From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

Mercenaries Too

Gamasutra interviews Chris Ferriera, lead designer for EA's new co-op title Army of Two. The game is based on the real-world rise of private military contractors:

Chris Ferriera:  We based the game around PMCs. What that is, is a "private military contractor." Right now in the world today, there are tons of these guys operating abroad, for different companies. Companies like Blackwater and Dimecorp, what they’ll do is take ex-military guys from anywhere -- guys from Chile, Ex-Chechen guys, wherever, anywhere. And they’ll take them on to their force and train them. They love to have special forces guys.

And what they'll do, is other companies such as Halliburton, or even the US government will then pay Blackwater money -- in our case the company is called SSC for the game -- they’ll pay that company to send those guys to do a mission. It may be something like guarding a consulate, it may be like, "hey, we have an oil pipeline running though Azerbaijan. And we need someone to patrol it, we want SEALs to patrol it, so we’re going to get these Navy SEALs."

They’ll send them over there. And thanks to US law and legislation, anyone that is a contractor working abroad is immune from prosecution. And that includes a contractor being someone who “I’m building a house," or rebuilding a country, or “I’m a military contractor and I’m in there to do whatever mission they gave me.” It can be overthrowing a dictator, it can get into some gruesome stuff. And the thing is, that there’s that deniability, so if that person does something, Halliburton is like, “we never paid them, we don’t know them.” The money trail disappears, they do it through all these smaller companies. So it’s never a big company paying SSC to send out [operatives] to do a job, it’s someone else through a smaller company and the money disappears.

What we’re trying to do as we advance though the story in the game, we start with the characters. We take them from their days in Delta Force, and their days as Navy SEALs, and their start as PMCs and how they get trained. We unveil the corruption behind the military privatization, and we explain the problems that poses to society and to America, and the world, when you have a gigantic organization that does nothing but operate for corporations and for money.

You said when you started, you didn’t know much about this. You had to read up on it.

CF: I pretty much knew nothing about this. I was a fan of shooters here and there. I knew a bunch about guns, but I knew nothing about PMCs and really nothing about the military. After reading a bunch of news articles and doing tons of searches -- plus I’ve been reading a book called Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I’ve been learning more and more information, just about how everything is run.

It’s actually kind of crazy to see just how funds change hands, and the fact that right now you watch the news and they say “Army Rangers." And [the Navy] can’t get SEALs and they’re having these big recruiting drives, and they’re upping everyone’s salary -- because, say, a guy who was a SEAL was making 1200 bucks a week working for the US government. As soon as he’s done with his tour of duty, or say he never got his tour of duty -- he’s trained to kill, these guys are trained killers, and they never get their war. So now they’re told “we’ll pay you 300, 800, 1200 dollars a day or a week to go do mission abroad, and you can bring your own gear, you don’t have to report to anyone. It’s just you and your boy doing your mission.” And they’re going to eat it up, and they’re going to do it because the money’s there.

But when you track it back through the political hierarchy it’s like, "who’s hurting who?" Sometimes it’s harmless; it's guarding a convoy of guys who are bringing food from one area to another. But other times it’s protecting business interests that are hurting other countries and stuff like that.

I reviewed a documentary about the same subject not too long ago. There's a trailer for that film, Shadow Company, available here.

Link: Gamasutra - An Uphill Battle: Chris Ferriera On Army Of Two's Gameplay and Philosophy (via WaterCoolerGames)

Publishing Peacemaker

Gamepolitics blogs that Manifesto will publish Peacemaker, the sim developed at Carnegie-Mellon that "allows the player to try his or her skills of diplomacy and leadership by playing as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President," in the words of the development team's press release.

Download the demo!

Link: GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » Award-Winning Israeli-Palestinian Sim Brought to Market.

See also: older Peacemaker coverage

Maoist Game Reviews

Electronic game reviews written for the Maoist Internationalist Movement website. An example: from the review of Shattered Union:

Despite its white nationalist outlook, "Shattered Union" has upset some "war gamers." The Wargamer, an online site for those who enjoy war pornography (www.thewargamer.com), had a few threads in its forums about how hurtful imperialists thought "Shattered Union" was. They didn't like the concept of their KKKountry falling apart and took time out of their cheerleading of U.$. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan to make this opinion known. Tough Shit, your kkkountry's days are numbered. The overwhelming majority of the world is going to shatter your union one of these days and there is nothing you and your beer and pretzels crowd can do about it.

