown, Ian. (2013, March 2). “Are video games like Assassin’s Creed rewriting history?” The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/are-video-games-like-assassinscreed-rewriting-history/article9237302/comments/. 21 A complementary chapter deals with thoughts on the psychological impact of reconstructing historical spaces. See: Hausar „Der Stadt ihre Spieler“. 22 Janet McMurray quoted from: McMahan, Alison. “Immersion, Engagement and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games” in The video game theory reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Bernard Perron, New York, NY: Routledge, 2003, 67–86, 68-70. 12

CHAPTER FOUR GAMES WITHIN THE GAME: ON THE HISTORY OF PLAYING IN ASSASSIN’S CREED II ANDREAS FISCHER

Video games can become self-reflective by presenting games within a game-world, thereby creating the possibility to discuss the use and functions of playing in general. In this perspective, presenting games of the past in a videogame means to create a reference to the videogame’s own history, the history of playing. By analysing a scene of carnival games based in the Renaissance Venice of ASSASSIN’S CREED II, I will examine the opportunities offered by the presentation of historical playing in the construction of conceptions of history in video games. Hence, the focus will be on the means video games have to tell history. For this purpose, I will make two assumptions: (1) History can be connected to the experience of alterity. Without difference, there remains identity, but identity leads to a second presence. Consequently, an experience of the difference between past and present creates at least a more evident experience of historical development. (2) Regarding the description of the relevant scene, I will use concepts derived from theatre studies, since theatre theorists have developed a complex set of notions in dealing with a quite similar phenomenon: theatres within a theatre.1 We can speak of metatheatrality when the performing aspects of a theatre within a theatre are discussed on stage, insofar as theatre is itself the subject of discussion. Implicitly or even explicitly, not only the theatre within the theatre is debated, but also theatre in general. In a similar manner, the presentation of games within a game means starting

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explicitly or implicitly a quasi metaludic discourse on playing in general. Based on these assumptions, I will argue that ASSASSIN’S CREED II, by representing historical games, makes use of a difference between videogames and traditional games to construct a Renaissance scenario which is derived from popular concepts of a morally corrupt Renaissance. Therefore, I will first outline the Renaissance game-world created by the developers of ASSASSIN’S CREED II. Then, I will describe the gamewithin-the-game-scenario and subsequently discuss whether it provides an experience of difference within a Renaissance context. Last, a conclusion will sum up the results.

The Renaissance world of ASSASSIN’S CREED II In an advertising text to the fifth part of the ASSASSIN’S-CREEDfranchise, Ubisoft is clear about the authentic nature of its game: “There’s the American Revolution you know from history books. And then there’s the revolution you’ll be fighting, set in a world that’s far more realistic, gritty, and alive than any history book ever could be.”2 The focus on authenticity is also evident in the effort Ubisoft makes in all preceding parts to create historical accuracy regarding architecture.3 However, historical accuracy is not the objective of these productions, since historical appearance is merely a part of the brand. Authenticity should rather be considered a key marketing strategy for the product ASSASSIN’S CREED, as representatives of Ubisoft have made clear in a contribution to conference proceedings edited by Angela Schwarz: At the beginning of such a project with a historical setting, the responsible game designers will consult literature regarding the respective theme. In so doing, they are primarily concerned to discover which things of the respective epoch could be useful for the realization of the game. Consequently, historical accuracy is not of great importance for most of the productions, since it doesn’t really matter to the developers.4 (my transl.)

Based on Carl Heinze’s arguments, we can assume that historical elements in videogames are to be understood as references to sociallyestablished discourses on history, which may not correspond to specialist discourses: video games are about a model-like communication of history that presents a possible version of history based on socially-established knowledge.5 This also coincides with the developer’s quite unscientific

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willingness to ignore or change historical chronology, “as long as it seems to be correct to the average player.”6 But how have the developers constructed a plausible seeming Renaissance game-world and which Renaissance concept is taken as the basis? ASSASSIN’S CREED II leads the player into a Renaissance of intrigues, crimes and racketeering, populated by prostitutes, mercenaries and thieves, torn apart by a conflict between the secret orders of the Assassins and the Templars.7 These two groups are fighting against each other to gain possession of some powerful magical artifacts called ’the pieces of Eden‘. The player follows and guides Ezio Auditore, a member of the Assassin order, whose path is woven into a coordinate system of historical places, persons and events.8 Broadly speaking, the game consists of a series of assassinations carried out by the player to eliminate different Templars who hold powerful positions in society. Operating secretly in Renaissance cities like Florence or Forlì, the player is also allowed some creativity in fulfilling the tasks, although the fundamental structure of the game could be rather described, in the words of Jesper Juul, as progressive, connected with an accordingly linear narration.9 In the course of his many assassinations, Ezio also comes to the illustrious city of Venice, where the position of the Doge is naturally held by a Templar. Led by their grand master Rodrigo Borgia, the Templars succeeded in seizing this position by poisoning the previous head of state. Consequently, Ezio undertakes to assassinate Marco Barbarigo (authentic 73. Doge of the Serenissima10) with the help of characters who stand outside the Venetian society. He is supported by the Robin-Hood-like Antonio de Magianis, whose gang robs only the rich citizens of Venice, and Theodora Contanto, head of the bordello La Rosa Della Virtù, an establishment operated exclusively by former nuns. This setting highlights ASSASSIN’S CREED II’S clever use of events verifiable by historical sources, mixing them with a popular picture of the Renaissance period. In this way, the historical Doge Barbarigo becomes part of fictional intrigues by a secret society seeking power at all costs. And admittedly, purchasable love did not play a minor role in Venetian society during the Renaissance. This is particularly illustrated by the existence of printed catalogues of prostitutes including prices in the 16th century.11 But the idea of a bordello operated by former nuns stretches the

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limits of creative adoption regarding a morally ambiguous side of the Renaissance period quite far.12 Despite this tricky mixture, making Rodrigo Borgia the head of the Templars and thereby the game’s arch-villain is almost a bit boring. The Borgia family’s lust for power has become a paradigm of early modern power politics and can be found beyond the specialist discourse as a popular Renaissance motif in many novels and television series.13 In my opinion, this strong emphasis on Renaissance moral ambiguity forms a basis for the Renaissance picture of ASSASSIN’S CREED II. Let’s see as to what extent the games of carnival contribute to this picture.

