The Political Economy of Cultural 
Memory in the Videogames Industry
Emil Lundedal Hammar
Abstract
Following the materialist approaches to contemporary digital mem-
ory-making, this article explores how unequal access to memory pro-
duction in videogames is determined along economic and cultural 
lines. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with different 
European, Asian and North American historical game developers, I 
make the case for how materialist and cultural aspects of videogame 
development reinforce existing mnemonic hegemony and in turn how 
this mnemonic hegemony determines access to the production of mem-
ory-making potentials that players of videogames activate and negoti-
ate. My interview findings illustrate how individual workers do not 
necessarily intend to reproduce received systems of power and hege-
mony, and instead how certain cultural and material relations tacitly 
motivate and/or marginalise workers in the videogame industries 
to reproduce hegemonic power relations in cultural memory across 
race, class and gender. Finally, I develop the argument that access to 
cultural production networks such as the games industry constitutes 
important factors that need to be taken seriously in research on cul-
tural memory and game studies. Thus, my article investigates global 
power relationships, political economy, colonial legacies and cultural 
hegemony within the videogame industry, and how these are instanti-
ated in individual instances of game developers.
Introduction
The production of modern historical videogames requires tens if not hundreds 
millions of dollars in investment that in turn motivate videogame producers to 
resort to dominant visions of the past (Hammar 2017b). With the more unique 
example of Battlefield  V (DICE 2018), a historical videogame set during World 
War II, the Swedish developer DICE and their multinational publisher EA chose to 
feature what they marketed as “The Untold Tales of WW II,” where players fight, for 
example, as a North-Norwegian resistance female soldier and the French-colonised 
Senegalese Tirailleur. Somehow, these “untold tales” prompted a sizeable contin-
gent of videogame consumers to react with disdain and venom (Farokhmanesh 
DOI 10.14361/dcs-2019-0105
DCS | Digital Culture and Society | Vol. 5, Issue 1 | © transcript 2019
62 Emil Lundedal Hammar
2018), in this case towards the audiovisual presence of a female soldier that the 
collective remembering of WWII does not usually feature. In return, the devel-
opers of Battlefield V had to publically address this organised opposition in order 
to quell this conflict over cultural memory. This example and comparable cases1 
indicate how different stakeholders produce and contest the remembrance of 
the past in popular culture across the divide between production, distribution 
and consumption. In turn, the producers of culture, such as videogame devel-
opers, partly decide how the past should be represented in their cultural product 
depending on a number of structural factors, such as working conditions, 
financial risk, player feedback and internal power hierarchies. As such, I very 
much follow Anna Reading’s observation that “a political economy of memory and 
digital memory” (2014: 750) is needed. Here, the field of cultural memory studies 
has considered how media as texts carry certain memory-making potentials 
that individuals and collectives activate and negotiate (Erll 2011: 9; Rigney 2016: 
69). Among these artefacts of remembering, historical videogames have gained 
cultural and commercial prominence, enabling consumers of differing ages to 
play with the past (Kapell & Elliott 2013; Chapman 2016: 49). These games allow 
those consumers who have access to digital technologies such as mobile phones, 
personal computers or dedicated game consoles to execute software that enables 
them to play with audiovisual representations of the past, which are structured 
by the game’s mechanical system on the level of code (Bogost 2007; Aarseth & 
Calleja 2015)2. This process of playing with the past is therefore possible due to 
what Chapman (2012) refers to as “the particular audio-visual-ludic structures 
of the game” that “produce meaning and allow the player to playfully explore/
configure discourses about the past” (42). These historical games are naturally 
wedded to the activity of play, which allows people to participate in and create 
1 We find similar controversies surrounding remembrances of the past in popular cul-
ture such as film – from the commodification of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List to 
the glorification of the US army in Saving Private Ryan to the white-saviour-complex 
in the Danish colonial film Guldkysten to the Norwegian trauma in the film adapta-
tion of July 22. The contestations over what appears to be naturalised mythologies of 
collective memory are clearly important and evident.
2 On a semiotic level, meaning-making potentials via games thereby operate on two 
levels  – the signifying level of audiovisual representation and the system level of 
mechanics and rules executed by the procedural nature of videogames as software 
(Shaw, 2017). By combining audiovisual representation with ludic elements, they 
enable players to activate their agency in the context of past settings (Uricchio, 
2005; Pötzsch and Šisler, 2016). For example, the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Free-
dom Cry (Ubisoft Québec 2013) situates players in eighteenth-century Caribbean to 
fight French colonial power as the black ex-slave Adewalè (Hammar 2017a); and the 
famous Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991 – present) series (Uricchio 2005: 328; Galloway 
2006; Carr 2007; Ford 2016) enables players to play with a “conceptual simulation” 
of history (Chapman 2016: 69 f.).
