Esther Wright

Claims of “authenticity” are widely found in the promotional surround of historical video games, and are often met with positive, or viscerally negative, responses from fans and potential players. This paper uses Rockstar Games as a case study to explore the ways in which the promotional materials for historical video games are paratextual sites at which game developers perform the role of “developer-historian” (Chapman, 2016), and in doing so, attempt to create expectations for the authenticity of their products. When promoting the release of titles that seek to represent specific moments of America’s past – such as the Red Dead Redemption franchise (2010-2018) and L.A. Noire (2011) – Rockstar created a number of different types of promotional materials that made explicit claims for their authenticity: ranging from blog posts and downloadable content hosted on the official Rockstar website, to trailers and exclusive features with select outlets of the gaming and entertainment press. One the one hand, this involved curating a discrete, consumable narrative out of the broader history of American popular culture, to create a discourse of cinematic authenticity around the release of these games (Wright, 2017). Complementing this, paratexts also worked to create a discourse of historical authenticity which used select pieces of evidence to suggest that their games were capturing certain ‘truths’ about the American West, or the post-war experience of urban spaces like Los Angeles. This paper will explore what kind of material was used to do so, what these narratives added up to, and ultimately, what it tells us about the way notions of historical authenticity are discursively constructed outside of historical video games themselves.

Panel discussion. Moderation: Felix Zimmermann