Historia y videojuegosla Segunda Guerra Mundial en la cultura y la sociedad digital contemporánea

Resumen

The objective of this research is to study the relationship between the video game and History through the examination of the history titles that represent World War II from 1978 to the present. The specific questions that have delimited this objective have been the following: how has the Second World War been represented and remembered in video games? Why has it been represented and remembered like this? When were certain moments represented and remembered and why? And where have these particular moments been represented and remembered and why? To provide answers to all these questions we have carried out a review of more than 600 titles from which we have extracted the necessary information to give answers to these five fundamental questions with the intention of displaying a mosaic that illustrates the main objective of our work: the study of the relationship between videogames and History. The first part of our work is a theoretical approach to the object of study where we offer a brief state of the art about the study of historical video games, providing a typology and its own definition based on the sources used for the elaboration of the work and the intention of the expressed by those responsible. After that, we insert our conceptualization into the theoretical framework of the three spheres in which our effort develops: studies of memory and cultural history, studies of visual culture and representation, and studies dedicated to mass culture. Once the pillars of our work have been settled, we will go on, following the aforementioned questions, to examine the evolution of the medium and its representation of the Second World War from 1978 to the present, differentiating between countries of origin, genres, images used, narratives, etc. We will place special emphasis on the works of greater depth, both from the point of view of the subsequent influence and the success generated, since it is these that will mark the path of the representations. Thus, titles such as Medal of Honor (Dreamworks Interactive, 1999) or Call of Duty (Treyarch, 2013) and all its subsequent iterations will occupy a large part of our effort given the popularity and importance of their proposals when it comes to influencing historical knowledge popular of the moment among society. This chronological study will end with a section in which we will address the latest works dedicated to the period that break the aesthetic memory of the moment and provide new visions within the already consolidated trends. Examples such as Trough the Darkest of Times (Paintbucket, 2020) or Attentat 1942 (Charles Games, 2017), built on historiographic works and individual memories of the moment, offer the player a new relationship with the past. They turn the story into a virtual problem in which the player intervenes by making ethical decisions with consequences within the virtual world. This relationship places the latter works in new forms of construction of the past in the present in which the former directly interpellates the latter. Two ways of approaching the past, by turning it into a spectacle or problem, very present in the video game environment and which guide a good part of our research. Once the theoretical framework and its theoretical development have been developed through the study of the history video game set in World War II, we will close our effort with some conclusions that synthesize our research effort and account for the results of this doctoral thesis.