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 63
culture (Henricks 2006), and thereby enable a negotiation and contestation in 
collective memory discourses as the example of Battlefield V above highlights. In 
that sense, historical games not only allow people to play with the past, but also 
inform broader collective memory discourses in which players affirm or contest 
the ways they remember the past. It is thus of crucial importance to understand 
how these games come about and are circulated in a global consumer industry, 
since, as Aphra Kerr (2017) writes,
The commodification of games and play is an example of how capitalism expands into all 
areas of everyday life and changes things that we do and use into things which we exchange 
for money. Since the early 1970s the videogames industry has explored ways to commodify 
children’s game and play time, and is increasingly a part of adult leisure too. It has developed 
links with existing cultural industries and practices as well as developing new ones. (29)
Videogames are designed objects that encourage play (Sicart 2014), and they are 
by and large commodified and encoded by the cultural producers in the games 
industry, where large networks of production with different actors situated in their 
own material and ideological context determine how sign and system are meant 
to be played with. Inspired by Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (1973) model, I 
conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with historical video game in 
order to ascertain how these cultural mnemonic objects are encoded with meaning 
potentials, i. e. created using the technology available, the discourses that inform 
the game and the relations of production and consumption. In turn, players 
decode, i. e. interpret, within the context of discourses, technologies and relations 
of production and consumption. As such, this article focuses on the hegemonic 
memory-making in historical videogames by investigating multiple levels in the 
form of production, distribution and consumption. I pay special attention to video-
game-related problems of memory-making against these levels in relation to the 
divide between production and reception. I then provide interview data as addi-
tional supporting material in the discussion and an indication for further inter-
view-based work. First, I first look to the knowledge established in the political 
economy of communication to qualify the approach of my qualitative study of 
historical game developers.
The Political Economy of Videogames
Vincent Mosco (2009) defines the political economy of communication as “the 
study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually 
constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including 
communication resources” (2). Such an approach helps uncover the power hier-
archies in the production of media, including videogames, which in turn partly 
determine the meaning potentials that audiences or players activate and negotiate. 
64 Emil Lundedal Hammar
This focus on power hierarches of media was addressed by Horkheimer and 
Adorno (2002: 94 f.) as the so-called “culture industry,” where mass culture’s 
domination and “sameness” derives from its economic production logic – i. e. that 
mass culture is homogenised by factory-like commodification and its purpose of 
generating profits. Hall (1986) similarly wrote that ownership and control of media 
is sufficiently important that it “gives the whole machinery of representation its 
fundamental orientation in the value-system of property and profit” (11). As such, 
if games and play are subservient to contemporary power hierarchies as indicated 
in Kerr’s quote above, it is pertinent to pinpoint how they motivate producers 
towards the encoding of particular meaning potentials. This serves as my primary 
motivation for conducting interviews with producers of historical games as to how 
they navigate and reflect on their encoding of cultural memory within said games. 
The upshot of these observations is in my view not to posit an entirely determin-
istic relationship between production and meaning, but “to map the limits within 
which the production of mediated culture can operate” (Golding & Murdock 1979: 
226–227). It is for these reasons that I find it important to explore the explicit 
and implicit reasons for why historical game development “factories” (as one 
informant put it) end up reproducing the ongoing rearticulation of hegemonic 
visions of the past. Questions such as why does the historical setting have to be 
in Europe or the United States? Why does the protagonist have to be white, male 
and Anglophone? Why is the primary engagement with the gameworld through 
violence and domination of others? And why does such a hegemony of perspec-
tives manifest itself repeatedly? Or in the words of Hall (1992): “the problem about 
the mass media is that old movies keep being made” (10).
These initial questions underscore the importance of exploring videogame 
production and its resulting reproduction of mnemonic hegemony. Molden 
defines this as, “Access to and control over the means of communication and 
diffusion of historical narratives are of utmost importance for the establishment 
and maintenance of mnemonic hegemony” (2016: 134). I argue that the political 
economy of videogames potentially leads to unequal forms of memory-making 
that, in this case, players negotiate and activate differently (Apperley 2010). Joanne 
Garde-Hansen (2011) states that:
powerful media and cultural institutions whose business it is to record, archive and make 
accessible the everyday life, major events and social and cultural heritage of nations and 
communities, invariably write those narratives in ways that glorify not only themselves but 
the cultural hegemony of the societies they serve. (50)
As such, I mainly stress the importance of a political economy of historical video-
game production, and, in turn, I highlight a potential research area of interest to 
media scholars alike to “situate these readings within the specific power geometry 
or map of power identified by the coordinates of commodification, spatialization, 
and structuration” (Mosco 2009: 225).
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 65
Player Negotiations
However, I do feel the need to address the often-mentioned objection against the 
top-down approach of political economy also seen in my choice to only interview 
videogame producers. This relates to player negotiations, “consumption” or 
the aforementioned “decoding” (Hall 1973). Chapman writes that “the player is 
both narrator and audience. In historical games, doing also means writing. […] 
Players […] configure the story space and produce particular narratives” (2016: 34). 
