The missing memorial: the Division 2 and the politics of memory
The Division 2 (2019) presents players with a near one-to-one recreation of Washington, D.C. with a glaring omission: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the erasure of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflect the politics of an apolitical approach to game design? What does the playable spectacle o...
| Published in: | Gamevironments |
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| Subtitles: | Special Issue: "Democracy Dies Playfully: (Anti-)Democratic Ideas in and Around Video Games" |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2020
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| In: |
Gamevironments
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| Review of: | Tom Clancy's The Divison 2 (Meyer, Joseph) |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, DC)
/ Political conflict
/ Collective memory
/ Politics
/ Neutrality
/ Video game
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| RelBib Classification: | AD Sociology of religion; religious policy KBQ North America ZB Sociology ZC Politics in general ZG Media studies; Digital media; Communication studies |
| Further subjects: | B
Hauntings
B gamevironments B Book review B Environmental Design B the Division 2 B Public Memory B Tom Clancy B Vietnam Veterans Memorial |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The Division 2 (2019) presents players with a near one-to-one recreation of Washington, D.C. with a glaring omission: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the erasure of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflect the politics of an apolitical approach to game design? What does the playable spectacle of military action but erasure of the remembrance of lives lost say about the politics of environmental design? The following details the development of The Division 2 and the controversies that surrounded it following the critiques of The Division and the developer’s insistence on the apolitical nature of their entertainment product. Utilizing Avery Gordon’s theory of hauntings, I apply an ethnographic approach to the digital recreation of the D.C. landscape to explore the creative and technical decisions developer Massive Entertainment made in their creation of D.C. to examine the significance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s absence in The Division 2. I analyze what the claims to apolitical creation mean in the context of an explicitly ideological game set in the Tom Clancy universe and how this reflects the ways power operates through video games as a means of enforcing American exceptionalism and techno-military fetishism to the detriment of contemporary democratic values in the United States. |
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| ISSN: | 2364-382X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Gamevironments
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.26092/elib/405 |