From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

Onward Christian Soldiers

The LA Times and Talk to Action run down the militaristic premise of a game I can't wait to play, the dominionist Christian Left Behind: Eternal Forces. The LA Times writes:

The game is set in New York City, where the Tribulation Force clashes with the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers in a tale that makes the United Nations a tool for Satan. Each side attempts to recruit lost souls in the battle for the city. "Eternal Forces" is a so-called real-time strategy game — players act as battlefield generals for their virtual armies, deciding where to place units and when to order attacks or retreats.

In the game, Tribulation squads unleash the usual arsenal against the Antichrist: guns, tanks, helicopters. But soldiers lose some of their spirituality every time they kill an opponent and must be bolstered through prayer. The failure to nurture good guys causes their spirit points to drop, leaving them vulnerable to recruitment by the other side.

The player's choices prompt intervention by angelic forces or unleash demons who feast on the faithful. As players progress through the increasingly difficult levels, they see Scripture passages presented as secret scrolls and hear inspirational music.

In multiplayer games, participants can choose to command the Antichrist.

The LA Times also includes a mini history of Christian games (though how could they leave out the pioneering titles of Wisdom Tree?)

Even creepier, from Talk to Action:

If you happen to blow away a neutral party - and collateral damage is inevitable in the End of Days - then you will lose "Spirit Points". But you can power back up with merely a brief timeout for prayer, or by converting one of New York's terror-stricken citizens.

Sounds a bit like C-Level's Waco: Resurrection, without the irony.

Surprise: HuffPo readers aren't happy.

As I note in the book (pages 290-291 for those of you reading along at home), video games as they exist today do lend themselves well towards simplistic us-versus-them scenarios, and therefore propagandistic, nationalist and sectarian variants seem inevitable—white power games, anti-Israel Islamist games, go-USA military games, etc.

This is not only because the military model is so deeply ingrained in modern games' FPS roots: unlike cinema or literature, the format has not yet found ways to create advanced forms of sympathy, empathy or complex moral shading for its characters. Video game characters--including their protagonists--don't have convincing interior lives (Max Payne notwithstanding), even if they have ever-more convincing exterior appearances.

Iran's Duke Nukem?

Today's mention of From Sun Tzu to Xbox in Techdirt (thanks Techdirt!) also points to a recent Reuters story: Iran is getting into the war games biz. Sez Reuters:

Rugged veteran Iranian special forces hero "Commander Bahman" will soon be tackling one of his toughest missions, rescuing one of his country's top atomic scientists captured by US forces in Iraq.

Or he will be doing so soon on computer screens across the Islamic Republic, the Fars news agency reported on Sunday.

The agency said a computer game detailing the fictional Commander Bahman's adventures, designed by schoolchildren belonging to the Union of Islamic Student Societies, would be available before March 2007.

AFP has another story on the as-yet unnamed Iranian game.

Reuters also notes that Iranians who were angered by a Kuma Reality game called Assault on Iran circulated a petition to take the game offline. Kuma, of course, is the company notorious for making mini-games based on current events. Assault on Iran (pictured above) was released in September 2005, and Kuma describes its gameplay as follows:

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance... millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake

Evidently, the petition against Kuma has not been successful. Kuma, never one to shirk from a chance at good old fashioned exploitation, is currently advertising Assault on Iran on its front page as its "featured mission."

Iran's Commander Bahman game won't be the first reality game from the Islamic world, of course. Many gamers are familiar with the Lebanese Special Force and the Syrian games Under Ash and UnderSeige. China has also gotten into creating "patriotic" war games. Given the spread of the medium, we'll be seeing a lot more of this internationalization of the war game in the months and years to come.

More: Gamepolitics reminds us that Commander Bahman game is of course nothing more than vaporware at this point, which raises the question: do political games even have to really exist in order to serve their purposes? Like Joseph DeLappe's dead-in-iraq project, it seems like the point of many of these games comes closer to that of conceptual art or political publicity stunts than actual game play.

WWII Retrobranding

The Guardian Games blog reveals that EA has penned a deal with Jeep (a brand of DaimlerChrysler) "to include the car manufacturer's Willys-Overland model in Medal of Honor Airborne. That's a licensing deal... in a WWII sim."

From the press release:

"Video games are quickly becoming the medium of choice for a new generation of consumers and Chrysler Group has been at the forefront of this exciting revolution," said Jay Kuhnie, Director - Jeep Communications, Chrysler Group. "By teaming with Electronic Arts and Medal of Honor Airborne, Jeep is celebrating its history while helping to take this medium to its next level."

