Likewise, the haunting music of pianist Erik Satie strikes a perfectly ambiguous emotional tone. The feline avatar may not have much agency, but it allows the player to unobtrusively skirt history, and the choice of that impassively omniscient creature evokes a soundly neutral perspective. By any traditional measure, it isn’t much of a game: the physics puzzles are rudimentary, sometimes inscrutable, and only lightly interactive. Mossadegh’s cat, guiding the Prime Minister from milestone to milestone in reverse chronological order, beginning with his death under house arrest in 1967. The Cat and the Coup offers a clever solution. How should we meaningfully do that in a story where every detail and outcome is preordained? But the documentary form itself presents an immediate challenge to interactive media, which are always about the user’s ability to guide the course of events. Though the educational value of the documentary game has been hotly contested, the coinage endures: it makes a brave sound, assuaging our secret anxieties that gaming is pure escapism.
Indie documentary games have been made about everything from JFK’s assassination to the Branch Davidian siege, and the idea that games can teach us about history has infiltrated the mainstream in the guise of war simulations. However, to call it a “documentary game” distorts both terms.
It’s also a charming and poignant-if sharply curtailed-experience. In an age of shallow historical memory, it performs a service simply by reminding us of a significant international controversy, and will surely give Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror a salutary bump on Amazon. The freeware game first made waves at IndieCade last year, and now, it’s widely available on Steam. Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister who first privatized the country’s oil fields, and whom American and British secret services consequently conspired to depose in 1953. That’s how Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad bill their surreal interactive hagiography of Dr. The Cat and the Coup is a valiant attempt at what may be an impossible form: the documentary game.
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