The Cold War Will Not Take Place: The Cold War in Non-Western Videogames

Abstract

This paper examines how the Cold War was depicted in videogames from outside the West. Using Jean Baudrillard’s double spiral of symbolic exchange and simulation as its theoretical framework, it describes the generation of the hyperreal in Western countries. The hyperreal is directly tied to machines in the welfare and warfare state that made the Cold War a battle that could never be fought. While these machines and the knowledge factories of which they were a part offered ludic alternatives to war in the West, in Eastern Europe and beyond, sitting outside of the Western hyperreal, they offer an opportunity to recollect and model human experiences of the inhumanities of their oppressors, through a certain point in history where digital technology and the downfall of the Eastern bloc coalesced. In this space, videogames from across Eastern Europe and Asia are interrogated in their form, function, content, distribution, and delivery to position non-Western videogames as offering a viable alternative to the technosphere that eventually swallows the world in its integral reality, indirect products of a war that could not take place.