Revisiting World War I in contemporaneity: The Myth of the War and the game Battlefield 1

Abstract

What is left of World War I a hundred years after the Armistice? Besides monuments and national holidays, texts are, in their various forms, among the remains of WWI. Together, they write what Samuel Hynes calls “the Myth of the War,” a narrative of signification that gradually became what and how we know about the war. A look at the relationship contemporary recreations of WWI establish with this myth is important to understand our sense of historical consciousness and collective memory. In this article, we propose a study of the single-player campaign mode of the video game Battlefield 1 (2016) to inquire into its treatment of the myth. We claim that this narrative, partially constructed by the player, simultaneously reiterates and denies Hynes’s Myth of Disillusionment. We also argue that this paradox derives from an attempt at retelling the traditional version of the war through the first-person shooter (FPS) game genre.