Playing With Gunfire: A Report on the Military-Video-Game Complex
From chess to Halo, games about war are as old as war itself. Paste examines the history, benefits, costs and ramifications of the massively popular world of virtual war.
In Capcom’s 1985 coin-op smash, Commando, you fire white pellets at endless streams of generic enemies. When hit, they simply vanish, leaving no trace on the stylized tropical environments behind them. In real war, the cost of a human life is inestimable. But in Commando, life’s value is both measurable and dirt cheap: dropping a quarter in the glowing slot bought you three lives. That’s a little more than eight cents per.
War’s strategic, competitive nature makes it ideally suited to
games in all media. Long before the digital revolution, games like
chess, capture the flag, football and Risk used the concept of warring
nations and their resources as frameworks for play. But
digital-simulation technology has been especially conducive to martial
fantasy.
What it means to digitally recreate war for fun is an important
question, especially now that video games have attained mainstream
popularity rivaling music and movies. The Entertainment Software
Association reported over nine billion dollars in total sales
(including consoles, console games and PC games) in 2007. And the
top-selling game of that year was Activision/Infinity Ward’s Call of
Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which, as of January 2008, had sold more than
seven million copies since its release in November 2007. Video games
are no longer a niche market; they’re a cultural bellwether.
From Commando onward, war games have tended toward greater intimacy
and realism. Like so many culturally significant stories, this one
involves technology gradually catching up with our fantasies. Chess
places the player in the role of a general and imagines war as purely
tactical, equalizing infantry fodder and military infrastructure as
carved icons constrained by elegant, inviolable rules. While many
real-time war-strategy games still employ this abstract approach, the
real innovation of war video games has been to privilege the visceral
over the cerebral, casting players not as generals, but as pawns
immersed in the chaos of the battlefield.
As video games become more immersive, plunging headlong toward true
holodeck-style virtual reality, and as war itself becomes increasingly
virtual, waged via satellites and computer screens, the relationship
between the two becomes more entangled. But this is nothing new. Going
as far back as the early ’60s when several MIT students created a game
called Spacewar! by hacking a simulation program in a university lab
funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), video
games have been inextricably linked to the military.
America’s Army, a first-person shooter owned and developed by the U.S.
government, is a far cry from the cartoon sprites of yore. You move
through a lush 3-D environment with realistic textures and touches of
natural beauty. In the tutorial phase, wisecracking officers teach you
how to fire various authentic weapons, use a bipod, and climb rope
bridges. As you learn where you’re allowed to walk and where you
aren’t, and what you have to do to advance the game, you might feel a
familiar sense of diminishing options.
Playing America’s Army illuminates how all video games— even the
so-called “open world” or “sandbox” ones (which supposedly provide
players with a higher degree of freedom than traditional, linear
games)—are good at indoctrinating players with values prized by the
military: discipline, conformity, obedience and a willingness to
repeatedly perform arcane tasks to minute specifications. Pace-setting
open-world franchise Grand Theft Auto grants players superficial
freedoms while teaching them the algorithms required to eventually win.
As such, America’s Army, openly acknowledged to be a recruitment
tool, scarcely needed to tamper with extant first-person shooter
protocols in order to give players a realistic idea of military life
(with some conspicuous PR-related omissions, including civilian
casualties and excessive gore). It simply replaces bossy wizards with
uniformed officers, and fantasy realms with military bases. Tony Ng, a
cadet at Valley Forge Military Academy & College, characterizes
America’s Army as “very realistic” compared to his real-world military
training.
By channeling players into the game world via their own embodied
perspective (instead of an avatar), the first-person shooter has been
pivotal in war games’ shift toward greater player immersion. The format
was popularized by 1992 PC game Wolfenstein 3D, where the player
explored a faux 3-D castle, blasting monstrous Nazis, culminating in a
final boss fight with Hitler himself. Many of the most popular modern
first-person shooters—Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Brothers in
Arms, to name just a few—have also adopted World War II as their
setting.
“In terms of pure gameplay,” explains one of Call of Duty 4’s lead
designers, Zied Rieke, “World War II has an enormous amount to offer:
massive forces using a huge variety of weapons; fighting in diverse
locales; militaries that are both uniquely equipped and equally
matched; unambiguous conflict between good and evil, democracy and
tyranny; historical and cultural relevance to most of the world.” The
widely accepted moral clarity of WWII ultimately makes it more
appealing to game designers than, say, Vietnam. “The idea of playing a
game that tries to emulate the complexity of Vietnam is a little
insulting,” says Seargent First Class Patrick McDougal, discussing the
game Conflict: Vietnam. “I can’t imagine playing it in front of my
Vietnam vet uncles.”
But even at a distance of more than 60 years, WWII games have
occasionally found themselves in hot water. In 2000, Medal of Honor was
added to Germany’s index of youth-endangering media for its use of the
swastika, which under German law can only be used for historical,
educational and artistic references. Whether war video games can refer
meaningfully to history, or only transform it into a playground, is at
the heart of their embattled morality. Rieke believes that war games
can shed light on history. “[In Call of Duty 4], our take on modern
warfare is definitely dark and gritty,” he explains. “I think it would
feel wrong to try to portray it in any other way. Especially in a
rah-rah ‘America, fuck yeah!’ kind of way. We aren’t trying to make a
documentary, but we definitely try to show the good and the bad aspects
of war in equal measure.”
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