“The Medal of Honor Airborne experience begins with unprecedented freedom of approach from the air. With the addition of the Willys Jeep, that freedom continues on the ground, on road and off, and in combat scenarios of all types." explained Patrick Gilmore, VP and Executive Producer at EALA. “This is the first time in any Medal of Honor game that a player will have the ability to drive a Willys Jeep, and we’re very excited to see this new addition increase the fun and intensity of the gameplay.”

"Perhaps I'm missing something," writes the Guardian's Keith Stuart, "but during my countless hours of playing Battlefield, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty I have never at any single moment thought that the experience would be in anyway improved by the addition of licensed motor vehicles."

Guardian: "EA prizes Jeep license into Medal of Honor"
EA press release (pdf)

The New Spartans

Interesting article from last February's Washington Post about how video games may have prepared the current generation of servicemen for combat.

A quote from Retired Marine Col. Gary W. Anderson, former chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab:

"Remember the days of the old Sparta, when everything they did was towards war?" says Anderson, now a defense consultant. "In many ways, the soldiers of this video game generation have replicated that, and that's something to think about."

Whether experience with commercial games actually improves soldier performance remains debatable. What's clear now, though, is how video games have provided a way of thinking about war for these guys--a useful, visceral metaphor for understanding their experiences.

One blistering afternoon in Iraq, while fighting insurgents in the northern town of Mosul, Sgt. Sinque Swales opened fire with his .50-cal. That was only the second time, he says, that he ever shot an enemy. A human enemy.

"It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! " remembers Swales, a fast-talking, deep-voiced, barrel-chested 29-year-old from Chesterfield, Va. He was a combat engineer in Iraq for nearly a year.

Like many soldiers in the 276th Engineer Battalion, whose PlayStations and Xboxes crowded the trailers that served as their barracks, he played games during his downtime. "Halo 2," the sequel to the best-selling first-person shooter game, was a favorite. So was "Full Spectrum Warrior," a military-themed title developed with help from the U.S. Army.

"The insurgents were firing from the other side of the bridge. . . . We called in a helicopter for an airstrike. . . . I couldn't believe I was seeing this. It was like 'Halo.' It didn't even seem real, but it was real."

and...

"The very first time I fired my rifle" -- it was an M249 squad automatic weapon, a machine gun -- "I was scared. I had never shot my gun before at an actual person. But once I pulled the trigger, that was it, I never hesitated," says Crippen, 22. He's now a sophomore at Virginia State University, studying computer engineering, trying not to get so distracted by his Xbox. "All I saw was the street where the RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] came from, and I just fired in that direction, maybe 20 rounds at most, and it felt like I was playing 'Ghost Recon' at home," referring to a Tom Clancy game.

and ...

"You just try to block it out, see what you need to do, fire what you need to fire. Think to yourself, This is a game, just do it, just do it, " says Trevino, 20, the baby of the group, recalling his first shot at a human enemy

The last quote is perhaps the most striking: thinking about killing as "just a game" helps him block out other emotions.

It also reminds me of war writers who describe the experience of live battle as unreal--as moments of disassociation. In other generations, they might have thought of it like a movie, or a dream, or even theater. Or think of the way we thought 9-11 resembled a blockbuster disaster movie. According to Paul Virilio's War and Cinema, American WWII soldiers joked with the phrase "we're off to the movies" when they knew they entering a heavy battle. Virilio provides this chillingly beautiful quote from Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel describing his experiences as a German WWI soldier:

In this war where fire already attacked space more than men, I felt completely alien to my own person, as if I had been looking at myself through binoculars...I could hear the tiny projectiles whistling past my ear as if they were brushing an inanimate object...The landscape had the transparency of glass.

Fracas in Caracas

BBC, AP and Gamepolitics report that Hugo Chavez is taking aim at the upcoming game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, produced by Pandemic.

Pandemic's site for the game describes its premise thusly:

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames™ is an explosive open-world action game set in a massive, highly reactive, war-torn world. A power-hungry tyrant messes with Venezuela's oil supply, sparking an invasion that turns the country into a warzone.

But for you, international crisis is all upside: You are a mercenary, and you profit from chaos. Mercenaries 2™ features a slew of potential clients, all willing to pay you to do their dirty work. Dirty deeds, done for exorbitant fees. These are world powers with deep pockets, deep grudges, and enough arms and ammo to start World War III. This is your kind of environment.

