Remediated Reality: S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Its Post-Soviet Video Game Legacy

• In Event: Liberation through Play?: Toys and Games as Objects of Indoctrination and Remediation

Abstract

Loved, dismissed, or even feared, video games are a defining artistic medium of the twenty-first century. As a means of play, video games depend on technological innovations of the past seventy years, and are deeply connected with military and cybernetic technologies. Combat simulations play out on computer screens and drone technology has gamified warfare. This is what some call the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Russophone gaming communities are some of the most active in the world, and Russophone game studios are deeply imbricated in the histories of Soviet and Russian, but also global military technologies. A number of Russophone video games have also created opportunities for players to imaginatively engage with and even subvert the troubled histories of Soviet and Russian militarism that have emerged out of the Cold War. Andrei Tarkovskii’s 1979 film Stalker has become a nexus around which several high-profile Russophone video games have interrogated the legacies and potential futures of Soviet and Russian nuclear technologies. This paper analyzes the impact of military technology on both the form and content of video game remediations of Stalker. The 2007 video game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Tin′ Chornobylia), developed by the Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, and the Latvian-developed virtual reality (VR) game Into the Radius (2019) exemplify the impact of Russian and Soviet war on post-Soviet video game narratives and aesthetics, but also demonstrate the implication of Russophone video games in a global military-industrial-entertainment complex.

Author

• Spencer Small, Yale U