And some commentary on a Full Spectrum Warrior billboard:

This billboard for a videogame up at Fort Bragg in North Carolina proves MIM's point that video games are not politically neutral. Brainwashed by militarism, bored people take up countless militarist games and real world killing just for excitement. Even pornography video games are not as popular. If people had more social control of their lives instead of just the illusion of "freedom," they would not be playing so many games like this one. Under capitalism, game-makers produce what is profitable. Under the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations over imperialism, games glorifying Uncle $am will be history and game-makers will flourish without having to cater to mindless sex and violence.

Old news, perhaps.  But that joint dictatorship of the proletariat thing sounds like a great plan.

These MIM guys should check out Soviet Untersagersdorf. Or maybe Poly Play.

Link: MIM bookstore.

Games About Liquids and Terror

Hey there. I'm in the Bay Area this week doing some speaking dates, including this upcoming show at Other Cinema, San Francisco on Saturday Oct 21.

Check out two games from Ian Bogost of Water Cooler Games, Oil God and Airport Security. The first is a game about global petropolitics, the second a spoof of current anti-terror measures at airports.

Link: Water Cooler Games - Persuasive Games releases The Arcade Wire: Oil God.

Face/On

Talk about identifying with a character...

Link: Put Your Face in Rainbow Six Vegas - Kotaku.

Iranian anti-US Counter Strike mod

 

Andrew Wearing from the downunderblog Boymeetsgame emailed me about this news item: 27-year old Iranian Ahmadreza Nouri has created a mod of Counter Strike in which players try to blow up a US oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. Seems to be inspired by a warning from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in June that the world's oil supplies could be serious compromised should the US go to war with Iran.

In Nouri's game, sinking the oil tanker results in blocking the Straits, through which 40% of the global oil trade passes through.

The game arrives in the wake of Al Qaeda's Night of Bush Capturing, announcements of a proposed anti-US game from the Union of Islamic Student Societies in Iran, and the larger context of recent games from the Muslim world that depict war from a Middle Eastern perspective.

Reuters/NY Times: Iranian video game offers chance to blow up U.S. tanker

Anti-Fada Paratrooper & Israeli war games

The archives of Jewish ideas mag Zeek include this dry spoof: a review of "Anti-Fada Paratrooper," a nationalistic Israeli response to pro-Palestinian games like Under Ash.

An armored personnel carrier rumbles across the cobblestones on your screen, the sound of shattering molotovs glass-clear and crisp in digital stereo. Apache whoop-whoops rise ominously as the choppers sweep down from the tenement line. You grit your teeth, thumb poised above your controller button. Before the missiles scream home, a final glimpse of the desert-red sunset, and two hooded figures scurry into the shadows of an alleyway. The shots find their sweet spot.

This isn't cable news, and the banner rolling across the bottom of your screen indicates your score has reached an all-time high. You completed your mission and earned bonus points for limiting civilian casualties.

Before you move on to your next mission, you pause to watch your screen engulfed in a sea of blue-and-white, the Seal of Solomon billowing and crackling as 'Hinay Matov u'Manayim' plays boisterously in the background. Your ethnic pride swells like a thick plume of smoke.

Welcome to the world of Anti-Fada Paratrooper, the new hyperreal battle-action game released earlier this year for Sony Playstation 2. Never heard of it? No surprise, given that the software sold out one month into its first million-unit production run. The mystery buyer: the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which just used the game as the centerpiece of its annual Purim campaign mailing. A second release is due in stores by the time summer vacation starts. So unless you know yourself some Jews, you're going to have to wait a little longer...

Apparently some thought this game was real.

In a feature on Peacemaker, Haaretz tells the story of a real Israeli nationalist game called Intifada:

The first computer game to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was called Intifada, and it was developed by an Israeli named Michael Medved in 1989, at the height of the first Palestinian uprising. The idea in this primitive game was to patrol the streets of a Palestinian village (only from right to left or vice versa), and to fire at Palestinian rioters who burst out from the sides of the screen and approached the image of the player. Between one bloody patrol and the next, slogans appeared on the screen such as: "In the course of your mission against the rioters, you operated contrary to your instructions. Your terrible performance was recorded by foreign television crews, and caused the fall of the government."

