Gang, we have GOT to stop killing JFK.
…in video games.
Many, many games explore history.
But when a game gets into Kennedy’s assassination, OH BOY, YOU KNOW IT’S GONNA GET WEIRD.
Real quick, for those of you who might be unfamiliar, President John F. Kennedy was
fatally shot in 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The assassination was shocking.
It happened in front of huge crowds, and footage of it was widely disseminated.
The gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested.
Two days later, he was killed, apparently in retaliation,
by a local Dallas man named Jack Ruby.
These are the most basic facts I can tell you about the Kennedy assassination.
Oh, but there’s a lot more!
Let me quickly just pull out this 888-page report that President Johnson commissioned
after Kennedy’s death! Oooh, I got it! It's right here!
Yeah, let's see. It says right here that witness testimony and forensic evidence showed that
Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository,
and that he was the sole shooter.
Thanks, THE WARREN COMMISSION.
(glass breaks, Simone's eyes start bleeding profusely)
But here’s the thing.
60 years later, the Kennedy Assassination is still fodder for LOTS of theories.
A 2012 Gallup poll showed that 8 in 10 Americans believe
that Kennedy’s death was part of a conspiracy.
- There are a lot of reasons why the Kennedy assassination still harbors
such a cloud of uncertainty around it.
- This is Dr. Carrie Andersen.
She has a Ph.D in American Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, where she wrote
the paper “There Has To Be More To It”: Diegetic Violence and the Uncertainty of President
Kennedy’s Death.”
To translate that into non-doctorate, it’s all about the video games that recreate the
JFK assassination — and what they’re doing to your brain.
- These reports, and these stories about Kennedy's assassination are
coming out in the mid-to late-1960s.
And this is a time when the US is mired in the Vietnam War.
A few years later, we're involved in Watergate.
-Nixon: That was, and that is, the simple truth.
- These scandals damaged U.S. Americans’ trust in the presidency.
Then, in the mid-70s, a series of Senate hearings revealed the U.S. Intelligence Community’s
many, many transgressions: like the CIA’s supervillainous “MK-Ultra” mind control
experiments… and the assassinations of foreign politicians….
And the FBI spying on civil rights leaders… and the NSA intercepting Americans’ private correspondence…
- So over time, trust in the government and trust in stories and the official narratives
that the government shares, starts to get chipped away.
- Faith in the government was at rock bottom, and the Kennedy assassination was
very fresh.
According to that Gallup poll, the 1970s is when belief in the Official Kennedy Narrative
started to decline.
Which is so funky, right? Because this is the first Presidential Assassination
that we got on video!!
Kennedy’s death was captured in the famous “Zapruder film,” a home movie by Dallas
resident Abraham Zapruder, who was watching the motorcade that day.
So like, we know what happened!
- But it in fact, allows more questions. It allows us to really investigate like, 'Okay,
we see the bullet came at this angle. Was that actually feasible, given the timelines
that we have?'
-Kevin Costner in JFK: This is the key shot.
The president going back, and to his left.
Back and to the left.
-Seinfeld: Say that again.
-Kramer: Back and to the left.
-Elaine: What are you saying?
-Seinfeld: That the spit could not have come from behind!
That there had to have been a second spitter.
- So it's interesting and somewhat paradoxical that the existence of this footage
is, in fact, a way to open the narratives up and really kind of create a space for alternative storytelling.
- This is exactly the phenomenon that drew Dr. Andersen’s attention to video games
— because they’re also creating alternate histories.
- Can video games help us understand what “really happened” where history is contested?
And what are the risks and benefits of approaching games in that way?
- In her paper, she looked at two games which take very different approaches to the
Kennedy assassination.
And what she found… was interesting, and a little disturbing.
- In early 2012, Call of Duty: Black Ops had recently been released.
That game had a single-player campaign that was focused on a Cold War era history, or
story, that culminated with Kennedy's assassination.
- In Black Ops, the player character Alex Mason may or may not have been
brainwashed to kill Kennedy.
Which version of events is true?
-Mason: You tried to make me kill me own President!
-Dragovic: Tried?
- Anderson: One of the most unique things about Black Ops is that it does have these
moments of gameplay … but you also have these cutscenes that integrate what feels
like documentary film footage. And the very end of the game, it literally is documentary
film footage; it's footage of Kennedy arriving in Dallas and getting in the motorcade.
- At the end of Black Ops … heavy pause if you care about spoilers I’m about to
do one … the cutscene pauses and rewinds like film to show Alex Mason in the crowd
as Kennedy arrives in Dallas.
The FINAL JUICY TWIST is: oh yeah, you did it after all.
-Andersen: Part of the reason that, you know, the game originally puts that documentary
footage in is to communicate: “this really happened.”
