While their potential as powerful memory media has only recently been addressed, digital games have already contributed to the digital memory sphere and are embedded within the meaningful movements of "travelling memories" (Erll 2011).
In this paper, I approach digital games as procedural experiences of becoming, set within the fluid structures of the digital memory sphere. I argue that their inherent converging powers (Jenkins 2010) derive from their ability to create accessible worlds of the past: Herein, the globalized memory tropes, narratives and images of the "mediated memory" (Ebbrecht-Hartman 2011) become intertwined with the aesthetic atmosphere of a specific game, shaping the game world as well as the game rules (Juul 2011). Consequently, game worlds – as highly systematized ludonarrative spaces – can be regarded as memory cultural systems of knowledge that promote their impulses always in relation to the surrounding memory media. At the same time, these game worlds reach their full potential only through the process of playing, ascribing the players a role of "shared authorship" (Chapman 2018).
As a process of "becoming" (Mukherjee 2015), the game act is defined through the players' choices, their possibilities of action and most of all through the haptic realization of the latter. Their relations to the game world and the own avatar are consequently shaped through the own perceived empowerment in motion. Building on this notion, I argue that the highly interactive structures of digital games as memory media promote a double-layered process of becoming for the players that is evoked through their bodily involvement. Drawing on My Memory of Us (Juggler Games 2018), a Polish independent game that deals with the survival of two children in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation, I seek to demonstrate that the hand as much as the eye and, consequently, the gesture even more than the gaze of players define this experience of the past: As the game system's motion and the players' body motion connect, so can the experienced memory narratives and images with the own body memory; the game-performance becomes an almost ritualistic performance of memory (Lagerkvist 2013).
To characterize this connection further, I bring together Alison Landsberg's notion of the "prosthesis" (2004) and Rune Klevjer's definition of the prosthetic player-avatar-relation (2006): I transfer these concepts on the literally as well as metaphorically involved "hands" within the memory/game acts of My Memory of Us. I argue that the experience of players as prosthetic witnesses (Widmann & Honke 2020) is defined as a process of ambivalent becoming set between distance and involvement, reflection and emotional immediacy as well as authenticity and hypermediacy. Simultaneously, it is coloured by the deep longing - a metaphorical reaching - to overcome these tensions, if only "prosthetically", within, through and beyond the game act.
