Memory and Representation of the Shoah in Video Games: Between the Construction and Reconstruction of Memory

This work is intended to study the way in which the Shoah has been remembered and portrayed in the video game and computer game milieu. In order to obtain a satisfactory answer to this question, we will proceed to examine three specific Call of Duty titles: WWII (Sledgehammer, 2017), Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) and Through the Darkest of Times (Paintbucket Games, 2019). Each of them addresses and represents the Shoah in different terms, which provides us a general framework to carry out a comparative exercise on its representation within this milieu. The three titles will be examined in terms both of what they show and what they do not show, since the absences and omissions are, in this case, just as relevant as the presences. Via the consultation of various interviews and testimonies, the manifest intentions of their authors to represent, or not, the Shoah and the audio-visual form in which it is represented to the user will be observed, as well as the visual elements of choice. The method to find a satisfactory answer will rest on their comparison with other mass media, most notably film or television, to try and explain the differences and similarities between the respective media formats. This comparative approach will be used in an attempt to integrate the video game into the wider debate on memory and its forms according to different authors so as to contribute two innovative ideas to the current state of the art: the first one, whether video game productions produce their own construction of the past or, on the contrary, reproduce previous reconstructions; and the second one, whether video games fulfil the "duty of memory" or, on the contrary, aestheticize and reify the events happened in the past, contributing to their trivialization and normalization.