Mukherjee (2017) takes this point of player negotiations further by arguing that 
previous research on historical videogames fail
[…] to consider the millions of players from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and the Middle 
East for whom these empire-building games actually provide a more direct experience 
of engaging with their colonial history. These games’ portrayal of the colonies is often 
simplistic and contains inaccuracies that are immediately obvious to players from these 
regions. (5)
As such, the point of who is activating and negotiating the encoded memory-
making potentials of historical videogames is a crucial one if we are to identify 
the limits of production on the level of meaning. Mukherjee’s point serves well 
to illustrate how meaning depends on the positionality of audiences. Stephanie 
Boluk’s and Patrick LeMieux’s work on “Metagaming” (2017) provides insight into 
the many ways that “diverse practices and material discontinuities that emerge 
between the human experience of playing videogames and their nonhuman oper-
ations” (4) independent from the game developer’s intention. Kristine Jørgensen 
(2012) has similarly proposed the importance of player studies that help capture the 
full range of meaning potentials of games that other previous approaches (Aarseth 
2014) arguably fall short of. These questions are not necessarily new, where for 
example literary studies have extensively debated and covered the question of 
author intentionality contrasted with reader responses (Mitchell 2008).
In turn, this emphasis on reception does not mean an infinite multiplicity 
of interpretations exist, which would negate the limited meaning potentials of 
historical videogames. As Mosco argues, a political economy of communication 
on one hand does concern itself or at the very least acknowledge the multiplicity 
of interpretations by audiences. He writes, “As Murray (2004) has demonstrated 
in her research on fan cultures, audience resistance is inscribed within limits 
established by the media industries” (2009: 224). Elsewhere, Kevin Schut (2007) 
uses the metaphor of a steep slope to illustrate how players often follow the bias 
in media: “many, if not most, will take the path of least resistance and go with the 
slope – and even if they do not, it will take extra effort to climb. […] Media […] have 
biases that encourage certain kinds of uses or certain kinds of interpretations” 
(218). It is thus wise to consider to what extent players of historical games regard-
less of their positionality are similarly confined within the encoded frames (Shaw 
66 Emil Lundedal Hammar
2017).3 It is precisely also through the nature of videogames as software code that 
questions of algorithms, structure and platforms intrude themselves on matters of 
agency and active users (Nieborg & Poell 2018) – and vice versa (cf. Apperley 2010: 
132). As Mosco (2009) goes on to state regarding the relation between production 
and form in the political economy of communication:
Media power, which gives those with control over markets the ability to fill screens with 
material embodying their interests, tends to structure the substance and form of polysemy, 
thereby limiting the diversity of interpretations to certain repeated central tendencies that 
stand out among the range of possibilities, including those marginalized few that diverge 
substantially from the norm. (224)
Bridging Production and Reception as “Memory-Making Potentials”
In order to bridge the questions posed by both political economy and recep-
tion studies and thereby qualify the importance of my interviews, I propose the 
following: text (in all its forms) constrains audiences and is itself constrained 
by relations of production and cultural hegemony. These textual frames invite 
meaning potentials that are then actively negotiated – if not subverted4 –by situated 
audiences. These meaning potentials in videogames can, I argue, to many extents 
be traced back to the context in which they are produced. Thus, my primary moti-
vation in this article revolves around the significance of these contexts of memory 
production and their materialist underpinnings in order to predispose what 
memory-making potentials are offered to players to activate and negotiate. Below, 
I briefly review the political-economic conditions that structure contemporary 
videogame production as a backdrop to my interview findings.
How Political Economy Predispose Games’ 
Memory-Making Potentials
Videogames as a mass cultural form are structured by the unequal power hier-
archies of the societies they are produced in. From the slave labour of mining 
minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Sinclair 2015, 2016, 2017; Valentine 
3 Chapman offers the term “(hi)story-play-spaces” to account for this tension between 
both the producer and the player in the formulation of historical narratives via video-
games (2016: 34).
4 Tom Apperley defines this relation between production and play as resonance (Apper-
ley 2010: 134) where the global game with its mass-produced meaning potentials is 
adopted in the local, i. e. the cultural, social and geographical context in which play-
ers play.
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 67
2018), to the exploited wage slaves in Chinese tech-factories assembling the media 
devices (Fuchs 2017; Qiu 2017), to the precarious working conditions of software 
developers in North America and Europe (Consalvo 2008; Williams 2013; 
O’Donnell 2014; Woodcock 2016) and cheaply outsourced countries like Malaysia 
and Vietnam (Thomsen 2018), to the e-waste dumps in Nigeria and China 
(Maxwell, Raundalen,  & Vestberg 2014; Nguyen 2017), the materialist aspects 
of game production follows contemporary global capitalist production networks 
that exploit the environments and workers in the periphery, while circulating 
capital toward the economic centre. It is from here, the centre of power located 
within this global network, that “a one-way flow of culture and information from 
centre to periphery” (Mosco 2009: 73) is enacted. Thus, in exercising power over 
cultural memory, the decision-makers are primarily white, male, heterosexual in 
their 20s to 30s (Edwards, Weststar,  & Meloni 2014; Weststar  & Legault 2015), 
with most major companies operating from United States, Canada and Western 
Europe (Kerr 2017). Across a general overview of the game industry, developer 
statements indicate that they rely on hegemonic articulations of race (Young 2016; 
Srauy 2017), gender (Johnson 2013) and a “one-dimensionality of creativity” due 
to profit maximisation (Bulut 2018). Not only does the game industry cultivate 
a mutually beneficial relationship to the US military industrial complex (Dyer-
Witheford & De Peuter 2009; Allen 2017) and gun manufacturers (Parkin 2013), 
but it also has adopted the “platformisation of culture” (Nieborg & Poell 2018) to 
capture and increase power over the cultural landscape that players as consumers 
operate in (Joseph 2017, 2018).