The four games of carnival In sequence 9 of the game, Theodora Contanto tells Ezio that Marco Barbarigo will arrange a ball in the forthcoming carnival. A guest would have an excellent opportunity to assassinate the Doge, particularly as he usually never leaves his palazzo. But only selected persons would be allowed to take part by receiving a numbered golden mask. However, an ordinary citizen also has the possibility to gain one of these masks if he succeeds in winning the four games of carnival. It is now up to the player to accept the challenge and win the competition. Accordingly, the player guides Ezio to a Venetian piazza and announces his participation in the games. It may sound paradoxical at first that a game is about to begin, when we are already playing a game. But in the game’s frame of reference, we are on a deadly serious mission, deeply distinct from the carnival competition for the golden mask.14 By integrating a carnival mask in the game, the developers makes once again use of a popular and at the same time historical object.15 In the gameworld, the mask is the prize that enables the ordinary citizen to cross societal boundaries: a success in the carnival games promises a participation in the life of the Venetian upper class. Thus, the fundamental rule of the games is that whoever wins the four games gets the golden mask and access to the ball. In the first game, the player has to collect as many ribbons as possible from the dresses of Venetian women. The second game demands quickness to reach a flag before an opponent and carry it back to the starting point. In the third game, a record has to be broken on a predefined course, and finally Ezio has to win a boxing match.

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From a historical point of view, one could say that games in the context of Renaissance carnival are not an unusual event. Accounts from different Italian cities tell us about the youth playing war games in carnivals.16 Also the first game with the ribbons could be linked to various parlour games at Italian courts.17 Certainly, the third game is to be seen as an example for the developers’ creativity regarding historical chronology.18 Nevertheless, the effort to present games which are imaginable in a Renaissance context is clearly recognizable. But so far, the depiction of games does not seem to be extraordinary. ASSASSIN’S CREED II makes simply use of more or less historical forms of playing for the construction of Renaissance Venice. However, it is immediately after the games of carnival and by virtue of genuine cheaters that the developers perform a trick to create an experience of difference between modern and historical forms of playing. And this trick certainly demands a closer look.

Cheaters: ‘Sorry Ezio, we could not have known Silvio would cheat as he did’ After having succeeded in all four games, the player sees Ezio on a stage next to the game master, who is about to announce the Assassin’s victory. But the expected celebrations are abruptly interrupted by the intervention of some Templars led by a man named Silvio Barbarigo. They manipulate the results by obvious bribery. In the end, one of the Templars is declared to be the winner. The rules are therefore being bent and Ezio has to leave the piazza without a golden mask. This scene is amazing from the point of view that it gives special attention to games within a game, as the event is made a subject of discussion by the game’s characters in a quasi metaludic discourse on playing. A subsequent video sequence shows the following statement of Theodora Contanto regarding the event: “Sorry Ezio, we could not have known Silvio would cheat as he did.” As Mia Consalvo has pointed out, the notion “cheating” has ambiguous meanings depending on the player’s perspective.19 The categorisation made by Theodora is by contrast very clear and consequently raises some questions: Which rules have actually been broken? Are these the rules of the video game or the rules of the games of carnival? And who has been cheated?

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To answer these questions, recourse to a classical author of game studies will be helpful. Scholars, and not only of video games, have discussed the separation of games from ordinary life using the term “magic circle”, coined by Johan Huizinga.20 In his classical work Homo ludens, Huizinga gives the following observations regarding the respect for rules: These rules in their turn are a very important factor in the play-concept. All play has its rules. They determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play. The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt. (…) Indeed, as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over.21

According to Huizinga, the game is performed within a separate space, related to rituals and cultic acts: “The turf, the tennis-court, the chessboard (…) cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.”22 Players enter this quasi magical space of undisputable rules voluntarily: “Play is a voluntary activity or occupation (…), according to rules freely accepted, but absolutely binding (…).”23 When the rules are broken, the game-world will collapse. In traditional games, players ensure the adherence to rules and consequently the preservation of the ‘magic circle’. The commitment to the rules can be controlled by oneself, if one plays alone, by each other, if various players participate, or in several cases also by an impartial third party. Violation of the rules will either be sanctioned or unconsciously as well as deliberately overlooked. In contrast, it makes sense to assume that video games offer at least the possibility to get along without any human supervisor.24 Even if one tried to let Ezio Auditore hurt himself with his own sword in ASSASSIN’S CREED II, the computer would prevent the action. As a player, you don’t have to agree actively to the rules because initially you cannot do otherwise but abide by the rules. Naturally, video games can also be manipulated technically: Cheating is said to occur also in video games. However, this is a process completely different from cheating in traditional rule-based-games. Cheating in video games means that clever players or professionals look for possibilities to change the game’s systems through manipulation of the program code.25

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The rules themselves are changed and the commitment to the rules is not simulated like it is in classical cheating. The essential difference regarding traditional games is consequently clear to Heinze: ‘The instance that gives the rules is the computer, and one cannot fake unreal facts to the computer.’26 Accordingly, to let a computer control the rules instead of a human, demands other methods to succeed in manipulating the game. Within the game-world of ASSASSIN’S CREED II, Ezio Auditore is consequently confronted with a different instance of control than the player of the video game. By looking at the scene of the annunciation of the winner in the games of carnival, the difference becomes quite clear. In the narration of the game, the instance that supersedes the respect for the rules is a human being, and accordingly he is open for social manipulation. He can be bribed, he can be menaced, and he may have sympathies for one of the competitors. In other words, he can be influenced in various ways that are not applicable to a computer. Therefore, a player of ASSASSIN’S CREED II makes within the gameworld an experience, which would not be possible regarding the video game he plays: the social manipulation of an instance of control. This experience means actually a defeat, since the reward for the effort made in the games of carnival remains absent. Nevertheless, the player has made progress regarding the progressive structure of the video game ASSASSIN’S CREED II. The linear narration of the game does not allow for avoiding the defeat in the games of carnival, since it is a fixed part of ASSASSIN’S CREED II. Accordingly, the completion of the four games actually means a success. Thus, the question for the breaking of rules can now be answered. The rules of the carnival games are being broken, yet the rules of ASSASSIN’S CREED II remain untouched. As a player, you have fulfilled the given task and get a reward by progressing in the context of the game’s linear narration. In the context of the game-world, however, your effort in the games of carnival was in vain because the instance of control was corrupted. The instance of control faced by the player of ASSASSIN’S CREED II27 is fundamentally different from the instance of control that refuses to declare Ezio Auditore the winner of the games of carnival. In this case, the Renaissance world does not work like the video game which evaluates success based on fixed rules.

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ASSASSIN’S CREED II therefore succeeds in creating a difference which is especially emphasized, insofar as the game undermines the player’s expectations. Involving the player by giving a task to fulfil, a technique used in many video games, does not lead to the promised reward of receiving a golden mask. This deviation from the rules, which is explicitly brought into a metaludic discussion within the game, shows a difference, a socially manipulable form of playing. Within the game-world, this difference is particularly created by showing the unscrupulousness of the Templars, who break the rules simply by virtue of their monetary power. Thus, the very moment that creates an experience of alterity, which means the experience of a different form of playing, also shows a fundamental feature of the game’s Renaissance conception: the morality-free power politics of the Templars led by Rodrigo Borgia. The very moment, in which the game in the game is separated from the video game, is constructed by showing an unfair manipulation of rules that conforms to the picture of Renaissance politics presented by the game and contributes to the construction of the alterity of the Renaissance world of ASSASSIN’S CREED II.