Chavez and his supporters say it's stealth propaganda on behalf of the US government. From the Beeb:

Venezuelan congressman Ismael Garcia, a supporter of Mr Chavez, said the computer game was preparation work for a real invasion.

"I think the US government knows how to prepare campaigns of psychological terror so they can make things happen later," he said.

and AP:

Lawmaker Gabriela Ramirez said Mercenaries 2 gives a false vision of Chavez as a tyrant and Venezuela as being on the verge of chaos. She said the game could be banned under a proposed law aimed at protecting Venezuelan children from violent video games.

In the U.S., "it sends a message to Americans: You have a danger next door, here in Latin America, and action must be taken," she said. "It's a justification for an imperialist aggression."

However, Pandemic denies. Company publicist Chris Norris tells AP that Pandemic "always want to have a rip from the headlines" and "although a conflict doesn't necessarily have to be happening, it's realistic enough to believe that it could eventually happen."

And Pandemic VP states to the BBC that "Pandemic has no ties to the US government...[we're] a private company, focusing solely on the development of interactive entertainment."

Ah yes, so it must be a kooky paranoid fantasy on the part of...wait a second. Pandemic? That name sounds kind of familiar...

Oh yeah, they were that company that worked with the Army to produce Full Spectrum Warrior with the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC. The game was supposed to function as a training aid for the Army.

A rather interesting definition of "no ties to the US government."

A chunk of From Sun Tzu to Xbox discusses the work at ICT, where I interviewed among others James Korris, a former television producer, who oversaw the Full Specrum Warrior project.

And a nice bit of context from Gamepolitics:

Pandemic's decision to base Mercs 2 in Venezuela is a bit edgy, to be sure. On the other hand, game publishers are increasingly seeking to make players feel like they are living the news. EA's Battlefield 2, of course, features U.S. forces conducting combat missions in Iraq and China. NovaLogic's Blackhawk Down, simulated the late-90's U.S. intervention in Somalia. And GP notes that the original Mercenaries, released in 2005, was a highly-rated, over-the-top action game which posited a fictitious invasion of North Korea. In the original, players could choose to work for the U.S., South Korea, or the Russian Mafia.

To which one could add Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Island Thunder, set in near-future Cuba after the fall of Castro.

B.O.E.F.I.V.G.T

We should all give thanks for the fine work being done by B.O.E.F.I.V.G.T., the British Organisation for the Eradication of Fundamentalist Islamic Video Game Training.

I am particularly moved by their stirring stories from parents who have to turn to them for help:

Peter's Story:

"I'm a farmer by trade, so I got no idea about these computer things. I prefer the real world of soil and muck. Still, my son Barnaby has always been into them, and I said to him, whatever can make you money in life, young lad.

I had no idea what he was doing, though. All I knew was that he was constantly on his Playcube or whatever he calls it whenever I came back in from milking the cows.

He was getting really into this stuff, and I thought he might be doing it too much, and it would make him go blind like my mother told me about other recreational activities. I approached the lad and asked him if he'd like to come out and slaughter the pigs with me. He spat in my face and started yelling furiously in Arabic. I was stunned and sent him to his room for a good lockup. Then I went down the pub and wondered what was the matter. Doris behind the bar said she'd heard of this kind of thing from her mate Agatha and gave me this number of these BOEFIVGT people...

dead-in-iraq

I just finished a feature for the June issue of Arthur Magazine on Joseph DeLappe's dead-in-iraq project, which if you haven't yet read about it, is detailed in the following GameSpy article. He's been logging onto America's Army under the name dead-in-iraq, and choosing not to fight. Instead, he just types in the names of American military casualties. So far, he has written out 450 names, and intends to continue until there are no more casualties to list.

One of the most interesting aspects of the work is reading the dicusssions it has spurred in various game forums. See for example:

America's Army Forum("I believe he wants us to be bugged so he could get his message straight.")
Terra Nova("Don't be surprised if there's a book deal in this. "My Noble Online Protest", by Joseph "surrender-monkey" DeLappe, coming soon to a B&N near you.")
Gamepolitics("So he's taking up a spot on the server. Boo. ****ing. Hoo. Get over it. Human life is more important than you winning a computer game.")
Women Gamers ("Couldn't he do something more original than name all the dead? That's been done like hundreds of times")
notsuchapatriot.livejournal.com (" its up to the users of the game to decide how it makes them feel.")

