Remembering futures: Synthetic memory in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

Abstract

When the average US video game player remembers military conflicts of the last 20 years through cultural tools like military shooters and, and more specifically in sites of memory like the Call of Duty series, they are not gaining access to a particular conflict, as one would expect of sites such as memorials of museums. Rather, these players are gaining access to a highly mediated text of the conflict that augments a public memory deeply invested in producing and reproducing extant systems of power. In this sense, military shooter video games commodify war memory for public consumption through conflating disparate collective memories of violence and channeling their affect through narrative, a process the author calls ‘synthetic memory’. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) is a strong case study of how memory is remediated and renarrativized into synthetic memory in order to perpetuate western chauvinism without the burden of historicity.