Conclusion The rules are broken and remain unbroken at the same time. In a metaludic perspective, it becomes clear that we have to deal with two different forms of playing and consequently with a difference. However, the alterity of the games of carnival is not a specific feature of the Renaissance period. The difference shown by ASSASSIN’S CREED II is rather a difference between traditional games and video games in general. By embedding this difference into a Renaissance game-world and connecting it to the narration of the manipulated carnival games, the difference is used for the construction of a specific picture of the Renaissance period, based on the outlined popular views of morally flexible elites and unscrupulous politics. Insofar, ASSASSIN’S CREED II shows an interesting technique to create self-reflective alterity in video games, which is not the least applicable to the construction of history.

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Notes 1

For these considerations, I will take as a basis Korthals, Holger. Zwischen Drama und Erzählung. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie geschehensdarstellender Literatur. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2003, 324-29 and 409-14. 2 Product information by Ubisoft referring to ASSASSIN’S CREED III, accessible online at URL Accessed May 01 2013. 3 Regarding the mimetic focus of the first part of the franchise cf. Heinze, Carl. Mittelalter Computer Spiele. Zur Darstellung und Modellierung von Geschichte im populären Computerspiel. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012, 155-183; regarding the even scientific support for the design of Renaissance Rome in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood cf. Hsu, Jeremy. A Renaissance Scholar helps build virtual Rome. LiveScience, 12.11.2010, accessible online at URL Accessed May 01.2013. 4 Benedikt Schüler et al.: “Geschichte als Marke. Historische Inhalte in Computerspielen aus der Sicht der Softwarebranche“ In: Schwarz, Angela (ed.). „Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf Ihre Gegner werfen?“ Eine Fachwissenschaftliche Annährung an Geschichte im Computerspiel. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2010, 199-215, to this (203): “Wird ein solches Projekt mit historischem Setting begonnen, lesen die verantwortlichen Gamedesigner Literatur zu dem jeweiligen Thema. Dabei geht es lediglich darum festzustellen, was es in diesem Zeitalter an Dingen gab, die für die Umsetzung des Spiels relevant sein könnten. Es wird folglich bei den meisten Produktionen kein großer Wert auf historische Genauigkeit gelegt, da diese für Entwickler eigentlich nicht von Belang ist.“ On this topic in the same book also Schwarz, Angela. „Computerspiele - ein Thema für die Geschichtswissenschaft?“ In Schwarz (2010), 7-28, especially 16. 5 cf. Heinze, Carl. Mittelalter Computer Spiele. Zur Darstellung und Modellierung von Geschichte im populären Computerspiel. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012, 77-108, especially 82-94. 6 Schüler et al. (2010), 03: “(…) solange es dem Durchschnittsspieler noch als historisch korrekt erscheint.“ 7 In the following, my remarks refer to ASSASSIN’S CREED II (2009) for the Xbox 360, regarding the games of carnival especially sequence 9 of the game. A very useful supporting source in terms of game characters and game plots provides the online accessible Assassin’s Creed Wiki, which was created by enthusiasts of the franchise and is part of the Wikia community. The English version is accessible at URL http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_Wiki. Accessed May 01 2013. 8 In this way, the Pazzi conspiracy of the year 1478 becomes a playable part of ASSASSIN’S CREED II (cf. ASSASSIN’S CREED II (2009), sequence 4). 9 In Juuls perspective, games of progression consist most of all in a series of separate challenges and proceed linear, whereas games of emergence offer a

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variety of possibilities based on a limited set of rules, as for example chess; cf. Juul, Jesper: “The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression” In Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, edited by Frans Mäyrä. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002, 323-29, especially 324-26. However, this division is not be understood as a strict dichotomy, but as an introduction of bipolar extremes of a continuum, since there certainly exist many hybrid forms, cf. Heinze (2012), 117-19. 10 cf. Franco Gaeta: “Barbarigo, Marco” In DBI, Vol. 6 (1964), 73; the article doesn’t tell a story of cruelty at all, it states: “Dopo un'intensa carriera politica, culminata con l'assunzione dell'ufficio di procuratore di S. Marco, fu eletto doge il 19 nov. 1485, soprattutto in virtù della sua gran pratica di governo.” 11 These books are more or less satirical, although they refer, according to Margaret Rosenthal, to real persons, cf. Rosenthal; Margaret: The honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, citizen and writer in the sixteenth-century Venice. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, 39-40 and 274-75. 12 On the difficulties of combining fictional, moralizing and administrative accounts regarding Renaissance sources on sexuality cf. Terpestra; Nicholas: Lost girls. Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp.10-11. 13 There exist numerous novels telling stories about the Borgias and even books containing two novels in one volume, cf. Plaidy; Jean: The Borgias. Two Novels in One Volume. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011. An example of their rather sensational focus could be Christopher Hibberts The Borgias, the cover of which has the following quote from the Sunday Times: “A tale of greed, nepotism, assassination and relentless jostling for power.” (Hibbert, Christopher: The Borgias. London: Constable and Robinson, 2011) The emphasis on the cruelty of the Borgias was already established by Jakob Burkhardt, undoubtly one of the most important promoters of the period name ‘Renaissance’, writing on Alexander VI. and his son Cesare Borgia the following lines: “But when the Pope in course of time fell under the influence of his son Cesare Borgia, his violent measures assumed that character of devilish wickedness which necessarily reacts upon the ends pursued.” (Burkhardt, Jakob: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Penguin Books, 2004, 87) In quite the same manner, the production company Betafilm promotes its television series Borgias by describing Rodrigo Borgia in the following way: “He was a man whose name would become synonymous with ruthlessness, and whose reign as pope would be remembered as the most infamous chapter of the history of the Catholic church – Rodrigo Borgia.” (accessible at URL , Accessed May 01 2013. 14 Ernest Adams defined game-world in the following way: “A game world can have a culture, an aesthetic, a set of moral values, and other dimensions (…).” (Adams, Ernest. Fundamentals of Game Design. Berkeley: New Riders, 2010, 85).Taking this as a basis, I will assume that the Renaissance culture ASSASSIN’S CREED II constructs is clear about describing the four competitions as games in the context of a cheerful carnival, as public spectacles obviously distinct from Ezios assassination attempts.

