Paper presented at Third Space Seminar, Transgressing Culture Malmö and Lund, November 29 – December 1, 2002-11-26 Work group: “Real Virtuality - Transgressing the Human Body (and Mind)” Eva Kingsepp Stockholm University, Dep. of Journalism, Media and Communication World War II Action Videogames as Post-Modern Fantasy Key words: Videogames, World War II, myth, ideology, fantasy, postmodernity Videogames have evolved into a big industry in the Western world. For example, in the USA sales of videogames now outnumber the sales of books, and in the UK the games are worth 80% more than video rentals (figures from 2001; Carlquist 2002). But the scope of videogames is very diverse; here, you find an amount of different genres that sometimes at first glance don’t seem to have much more in common than the concept of interactivity. Within the quite young field of academic studies of videogames, there is also a diversity of perspectives, among which for example the literary (”what kind of narratives are there in videogames?”), the structural (”how are they constructed?”, ”how can they be analysed?”), the pedagogical (”how can they be used in learning?”) and the affective (”how do they affect players?”, ”are they dangerous?”). In this paper I adopt another viewpoint, namely the ideological. Ideology should here be interpreted as cultural myth, or those mental structures that we use quite without reflecting, since they are so naturalised, in interpreting the world. I have chosen to study the genre of World War II videogames, focusing on the popular Medal of Honor: Underground (Electronic Arts Inc./DreamWorks Interactive 2000), and the classic Wolfenstein 3D (id Software 1992), here abbreviated MHU and W3D respectively, both belonging to a category I here choose to call action-based adventure. They are both set in a first-person perspective – you ”are” actually inside the game, thus experiencing a sort of virtual reality. This is more elaborated in MHU, where the illusion of experiencing WWII ”like it was” is an important part of the game´s image, compared to W3D, where this does not seem to be of any importance. You might say, borrowing Mark Poster´s words, that games like MHU make a new cultural space, multiplying the kinds of ”realities” one encounters in society (Poster 1995/1998:263). But in this case it acts simultaneously both in real and reversed time, creating an anachronistic ”real-time historical space” , in which a re-enactment of history is 1