The Paradox of Abstract Time in Historical Video Games

“Playing at history”.

A few generations ago, science fiction writers seemed almost alone in entertaining the thought. Today, the very idea of going on a trip in a virtual historical setting has gone mainstream, thank in good part to the spread of video games.

This success comes at a price. Our hunger to relive historical experience through historical fiction, historical reenactment and games has turned the extraordinary into the ordinary. It is now as commonplace to try on different historical skins as we do clothes.

Yet, just as it seems “magical” to drive a car or ride on an airplane for the first time, there is nothing banal in plunging into a recreated historical universe, to live out vicarious historical adventures or experiences.

At least not the first time we load up a game.

Soon enough, though, we find out that games can be saved, loaded, reloaded. That we can enter and leave these mirages at will. We can replay sequences, and see how we handle game challenges a second time. Or a third, forth, fifth, etc. In fact, it is often though that the better the game, the more replayable it should be.

In History, Take Three: How Video Game Replay Alters Your Perception of Time, we set out to explore the paradox of “historical replayability” in games. If games can be replayed at will, how does this affect, or alter, our perception of historical time? For example, if play time is experienced in the forward-looking “present tense”, how does this play-time-bias intermingle with open-ended historical narratives in games? And if history marks the irreversible course of human actions and outcomes in time and across time, what insight (or gratification) can be obtained through the replay of historical scenarios, given the limited set of outcomes offered by each game title, and game genre?

These question led us down the winding roads of historical representation in games, from the standpoint of players engaging with historical narratives. With the help of Adam Chapman and Jesper Juul, we discovered that time in video games – or temporality, “the experience of time” – took on a layered aspect in general (player time and game narrative), with additional nuances in temporal structure conditioned by different games genres. Real-time action games, for example, always present narrative from the standpoint of time-of-action, the past experienced as a living present. At the other end of the spectrum, turn-based strategy games give players control over the game clock, as they adopt the posture of a historian looking at a historical panorama from a distance.

Replayability: Will to Power or Last Man Sitting?

If game genres open up different possibilities for narrative design, can video games also limit historical expression? To our original point: what becomes of time and temporality when we come under the thrall of simulation media?

In the first chapter of his book Philosophie des jeux video, technoculture theorist and historian Mathieu Triclot tries to debug the pleasures that players derive from Doom-like first-person shooters. From an outsider’s perspective, these games come across as a virtual theme-park of gratuitous violence. Attentive onlookers will notice, however, that the F5 / F9 keys, “quick save ” and “quick load “, are regularly activated by players engaged in prolonged gaming sessions; thanks to these controls, players who fail a sequence can attempt to replay from the chosen save point. As Triclot points out – and herein lies the peculiarity of the video games – this design feature allows players to replay a game sequence to their satisfaction. In this way, the skill of shooting married to the spectacle of violence are boosted by the even headier desire of game mastery. Thus, the fantasy of temporal control, which operates here powerfully, becomes itself a source of morbid pleasure.

It seems significant that this encapsulation of replayability can be found in a book that delves into the cultural history of computer technology and the phenomenology of play. Replayability, in fact, casts a long shadow across “playability” itself; one presupposes the other – a game that cannot be replayed loses its identity as a game and begins to resemble the playful improvisation theorized by Roger Caillois in Les jeux et les hommes. The replayability of games also raises an old philosophical conundrum – how can “sameness” produce difference? And in the case of video games: does replayability not imprison “difference” in the cage of the identical – abstract time?

In the critical literature on replayability, I have found philosophical perspectives to be curiously absent. The question of replayability is generally approached from the standpoint of game design – tricks or techniques to improve the replayability of a game – or, marketing – how replayability adds value to a game product – or even, psychology – what compels players to replay a match or a game sequence, or return to a game after a hiatus?

One notable exception: a dissertation that examines replayability with reference to Nietzschean philosophy, by Benjamin Lavigne from the University of Lorraine. As Lavigne points out, advancement in a video game is achieved, at gameplay-level, by incremental mastery of the main gameplay loop, that the player must overcome in order to meet all the core challenges that comprise a game. From a Nietzschean perspective, this contrived challenging of players by the designers, by correctly dosing frustration and pleasure levels, allows for the player’s will to power to be expressed.

