The Missing Memorial: The Division 2 and the Politics of Memory

Abstract

The Division 2 (2019) presents players with a near one-to-one recreation of Washington, D.C. with a glaring omission: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the erasure of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial reflect the politics of an apolitical approach to game design? What does the playable spectacle of military action but erasure of the remembrance of lives lost say about the politics of environmental design? The following details the development of The Division 2 and the controversies that surrounded it following the critiques of The Division and the developer’s insistence on the apolitical nature of their entertainment product. Utilizing Avery Gordon’s theory of hauntings, I apply an ethnographic approach to the digital recreation of the D.C. landscape to explore the creative and technical decisions developer Massive Entertainment made in their creation of D.C. to examine the significance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s absence in The Division 2. I analyze what the claims to apolitical creation mean in the context of an explicitly ideological game set in the Tom Clancy universe and how this reflects the ways power operates through video games as a means of enforcing American exceptionalism and techno-military fetishism to the detriment of contemporary democratic values in the United States.