When access to game development largely follows what Patricia Hill Collins 
terms as the matrix of domination (2002: 221–238), and if the economic struc-
tures of game development cultivate certain playful visions of the past, then it is 
pertinent to ask what possible mnemonic objects of play are made available to those 
who decode them. I claim that this context of production surfaces in the meaning 
potentials of historical games as well as evidenced in my interviews. Although no 
quantitative study has to my knowledge been published on the dominant forms of 
memory-making in games, this genre of videogames relies on colonial logics with 
Eurocentric visions in both their narratives, gameworlds and mechanical systems 
(Mukherjee  & Hammar 2018). Historical videogames, according to Sybille 
Lammes, “all share a strong fascination with colonial history, including its mili-
taristic, economic and technoscientific dimensions. Through employing colonial 
techniques of domination like exploring, trading, map-making and military 
manoeuvring, players create their personal colonial pasts and futures” (2010: 
2). For example, in reiterating Michel Foucault’s power analysis of the archive, 
Adrienne Shaw (2015) argues that historical games similarly rely on conventional 
understandings of history, especially with an emphasis on the so-called authen-
ticity of the material cultures of history (Köstlbauer 2013; Salvati & Bullinger 2013), 
which in turn is mostly predicated on what sells (Copplestone 2017). Indeed, Adam 
Chapman, Foka, & Westin (2018) write that:
68 Emil Lundedal Hammar
As have been shown on numerous occasions […], the representations we are creating of the 
past often follows [sic] well established conventions that are outdated, homogenous, and 
highly problematic, and may feed into contemporary political conflict. (283)
Previous contestations over hegemony in game culture bring to the surface 
the overriding logic that predisposes the meaning potentials of a game and its 
surrounding discourse. The representation of women in games is perhaps the 
most common phenomenon, where player-grassroots and feminist organisations 
push for more and better representation of women, yet are met with dismissals 
by the industry and harassment by reactionary male consumers. Whether it is 
the exploitative or erasing marketing of marginalised groups in games (Smith et 
al. 2005; Dietrich 2013; Kirkpatrick 2017), or the unwillingness to fund projects 
featuring these groups as protagonists (Kuchera 2012), or the industry’s silence 
and implicit support of reactionary hate movements (Massanari 2017; Salter 2017; 
Keogh 2018), most rationalisations in the industry seem to derive from heteropa-
triarchal, white supremacist, colonialist and capitalist logics. As a consequence, on 
the level of text, female characters are erased from the marketing; protagonists of 
colour will not get funding by game publishers; women protagonists are changed 
into male protagonists at the request of game publishers; historical narratives 
featuring under-represented groups are met with organised consumer backlash as 
being “historically inaccurate” (Farokhmanesh 2018) and studies show that male-
identifying players do not care about women protagonists in games (Yee 2017). In 
sum, there are plenty of examples of cultural struggles and contestations within 
current hegemony, which provide insight into an otherwise hermetically sealed 
industry. Here, matters of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language and class 
intersect in the maintenance and reproduction of a cultural and economic domi-
nation by those in power positions of the game industry (Fron et al. 2007). Given 
this political economy of videogames and the qualified relation between produc-
tion and form, I now move to outlining my interviews and the data gathered from 
them.
Methodology
In the period between May 2015 and June 2017, I conducted a series of semi-
structured qualitative interviews (May 2011: 123; Brinkmann 2014) with nine 
game industry professionals out of 35 requests for interviews. The two women and 
seven men hailed from Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Scotland, Canada, USA and 
Taiwan and were between 21 and 48 years of age. The selection process was incred-
ibly broad where anyone affiliated with the development of a historical videogame 
was considered acceptable for interview. The majority of my informants worked 
in mid-sized companies and ranged from student to lead game designer, to lead 
writer, to project lead, to CEO of the entire company in question. Interviews were 
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 69
conducted and recorded via Microsoft’s Skype with the consent of the infor-
mants. The data were stored locally, with only myself treating and analysing 
the data in compliance with the Norwegian Center for Data Research’s (NSD) 
formal approval. After data collection, I transcribed and anonymised the inter-
views and coded the data into key statements. This relatively low number of infor-
mants, coupled with the broad range of age, job position, gender distribution and 
geographical bias, make the dataset less reliable and generalizable. Instead, the 
dataset allows for a preliminary direction of analysis, which is reflected through 
what I map out as four identified “themes.” (May 2011: 150). These themes are 
self-reflections that motivated my respondents to reflect on their own position in 
society and history when producing cultural memory via videogames; mnemonic 
reinforcements and contestations, a theme that draw out the ways that my respon-
dents engaged with the memory politics of their cultural expressions; techno-ludic 
constraints, which shows the material and cultural perception of videogames and 
how this limits cultural memory and finally economic axioms, which highlights 
the materialist conditions of game production. These themes help structure my 
data analysis to draw out overarching tendencies in the responses and how they 
relate to the memory-making potentials that my respondents encode into their 
products.
