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Toward a virtual reenactment of history: Video games and the recreation of the past

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13642520701353652

1470-1154

Brian Rejack,

Cinema and Media Studies

Abstract Several modern video games claim a high degree of historical authenticity, and indeed the experience of modern gaming is often described as being more 'realistic' than ever before. This article explores the relationship between history and video games by discussing Brothers in Arms (2005( as a form of reenactment. What emerges from the game is a complex negotiation of two goals that often appear to be contradictory—fidelity to the conventions of gaming and attention to historical detail. By deferring to historical authenticity, the game attempts to build historical knowledge through sympathetic identification, which is precisely what the game fails to induce through its own narrative and characters. After treating Brothers in Arms, I conclude with a discussion of a very different game (Façade, 2005 Mateas, M. and Stern, A. 2005. Façade (PC), Procedural Arts. [Google Scholar]) as a way of speculating on future possibilities regarding the intersections of history and gaming. Keywords: Video GamesHistoryReenactment Brothers in Arms SympathyWorld War II Notes [1] Throughout the article I use the term 'realism' or 'realistic' to describe modern video games. Generally this term refers to recent trends in gaming graphics, which include, for example, increased detail in facial features, highly textured environments, and lighting and shading effects, all of which tend to be described (by developers and reviewers alike) as features that contribute to a game's graphic, mimetic realism. One might also understand these attributes as factors that help to produce a game's 'reality effect', to use the term in Roland Barthes's sense. For Barthes (1984 Barthes, R. 1984, 1986. The Rustle of Language, New York: Hill and Wang. trans. R. Howard [Google Scholar]), the ostensibly inconsequential details of realist narrative (he uses examples from Flaubert and Michelet) become 'the very signifier of realism', which is, of course, still verisimilitude, still 'effect'. Just as the presence of a barometer in a description of a room by Flaubert and the detail of a 'little door' in Michelet's Histoire de France 'finally say nothing but this: we are the real' (p. 148), so says the appearance of grass bending with the wind, for example, in a video game. [2] The reality effect, for Black (2002 Black, J. 2002. The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), has been produced by film culture, which asserts that visual documentation is tantamount to reality. In these terms, the legitimacy offered by CGI technology arises out of the ability of recorded media to produce a reality effect—if we see it, it must be real. Of course, Black's larger argument is that, by claiming 'reality' from virtual images, film culture is leading to a point at which the two categories become indistinguishable. Video games capitalize on this collapse of differences. [3] Throughout my discussion of history and the role that sympathy plays in relation to history, I am drawing on Mark Salber Phillips' (2000 Phillips, M. S. 2000. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740 – 1820, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], 2003 Phillips, M. S. 2003. 'Relocating inwardness: historical distance and the transition from enlightenment to romantic historiography'. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 118(3): 436–449. [Google Scholar]) work on eighteenth-century historiography. He points out that 'eighteenth-century sentimentalism played an enormously important role in encouraging the idea that we go to history in order to experience a sense of the evocative presence of other places and other times' (Phillips 2000 Phillips, M. S. 2000. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740 – 1820, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 28). And it is the trope of distance that determines how a certain writer will establish sentimental identification with the past. In order accurately to conceptualize distance, one must move beyond an understanding of it as merely 'objectivity', and instead consider 'all points along a gradient of distance, including immediacy as well as detachment' (Phillips 2003 Phillips, M. S. 2003. 'Relocating inwardness: historical distance and the transition from enlightenment to romantic historiography'. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 118(3): 436–449. [Google Scholar], p. 438). My discussion focuses on how gaming negotiates distance precisely in terms of the movement back and forth from engagement to detachment. [4] What Façade hopes to be is, I imagine, similar to what Joel Black (2002 Black, J. 2002. The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) means by the term 'real virtuality'. Black proposes that the twentieth century as the 'century of film' will end up being 'a brief, transitional stage on the way toward the kind of transpersonal, virtual reality that a fully interactive technology is bound to achieve' (Black 2002 Black, J. 2002. The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], p. 14). [5] This knowledge would most likely be gained through sympathy, but one could also imagine gaming facilitating a sort of virtual 're-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind' (Collingwood 1946 Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 215). [6] First-person shooter is broadly defined as a game in which the on-screen view is from the perspective of the character (as opposed to a third-person perspective, in which the player sees the body of the character from an imagined camera constantly following behind), and the bulk of the action involves shooting. [7] Scholars on video games have continually wrestled with the question of gaming's relationship to narrative. Jesper Juul (2001 Juul, J. 2001. 