My name is Cindy Poremba, and I am a documentary videogame maker. I blog at shinyspinning, but have created this site to track and share other research into documentary videogames, games interesting to consider as documentary, media reports on docgames, and to share updates on my documentary videogame projects.

We can assess the documentary quality of videogames using the same criteria as other documentary forms, as long as we understand what those criteria are, and what it means to be a documentary. With few exceptions, a documentary is an expressive framing of indexical documents, that plays off the connection created between the viewer and the world. It is not a genre, per se, but rather a mode of representation with its own unique history, theory and conventions of practice.

There is no reason this tradition can’t be extended into videogame creation, but there are certainly challenges. For one, these games need to address what it means to document something, within a medium still questioning its own relationship to indexicality. Secondly, we need to better understand how games serve as expressive, meaning-making frames, not only so we can understand how our games will create documentary experiences, but why we might want to.

To this end, my research and practice attempts to identify potential strategies for documentary videogames, including the use of indexical simulations (as documents) and non-indexical simulations (as frames), attempts to create a phenomenological shift towards documentary viewing, and the creation (and understanding) of artificially situated perspectives.

That being said, this site serves as a means of tracking ALL material relating to documentary games, not just material reinforcing my research perspective. Including a paper, game, or news article on this site should not be viewed as an implicit endorsement. I welcome any suggestions on games, papers etc. I may have missed.