Great War Games: Notes on Collective Memory, the Adynaton, and Posthumanism

Abstract

This essay performs a narratological reading of 2014 video games Valiant Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.