War Never Changes? Examining the Perceived Relationship Between Computer Games and Transgenerational War Trauma on Steam

The growing number of studies discuss how playful experiences enabled by computer games influence individual and collective perceptions of the past. Characterized by Chapman (2012) as a “new historical form”, computer games provide an additional level of negotiating historical meanings by allowing players to interpret the narrative and to immerse themselves into it by playing the game. These qualities turn games into potent means of communicating the past for different age groups, varying from teenagers playing in the classrooms to adults using computer games to comment on the past. While a number of studies discuss the impact of computer games on representing historical conflicts, the existing studies tend to focus on general representation of the past violence. Hence, the existing scholarship rarely discusses to what degree these games communicate collective traumas associated with these conflicts and how these traumas are perceived by the individual players. Similarly under-studied is the issue of the game-based mediation of transgenerational trauma, in particular how the (re)activation of the affective attachment to the past varies depending on different temporal horizons to which traumas belong. To address these gaps, the paper scrutinizes reactions to three computer games devoted to major international conflicts: the First World War (Valiant Hearts: The Great War), The Second World War (Warsaw) and the Yugoslav War (This War is Mine). Specifically, it looks at community hubs on Steam, a digital game distribution platform, to examine how players reflect on transgenerational traumas which are the focal points of all three games. Using close reading, the paper analyzes how the war trauma is discussed in the hybrid private/public environment of Steam, in which ways the platform’s digital/community affordances are used to enable trauma reflection and how individual/collective reflections on trauma vary depending on the trauma’s temporal horizon