From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

Lad Lit, Wartime Edition

 

In the current issue of the London Review of Books, Andrew O'Hagan looks at two bestselling British war thrillers--Andy McNab's Crossfire and Chris Ryan's Strike Back--and contends that "it is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad writers."

Of note particularly for our purposes: O'Hagan spends nearly half of his review setting up an analysis of the current generation of soldiers by discussing the ubiquity of videogames, from Halo 2 to Manhunt 2 (currently the target of censors in the UK).

Boys will be boys, and men will be boys too, but it's arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom...Many of the British and American forces now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan grew up on computer games and their understanding of their mission, their power, their enemy and their equipment may be highly coloured by the virtual lives they have lived and the vivid, hardened sense of worlds changed and prisoners taken. If you ask them, a great many young servicemen feel they are performing a duty of civilisation, an idea they did not learn simply by glancing over the adjacent shoulders of Bush and Blair...

Men who don't ordinarily read have come in great numbers to love the insiderish bravado of McNab and Chris Ryan. Their books are driven by stereotype and cartoon violence, by idiocy, prejudice and unreality, which is why they are inadvertent masterpieces of social realism, for in their garish video-game manners they enclose their subject.

Unfortunately, most of the review is unavailable unless you are a subscriber.

Link: LRB · Andrew O’Hagan: Living It.

Googled

 

For your online pleasure: From Sun Tzu to Xbox now available on Google Books, complete with the incorrectly-capitalized "XBox" portion of its name under which my less-than-careful publishers registered the title, among their other editorial injustices.

I am really into the Google Map that shows you places mentioned in the book.

Rumor!

From a $1 yard sale find: a book from 1984 entitled Rumor! by Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker—sort of proto-SNOPES—included this bit:

Related to this, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a few reports in the 80s that said military recruiters were indeed going to arcades to hit up young men, though by far less surreptitious means.

Some other video game urban legends.

No More Sale

Sorry readers...looks like the "nice-price" $5.99 summer sale on the book is over at Amazon.

war (and video games) for sale

Noticed recently that the book is on sale at Amazon for merely $5.99! Tell your friends it's a great beach read.

"Designing Pacifist Films"

From "Designing Pacifist Films" by Paul Goodman

Especially in cinema, the conditions of fantasy and the habits of the audience are so discontinuous with behavior in the waking public world that the shock of strong images is sentimentalized: the rationalizing sorrow and regret is used to insulate the experience from any possible action. The energy of revulsion turns into pity, a pornographic emotion, rather than active compassion or political indignation — not otherwise than with Christians who exhaust their neighbor-love in the sentimentality of the Cross. The next step is for the sentimentalized horror to be taken as matter-of-course in the public world, just as for those Christians the poor must always be with us, so Christians can be charitable...

Again by definition, in a work of genuine art the images of horror, etc., do not have a pornographic effect and do not incite to repetitions, for the experience is finished and cathartic: the fearful images are purged, transcended, interpreted, or otherwise integrated with the rest of life...

"United States"

"'United States' no longer connotes a federated political structure, and it only routinely refers to a nation, as in 'President of the United States.' But it comes alive as a brand-name on a commodity, 'made in the United States,' or painted on the side of a bomber."

-- Paul Goodman, Five Years (1966)

Old War-Dreams

In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look,)
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
    I dream, I dream, I dream

Of scenes of Nature, fields and mountains,
Of skies to beauteous after a storm, and at night the moon so unearthly bright,
Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches and gather the heaps,
    I dream, I dream, I dream

Long have they pass'd, faces and trenches and fields,
Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen,
Onward I sped at the time--but now their of forms at night,
    I dream, I dream, I dream

--Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

The True Believer

Quote from a book I have only recently discovered, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer:

Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance, or game. There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or light-hearted dramatic performance.

Hitler dressed eighty million Germans in costumes and made them perform in a grandiose, heroic, and bloody opera. In Russia, where even the building of a latrine involved some self-sacrifice, life was an uninterrupted soul-stirring drama going on for thirty years, and its end is not yet. The people of London acted heroically under a hail of bombs because Churchill cast them in the role of heroes. They played their heroic role before a vast audience—ancestors, contemporaries, and posterity—and on a stage lighted by a burning world city and to the music of barking guns and screaming bombs. It is doubtful whether in our contemporary world, with its widespread individual differentiation, any measure of general self-sacrifice can be realized without theatrical hocus-pocus and fireworks…

The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death. We speak of the theater of war and of battle scenes. In their battle orders, army leaders invariably remind their soldiers that the eyes of the world are on them, that their ancestors are watching them, and that posterity shall hear of them. The great general knows how to conjure an audience out of the sands of the desert and the waves of the ocean.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or “of those who are to be.” We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.

Compare this to the testimonials of contemporary American soldiers in Iraq I've blogged about. Two things different but related things are going on here. In Hoffer's case, leaders evoke the idea of theater, or play, in order to enable everyday people to risk death in ways they otherwise might not. In the case of these soldiers in Iraq, the metaphor of killing-as-a-game occurs spontaneously—rising up in the minds of the soldiers, at the moment of existential and moral crisis, as a coping mechanism.

Recon Report

Back when I was shopping From Sun Tzu to Xbox to publishers, one of them brought up a question I hadn't thought of: where would such a book get shelved in a bookstore? After all, even if a bookstore does have a video games section, it's there for game guides, not nonfiction works. And the list of nonfiction books about video games has been somewhat limited: there are probably only a handful in print at any given time, though the list of academic titles does seem to be growing.

After surveying bookstores in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, I found that my book wandered from section to section, probably depending on the store manager's whim:

A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, San Francisco: Games section
Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco: Featured Nonfiction
Borders, Union Square, San Francisco: Military History-General (pictured above)
McNally Robinson, New York: History
St. Mark's Bookshop, New York: Science (!)
Powell's, Portland: one branch stocks it in Current Affairs, another in Featured Titles-General, another in American Studies-Popular Culture, and yet another in Military History-General

In other news: if you're in New York, feel free to stop by the book party tomorrow night, at the New Museum Bookstore, 6:30 to 8:30. Free cocktails!