But what you gradually learn over the course of the game
is the protagonist's memories cannot be trusted one bit.
So by putting a video game character into the documentary footage, you again, kind of
chip away at this notion that like, filmed reality is reality, or that it is possible
to capture reality and not question it for film.
- And question it… is exactly what some players did!
- A lot of them started to question, “Wait, was Alex Mason, the game's protagonist,
a real person?
Was he actually the one who killed Kennedy?”
So these stories that video games can kind of tell, can in turn
shape how we interpret those historical events, to the extent that people did in fact, question
“Is this fictional character, Alex Mason, actually real?”
- Simone: Just like when people saw Tár.
-Andersen: Yeah, exactly.
- Dr. Andersen was looking at forum comments to see peoples’ reactions to the
Mason twist.
That stuck out to me when I was reading her paper, and it was one of the things that I most wanted
to get her opinion on — because I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I know how
likely it is for people to lie or exaggerate, or just post through a thick layer of irony.
Did people actually believe that Mason might be real?
Or were they just shitposting?
- What I was looking for was general trends.
So if one person said something about their interpretation of a game,
you know, okay. That means something.
But you start to see more and more of these stories and you start to think, well, maybe,
maybe this is more than just an isolated incident.
- I do think that’s a valid way of looking at commentary online, and it’s strengthened
by a concept called “prosthetic memory,” which was coined by the scholar Alison Landsberg.
Prosthetic memories are essentially a belief in the past that’s generated through our
experience of consuming media.
A really simplified example of this might be the mass cultural hallucination of the
stereotypical pirate with a peg leg and an eyepatch.
That’s not a real thing. But until you learn that, you might have that as a historical
reality in your mind …because you saw it in Muppet Treasure Island, and Tim Curry is
so sexy, and you don't have anything to replace it with!
And nothing could ever replace Tim Curry anyway, so … why would you even bother?
- What we come to learn about an historical event, through media, that's
going to feel real to me, even if I myself did not experience it.
- As Dr. Andersen points out in her paper, the Zapruder film is another source
of prosthetic memories.
As far as any of us who didn’t witness the Kennedy assassination are concerned, that’s
the only version of events that we have access to.
And it’s a version of events that people have dissected for “clues”
for over half a century.
Finding patterns is one thing that human beings are particularly good at, and once you start
connecting dots, it’s hard to stop.
A notable recent example is the online sleuthing obsession that happened after the murder of
four Idaho university students in November of 2022.
Online wannabe detectives were able to get ahold of security footage and social media
accounts and spin all kinds of theories about who was responsible for the crime.
Connecting dots became an online sport, or a game.
And innocent people were harassed over it, including the victims’ families.
That’s why conspiracy theories are dangerous, and believing in them is a slippery slope.
The more information you get, the more patterns you can find, the more convincing the conspiracy
becomes — and suddenly the world is a lot scarier, and maybe those other theories...
...those are real too.
By blending actual motorcade footage with the game’s cutscenes, and treating that
cutscene like a documentary that can be rewound and [dramatic CSI voice] enhanced
Black Ops could generate prosthetic memories of the Kennedy assassination.
But Black Ops is still really BONKERS, a pulpy alternate history of the Cold War.
It’s pretty out there, and regardless of how some people may have received it, its
creators never intended for it to come across as anything but alt-history.
The second game that Dr. Andersen looked at is the polar opposite.
JFK Reloaded is a very short game that puts players in the shoes of Lee Harvey Oswald.
-Andersen: So in order to win, the player has to fire the rifle at the exact same time
that the Warren Commission identified that the rifle was allegedly fired,
fire all three of the shots that Oswald allegedly fired.
At the exact same time, exact same angle, exact same distance.
- Simone: JFK Reloaded creator Kirk Ewing’s intention was to validate the findings of
the Warren Commission: it was possible for a single shooter to fire these shots from
this location and achieve this result.
-Andersen: But what ends up happening, because it's so short, you either get players who
try again and again to recreate the assassination — potentially getting closer to it, potentially
getting farther away from it — but you sort of get the accrual of like, “Man, this is
really hard… was this even possible?”
- Nobody who has played JFK Reloaded has ever been able to recreate Lee Harvey Oswald’s shots.
[DRAMATIC PAUSE]
And that’s normal, right?!
A) IT’S A GAME. The conditions are totally different.
B) If I resurrected Lee Harvey Oswald and put him in the Book Depository, I don’t think
he’d be able to recreate his shots to the second, at the exact same angles.
Because he was a human being, and not a JFK-assassinating robot.
Despite what conspiracies might tell you.
Like — we don’t know what Oswald was thinking when he shot Kennedy, but it probably wasn’t
“Okay, I have to wait approximately two seconds for the motorcade to round the corner
and then hit X,” and I know Kennedy’s hitbox on his big head is a little bigger than
the character model, so I think I can get it — no. Stop it.
