ABSTRACT
Games for change that represent ‘serious’ topics like historical violence have often become subject to public controversies. Why is that? This chapter answers this question by analysing two controversial games, 1378(km) (2010) and Playing History 2: Slave Trade (2013) through the lens of Goffman’s frame analysis. We argue that representing any historical act of violence in a documentary form easily runs into people’s normative frame limits for appropriate representation. While the games’ creators believed in the artistic and educational potential of games, making games an apt medium for representing topics like state violence or slavery, their wider audiences viewed games as inherently carefree, trivial, and thus, trivializing whatever they represent. Similarly, enacting a perpetrator from a first-person perspective (as afforded by the games in question) was seen as inherently endorsing the perpetrator’s actions. This frame dispute over the moral legitimacy of presenting historical violence in game form was exacerbated by the fact that social and mass media circulated representations of the games far beyond intended contexts and audiences. We conclude that games for change design entails ensuring that audiences co-intentionally frame the game in question.
