“Afterword: Toward a Camera Ludica —Agency and Photography in Videogame Ecologies”

Deeply influenced by analog media but born of computer technology, the videogame is not only the site of untold digital futures but also of countless photographic and cinematic afterlives. In videogames, we engage with photographs and film as fluid, ongoing processes that inspire our emotional and mental involvement, while affording—or demanding—our active, haptic input. In serious historical games like Attentat 1942, players sift through still and moving images that gesture to historical gravity and authenticity while serving as a testament to the demands of videogame interactivity. By translating photographs and filmic testimonies into interactive processes, Attentat 1942 explores and complicates the essential role that analog media continue to play in our ongoing negotiation of (and memories of) the past—while reframing the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany and beyond.