‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of truth. Isn’t it?’: Constructing and Deconstructing ‘the Truth’ in ‘Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength’

The aim of my proposed contribution is to investigate how post-truth dynamics are both represented and simulated in literary-inspired video games, focussing on the ‘Orwell’ series. Developed by the Hamburg-based indie company Osmotic Studios and influenced by George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949), this video game series consists of two narrative-driven drag-and-drop political thrillers: ‘Keeping an Eye on You’ (2016) and its midquel, ‘Ignorance Is Strength’ (2018). Both games place players in the role of investigators using a state-run monitoring system to scrutinise citizens’ digital activities and determine potential threats, with their choices profoundly shaping the narrative. While scholarly attention has largely concentrated on Keeping an Eye on You, which explores the theme of state surveillance and is often discussed in the same breath as games grappling with similar issues, like the critical darling ‘Papers, Please’ (3909 LLC 2013), my paper presentation intends to shift the focus of attention towards the more recent title in the series, which addresses the theme of misinformation more explicitly. Drawing inspiration from ‘the rise of fake news, the social media echo chamber and the death of truth’, Ignorance Is Strength not only thematises misinformation, but also gamifies it, allowing players ‘to both uncover and play with “the truth”’ (Steam 2018) in the shoes of a twenty-first-century Winston Smith. In my contribution, I aim to perform a multimodal analysis that attends to the ‘procedural rhetoric’ (Bogost 2007) of ‘Ignorance Is Strength’. In so doing, I will attempt to tease out and interpret the ideological implications of the representation/simulation of the construction and dissemination of fake narratives in this literary-inspired game