Documentary Interfaces

The article examines the documentary resource of computer games and develops the concept of a documentary interface. Media serve as a filter: they construct our perspective, mediate, inform, and sift through information. Despite this, some media (photography, cinema, diary) are associated with hopes for docu­mentarity and authenticity. In scholarly literature, these assumptions have been repeatedly called into question: the objectivity of photography, documentary film, and memoir prose is revealed to be merely a soothing fiction. The resource of documentality can be found even in unexpected places: a game allows not only to narrate a particular real event but also to experience it through the affects of traumatic gameplay. The authors consider the docugames project and modes of documentality, procedural rhetoric and incidental testimonies, remediation ef­fects of computer wars, and the fragmentation of the subject in military shooters like Spec Ops: The Line. They explore the documentality of trauma and the trau­matic nature of the interface as heterogeneous attempts to master the paradoxical resource of gaming documentality, using the gaming medium to connect us with the conditions of presence and experiences of others, allowing us to delineate the boundaries of our inner experience in a fluid and traumatic modernity

Computer game · Construct (python library) · Memoir · Narrative · Objectivity (philosophy) · Resource (disambiguation) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Digital Games and Media