What does it mean for people to play games about the war, such as Call of Duty: WWII, 75 years later? Pieter Van den Heede researched this in his PhD dissertation ‘Engaging with the Second World War through Digital Gaming’ which he will defend on 11 February 2021.
“One of the observations I make is that marketing materials for these games still tend to rely quite heavily on, for example, imagery produced by the Nazi regime itself, because it is a rather standard point of reference. However, this imagery was often explicitly propagandistic in nature.”
Can you explain what your dissertation is about?
In my dissertation, I studied how popular digital games such as Call of Duty depict the Second World War, and what it means for people to play these games about the war, 75 years later. My study is part of a broader project named 'War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts'. In this project we study how mass violence in the 20th and 21st century is depicted through popular culture. Many researchers have studied how the mass violence of the Second World War is portrayed and remembered through commemorations, monuments and education. Popular culture has long remained underexplored by historians in that respect. The 'War'-project aims to fill in that gap.
Why did you decide to write your dissertation on this subject?
I have a great passion for history. I also had been playing games for a long time, and during my masters training in history at Ghent University, I got the opportunity to write a thesis on the subject. Since then, my passion for both history and games has only increased. I chose to study digital games about the Second World War because the war is one my key topics of interest and because there are a lot of games about the war available on the market. It made it a very rich topic to delve into.
What were your expectations beforehand and how much do they differ from the actual results?
When I started my project, some of the games I studied extensively weren't even available yet! I decided to delve deeper into how digital games about the Second World War depict the Holocaust for example, and some prominent games in that respect, such as Call of Duty: WWII, were only released a few years after I started my project. For me, the project helped a lot to gain a better understanding of digital gaming as a broader sociocultural phenomenon, but also to better understand how players can reflect in various ways on their gameplay activities. I also learned about 'positive negative' experiences players can have while playing a historical game, for example. During my study, I held focus group discussions with players on how they reflected on playing the game Call of Duty: WWII. In that game, there is a part at the end where you, as an American infantry soldier, discover and liberate inmates in a German labor camp. As a player, you can also freely walk around in the camp. When I discussed this scene with players, some players told that they felt a bit shocked and overwhelmed at first. Afterwards, however, they told me that they thought the scene was beautifully made, and that it served as an important reminder for them that these atrocious acts of mass violence had occurred during the Second World War. As such, the scene served to complement their understanding of these events.
What is the most interesting outcome of your research?
There are many! There's a lot of theoretical and empirical material in there I would like to discuss further. I already mentioned my finding on 'positive negative' gameplay experiences above. On top of that, I also identified a very homogeneous depiction of the Second World War in the marketing materials accompanying commercial digital games about the war, for example. In those marketing materials, you can discern a depiction of the war that is heavily centered on depictions of military technology, tropes from the 'Nazisploitation' (Nazi exploitation) film genre from the 1970s and more. I also looked at how marketing materials use distinct audiovisual conventions to 'repackage' the Second World War. One of the observations I make is that marketing materials for these games still tend to rely quite heavily on, for example, imagery produced by the Nazi regime itself, because it is a rather standard point of reference. However, this imagery was often explicitly propagandistic in nature. As such, marketing materials tend to at least partly replicate the 'image' of the Third Reich the Nazi leadership itself wanted to establish. This is certainly something that we should think about more critically. This can for example be achieved by discussing this imagery in the history classroom.
Is there another historical event that you would like to research through digital gaming?
Certainly, although I'm also very interested to delve deeper into how we can leverage the power of gaming to further promote historical understanding and historical thinking more generally. Due to their experiential nature, I argue in the dissertation that games can allow for forms of 'historical revelation'. These experiences of historical revelation can both be productive and counterproductive, and I would be very interesting to further explore how we can create games that allow for productive forms of historical engagement.
To what extent should we add gaming to the current education system?
Here, we are confronted with a bit of a challenge. We know from existing research that games can be very productive for learning. At the same time, it is sometimes also difficult to integrate games into formal history education, because of various technological and infrastructural constraints (the availability of the proper hardware in schools for example). There are several ways to alleviate this, and I think we can certainly explore those. At the same time, a fitting strategy for teaching is also to use certain imageries and scenes from games and use them as a starting point for a critical discussion in the classroom. A critical interrogation of the propagandistic images produced by the Nazis as used in marketing materials for games could be an example of that. Another option is to think about how we can promote historical engagement through gaming outside the classroom. That is certainly also a venue I really would like to explore further.
Two more colleagues will have their PhD defenses this month, both on 25 February 2021. Lela Mosemghvdlishvili will defend her PhD ‘The Politics of Mobile: Code Exploring Possibilities and Limitations of the Programmability of Smartphones’ and Balazs Boross will defend his PhD ‘Inside interventional television: Media rituals in the age of participation’.