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cf. Johnson, James H. Venice Incognito. Masks in the Serene Republic. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of Berkeley Press, 2011, who at least dates the first reference to masks in Venice to the year 1268, cf. 54. 16 cf. Ciappelli, Giovanni. Carnevale e Quaresima. Comportamenti sociali e cultura a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1997, 123-36, regarding the connection to carnival cf. 125. 17 As for example described in Baldassare Castiglione: Il Libro del cortegiano. Rome: Bulzoni, 1986 (Reprint of the edition 1528), or in Innocenzo Ringhieri: Cento giuochi liberali, et d'ingegno. Novellamente da M. Innocentio Ringhieri Gentilhuomo Bolognese ritrovati & in dieci libri descritti. Bologna: A. Giaccarelli, 1551. 18 Allen Guttmann holds that records are a specific feature of modern sport, cf. Guttmann, Allen: From Ritual to Record. The Nature of modern Sports. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, 51-55. 19 Mia Consalvo: Cheating. Gaining advantage in video games. Cambridge (Mass.) and London: MIT Press, 2007. 20 cf. for example Salen, Katie; Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003, 95. 21 Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens. A study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1949, 11. 22 ibid., 20. 23 ibid., 28. 24 Michael Liebe: “There is no Magic Circle. On the Difference between Computer Games and Traditional Games” In Stephan Günzel et al. (ed.). Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer games 2008. Potsdam: Potsdam University Press, 2008, 324-40. Liebe concludes with a strong general thesis: “Consequently, the idea of the magic circle is based on factors that are not relevant to computer games.” (338) My formulation is less general, for I think the following statement by Stephan Günzels regarding online games is to be taken into account: “Video games (…) are playable without any commitment (…). This situation changes only in online worlds. In this case the players have to commit themselves to respect the rules of the game, for example to be present at the same hour to fight against another guild. Only here the magic circle is recreated - also in the digital world.” (my transl.) (Original: “Computerspiele (…) sind ohne jedwede Verpflichtung spielbar (…). Diese Situation kehrt sich erst wieder in Onlinewelten um. Hier müssen sich Spieler tatsächlich verpflichten, die Regeln des Spiels einzuhalten, also etwa zur selben Zeit antreten, um gegen eine andere Gilde zu kämpfen. Erst hier kommt es zur Wiedererstehung des Magic Circle – auch im Digitalen.“) (Stephan Günzel: „Der reine Raum des Spiels. Zur Kritik des Magic Circle. In Mathias Fuchs; und Ernst Strouthal: Das Spiel und seine Grenzen. Wien: Springer, 2010, 187-200, to this 199). 25 Heinze (2012), 65-66: “Aber auch bei Computerspielen ist manchmal von Betrug, dann meist mit der Vokabel Cheating, die Rede. Dabei handelt es sich aber um einen ganz anderen Vorgang als beim Falschspielen im traditionellen Regelspiel: Bei der Computerspiel-Mogelei suchen findige Spieler und

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Spielerinnen oder professionelle Anbieter nach Möglichkeiten, das Spielsystem durch Manipulation am Programcode zu verändern.“ 26 Ibid., 66: “Die regelgebende Instanz beim Computerspiel ist der Computer. Diesem kann nichts Falsches vorgespielt warden.” 27 It should be noted that my observations refer to a single player of ASSASSIN’S CREED II. Any game with the participation of more human players will be a more complex phenomenon. This broad topic, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

CHAPTER FIVE ASSASSIN’S CREED AND THE FANTASY OF REPETITION MARTIN ISAAC WEIS1

ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS opens in either 16th century Masyaf or 21st century New York, depending on how you look at it.2 On the one hand, there is Ezio Auditore, slowly making his way up the side of a mountain in Masyaf and into the ancient Assassin stronghold that was once overseen by the legendary Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad. But on the other, despite appearance, the game’s diegesis repeatedly makes clear that the player only indirectly controls Ezio, and that access to Ezio is always mediated by a second character: Desmond Miles. From his position in the 21st century, Desmond uses the video game-like Animus–“a projector that renders genetic memories in three dimensions”–to take control of his ancestors and replay their pasts.3 If the past is the game’s present, this is only because the present functions as a screen onto which history can be projected. The temporal confusion of this scene is only furthered by the phantomlike trace of Altaïr that is visible to Ezio as he climbs. This trace provides Ezio with a glimpse of Altaïr’s past, revealing to the younger assassin the path that his forebear once took and overlaying it onto the present; but this trace also causes the scene to allegorically fold in on itself. As a first attempt, we might say that the player plays as Desmond playing as Ezio playing as Altaïr. That is, as I discuss below, just as Desmond takes control of his ancestors by ’synchronizing‘ with them through the Animus, here, Ezio must also synchronize with Altaïr. But Altaïr is hardly a new face, just as Masyaf is hardly a new location. In fact, the opening of REVELATIONS is bound to evoke a feeling of déjà vu for those players familiar with the first ASSASSIN’S CREED. In the opening of ASSASSIN’S CREED, Desmond controls Altaïr as he–like Ezio

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will three centuries later–fights his way into the stronghold; once there, Altaïr is overwhelmed by Templar soldiers and forced to perform a daring leap of faith from atop the peak of the stronghold. Ultimately Altaïr–still like Ezio will–is able to scale the walls of the stronghold and sneak back in. Play in these opening moments of REVELATIONS, then, becomes a form of replaying, with the player playing as Desmond playing as Ezio playing as Desmond playing as Altaïr. It is a dizzying chain of control that emphasizes the series’ anxieties about history–history of the distant past, but also of past gameplay. The ghost-like trace of Altaïr provides the player with the chance to reexperience a past nearly 500 years old. It also allows the player to reexperience a past much more recent and produced as an earlier moment of play, a process that thematises the ephemerality associated with video game.4 Both of these histories are, of course, fictionalized. In its engagement with the mystical and the superstitious, the ASSASSIN’S CREED series makes little attempt at sustained historical fidelity;5 similarly, while the trace of Altaïr follows a path that clearly alludes to the one Altaïr takes in the first game, it’s hardly a perfect reproduction. What persists despite these historical inaccuracies, however, is the impulse to use the video game as a historical medium, one that is as capable of reflecting on a distant historical past as it is its own. History in these video games, then, is not just about distant events, but the medium through which these events are experienced. As the above discussion of REVELATIONS suggests, the ASSASSIN’S CREED series is not simply composed of historical video games, but of video games about historical video games. The opening of REVELATIONS draws our attention to a common desire to stabilize the ephemerality of history and make it repeatable in its totality (a desire that is cultural if not also a constitutive feature of the human psyche).6 Many media forms afford a fantasy of repetition in which they attempt to concretize the vanishing passage of time,7 and the video game in particular – with its multiple lives and new games–presents the past as replayable.8 In what follows, I argue that the ASSASSIN’S CREED series thematises this fantasy of repetition in order to provide an interpretive model in which the skill of the gamer functions as a tool for historical investigation. Although the ASSASSIN’S CREED series embraces its historical inaccuracies, this same model has been employed by the educational television show TIME COMMANDERS, in which contestants play through historical campaigns on a modified version of The Creative Assembly’s video game, ROME: TOTAL WAR. In thematising

