The historical video game as a form of memory

Abstract

In this article, I shall define the historical video game as a form of memory, as opposed to definitions of this medium as history or a form of historiography. To arrive at this new definition, I will examine the case of several different historical video games such as the American Call of Duty WWII (Sledgehammer, 2017), the also American —albeit of Iranian origin— 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (iNK Studios, 2014) and the Austrian (and Syrian) Path Out (Causa Creations, 2017), together with other games that serve to provide the necessary context. Direct observation of these will be combined with an examination of the work of Le Goff (1991), Hobsbwam (2014), Aguilar Fernández (2008), Traverso (2011) and Todorov (2008, 2013) to determine whether, indeed, the historical video game can be considered memory rather than history, and if so, what the consequences of this are for its study.