Digital Cultures of Commemoration: Learning and Unlearning History through Video Games

This paper is a reflection on how video games support representations of history by using the interactive particularities of the medium. History appears as a space that can be recreated through technologically-mediated performances in which players are assigned the role of participants in a story made available by design. Fiction and realism are constitutive parts of historical games in which players have no choice but to navigate a world depicted through precise programmes of action. By analysing a representative game in the historical genre (i.e. 'Valiant Hearts: The Great War'), I argue that video games are tools prone to reshape the understanding of history in such a way that learning about past events becomes a matter of boundary control and collaborative knowledge production.