Admittedly, this is a fantasy “will to power”, since it is staged within a cybernetic process of automation. To take up Mathieu Tricot’s already-cited example: players obsessed by their performance, enjoying the effects of video game power fantasies, are in reality in the tow of algorithmic logics which they internalize in their will-to-mastery. Douglas Hoare also analyzed this form of pleasurable self-dispossession in his book Le jeu vidéo, ou l’aliénation heureuse. To put it in Nietzschean terms: the gamer is the “last man” – the ultimate end-product of modern comfort – playing out his/her/their Übermensch fantasies on the screen.

Thus, replayability – conveniently assumed in video games – allows players to simulate the experience of Eternal recurrence, though emptied of its original meaning. Under the spell of replayability, Nietzsche’s parable suffers an ironic twist: a philosophy that sought to lift the spirit by confronting one’s self to temporality (“lead your life so that you can wish it to repeat itself eternally” ) dissolves into the “identical difference” of the abstract time loop, recurring eternally around virtual self-mastery.

No Escape from Abstract Time

 The seductive power of history-themed video games, I insist, rests in large part on the premise of “​​reliving history” in light of this technological promise of time mastery, reduced to the manipulable parameters of the gameplay loop. To answer the question “why do players replay history”, the three epistemological stances common to history-themed games (as theorized by Adam Chapman in his book Digital Games as History) can then help explain how game genres compel players to “rehash” history with different goals in mind.

The reconstructionist approach in historical video games provides players with an impression of “presence” in a simulated historical settings. Why replay? To take up again a game sequence after failure, improve one’s performance, revisit a scenario, return to an atmosphere, etc. And what are the effects of repetition on the player? Arguably, the development of the analytical reflex to master a game; further, the critical assessment of the construction of the scenario/game, by virtue of familiarization…  

The “constructivist” ethic proposes simulation as a gateway to counterfactual historical experiments. This epistemology rests on setting up game frameworks for understanding historical conflict, and transhistorical development. Why replay? To deepen one’s knowledge of a game, or respond to the call of “making history” set by a game’s marketing, as the privileged actor/interpreter of the played-out scenario. Better, to modify the code of the game so that it better fits with actual historical details/scenarios. What are the effects of repetition on the player? Mastery of the game by successive attempts at game scenarios; generating hypotheses on historical causality, etc. Or again, take the leap from being player-historian to developer-historian, aka. modding.

Finally, the “deconstructionist” approach beckons us to “play with the code(s) of history”, by pointing to the constructed nature of historical discourse. This approach relies on the use of scriptwriting techniques, admixture of improbable genres, ironic anachronisms, etc. and other rhetorical devices that highlight the artifices of historical narration. Why replay? Quite simply, it is through the act of replay that the constructed aspect of a narration comes to our awareness, much like analyzing a book or film by reviewing them. Moreover, this approach encourages semiotic play with signifiers, as for example with the practice of quasi-historical modding. What are the effects of repetition on the player? Positively, the deconstructionist approach empowers the player by giving him/her/them an insider’s perspective on historiography. Negatively, it “virtualizes history” by reducing past lived experience to semiotic codes or conventions.

In a way, we could say that replayability, in its essence, carries with it the posture of deconstruction, because it focuses the player’s attention on the rhetorical codes of video game culture, how stories and genres “work” with audiences; as mentioned, the overall effect is a push toward virtual history, where referenced historical materiality is reduced to semiotic code – or computer code, in our case!

In closing, I would like to summarize three structural tendencies that bring concrete temporal relations to a vanishing point in video games, giving rise to abstract, automated time structures:

  1. Video game play time in the (eternal) present verb tense – even in games with historical themes.
  2. The inherent replayability of games, due to their interactive time loops and their ludic/cybernetic structures.
  3. Video games as commodities, that transform the embodied time of production into abstract work/time of economic value (Marx, theory of value).

Entertain us they may, video games also operate a reduction of historical narrative to programmable outcomes. And video game replay will ultimately force machine time down your throat. We have argued above that the fundamental tension that shapes player expectations toward historical narratives in games is the player’s confrontation with the cybernetic process, the interplay between the concrete time of the body and the abstract time of the machine. Which strategies we should devise to ground our historical thinking and build bridges between our ancestors’ lived experience and our own, I leave you, dear readers, to explore – whether such strategies can be imagined inside or outside the “magic circle” of games and the iron fist of algorithmic logic.

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