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Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity by Esther Wright (review)

2023; Volume: 104; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nyh.2023.a918287

2328-8132

Angela Schwarz,

Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Reviewed by: Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity by Esther Wright Angela Schwarz (bio) Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity By Esther Wright. Berlin: De Gruyter-Oldenbourg, 2022. 278 pages. $102.99 hardcover. By now, various disciplines have been analyzing video games as an important medium for several decades. However, to deal with them not as a popular medium with a history but as representations of history itself is fairly new, particularly so in the historical sciences. A great number of these historiographically oriented studies on video games with historical settings have emphasized the impact of these media productions and their value as sources of popular conceptions of history at a given time, have studied their creation, dissemination and, in a few instances, even their reception by players. Scholars have highlighted these important issues in their analyses of how developers embedded historical elements and popular conceptions of certain past events, eras, or even the historical, in general, into their narrative, audiovisuals, and gameplay. Studies of this kind are all based on the assumption that video games of this type stage and popularize history, thus ultimately joining the production, representation, and negotiation of popular history in other media such as films, novels, comics, and so on, and in society at large. According to this approach, video games then, are not doing history work in the sense of producing academically researched results; instead the games add and confirm facets of popular notions of a certain past as these notions pervade public discourse in modern societies. Esther Wright's book takes historical game studies in a different direction, and—like Adam Chapman's Digital Games as History (2016)—considers the medium itself as "historical work" (26) and game developers as historians, so-called "developer-historians" (11). Their influence, however, is not examined through an in-depth analysis of Red Dead Redemption (2010) and Red Dead Redemption II (2018), L.A. Noire (2011), and the present [End Page 455] and related bestselling Grand Theft Auto series (from part III, issued 2001) but through promotional material, statements in interviews, and other public material deployed outside of the gameplay itself. Rockstar's pivotal marketing strategy is to creating and further develop a brand identity by promoting a specific interpretation of parts of American history. To substantiate this hypothesis, Wright considers the promotional material as paratexts and the discourses they initiate in their interconnectedness with other textual representations of the past. She also considers the ways in which they make for a specific, seemingly authentic image of American history of the periods depicted in the four games. In addition, the fact that each of the four games can be attributed to a specific genre—Red Dead Redemption to the Western genre; L.A. Noire to the film noir of the 1940s; and Grand Theft Auto to the more recent gangster film—comes into play as well. For each affects representations of American history in the games and, more importantly, in the discourses around them considerably. In this regard, Wright makes an important point: that the goals of publishers and developers, as expressed publicly and thus deployed in view of marketing a product and a particular image of history, form part of the representations of the past contained in historical video games, an add-on to the staging of past events in a game's narrative, visualization, and mechanics. Wright makes another point in choosing games that operate according to well established—literary and filmic—genres and that therefore follow certain given structures and crossmedial references. Video games in general, and those by Rockstar in particular, create and influence popular notions of history with paratextual content contributing to this process. However, marketing strategies pertaining to a product in the entertainment sector should not be equated with seeing and doing academic history. What is more, they represent only part of the picture, which is completed by internal company arrangements—difficult to get at for research—and by the content of the games themselves. Moreover, in titles like Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire, which thoroughly conform to the conventions of a highly familiar genre, the scope...