My data gathering has a series of weaknesses: low response rates, an emphasis 
on European and North American respondents and most of all the non-disclosure 
agreements that encouraged potential informants to decline being interviewed. 
The latter refers to the contracts that workers in the game industry often sign when 
hired, which serve as a legal gag-mouth to prevent internal knowledge, capital and 
controversy to leak out to the public. This results in an opaque, impenetrable wall 
of higher-budget studios, which is an often encountered and researched phenom-
enon for previous researchers (O’Donnell 2014; Woodcock 2016; Srauy 2017). 
For the consented informants, I also inquired about other people who might be 
relevant for my research, but most people did not send me further connections, 
possibly due to fear of getting identified or simply because time is precious for 
those precariously developing commercial games.
My own position as both a critical enthusiast of videogames and as a white, 
male academic meant that the white male informants I met possibly felt more 
comfortable with me by virtue of my identity, thereby revealing more uncom-
fortable statements to me. However, my previous critical work on the produc-
tion of racial, gendered and economic power in videogames did not prove to be a 
hindrance, as far as I have gathered, since all of them were self-admittedly unfa-
miliar with my research project and my background before the interviews. I now 
proceed to outline the findings according to each theme.
70 Emil Lundedal Hammar
Findings
Theme 1 – Self-Reflections
At the end of each interview, I explicitly asked the informants to reflect on their own 
position in society as cultural producers. I wanted them to tease out their thoughts 
on the status of their own games on memory and society, with an emphasis on 
the political and ethical nature of memory, games and play. Only Tumelo gave the 
motivation reason for making their particular game set in Taiwan: “Why can’t 
I find any game out there that could represent our culture and share with the 
world the place I grow up in?” Moreover, for their non-English game, Tumelo 
stressed that “localization is essential.”, because they did not just want to make a 
game for themselves and the people in their country, but “in order to let the world 
know about our culture, we have to publish our game worldwide. […] To break the 
barrier, we tried to seek for a message that’s universal for everyone.”
Most other informants unfortunately had not given much thought to it. Farai 
simply stated that “it’s really rewarding to be able to develop something and then 
see others have fun playing it.” Keaton found that “political correctness” and 
“self-censorship” had run amok when political topics are treated in games, so 
they found it difficult to include sensitive historical traumas in their productions. 
Alternatively, Doron happily welcomed whatever controversy if it would lead to 
more sales of their historical game. In that sense, they did not appear to be actively 
conscious about their situatedness within the already hegemonic mass culture. 
If they received criticisms stemming from how their games were distributed and 
consumed in society, they mostly were hesitant or nervous. However, this lack 
of awareness was nuanced by their statements on how they viewed history and 
memory as seen in the subsequent theme.
Theme 2 – Mnemonic Reinforcements and Contestations
The theme of reinforcement and contestations over memory illustrate on one hand 
the sources the informants relied on and how they encoded their understandings 
of history to a videogame, while on the other, it also shows how each informant 
positioned themselves in relation to contemporary mnemonic hegemony. Most 
sources did not approach sources in a critical way; they simply consulted online 
articles on Wikipedia or at their local libraries, save for those few who were 
critical of typical historical sources. Informant Doron revealed that they used 
the Hollywood film Apocalypto as a “good source of inspiration for that period 
and that setting, in order to get the South American culture right.” Gili stated 
that their experience working in big-budget productions meant that people “will 
have seen a lot of science fiction and action movies, so [their] references […] are 
very pertinent and always on the forefront, […] anything you want to do has to be 
able to work with those people who only have those references to make them see 
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 71
beyond […] an action movie.” This reliance on broader cultural memories within 
game production teams indicates the influence of even fictional historical narra-
tives. Taking a different stance to historical sources, Tumelo stated that since 
they “are not scholars nor historians, we simply felt that it wouldn’t be right to 
discuss the history and facts from our own narrow perspective.” In their specific 
production, Tumelo said that the team members had “many personal stories 
about [the historical trauma] from our grandparents. We knew that the trauma 
was real,” thereby echoing the mnemonic trauma between generations according 
to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (2012), but they still relied on “old 
footage, newspaper, articles” as well as folklore, fiction literature and film as inspi-
ration for the historical setting.
