We can think of code comments as a kind of textual marginalia-the doodles, notes, and corrections that authors and readers add in the margins of a text. BrooksMarlin noticed them in 2004, but nobody to my knowledge has ever read these comments against the game itself and against the existing scholarship on the game. In fact, I wasn’t the first to find these comments in the JFK Reloaded WAD file. They are not intended for the end-user, but with the right tools, the end-user might find them. They are visible only if one is able to view the source code. They are ignored by the machine interpreter and readable by humans, but not exactly legible. Code comments pose a number of interesting epistemological challenges. Any line that begins with the double slash is a comment in the code. they’ve got no special animation for it This is the action that a character takes when they should die if But beginning with line 224,070, we find plain text information that resembles XML structured data, accompanied by programmer comments.įor example, the following lines specify the actions that should occur when a generic character is fatally hit by Oswald’s rifle: In the case of JFK Reloaded, opening up the core000.wad in a text editor reveals mostly binary codes that look like junk (because they ought to be opened in hexadecimal editor rather than a plain text editor).
JFK RELOADED CROWD MOD PC
Originally used in Doom, WADs or similar composite files are now commonplace in many PC games. WAD stands for “Where’s All the Data?” a WAD file is a collection of individual sounds, sprites, level information, NPC (non-playable character) behavior, and other often customizable game data. I want to look at a very precise kind of texture, the human-readable comments that appear in the code in one of the two WAD files that comprise JFK Reloaded‘s game assets. In other words, the game emerges out of a specific time and place, textured by the touch of countless hands. But it is also a historical artifact itself. The game is indeed part of a documentary tradition, or to be more precise, an engagement with documentary evidence and historical archives, as Poremba suggests. Today I want to double back on my and these other videogame scholars’ interpretations of JFK Reloaded. JFK Reloaded doesn’t ask us to play history so much as to reimagine history. For my own part, I argued that the game’s greatest strength was not as a documentary videogame, but as an engine of counterfactual historical thinking. Even though the Kennedy family called the game “despicable,” many scholars argued that JFK Reloaded was a legitimate engagement with history (see Raessens, 2006 Bogost, 2007 Fullerton, 2008 and Bogost et al., 2010).
The game lets players reenact the Kennedy assassination, the goal being to match the findings of the Warren Commission Report with as much accuracy as possible. In my previous post on Play the Past, I looked at the way critics and scholars made sense of the videogame JFK: Reloaded (Traffic, 2004).
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