The Fate of Documentary Games.
I want to be clear that I believe there is a space for documentary games in the style of The Cat and the Coup and others, they can be valuable contributions to the medium while also addressing important historical events. The problem is the burden of documentary storytelling. As I see it, documentary games cannot satisfy player agency and present factual information about historical events without confining the game aspects from the documentary in critical ways. At which point, the entire experience becomes supplementary. Again, this is fine, but it relegates the genre to the outskirts of what games and documentaries can do alone.
As in the post, I differentiate between games about issues and games about actual events. Some experimental games might actually get us to a happy medium between the two perhaps. Simulations, if they can put enough pressure onto players to corral them through a documentary experience, can provide some interesting insight into the processes by which events actually occurred. Opera Omnia, a game Scott and I discussed during our 2011 GDC roundup, might offer a glimpse at some weird experimental design elements that can play with history in unique ways. Omnia is essentially a game about historical revisionism, in which players change the logic of the past to change the justification for why the present exists. If we were to plug real historical information into that process, it might commit the greatest historical sin and allow players to rewrite history as they wish. However, if we were to set the puzzle perimeters such that they demand a complex understanding of a historical process, if players had to correct history and therefore understand, then maybe a game like Omnia could overcome some of the burdens on documentary games.
All that aside, I am actually looking forward to playing The Cat and the Coup. Frankly, I am less interested in the gameplay than I am the very idea of the game. I may have put a glass ceiling on documentary games, but I still think there are not enough of them. I actually think a murder mystery style game could be really interesting enriched with documentary information. David Fincher's Zodiac, for example, is a dramatic retelling of historical events that takes a great deal of historical liberties while also drawing tons of information from actual case documents. With some factual fluidity, games can do amazing things with real world contexts. Zodiac is one of my favorite mystery films, and if games aimed as high as Fincher, I'm certain I would add documentary-game-ish experiences into my favorites list.