'Games telling stories? A brief on games and narrative'. Game Studies, 1(1) [Online] Available at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ [Google Scholar]) for example, in his article for the first issue of Game Studies, criticizes the use of narrative theory to study video games. Other scholars like Jan Van Looy (2005 Van Looy, J. 2005. 'Virtual recentering: computer games and possible worlds theory'. Image & Narrative, 12 [Online] Available at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/tulseluper/vanlooy.htm [Google Scholar]) have taken a less extreme position, arguing that 'the inability of narratology to account for the full experience of games does not mean that we should do away with the concept of narrative in ludology altogether'. Mainstream video games, particularly first-person shooters, are notorious for lacking narrative finesse. [8]Brookey and Westerfelhaus (2002 Brookey, R. A. and Westerfelhaus, R. 2002. 'Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet'. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(1): 21–43. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 25) argue that the DVD extra 'collapses the functions of secondary texts into the product of the primary text, and gives the signifying force of intertextual relationships an intratextual advantage'. Their analysis focuses on the Fight Club DVD and the ways in which the extras discourage reading the film as homoerotic, while the film itself seems to encourage such an interpretation. The extras from Brothers in Arms similarly attempt to guide the player's interpretation, but not necessarily into an interpretation that is clearly at odds with how one might read the game without such guidance. [9] Agnew (2004 Agnew, V. 2004. 'Introduction: what is reenactment?'. Criticism, 46(3): 327–340. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 330) writes that 'Reenactment's central narrative is thus one of conversion from ignorance to knowledge, individualism to sociability, resistance to compliance, and present to past.' [10] For a consideration of historical distance, see Phillips (2003 Phillips, M. S. 2003. 'Relocating inwardness: historical distance and the transition from enlightenment to romantic historiography'. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 118(3): 436–449. [Google Scholar]). [11] In the interest of accuracy, it should perhaps be noted that the Texas was equipped with 14-inch guns (Ambrose 1994 Ambrose, S. E. 1994. D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster. [Google Scholar], p. 120). [12] The player can choose to play as a man or a woman, which changes the way in which Grace and Trip interact with their dinner guest. [13] Mateas and Stern developed a programming language called 'A Behavior Language' (ABL) to run Grace's and Trip's actions. ABL has the ability to 'decide how a particular character might, for example, simultaneously mix a drink, walk across the room, and yell at her husband, as a human actor would do'. The game also uses a program called a drama manager, 'which looks at what the player and characters are doing and makes plot and dialogue choices intended to ratchet up and then release dramatic tension' (Rauch 2006 Rauch, J. 2006. 'Sex, lies, and video games'. Atlantic Monthly, 298(4): 76–86. [Google Scholar], p. 80). And finally there is also a program that processes the dialogue input by the player and creates adequate responses for the characters. For an in-depth discussion of ABL and its application in Façade, see Mateas and Stern (2004 Mateas, M. and Stern, A. 2004. "'A behavior language: joint action and behavioral idioms'". In Life-like Characters: Tools, Affective Functions, and Applications, Edited by: Prendiger, H. and Ishizuka, M. Berlin: Springer. [Google Scholar]). [14] Upon starting the game, one is asked to select from a list of possible names, which determines how Grace and Trip address the player. [15] In my limited playing time I was unable to create a lasting, dramatic moment that worked smoothly, although there were brief moments when it worked perfectly. As an example of a more sustained exchange, take Rauch's (2006 Rauch, J. 2006. 'Sex, lies, and video games'. Atlantic Monthly, 298(4): 76–86. [Google Scholar]) excerpt from a game in which he played as Ed: TRIP: Okay, you know what, Ed, I need to ask you something. GRACE: Trip— ED: What? TRIP: Grace, let me ask our guest a question. Ed, yes or no— ED: Let him ask, Grace. TRIP: Each person in a marriage is supposed to try really hard to be in sync with the other, right? GRACE: What? TRIP: I mean, when you're married, to make it good, you need to always be positive, and agreeable, and together, right? ED: [Hesitates] TRIP: Yes or no. ED: No, not always. GRACE: What?! Oh, all right. Yes. Just admit it. Trip, admit it, we have a shitty marriage! We've never really been happy, from day one! Never, goddammit! (p. 82) This is the kind of dramatic moment toward which the game moves from the beginning. And once the game is finished, the player has the option to create a 'script' of that particular play by one click of the mouse. Doing so opens a text document with the entire script of the game just played. [16] Playing Façade can be frustrating at times, since the technology is still in the experimental stages. Often while playing the characters get confused and respond incorrectly. Rauch (2006 Rauch, J. 2006. 'Sex, lies, and video games'. Atlantic Monthly, 298(4): 76–86. [Google Scholar]) gives an example of one particular mix-up: 'When I played as a woman … and announced that I was pregnant with Trip's child, Grace and Trip thought I was flirting with them' (p. 82). I had one play in which Trip held up a bottle wine and asked, 'So, how about some Bordeaux?' I responded with answers such as 'Sure' and 'Yes, let's have a drink', and even 'Let's all get drunk', but nothing seemed to have any effect. Trip's only response to my comments was, again and again, 'So, how about some Bordeaux?' While the game has problems like this, there are moments when it works smoothly and the potential for such technology is revealed.