If you check out the more recent posts on Gamepolitics, notsuchapatriot's livejournal and Terra Nova, you see where DeLappe himself joins in on the discussion.

A New Kind of Art Form Leads to a New Kind of Protest (PC)

By Li C. Kuo | May 23, 2006

2,456 Names
Joseph DeLappe can often be found logging into an online session of America's Army for hours at a time, but this Associate Professor from San Francisco isn't running around shooting terrorists. Instead, Prof. DeLappe spends the entire session typing. He may stop occasionally when his character is killed and he has to wait for a respawn, or he'll stop to take a screenshot of a reply sent to him from another player, but otherwise, he's just typing.

Prof. DeLappe expects to be typing for some time. This is because he's typing in the name of every single American soldier killed in Iraq since the war started, which according to the Department of Defense is currently 2,456. DeLappe knows this project will take a while. "I tend to do probably 2-3 hours a week" he says, "That'll get me somewhere between 40 and 75 names." The name of his project is "dead-in-iraq," and it's also the name that he signs in under when he logs on to America's Army.

In Memoriam and in Protest

"The piece is intended as a memorial and a protest," explains DeLappe as he talks about his motivations. "It merged really from my thinking both as an artist and as a citizen. Thinking about what is happening, the nature of this war, how it came about, and really, essentially the nature of the America's Army computer game." He goes on to say "Part of it was thinking about the nature of what is a memorial... A memorial is to remember sacrifice and heroism and death. Why wait for when it's (the war) over? Why not do it now?"

the complete article at GameSpy...

See also Rhizome

gamer targeted ad

                                       

From the current (June 2006) issue of GAME INFORMER, inside back cover full page ad. The Army has been advertising in this same spot for a long time now. On closer inspection, its quite difficult to tell how much of it is a computer-generated image versus a real photo that has undergone a great deal of digital tweaking (although I'm pretty sure most of it is the latter). Also, speaking of things that are strangely unreal -- that's quite some plucking this dude has had on his eyebrows.

Image War

pictured: Joy Garnett's Kill Box (2001), an oil painting based on a night-vision image from the first Gulf War.

WHITNEY’S INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM PRESENTS IMAGE WAR: CONTESTING IMAGES OF POLITICAL CONFLICT, MAY 19-JUNE 25, 2006 At the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street Opening Reception: Friday, May 19, 2006, 6-8 pm Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 12-6 pm Featuring work by fourteen contemporary international artists, Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict highlights recent artistic practices that explore media representations of war and conflict. Artists included are Willie Doherty, Claire Fontaine, Coco Fusco, Rainer Ganahl, Joy Garnett, Jon Haddock, Amar Kanwar, Dinh Q. Lê, An-My Lê, Radical Software Group (RSG), and Tamiko Thiel & Zara Houshmand.

...Organized by the 2005/06 Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, this exhibition features work in a variety of media including painting, photography, digital compositions, video, and interactive virtual reality. The works in the show were all made since the first Gulf War, but focus on conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War through the current war in Iraq. The artists in the exhibition examine how media coverage of political violence often determines our understanding of conflicts.

More info on Image War at Newsgrist

See also: Night Vision, a travelling exhibition curated by Joy Garnett

America's Army to include real vets

Sent to me by Jay Babcock of the incredible Arthur:

War vets feature in US army game

By Alfred Hermida

Technology editor, BBC News website

The US military is putting soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan into its video game in an attempt to put a human face on its operations overseas.

The soldiers' stories are part of a new version of America's Army, a game which is part of its recruitment strategy.

The US military denies that the project is a way of selling an unpopular war to the American public....

Also, interestingly enough:

"We are not attempting in any way to sell a war to the people, that has nothing to do with our agenda.

"We're trying to create awareness about the people doing the fighting, and that is a very apolitical agenda," said the major who now teaches at West Point.

Well, selling the war versus selling recruitment during the war -- a fine distinction indeed.

Full story [BBC]

Update: America's Army will not be the first video game to include stories and characters based on real contemporary experiences. Kuma has explored this territory before with its Stories from the Front contest: the winner saw one of his own missions recreated as a Kuma minigame.

Destineer's Close Combat: First to Fight, which was created with the participation of the US Marine Corp as a training aid, includes characters based on real-life Marines.

And of course much earlier there was [General] Custer's Revenge, but I'm skeptical of this game's tactical veracity.