Here, Gili also took an active stand about listening to those in the margins 
rather than “stuffy historical sources” as they put it. They saw their “role within the 
team to find what’s uncomfortable in history and raise the question and push for its 
representation […] and decolonization.” Keaton revealed that the often-mentioned 
refrain of using “historians” for a game project was mostly about consultancy in 
reference to dates, while Gili claimed that historians were mostly used as a point 
to market their multimillion product. Just as well, creative licenses seemed to be 
the modus operandi when it came to depicting history – each informant revealed 
that the importance was engagement and creativity to entice players rather than 
so-called “historical authenticity”  – in the end, as Keaton put it, “it is us who 
decide [on what is important to depict], but not usually the historians.”. This is in 
line with Copplestone’s (2017: 430) research that corroborates developer’s prioriti-
sation of “fun” and “sales” over cultural heritage.
Two of the student informants stated that they approached history as a 
means to counter mnemonic hegemony – i. e. going against a dominant historical 
narrative of a former slave nation where the informants revealed that they never 
learned about colonial history in school so their games were challenges to such 
collective memory writing. Two of the small-scale informants stated that they also 
saw their memory products as a way for people to reflect on their own position 
today via a historical narrative. As Farai said, “So I really wanted to kind of get onto 
the project more and more about it and hopefully deliver something that would 
educate other people about the sugar trade in Scotland,” a history that they did 
not recall being taught about in school or via popular culture. Chi made similar 
remarks about their upbringing, where “I was not told that Portugal was the 
country that pioneered the transatlantic slave trade […] We do not talk about the 
crimes in our collective past; what is taught is how Portugal was great, a glorious 
country, because it ‘found’ this or that country before all other Europeans, and 
because it held the first overseas empire in history.” In contrast to Farai’s and 
Chi’s active stance towards collective memory discourses, Merrik revealed that 
their team remained “relatively as neutral as possible regarding the reason for [the 
U. S. civil war]. Our goal is to depict how it is to be a soldier in the 1860s and not 
politics.”
72 Emil Lundedal Hammar
Meanwhile, the rest of the informants simply used history as a way to stand 
out in the marketplace or where dominant tales of colonialism is seen as “the 
potential for exploration and discovery” as Doron put it. They further stated that 
“the whole European discovery of America is one of the most central journeys of 
discovery ever […]. Those are some of the first things you think about when you’re 
talking about history and tales of exploration.” Doron saw this rarely seen histor-
ical setting as “something that stood out in the market/industry, something that 
could have an identity that clearly separated itself from other games.” Here, Doron 
views colonial history both as a white-washed tale of exploration and discovery and 
as a way to stand out in the marketplace. Conversely, Chi stated that “[…] part of 
the reason was I just wanted to make something different. […] I mean videogame 
landscape in terms of representation is very uniform. It’s always about like an 
angry Anglo-Saxon dudes.” As such, there appears to be differing motivations for 
producing counter-hegemonic memory.
Theme 3 – Technoludic Constraints
The respondents also revealed some of the particularities with developing games. 
For instance, Farah stated that the development method of white-boxing meant 
that signifying elements such as narrative, characters, objects, etc. were secondary 
to the actual playtesting of the game design that they had in mind for their histor-
ical game project.
This crude way of testing out game design also speaks to the incredibly 
complicated nature of game development that require lots of highly skilled labour 
in order to produce polished play experiences. Chi stated that “the very nature 
of the kind makes it difficult to do something highly polished and commer-
cially viable.” Developing videogames is an incredibly complex process with 
multiple pressures on what priorities to make, that most of the informants 
found it very difficult to make something up to expected standards – as Keaton 
put it, “it is highly limited what historical points we want to convey” given “the 
bandwidth and complexity” at their studio. From animating objects and charac-
ters, to creating art assets, to establishing the game design, to programming, to 
placing sound triggers in the environment, to creating the actual sounds, and 
to make it all come together for players to find it an engaging experience that 
they want to play with. As such, the amount of work required to make games 
and the required economics speak to how the informants found making games 
challenging, complex and costly. To make their historical games believable for 
their audiences, Merrick stated that it “requires many, many resources and time 
in order to get right.” Doron added that access to hardware and software makes 
the work they have put into the game difficult or inaccessible to be widely played 
among consumers. Thus, there is a double bind of having complex software being 
constructed via highly skilled labour contrasted with the relative privilege or inac-
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 73
cessibility of this software via the hardware platforms that only a select few have 
access to.
In the same sense regarding the nature of game development, many infor-
mants revealed their own inclinations to why they thought games were important 
for history and memory. Several of the informants reiterated the notion that 
“games are unique” and their “interactivity” allows players to experience history 
differently and “better” with “reactive stories.” Just as well, the common refrain of 
historical games as gateways for an interest into learning more about “history” (“if 
you wanted to you could really go and learn a lot more about the subject” as Farai 
stated). Tumelo mentioned that
since [historical period] is seldom mentioned in the history textbook nor emphasized in 
the educational system, young generation nowadays isn’t quite familiar with this part of 
history. After the game came out, [it] somehow provided them a channel to learn more 
about the past incident they were unaware of before. Some players even became intrigued 
and did their own research about [it].
