DIGITAL FRONT: WORLD WAR I IN COMPUTER GAMES

Immersive Historicity in World War II Digital Games

In this article I examine the potential feeling of time travel – historical immersion – in the World War II games Medal of Honor: Underground, Medal of Honor: Frontline, Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. To accomplish this, I make a semiotic analysis of visual and auditory signs based upon the three categories of space, time, and sound. I also consider the element of myth to be a...

War News and Exchange Rates during World War I: the Eastern versus the Western Front∗

Using a newly compiled dataset on prisoners of war and on soldiers killed and wounded on the Eastern and Western Fronts of World War I, this paper shows that changes in the exchange rate among the currencies of the belligerent countries were associated with good or bad news from the battlefield. Prospects of losing the war depreciated a country’s currency because a defeat would increase the lik...

The "torpillage" neurologists of World War I: electric therapy to send hysterics back to the front.

The French neurologists and psychiatrists who were mobilized during the Great War were confronted with numerous soldiers with war neuroses, often with novel clinical manifestations such as camptocormia. They addressed hysteria and pithiatism according to concepts that had been formed before the war, and many doctors considered these soldiers to be malingerers. As a result, the use of aggressive...

Computer Games and Digital Cultures

World War I: an air war of consequence.

On December 17, 1903, the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the world's first successful airplane, following this with the first military airplane in 1908. (The 1908 Flyer was built by the brothers in response to a 1907 requirements specification for a 2-place aircraft capable of flying at 40 mph and able to be broken down and transported in a horse-drawn wagon. Technically, since it cras...