Abstract

In looking at the history of U.S. military execution during World War II, this article explores the relationship between memory and psychological interference in the browser-based game Disavowed (2021). As an interesting example of the palimpsestuous negotiation between individual identity, narrativity, and cultural memory, Disavowed structures itself through the misremembering of an actual historical encounter. In such a way, it reconstructs a false history of events misconstrued within the memory of the game designer, put into dissonance with historical documentation of what “really happened” – an execution witnessed by tens of thousands of soldiers, but that seems largely erased from the record. The result is an interplay between the memories of veteran Theodore “Ted” Eaker, the public awareness of Private Eddie Slovik’s execution, and the journey to piece together what is a fractured, unreliable and racially problematic history of the practice of military execution.

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