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this fantasy of repetition, however, the video game reveals its inability to stabilize the passage of time, revealing both history and gameplay to be unrepeatable. The ASSASSIN’S CREED series stars Desmond Miles, an ex-assassin turned bartender who, upon finding himself thrust into a war of millennial proportions between the eponymous Assassins and the Knights Templar, is turned assassin once again. In many ways, the games in the series play like standard action-adventure games. Players sneak around the city completing various stealth and combat-based kills, spending the money earned in the process to purchase sturdier pieces of armour and stronger weapons. Where these games distinguish themselves from other games of the genre is in their representation of health. In a tutorial that is directed at Desmond as much as it is the player, the computerized voice of the animus explains that “The synchronization bar represents how in sync you are with your ancestor’s memories. If you ever fall completely out of sync, the animus will restore you to your last synchronized position.”9 It is a familiar concept reconfigured along the lines of the game’s investment in history: instead of losing a bar of health every time you are hit, you lose a bar of synchronization–lose enough, and you restart from the last checkpoint. But there are other ways to become desynchronized that don’t involve getting hurt, and these play a significant role in structuring the historical model articulated by the ASSASSIN’S CREED series. Kill an innocent bystander in the first game, for example, and a warning will pop up, informing Desmond that Altaïr did not kill civilians. With each warning, the synchronization bar flashes red and another unit of the bar is removed. Certain assassinations require the player to remain undetected until going in for the kill, and failure to do so will boot Desmond out of the memory and back to his last synchronized position. The Animus, then, turns Desmond into equal parts gamer and historian. In his discussion of digital historiography, Steve Anderson has argued that digital media transforms the historian into a figure capable of “discovering, reproducing and linking data into new combinations.”10 While Anderson approaches this figure in terms of the computer scientist or the hacker, these traits are equally applicable to the gamer, whose own creativity is required to overcome the various obstacles that make up a video game.11 In the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, these obstacles are about maintaining historical fidelity–albeit, a fictional historical fidelity–while Desmond replays the actions of his ancestors. Successfully replaying a memory means obtaining an acceptable level of historical fidelity in which

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the narrative constructed falls within specific constraints, a process that is measured by the synchronization bar. What becomes clear while playing, however, is that Desmond can always only play a version of his ancestor’s past: he might complete a memory by remaining synchronized with the animus throughout, but there are always other ways of doing so. Beginning with the second game in the series, the player is offered optional objectives that allow Desmond to establish perfect synchronization with his ancestor. These objectives– which range from completing a mission within a certain amount of time to eliminating a target by throwing him into a wall–ostensibly provide Desmond with a more complete sense of a specific moment of his ancestor’s history. Yet, ultimately even this idea gestures to the way in which absolute historical knowledge remains unobtainable. Although these optional objectives act as a sort of historical corrective–functioning to more closely align Desmond’s replaying of his ancestors’ actions with his ancestors’ actual actions–they also reveal the uncertainty that continues to surround the past; that is, by emphasizing what is constrained, these optional objectives also paradoxically emphasize what is left unconstrained. Desmond might choose to have Ezio use stealth and assassinate his mark without being detected, or he might throw caution to the wind and choose to fight through a sea of guards: 12 so long as he kills his mark within the set amount of time, however, the end result–perfect synchronization–is the same. By applying the variability inherent in many video games to a historical narrative, the ASSASSIN’S CREED series suggests a model for thinking about the video game as a medium capable of producing historical narratives that resist interpretive closure. These narratives should be understood as alternative in the sense that they always exist in relationship to other narratives. While the histories produced by the ASSASSIN’S CREED series are certainly alternative in the traditional sense of the word–that is, they offer a fictionalized retelling of the past–these games also offer a model for using the video game to produce alternative histories that fall within the range of traditional historical interpretations. This is done by mapping two forms of play onto each other: the play of the video game and the play present in any historical narrative (that emerges between the gaps of what is known). While the historical knowledge produced by playing the ASSASSIN’S CREED series is fictional, we can already begin to see the sort of historical

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process suggested by the ASSASSIN’S CREED series emerging in and around other video games. Consider, for example, the historical television series, TIME COMMANDERS. Using a modified version of Creative Assembly’s historical video game, ROME: TOTAL WAR, BBC Two’s TIME COMMANDERS places a group of four Rome players in charge of an army in a historic battle: “Welcome to the show that can change the course of history.”13 It is a dramatic line–no doubt intended to keep viewers from changing the channel–but it also emphasizes the active role played by the gamer in producing a historical narrative. Just as in the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, in TIME COMMANDERS this production must take place within certain boundaries: “You have to find a way to preserve the course of British history,” the host tells the contestants during “Battle of Stamford Bridge,” an episode that pits them as the English against the Norse.14 Through the interplay of these two thrusts–on the one hand, to “change the course of history,” and on the other, to preserve it–the show transforms gameplay into historical interpretations whose outcomes are indicative of their authenticity. During the early moments of the “Battle of Stamford Bridge,” one of the contestants yells out to his teammates to “Try to get into a wedge shape, guys!”15 While the sentiment is familiar to anyone who has ever played a team based multiplayer game, what happens next is not. “Look, Sam’s going for a wedge shape,” begins one of the trained historians who act as commentators during the show. “Now the English used a variety of battle formations. Perhaps the most famous was the […] boar’s snout, and very similar to what Sam’s doing here.”16 Sam’s decision is not only a tactically valid one–in that it ultimately leads to victory within the game–but also a historically valid one–in that it produces an acceptable narrative. The point, however, is the relationship between these two registers: in successfully leading the English to victory, Sam helps “to find a way to preserve the course of British history.” Despite the difference in genre, then, TIME COMMANDERS follows a model of history very much like the one suggested throughout the ASSASSIN’S CREED series: in both, winning is about using skill to manipulate the game such that certain historically based objectives are met. Whereas the ASSASSIN’S CREED series uses the language of synchronization, in TIME COMMANDERS this is represented through the giant announcement that flashes on the screen at the end of the battle, announcing in all capital letters that “YOU ARE VICTORIOUS.”17 “I know it’s difficult, but try to compartmentalize. Focus on the present,” Lucy warns Desmond near the beginning of ASSASSIN’S CREED: BROTHERHOOD, the third instalment in the series. “What if I can’t stop the