While the uniqueness of videogames has been criticised by several scholars, the 
informants’ perspectives nevertheless reveal their own justifications and value-
systems of making games and what their products are able to do for the people who 
play them. This echoes Ian Bogost’s (2007) concept of procedural rhetoric, where 
videogames form certain messages on the level of mechanical system and sign 
to e. g. produce “serious games.” The mechanical nature of games was also high-
lighted in the way that one of the developers emphasised that visual marketing 
had to signify what players are able to do in the game – so that for example Doron 
wanted tools and weapons to be prominent in the marketing of their game about 
construction and combat. In this sense, it appears significant that paratextual 
elements also have to clarify or denote not only what the game is about, but also 
what players are able to do in the game.
Finally, the cultural perception of “games being unique” also had drawbacks 
for whenever some of my informants engaged with people who considered games 
to be frivolous and incapable of tackling “serious” topics. For instance, Chi was 
met with dismissals when they pitched their game idea about slavery, because 
“due to the stigma attached to the interactive medium, and a lingering notion 
that videogames cannot discuss serious subject matter.” They were “often imme-
diately asked why I am telling this story, and approaching this topic, through a 
videogame, instead of using literature or film.” This speaks to what Chapman & 
Linderoth (2015: 137) argues with the “limits of play” where the perception of ludic 
aspects clash with more serious historical topics. As such, the informants also 
faced challenges by the so-called “uniqueness of games.”
74 Emil Lundedal Hammar
Theme 4 – Economic Axiom
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the informants were all very much 
occupied with the question of economic and funding – i. e. almost everyone stated 
that they need to earn money to keep the lights on in their offices and put food 
on the table. For example, Tumelo stated that in order for their smaller company 
to survive, “there were times we had to take outsourcing cases to keep the studio 
running” and towards the end “we encountered financial difficulty” that only was 
overcome, thanks to a public funding pool. As a consequence, this concern contin-
uously impacted their creative decisions on what type of game to produce. This 
was a recurring phenomenon across the different scales of productions, where 
small-scale developers to those working within multimillion projects were first 
and foremost concerned with how much their product would sell. As Doron put 
it, “[our creative planning] would exclusively be about what can we get funding 
for. […] the only thing that matters is if you can prove there’s a market for it,” 
while Erin felt that game developers “should be a lot more cynical […] and think 
about how can I make the most profit of the games that we’re making.” Thus, 
when asked about their creative choices for which pasts to include, the overriding 
concern was always that it had to earn money. Chi revealed that any funding from 
publishers require evidence of a secure return of investment, and therefore Chi 
had to prove what had sold before, thus ensuring that only sequels of what had 
already proved profitable is produced – i. e. the production of cultural memory 
is backwards looking and self-referential. What was successful before will be 
successful again seems to be the operating principle. This meant that hegemonic 
narratives of history were easier to get funding for, so already well-known histor-
ical periods and perspectives were more likely to sell – e. g. one informant stated 
that they chose to depict the Viking era instead of a Chinese explorer in the 11th 
century simply due to using “safer historical settings until we have established 
a customerbase.” Informant Chi revealed that sensitive or seemingly contro-
versial topics such as slavery are denied funding by those in power, while the 
same informant revealed that people in economic power positions and funding 
were “Anglo-Saxon Nordic […] So like what you see outputted to the big markets 
are things that are products that reflect that culture.” Here, Chi is pinpointing 
who is giving money to these games, who is making them and how this influ-
ences the production of memory in videogames. The economic precarity caused 
by including sensitive or controversial historical topics also made it difficult to 
balance pragmatism versus idealism  – in Tumelo’s case, their team ended up 
siding with the latter:
Since our game dealt with a serious topic, we were once afraid of the players’ reception. Yet 
on a second thought, even if the sales didn’t turn out to be good, we would still be content, 
for at least we were able to share our perspectives to the world in the form of game.
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 75
Informant Gili revealed that working on larger big-budget projects also meant 
that it was harder to push back against preconceived hegemonic notions of history 
and representation, simply because the amount was that much bigger. As they 
put it,
[the larger the team,] the more likely you are to find people who just not have pre-existing 
ideas about how things, its about a nest of pre-existing ideas, how things are in history, how 
things have to be in games, what is going to sell, and there’s a cautiousness with having to 
protect a large budget that makes it harder for people to embrace larger ideas.
This meant that not only does return of investment impact the production of 
cultural memory in historical games, but the scale of production and the amount 
of workers also increases the likelihood of mnemonic hegemony.
Several informants revealed that they knew what audiences to target and their 
preferences, and therefore they were motivated or forced to produce what such 
audiences found appealing. As Chi put it “They are more likely to give money 
to something that they know will work or that they can estimate better that it 
will work to something that they’ve never seen before.” Doron revealed that they 
wanted to target 20- to 35-year American men if they wanted to sell, since “I want 
to live or survive making games that I’m talking about the market,” as they argued.
The informants who revealed their audience conceptualisations did not 
provide evidence or explanation of where or how they constructed them. The infor-
mant Gili said that they were not privy to how the multibillion publisher gathered 
data about audience preferences. Gaining insight into the epistemology of such 
capitalist logics would otherwise prove useful in understanding the continuous 
reproduction of mnemonic hegemony in games.