But the ironic effect of the game’s strict parameters is that it made people ask questions.
"Wasn’t this really difficult?"
"Why did he fire here instead of here?"
"Wouldn’t it make more sense if —" (static)
- So it, in effect, just ends up raising all of these other alternative possibilities,
rather than actually closing down the story.
- Because JFK Reloaded is basically a time-loop sandbox chaos machine,
and players love to find ways to break the rules — they got silly with it!
They’d challenge themselves to crash as many cars as possible, or kill as many people as possible.
The repetitive nature of the game means it’s not a big deal to try again and again and again.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s bad to mess around with how many ragdolls you can
make in a video game.
What’s interesting to me is how the game created ambiguity, without intending to, simply
by showcasing slapstick alternate routes that history could have gone.
And ultimately, what Dr. Andersen’s work showed was that it doesn't matter whether
players have control or don’t.
Whether it’s a cutscene in Black Ops, or a player-directed experiment like JFK Reloaded,
historical representations can raise questions.
When it comes to JFK’s assassination, people who work in intelligence are, understandably,
sensitive to the way it’s discussed and reimagined.
In the 1996 game Spycraft: The Great Game, the developers present the player CIA agent
character with an array of so-called “spy tools.”
One lets them analyze the angle a shot was fired from, tracing bullet holes back to the source.
In the game, it’s called the “K.A.T.”
Kennedy Assassination Tool.
Ostensibly, the implication is that the tool was used, in fiction, as part of the Warren
Commission’s research.
But there’s the tongue-in-cheek innuendo — what if the CIA named this tool for a
different reason?
DID THE CIA — KILL — (static)
When we interviewed Dr. Andrew Hammond, the historian and curator of D.C.’s Spy Museum
for our upcoming documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, he was immediately
wary of the tool’s name.
The CIA, while guilty of many things, is not responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy.
OR ARE THEY?
NO, they're not.
It's a conspiracy, damnit!
- Hammond: I mean I think this brings up a bigger question about popular culture and espionage.
For many people that come to these things, they're not necessarily parsing through each
scenario and thinking well, what did the authors of the game actually mean here?
… they may take two and two come to come to six.
- So because this is YouTube, I should probably come out hard with an answer on whether
or not presenting alternate histories in games is good or bad.
Unfortunately for you, even Dr. Andersen agrees the reality is a little more complicated.
- I think a lot of the excitement that I have about video games being a source
for historical stories and narratives is, in the past, a lot of Orthodox and accepted
and official narratives really privileged those in power … So when you create a medium,
or when you use a medium that creates that possibility for alternative stories, you also
create a space for hearing about underrepresented or disenfranchised or disempowered stories,
- What I think about when I hear this is how many people assume that being transgender
is a ~modern fad~ and don’t know that in the 1770s, the Chévalier d’Eon retired
from being a French spy, but continued to live as a woman.
- Gary Kates: The only reason why d’Eon is wearing womens’ clothes, is because d’Eon is choosing to!
- And everyone was kind of like, "You’re eccentric... but okay!"
The Chévalier d’Eon does appear in a game — as a kind of joke-y side character in
Assassin’s Creed Unity.
I also think about Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George.
(SORRY THAT I INCLUDED SO MANY FRENCH PEOPLE IN THIS SCRIPT)
He was a famous and virtuosic Black violinist living in Marie Antoinette’s France.
He’s the subject of the upcoming movie Chevalier, which has led to some bigoted idiots whining
about historical accuracy — despite the fact that he was a real guy.
But…
I didn’t know that either.
I’d never seen his story before.
- There’s always going to be something to analyze, there's always going to be something
to learn more about, and to understand.
There are some inherent risks with that, and some challenges with that, because, you know,
how do we come together as a group and kind of align on what happened or align on this story?
But from like, an analytical perspective, it's quite fascinating to think about stories
and counterfactuals that exist beyond what we've kind of been told is the true story.
- Video games are an incredible tool for exploring alternate histories.
We experience that when we make split-second story choices — or when we replay an RPG
to fix our mistakes.
And they’re an incredible tool for exploring real history.
Whatever that means!
Like all media, they have the power to shape the way that we see the world.
And that’s something we should all be aware of...
next time we load up our guns and take aim
at John F. Kennedy’s big melon head.
- Pat (off-screen, laughing): Is that really what it says in your script?!
- Simone: That’s really what it says!
- Pat: Beautiful, okay.
- Simone: They let me put it in!
-Pat: Awesome. Cool.
-Simone: Did I hit the tripod?
Thanks, the Warren Commission!
- Pat (off-screen): Tell me what we’re gonna stop doing to JFK.
-Simone: Shootin’ him.