The article examines the documentary resource of computer games and develops the concept of a documentary interface. Media serve as a filter: they construct our perspective, mediate, inform, and sift through information. Despite this, some media (photography, cinema, diary) are associated with hopes for docu-mentarity and authenticity. In scholarly literature, these assumptions have been repeatedly called into question: the objectivity of photography, documentary film, and memoir prose is revealed to be merely a soothing fiction. The resource of documentality can be found even in unexpected places: a game allows not only to narrate a particular real event but also to experience it through the affects of traumatic gameplay. The authors consider the docugames project and modes of documentality, procedural rhetoric and incidental testimonies, remediation ef-fects of computer wars, and the fragmentation of the subject in military shooters like Spec Ops: The Line. They explore the documentality of trauma and the traumatic nature of the interface as heterogeneous attempts to master the paradoxical resource of gaming documentality, using the gaming medium to connect us with the conditions of presence and experiences of others, allowing us to delineate the boundaries of our inner experience in a fluid and traumatic modernity.
Translated title of the contributionDocumentary Interfaces: Procedural Rhetoric and the Experience of Trauma in Computer Games
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)42-52
Number of pages11
JournalВОПРОСЫ ФИЛОСОФИИ
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Nov 2025

    Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities(all)

    Research areas

  • computer games, documentary games, documentary interfaces, first-person perspective, interface as trauma, interfaces, procedural rhetoric, remediation

ID: 145089001