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visions?” Desmond asks with a reluctance that suggests won’t as much as can’t.18 The two are walking underground Auditore Villa in Monteriggioni, trying to find a new place to set up base, and Desmond keeps seeing the past in the form of Ezio and his allies trying to escape from the Templar army. This would be normal for Desmond, only at this point–no longer hooked up to the Animus–he is hallucinating freely. Ezio, translucent, appears as a ghost, flickering in and out of focus as Desmond traces Ezio’s path in reverse, using it to find his way past obstacles. Despite Lucy’s advice, it is clear that the past is coming in handy. The ghosts, both in appearance and function, are reminiscent of the ghosts conjured from bloodstains in the extremely difficult action roleplaying game, DEMON’S SOULS (as well as its spiritual sequel, DARK SOULS).19 These bloodstains appear throughout the game’s fantasy world, marking sites where other players have died. Walk across one of them and a ghost will appear, replaying the final moments of its player’s life. In a game so cruel that players are likely to spend more time dead than alive, the bloodstain system is a rare reprieve, providing the player with the chance to learn from the mistakes of those who have come before. If the trace of Altaïr at the beginning of REVELATIONS tells the player what to do, then these traces tell the player what not to do. DEMON’S SOULS thrusts its player into the decayed and decaying world of Boletaria. Unlike most games with an emphasis on role-playing and character development, DEMON’S SOULS doesn’t reward its player for aimlessly killing monsters to level up. Souls, which function as both currency and experience points, are slowly collected as the player works through a stage, and can only be spent at Nexus, the hub world that players are transported to between stages. Although the player can opt to leave a stage before completing it, this process is incredibly tedious, as the average monster drops a number of souls that is disproportionate to the ease with which it can kill you. But the difficulty of DEMON’S SOULS is not just produced by the scarcity of souls or the feeling that death is always one mistake away; DEMON’S SOULS is difficult because most everything, souls included, is subject to loss. If the player is killed, any unspent souls remain on the character’s corpse, waiting to be retrieved. But if the player is killed again before making it back to the corpse, that corpse, and all of the souls on it, vanish, an occurrence that can leave the player with almost nothing to show for hours of adventuring.

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Despite the regularity of such a loss, DEMON’S SOULS is not arbitrarily difficult; rather, this difficulty raises questions about what does and doesn’t remain–as well as what can and cannot be re-experienced–during gameplay. The constant sense of decay that permeates the game acts as a foil, emphasizing the traces that the player is able to leave behind. One of these traces is, of course, the bloodstain, a mechanic that itself originates from loss. Additionally, players can select from a list of pre-scripted messages that range from “Beware of the enemy’s reinforcements” to “I’m in trouble,” leaving these behind as warnings for other players.20 Doing so not only helps the player reading the message, but also the one writing it, as players receive in-game benefits if their messages are recommended by other players. In a game where just about everything else is subject to decay–weapons, armor, the player’s progress, even Boletaria itself–these messages and bloodstains provide the player with a way of leaving a mark on the world. Mechanics such as these–in both DEMON’S SOULS and other video games–thematise the fantasy of repetition as it relates to the video game. Consider, for example, the opening moments of REVELATIONS, in which repetition is thought both in terms of space (Ezio’s ability to follow an identical path) as well as time (Ezio’s ability to climb at the exact same rate as Altaïr). As if conceding the impossibility of sustaining such a challenge over any extended duration, Altaïr’s phantom reoccurs over regular intervals, endlessly repeating the climb. The point of such a moment, then, is not to stabilize the ephemerality of the game, but to demonstrate the impossibility of doing so. And while the bloodstains provide a recording of the past, the system is structured around not repeating the past; these recordings emphasize the role of the player in shaping gameplay, making clear the difference between a medium and the experience of that medium. In this regard, DEMON’S SOULS has much in common with the ASSASSIN’S CREED series or TIME COMMANDERS: both demonstrate the unrepeatability of the past. What makes the latter two exceptional is that they think this past both at the level of distant historical events and gameplay. In concluding, I want to attempt to provide a new perspective for thinking about the role of history in the video game by situating the ASSASSIN’S CREED series next to a number of other video games that thematize the fantasy of repetition. As my discussion of DEMON’S SOULS suggests, fantasies of repetition are hardly unique to the ASSASSIN’S CREED series. Consider, for example, RATCHET AND CLANK: A CRACK IN

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TIME, in which the player must solve puzzles by making multiple recordings of the player character Clank, replaying them simultaneously to step on a number of triggers in the right order.21 The entire narrative of Bastion is premised on the possibility of returning to the past, a possibility that ultimately unlocks a New Game Plus that sends the player back to the beginning.22 As its name might suggest, PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME, allows players to rewind the game, a mechanic that is also employed by the game’s two sequels, WARRIOR WITHIN and THE TWO THRONES.23 The MARIO KART series has long featured a time trial mode that allows players to record previous attempts and race against them later.24 Such a list, of course, is necessarily far from exhaustive, but in concluding I would like to turn now to the exemplary case of Nintendo’s flagship THE LEGEND OF ZELDA series, noteworthy here for being one of the few video games that has received its own history book.25 Released in 2011 in Japan and 2013 in the United States and Germany, The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia not only provides its reader with exclusive artwork and character descriptions, it also features an officially sanctioned timeline that explains the chronological relationship between all of the events that happen in the series. The Hyrule Historia, then, is a history book in two senses, documenting both the development of the series and its fictional history. What makes this fictional history so noteworthy is that, in many ways, the ZELDA series, with its time travel narratives and its branching timeliness, resists the sort of unified history that the book ultimately succeeds in offering. Or, framed another way, one more in line with the interests of this article, the Hyrule Historia is particularly interesting because of the central role that fantasies of repetition have played in the series. MAJORA’S MASK, which is structured around repeating the same day over and over again, might be the best example of this fantasy of repetition within the series, but OCARINA OF TIME, ORACLE OF AGES, and ORACLE OF SEASONS all involve manipulating time and alternatively returning to the past and present.26 The Hyrule Historia, then, makes historical a series of video games that, at the level of gameplay, thematise the ephemerality associated with the medium. From this perspective, the Hyrule Historia shares much with the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, and emphasizes the way in which a video game is historical not (necessarily) because it engages with the distant past, but because it thematises the fantasy of repetition. I began this chapter with an analysis of the ASSASSIN’S CREED series, a series of video games that is historical in the traditional sense of the word. But as a series

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of video games about historical video games, ASSASSIN’S CREED provides a new framework for thinking about the role of history in the video game. Such a framework emphasizes not only the distant past, but also the past in terms of gameplay. The Hyrule Historia, too, marks this intersection. These two historical registers often intersect in the video game, and in this article I have attempted to show that historical video games are just as much about the medium on which they are experienced as they are historical events. This is not to deny that the video game is capable of telling us something meaningful about the past; rather, it is to assert that in doing so, the historical video game also tells us something meaningful about itself as a medium, and that we must be attuned to the interplay of these two registers.

