Playing With Gunfire: A Report on the Military-Video-Game Complex

Page 2 of 2

As war games continue to gain popularity, and the electronic gaming industry as a whole becomes more powerful, it’s likely that we’ll see more war games venturing into modern contexts, with results that might be edifying, as described by Sergeant McDougal, or absurd. The forthcoming game starring rapper 50 Cent, Blood on the Sand  (a sequel to 2005’s roundly panned urban brawler 50 Cent: Bulletproof) will find him wreaking havoc in the Middle East. The mind boggles at the idea of pretending to be a superstar rapper running amok in a fictionalized war-torn country as the daily fatalities roll down the wire.

The soldiers I spoke with agreed that there are still certain lines these games shouldn’t cross. “The moment you’re rewarded for performing as our enemy, or you piss on the guys who do this stuff for real,” says Sergeant McDougal, imagining a game from the perspective of al-Qaeda, “that’s when I’m marching in the streets.” And Sergeant Stoney Archambault, an MP in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, believes that “production companies should never put America’s army or any of the allied armies in a bad light.”

The limits of what Western war games can tastefully convey aren’t just patriotic, they’re pragmatic, and it’s practical concerns that ultimately hamper the realism of war games. Games will probably never include the long stretches of tedium that real war involves, let alone actual injury or death. Sergeant Archambault puts it bluntly: “Fear is the one thing that games could never recreate.” Rieke compares war games to reality television: “We still don’t have shows about brushing your teeth and taking out the garbage,” he says. “The same thing applies to video games. Realism is great as long as it’s still fun. At Infinity Ward, in the cases where fun and realism come into conflict, fun always wins.”

To believe that Americans of enlistment age are naive enough to take war’s portrayal in games at face value is to believe that Internet-generation Americans are much less media-savvy than they are. In Call of Duty 4, Cadet Ng jokes, “Who knew that carrying 50 pounds on your back and running around all day would actually get you tired? That’s something video games can’t get too realistic about, it just wouldn’t be fun.” The transaction is more complex and goes far beyond games, which are part of a cumulative, media-driven portrayal of war that affects young Americans on a subconscious level: something less believed than felt. We learn awful truths about war pretty early in our lives, but the heroic aura the concept accrues in childhood lingers on.

“I was heartbroken,” Sergeant McDougal says about G.I. Joe, “when I realized that the Armed Forces didn’t have massive two-way communication screens inside secret compounds built all in steel, and unrated sailors who try to take off in F-16s on a whim get court-martialed, not applauded. I would be an idiot if I thought the ‘Real American Hero’ didn’t influence my worldview.” Whether you regard this media-driven war boosterism as insidious (for misleading young Americans about the nature of military life) or admirable (for inculcating them with a sense of duty and selflessness) obviously depends on your ideology. But the effect is real, and it’s worth considering whether video games and other entertainment media influence or simply reflect culture.

Cadet Ng believes that “if gamers enjoy playing war video games so much, then they wouldn’t have a problem doing it in real life.” This is difficult to empirically verify. Enlistees who are influenced by war video games are also likely to be influenced by a vast array of other factors: social, economic and familial. Sergeant McDougal has a different take than Cadet Ng. “I am somewhat disturbed by all war games,” he explains, “primarily because they’ve gotten into the uncanny valley of combat patrol while ignoring the rest of military existence. It’s dismaying to think that a game that accurately emulates a raid is being played by some guy who would never voluntarily enlist and is waving a CODEPINK sign as his day job…. [It] grates and galls me to think that some guy is playing these games and thinking he’s accurately emulating the reality of a GWOT engagement.”

On the surface, the military’s relationship with games looks like one of co-option. Video-game magazines almost always include recruitment ads for the military, which emphasize the same qualities that ads for games do: access to bleeding-edge tech, adventure and heroism, comradeship and community, purpose and fun. And the military has long provided consultants and aid to entertainment media of all stripes (sometimes, in hilariously wrong-headed ways: in 1979, the U.S. Navy provided an aircraft carrier and uniformed personnel for The Village People’s “In the Navy” video; one doubts this had the desired effect on recruitment rolls). But the relationship is actually more about reclamation than co-option, as the military invented the technology that makes modern gaming possible.

In a 1997 Wired article, Fred Hapgood told the story of Air Force Captain Jack Thorpe, who—from the late ‘70s to early ‘80s—led the team that developed SIMNET, an application for linking simulators to teach group maneuvers via the proto-Internet network: ARPANET. SIMNET employed avatars, “toy” models and force feedback (akin to the rumble technology in many modern console controllers), setting the technological template for first-person, online, multiplayer war gaming as we know it. The use of simulation technology for training purposes became widespread in the Department of Defense, and remains so today.

Because of their status as commercial products designed to entertain, video games are compelled to skirt the more tedious and grim realities of war, but industrious players are finding ways to inject reality, or at least countervailing opinion, into these fantasies. Since 2006, online activist Joseph DeLappe says on his website, “I have been entering the America’s Army recruiting game as ‘dead-in-iraq’ and utilizing the in-game text-messaging system to type in the names, age, service branch, and date of death of each American casualty” in the current conflict in Iraq. “Think of me as a participant in the game,” DeLappe told Radar’s Matt Peckham, “only I’m choosing to be a conscientious objector.”

And the Jenkins Collaboratory (whose project leadership includes Timothy Lenoir, a Duke University professor who has extensively researched and written about the “military-entertainment complex”), recently received a MacArthur Grant for its project “Virtual Peace: The Humanitarian Assistance Training Seminar,” a “digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and interaction relations,” according to the official announcement.

But will it be fun? It’s hard to imagine gamers rallying around the dissemination of relief as ardently as they drive machine-gun mounted Hummers through enemy terrain: The humanitarian urge, perhaps thankfully, tends more toward the real world than the virtual one. Gaming technology will continue to be used as propaganda, by hawks and doves alike, for as long as it’s profitable and effective—or until games blur into the truly immersive cyberspace imagined in sci-fi classics like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and hinted at by Second Life: virtual worlds with all the free will, complexity and moral ambiguity of the one we actually live in.

But Second Life isn’t even a game according to stricter definitions, which dictate that a proper game must have an ultimate end, an angle or slant. Games demand winners and losers, and as such they are perfect reflections of militaristic culture. As long as our way of life is suspended in a tense web of opposing military powers, to argue that war games shouldn’t exist is naive at best, and hypocritical at worst. In the end, it should be left to gamers to decide what they deem acceptable and rewarding in their virtual play.