These aspects highlight how digital games often develop games according to profit-maximizing purposes. Firstly, the dissertation identifies the unstable working conditions, the economic structures, the technical challenges, and the social norms through which the digital games industry operates. The research project also contextualizes its findings with attention to the contexts of production and reception of historical digital games. Therefore, the dissertation investigates how digital games systematically promote and invite specific understandings of the past on both a micro and macro-level of analysis, accomplished through the close readings and the quantitative analysis. Here, general trends of historical representation emerge, where whiteness, masculinity, and simple violence are most common, the larger the production budget of each historical game. In turn, the quantitative analysis highlights the dataset’s dominant representations of the past. The close readings of the two games identify their meaning-potentials through which they are analyzed for their possible impact on memory-making processes. On the one hand, the dissertation conducts a qualitative, formal analysis of the digital games Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry and Mafia III, and on the other, a quantitative content analysis of 208 different historical digital games. By analyzing these formal devices, the dissertation contributes new knowledge on the role of digital games in the larger picture of cultural commemorative processes. The research findings demonstrate that games’ formal devices, such as game mechanics, representation, and physical instantiation, motivate distinct understandings of history. The dissertation therefore raises the question of which understandings and subject-positions digital games systematically promote and invite to understand the past. However, at the same time, some historical digital games also manage to go beyond these conventional norms by allowing players to experience, for example, the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century, or the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. Typically, so-called historical digital games depict historical scenarios such as World War II, the Cold War, and more recently, the War on Terror, as also seen in major film productions, TV series, and literature. This dissertation investigates the relation between digital games and common understandings of the past, which people experience through popular culture, formally called 'cultural memory processes'.
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