Challenges and Limitations
In addition to the weaknesses mentioned earlier, there are other limitations to my 
study. As Rigney (2016: 3) writes, memory is more akin to process than a product. 
What gets encoded by developers and how they think about memory based on 
their own convictions and economical context, the formation of memory is still 
reliant on the constant, iterative process of individuals and collectives.
Similarly, my limited qualitative interview dataset does not address the day-to-
day practices in each studio that would otherwise reveal more about the implicit 
assemblages of actors within the studio itself. Just as well, I do not conduct an 
institutional or structural analysis that would further reveal how memory produc-
tion organisations and networks form memory-making potentials in their games – 
especially on a macro-level. Neither does my method account for the responses that 
my informants would not admit or did not consider important for the interview. 
This drawback is made more apparent when one considers the fact that my infor-
76 Emil Lundedal Hammar
mants were mostly people who are the face and leaders of their studios, and so 
my interviews did not give voice to other workers who may or may not contest the 
statements by those in charge.
My research also forgoes the other, usually silenced or hidden workers of the 
games industry, namely the hardware assemblers and outsourcing studios that do 
much of the legwork for contemporary videogame production. Additionally, I did 
not ask my informants how they utilised the labour of players to increase the value 
of their product, since that is one way of capturing and commodifying play as seen 
in the example of hidden data-harvesting and general “playbour” that exploits 
players to increase profits of the studios or publishers who make these games.
Discussion
Linking back to the initial discussion on the political economy of videogames, 
the production, distribution and consumption of historical videogames are highly 
conditioned by the social and economic power hierarchies in which producers 
operate. As my informants revealed, their working conditions, their positioning 
and negotiation of collective memory discourses and their privileged access to 
games production result in an unequal distribution of communication resources 
across the divide between production and consumption. The four themes each 
reveal the underlying conditions of producing cultural memory in historical 
games. Primarily, their continued refrain of concerning themselves with the 
economic conditions they work under means that their precarious situation results 
in reproducing tried-and-true formula. Although few explicitly reflected on their 
position as producers of cultural memory, their positioning towards reinforcing 
or contesting mnemonic hegemony revealed each informants’ implicit negotia-
tions of cultural memory. Yet whether it was student informants or the CEO of a 
mid-sized company, the overriding logic was always economic.
However, at the same time, I would also state that there is something more 
going on than simply an overriding economic logic that drives their “one-dimen-
sionality of creativity” (Bulut 2018). Some of the informants relied on assumptions 
about their target audiences, their preferences and what is appealing at the level 
of consumption. Yet they did not suggest or explain how they knew these prefer-
ences. As such, I propose that their assumptions rest on implicit notions about 
identity cultivated by the hegemonic values of the society they live in. This means 
that my informants reproduced their own biases about gender, race, sexuality, 
ethnicity, age and social class, and how these categories influenced who would be 
“the target market,” i. e. those with purchasing power. In that sense, the economic 
axiom is inadequate in accounting for the other ways that mnemonic hegemony is 
maintained and reinforced.
Overall, the data indicate the conditions in which the production of historical 
games as part of a global production network motivate the commodification of play 
The Polit ical Economy of Cultural Memor y in the Videogames Industr y 77
and games. Echoing the existing work on the political economy of the videogame 
industry, historical videogames are structured by the hegemonic mass culture in 
which they are produced.
Conclusion
This article has established the significance of the relation between production 
and form in cultural memory. My qualitative interviews form one part of mapping 
and illuminating how game developers encode memory-making potentials into 
historical videogames and in turn, what explicit conditions they operate under. 
Specifically, the themes that I established drew out the economic axiom of memory 
production, the individual contestations over memory, the technoludic constraints 
of game development and finally their own mnemonic role in society. As I argue, 
these results highlight on one hand the system in which these individuals are 
embedded that motivate them to churn out specific hegemonic memory-making 
potentials in their games, and at the same time rely on assumptions and notions 
that go beyond the economic axiom. Historical game developers are, like the rest of 
the games industry, enveloped in deep economic precarity with engrained notions 
about what games can be and who buys them. This holds true across the economic 
spectrum where both student developers as well as workers within medium- to big-
budget productions both operate under similar working conditions. Regardless of 
whether it is a commercial or a subversive avant-garde production, the capitalist, 
heteropatriarchal, racialised, Western-centric nature of the videogame industry 
motivates the reproduction of mnemonic hegemony. As such, my limited data 
indicates how cultural memory is very much predisposed by the material as well 
as the hegemonic conditions that structure individuals into reinforcing mnemonic 
hegemony via their encoding practices. Future research that analyses the institu-
tional, structural and geographical relationships between producers, distributors 
and consumers is needed. Additionally, a full-scale analysis of the unequal distri-
bution of global communication resources in videogames with special attention to 
the so-called Global South and the hoarding of wealth by multinational companies 
would prove especially insightful in determining how contemporary mass media 
such as videogames reproduce mnemonic hegemony.
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