Acknowledgements This research project was supported in part by the IMMERSe network for video game immersion, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Notes 1

I wish to thank Colin Milburn, Danni Gorden, Ian Afflerbach, and Katherine Leveling for their invaluable insight and support. 2 Throughout this essay, I refer to the ASSASSIN’S CREED series. In doing so, I refer to those titles that feature Desmond Miles: Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED, (2007); Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED II, (2009); Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED: BROTHERHOOD, (2010); Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED: REVELATIONS, (2011); and Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED III, (2012). 3 Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED, (2007). 4 For a discussion of the relationship between digital media and ephemerality, see Kirschenbaum Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, The MIT Press, 2008. 5 For a discussion of historical fidelity and video games, see Schut, Kevin. “Strategic Simulations and Our Past The Bias of Computer Games in the Presentation of History”, in Games and Culture 2, no. 3 (2007): 213-235. Schut argues that “because of [the video game’s] cultural and technological construction, [it] is predisposed toward presentations of history that are stereotypically masculine, highly systematic, and focused on spatially oriented interactivity” (214). 6 See Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Broadview Press, 2011. 7 For a discussion of the relationship between film and the concretization of time, see Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University of Minnesota Press, 1989. For a discussion of

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ephemerality and performance that frames itself as applicable to art objects in general, see Phelan, Peggy. “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction”, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993). 8 See Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ephemeral games: Is it barbaric to design videogames after Auschwitz?” in Cybertext Yearbook (2000): 172-182. 9 Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED, (2007). 10 Anderson, Steve. “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History”, in Interactive Frictions, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. My analysis of the historian and the shifting process of historical interpretation is also influenced by Rosenstone, Robert A. History on Film/Film on History, Addison-Wesley Longman, 2006, and White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. JHU Press, 1975. 11 For a discussion of the role of the player and the significance of creativity, see Sicart, Miguel. “Against Procedurality”, in Game Studies 11, no. 3 (2011), as well as the two books by Ian Bogost against which Sicart positions his work, Bogost, Ian. Unit operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, The MIT Press, 2006, and Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, The MIT Press, 2007. 12 For a detailed analysis of the decision-making process that games afford their players at a micro-level and how these decisions work to develop the gameplay, see Arsenault, Dominic and Perron, Bernard. “In the frame of the magic cycle: The circle (s) of gameplay”, in The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2009): 109-131. 13 “The Battle of Stamford Bridge,” Time Commanders, January 23, 2005. See also, The Creative Assembly, ROME: TOTAL WAR, (2004). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ubisoft Montreal, ASSASSIN’S CREED: BROTHERHOOD, (2010). 19 For a discussion of recorded data and ghosts in video games, see Medler, Ben. “Generations of Game Analytics, Achievements and High Scores”, in Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 3, no. 2 (2009): 177-194. See also From Software, DEMON’S SOULS, (2009); as well as From Software, DARK SOULS, (2011). 20 From Software, DEMON’S SOULS, (2009). 21 Insomniac Games, RATCHET AND CLANK: A CRACK IN TIME, (2009). 22 Supergiant Games, BASTION, 2011. 23 Ubisoft Montreal. PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME. (2003); Ubisoft Montreal, PRINCE OF PERSIA: WARRIOR WITHIN, (2004); and Ubisoft Montreal, PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE TWO THRONES, (2005). 24 Nintendo EAD Group 1, MARIO KART 7, (2011). 25 Thorpe, Patrick (ed.). The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia; Dark Horse Books, 2013; Nintendo EAD, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE OCARINA OF TIME, (1998); Nintendo EAD, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: MAJORA’S MASK, (2000); Capcom, THE

Assassin’s Creed and the Fantasy of Repetition

211

LEGEND OF ZELDA: ORACLE OF SEASONS, (2001); and Capcom, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: ORACLE OF AGES, (2001). 26 These video games that thematise the fantasy of repetition raise questions about media obsolescence and what it means to sufficiently preserve a video game. It is worth noting that the ZELDA games have been released and rereleased with startling frequency. OCARINA OF TIME, for example, first released in 1998, has been rereleased four additional times, the most recent of which was for the Nintendo 3DS; MAJORA’S MASK has been released three times with a fourth release already rumored, and the majority of the other games in the series can all be played on multiple platforms. For a discussion of video games and obsolescence, see Newman, James. Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence, Routledge, 2012, as well as Barwick, Joanna, Dearnley, James, and Muir, Adrienne. “Playing games with cultural heritage: A comparative case study analysis of the current status of digital game preservation”, in Games and Culture 6, no. 4 (2011): 373-390.

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CONTRIBUTORS

MARC BONNER, Lecturer/Research Assistant, Department of Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne, Germany. Publications: Bonner, Marc. “Digitale Spielarchitektur und ihr leiblicher Raum – Über das affektive Erfahren des Spielers und den Transfer von Atmosphären gebauter Wirklichkeiten.” In Zwischen|Welten. Atmosphären im Computerspiel, ed. Christian Huberts and Sebastian Standke. Glückstadt: Werner Hülsbusch (forthcoming 2014). Bonner, Marc. “Die Visualisierung von Angst und Alptraum in Computerspielen durch Formensprache real erbauter Architekturen.” Horizonte – Zeitschrift für Architekturdiskurs 6 (2013): 106-115. Bonner, Marc. “Gebaute Wirklichkeit in digitalen Welten: Die Medialität der Architektur und deren Korrelation mit Bauwerken in Computerund Videospielen aus einer kunsthistorischen Perspektive.” In Clash of Realities 2012 – Gamebased Learning, ed. Winfried Kaminski and Martin Lorber, 327-340. München: Kopaed (2013). ADAM CHAPMAN, PhD Student, Department of Media Culture and Society, University of Hull, United Kingdom. Publications: Chapman, Adam. 2013. “Affording History: Civilization and the Ecological Approach” In Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History ed. A. Elliot and M. Kappell, 61-73. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Chapman, Adam. “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History?” Rethinking History 17 (2013): 312-332. Chapman, Adam. “Privileging From Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames” The Journal of Digital Humanities 1,2 (2012): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/privileging-form-overcontent-by-adam-chapman/. TOM CHATFIELD (PHD), Author, Columnist for the BBC, Speaker at TED Global, United Kingdom. Publications: Chatfield, Tom. Netymology: From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World. London: Quercus, 2013. Chatfield, Tom. How to Thrive in the Digital Age: The School of Life. London: Macmillan, 2012.

