Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)

Abstract

This research seeks to add to recent critical reevaluations of Alexander Galloway’s seminal “Social Realism in Gaming” through a closer analysis of the texts by Andre Bazin and Gilles Deleuze which inform Galloway’s initial conceptions of social realism. The present work emphasizes social criticism in this esthetic movement and finds the medium specificity of games limits applicability of cinematic terms like neorealism. Procedural rhetoric and effective Brechtian alienation tactics emphasizing player-character subjectivity, can be used to effectively convey the philosophical and ideological tenants of neorealism and broader social realism. This is expanded upon using the World War Two (WWII) game Red Orchestra 2 as a case study. Ultimately this work argues against Galloway’s “congruence requirement” between players real-world contexts and game interactions, rather finding social realism in games as dependent on convergence between a game’s functional and visual rhetoric.