"Know Your History!" The Cold War in Video Games and its function.

Digital games are products of our society, products of our culture; they are not created in aseptic underground laboratories without contact to the outside world. Whether consciously or not, developers are always inspired by their environment, their experiences and worldviews in the creation of their game worlds. Fantasy game worlds, just like “historical” ones, therefore always transport political statements. Ideas of domination, gender and economy thus find their way into global strategy games, role-playing games and economic simulations. These communicated worldviews, however, do not remain static. On the contrary, they evolve with our societies. This becomes particularly clear in the case of historical settings.
The Cold War is particularly interesting for this type of research for two reasons: First of all, the Cold War was a geopolitical, but at the same time also a political and a cultural conflict that potentially had an impact on people's everyday lives. And second, we have here the rather unique opportunity to compare how one and the same medium first processed a contemporary conflict (until 1989/1990) and later went through a similar process but with a now historical phenomenon (from the 1990s to today)