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Contributors

Chatfield, Tom. 50 Digital Ideas: You Really Need to Know. London: Quercus, 2011. STEFAN DONECKER (PHD), Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. Publications: Donecker, Stefan. “The Werewolves of Livonia: Lycanthropy and ShapeChanging in Scholarly Texts, 1550 – 1720.” Preternature. Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 1 (2012): 289-322. Donecker, Stefan. “The Ambivalence of Migration in Early Modern Thought: Comments on an Intellectual History of Human Mobility.” In: Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Michi Messer, Renée Schroeder and Ruth Wodak, 227-237. Vienna: Springer, 2012. Donecker, Stefan. “The Lion, the Witch and the Walrus. Images of the Sorcerous North in the 16th and 17th Centuries.” TRANS – InternetZeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 17 (2010): 4.5 (http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/4-5/4-5_donecker.htm). ANDREAS FISCHER, Institute for Intellectual History and Renaissance Philosophy, LMU Munich, Germany. SIMON MARIA HASSEMER, Associated Member of the DFG Research Group History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge, currently working on his dissertation: Medievalism in Popular Culture. Media – Designs – Mythemes, University of Freiburg, Germany. Publications: Hassemer, Simon Maria. “Metal-Alter. Zur Rezeption der Vormoderne in Subgenres des Heavy Metal” In Metal Matters. Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt, ed. Rolf F. Nohr and Herbert Schwaab, 247-262. Münster: Lit, 2011. Hassemer, Simon Maria. “Das Mittelalter der Populärkultur” In Das Mittelalter zwischen Vorstellung und Wirklichkeit. Probleme, Perspektiven und Anstöße für die Unterrichtspraxis, ed. Nicola Brauch and Thomas Martin Buck, 129-140. Münster: Waxmann, 2011. GERNOT HAUSAR, Lecturer, Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria. Publications: Hausar, Gernot: Discarded Toys – Excavating, Documenting and Reviving Abandoned Digital Games. In: Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies. Digital Edition. Vienna: Stadtarchaeologie Wien (Publikationsdienst des Rathauses der Stadt Wien) (forthcoming 2014).

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Hausar, Gernot: Digital Archaeology. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies. Digital Edition. Vienna: Stadtarchaeologie Wien (Publikationsdienst des Rathauses der Stadt Wien) (2012) (http://www.chnt.at/proceedings -chnt-17/). Hausar, Gernot: eLib.at – Historical Information on their way to Guerilla eLearning. In: Offene Bildungsinitiativen: Fallbeispiele, Erfahrungen und Zukunftsszenarien. Medien in der Wissenschaft 58, ed. Hannah Dürnberger, Sandra Hofhues, and Thomas Sporer, 161–179. Münster: Waxmann (2011). SIMON HUBER, PhD Candidate at University of Applied Arts of Vienna. Program Chair of the F.R.O.G.-Conference (Future and Reality of Gaming) 2013. Publications: Huber, Simon. “Visualisierungen des Mittelalters im Computerspiel.” In Reflexiv Geschichte denken. SYN 2, ed. Thomas Marchart, 29-42. Wien: LIT (2011). Mitgutsch, Konstantin; Huber, Simon; Wagner, Michael; Wimmer, Jefferey; Rosenstingl, Herbert (ed.). Context Matters! Exploring and Reframing Games in Context. Proceedings of the Vienna Games Conference 2013. Wien: New Academic Press (2013). JOSEF KÖSTLBAUER (PHD), Member of the Project Discourse and Art Historical Research of the Allegory of Continents, Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria. Publications: Köstlbauer, Josef; Gasteiner, Martin. “How Digital Media Challenge Research on the Eighteenth Century.” In 18th Century Studies in Austria 1945-2010, ed. Johannes Frimmel, Werner Telesko, and Thomas Wallnig, 245-260. Bochum: Verlag Dr. Dieter Winkler (2011). Köstlbauer, Josef. 2009. “Digitale Visualisierungssysteme für die Geschichtswissenschaft” Kunstgeschichte Aktuell (2008): 11. Köstlbauer, Josef. “Struggle for Control of the Peripheries. Comparing American Borderlands of the 18th Century.” In From the Habsburgs to Central Europe, ed. Arnold Suppan and Richard Lein, 77-100. Wien: LIT-Verlag (2008). ROLF F. NOHR (PHD, PROF.), Lecturer, Department of Media Research, University of Arts Braunschweig, Germany. Publications: Nohr, Rolf F. “Restart after Death. Self-optimizing, Normalism and Reentry in Computer Games” In The Game Culture Reader, ed. by Marc

240

Contributors

Ouellette and Jason Thompson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (2013). Nohr, Rolf F. “Free Market Economy and Dino Crisis: The Production and Circulation of Knowledge in Strategy Games. In Computer Games and New Media Cultures. A Handbook of Digital Games Studies. ed. by Johannes Fromme and Alexander Unger, 125-142. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands (2012). Nohr, Rolf F. “Strategy Computer Games and Discourses of Geopolitical Order.” Eludamos. Journal of Computer Game Culture 4 no. 2 (2010): 1-2. RENÉ SCHALLEGGER, Postdoc-Assistant and Deputy Head of Department, Department of English and American Studies, University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Publications: Schallegger, René. “Teaching / Games – Video Games in Educational Contexts.” In Introduction to the Role of Literature in the EFLClassroom, ed. Werner Delanoy, Maria Eisenmann and Frauke Matz. (forthcoming 2014). Schallegger, René. “The Nightmare of Politicians – On the Rise of Fantasy Literature from Subcultural to Mass-cultural Phenomenon.“ In Collision of Realities: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe, ed. Lars Schmeink and Astrid Böger, 29 – 48. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter (2012). Schallegger, René. 2012. “Unidentified Human Remains – Brad Fraser’s Theatre of Alienation.“ Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien, 1 (2012): 88 – 109. LUTZ SCHRÖDER, Research Assistant, Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, University of Hamburg, Germany. Publications: Schröder, Lutz. 2012. “Computerspiele als ein neuer Zugang zu Geschichtsthemen? Das Beispiel Empire: Total War” Spielbar.de, June 13. http://www.spielbar.de/neu/2012/06/computerspiele-als-ein-neuerzugang-zu-geschichtsthemen/ ANGELA SCHWARZ (PHD. PROF.), Professor in Modern History, University of Siegen, Germany. Publications: Schwarz, Angela. Industrielle Revolution – Industrialisierung. Schwalbach am Taunus: Wochenschau-Verlag (2013). Schwarz, Angela. ‘Wollten sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf ihre Gegner werfen?’ Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annäherung an Geschichte im Computerspiel. 2nd ed. Münster: LIT (2012).

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Schwarz, Angela. “The Regional and the Global: Folk Culture at World‘s Fairs and the Reinvention of the Nation.” in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the long Nineteenth Century, ed. Timothy Baycroft, David Hopkin, 99-111. Boston (2012). MARTIN WEIS, Associate Instructor, currently working on his dissertation about the intersection of the video game, geopolitics and the life sciences, University of California, Davis, United States of America.