The Landscape of Durance: Utopianism and Eastern Europe in Video Games

Abstract

This paper considers the video games S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl (2007), Metro 2033 (2010), Papers, Please (2013), This War of Mine (2014) and Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (2021), which all explore the recurring chronotope of Eastern Europe as an experimental space designed for testing the player's ethical agency. I argue that there is a thread linking formal ludic iteration, and the returns of modernist utopian discourses as post-apocalyptic within these games. This thread weaves ethical and unethical choices into a simulacral ludic history, trapping the player within a virtual embodiment of their own utopian desire, to provoke them to escape it, or seek alternatives to it. All these games allegorize Eastern Europe as a site of both normalized oppression and of sovereign choice, holding the player responsible for both options. They imagine and stereotype Eastern Europe as a durance: an entrapping space of looming ideological oppression that can be territorialized only through being survived. This paper interrogates the critical potential of video games by considering what may be the medium's most oppressive aspect ‒ its immense facility at ideological training disguised as sovereign freedom of choice.