And some others, which sound more like typical commerical games with Israeli themes:

Two games that are more serious and come from the mainstream of the game industry, are Divided Ground: Middle East Conflict, and (in Hebrew) Blue Star: The Israel Air Force, which was developed in Tel Aviv by the Israeli Pixel company. Divided Ground is a strategy game based on taking turns, in which players act as IDF commanders or generals in Arab armies, who fight the enemy of their choice on historical battle sites such as Latrun in 1948, the Rafah Salient in 1967 or the Chinese Farm in 1973. When the game came out in mid-2001, critics considered it mediocre. In Israel it was almost ignored.

Blue Star, on the other hand, became a local best-seller immediately after it arrived in the stores at the end of 1998. The game - which simulates a military flight - enables armchair pilots to fly generations of air force planes and reenact various historic battles, high above virtual Earth.

(If anyone has any more info on Intifada or Blue Star, or first hand experience with the games, let me know)

See also: Hasan Nasrallah web games (with commentary at Water Cooler Games)

A Taste of Viktory

BoingBoing reveals the story of a DIY board-game inventor Peter Morrison and his home-brewed table-top wargame VIKTORY II. Morrison's site chronicles V-II's development from concept to packaged indie product. Very cool! Looks like a beautifully designed game.

Link: Boing Boing: DIY board-game inventor's build-log.

New US Army Videogame

Looks like the Army has another free video game for download: F2C2, a real-time strategy game, produced by contracter SAIC. F2C2 is based on the Army's Future Combat Systems initiative, a planned overarching network spanning the manned and unmanned forces of all of America's military branches.

Bummer, it's PC only. Well, see what they're saying over at the Battlefront forums.

21st CENTURY BATTLE COMMAND

Future Combat Systems (FCS) will transform the U.S. Army's Current Force to a more lethal, agile Future Force to achieve battlespace dominance. The F2C2 video game demonstrates the FCS wireless network-centric operating system that seamlessly links advanced communications and networking systems with soldiers, platforms, weapons, and sensors.

A REAL-TIME TACTICAL STRATEGY GAME

F2C2 is a real-time tactical strategy game that allows you to learn about the Army’s FCS program by giving you command of a Mounted Company Team in the year 2015. Through gameplay, F2C2 shows how FCS is designed to give the 21st Century Soldier unprecedented situational awareness and the ability to see first, understand first, act first, and finish decisively.

MANAGE MISSION, TERRAIN, TROOPS, AND TIME

You’ll experience an exciting range of real-time missions while equipped with the full spectrum of FCS capabilities. F2C2 shows the sophisticated sensors linked among the 18 different FCS systems, and how the FCS network quickly disperses tactical intelligence enabling soldiers to pre-empt enemy attacks and mount offensive assaults.

YOU ARE A FUTURE FORCE COMPANY COMMANDER

F2C2’s battle command interface enhances your planning and decision-making skills by giving you automated planning tools, real-time situational awareness, ISR and fire support planning tools, and more.

Games for War and Peace

NPR's Studio 360 last week on games includes this segment on game training for warfighters, "Iraq and the Xbox" (realaudio link). Reporter Rachel McCarthy covers the development of Full Spectrum Warrior and another project called "Dark Hunt" at the Institute for Creative Technologies, as well as the Institute for Defense Analyses' large-scale urban combat simulation Urban Resolve.

In the New York Times, Clive Thompson's article "Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time" looks at the current interest in serious games, including games like Peacemaker, the UN's Food Force, and a game of nonviolent conflict resolution called A Force More Powerful, with quotes from Ian Bogost, Gonzalo Frasca, Henry Jenkins and others. 

Thompson's bit on Peacemaker, a game based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Video games, serious-games advocates say, also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective. When Mr. Burak first showed Peacemaker to Israelis and Palestinians, he found that they were most interested in playing as their own “side.” But when he pushed them to switch positions they developed a more nuanced sense of why the other side acted as it did. In Qatar several people told him that “they kind of understood more the pressures the Israeli prime minister has.”

Not everyone agrees with Peacemaker’s basic assumption: that both Palestinians and Israelis want peace. I discovered I could get to a ceasefire by removing settlements while assassinating Hamas militants, a strategy I doubt Israeli hawks would approve of. Mr. Burak said Israeli players complained about the bulldozing of Arab villages; Palestinians felt the game ought to more clearly reward the use of “subtle” measures. Still, he said, Peacemaker (which was designed before Hamas’s electoral victory or the recent Mideast eruption) inspires an unusual kind of debate: an argument about how rule changes can affect society. “That sort of complex thing is precisely what you can do with a game,” Mr. Burak said.