History, Historicity, and Fiction: Pseudorealities in Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain

Abstract

This chapter considers how Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain both explore post-9/11 realities by using a narrative frame set in the past––in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Ground Zeroes, through its use of setting the game in a military detention facility in Cuba named Camp Omega, provides pointed and devastating commentary on America’s uses of Guantanamo Bay as a prison and the extraordinary rendition program as a tool in the War on Terror. The chapter also considers how these two games present a complex intersection of what is historically accurate and what is essentially historical fiction, utilizing this space as a place from which to comment on modern events.