To use an economic analogy, war is the most competitive and ruthless of all markets: all edges are used and the most aggressive risks are taken, because war is the ultimate competitive ground. Self-preservation is our most overpowering primal instinct. War is the last resort when other options are exhausted or untenable (or sometimes, not preferable). From this, we find that war gives us the conditions to discover in ourselves capabilities we would never have found otherwise. By creating new necessities, it pushes us to our limits. Activities which require militaristic skills are pervasive throughout society as forms of entertainment, often because they are both physically and mentally challenging. While the recreational equivalents of war may not in fact be truly as challenging as the “real thing,” they reflect those elements of it which we desire.

What we gain from playing video games is not necessarily “real-world” knowledge, but situational understanding. Games are our window to the knowledge that would previously only have been attained in war, because they can lawfully model real-world dynamics (and as they improve technologically, even randomize impressively). Through them, we can encounter hypothetical situations and not only learn about the dynamics of that particular instance, but experiment with solutions to it and even learn entirely new, generally applicable inferential structures in the process. In Rome: Total War (a complex, turn-based campaign strategy game with real-time combat), players can be faced with a broad variety of world states in the historical campaign after a few turns, depending on their actions and the actions of AI-controlled computer factions responding to each other and environmental dynamics (such as natural disasters or plagues). If Rome declares war on Egypt in 250 B.C., the player finds that many of his profitable trade routes have been lost, and that his resources are spread too thin in fighting Gaul and Germania at the same time. This is one of many different strategic decisions and outcomes a player of this game will encounter while playing.

With the growth of the internet in the mid-90s came the more frequent implementation of “multiplayer” features in computer games. Over the following decade, multiplayer games reached a new height of competition. One of the first games that utilized a fully 3D graphics engine (which included Z-axis rendering and movement, unlike Doom or Wolfenstein 3D) along with a flexible, player-modifiable mapping system, was a futuristic first-person shooter called Starsiege: Tribes, released in 1997. The game was specifically catered to team-based internet games (it lacked a single-player mode) with quantities of players never seen before: most popular maps were so large that games with less than 16 players were impractical, and servers could host up to 32 players in a single game (and up to 64 after later improvements). In the game, players select their own equipment loadouts, and thus define their own roles, such as a fast and mobile skirmisher, or a slow and heavily-armed bombardier. Orders can be issued via first-person targeting or a command map, which integrates all current sensor data from all team members and emplacements to create an image of the battlefield. Very uniquely to Tribes, all players are also equipped with jetpacks which are needed to fly across the planet surface to attack the enemy base or capture the flag, and which inevitably play a major role in player-on-player combat.. Compare this to horizontal-axis-only, 4-player maximum multiplayer games of Doom, and the result is an intense, constant, and large battle whose outcome is highly dependent on skill and teamwork- all in all, a revolutionary war gaming experience.

Tribes alone encompasses several beneficial aspects of warfare. For one, an adept player likely has excellent reflexes combined with strong hand-eye coordination and ambidexterity, which allows him to control his horizontal movement on the keyboard and his vertical jetpack movement with the mouse, while simultaneously firing his weapons accurately at his (moving and fighting) opponent. Meanwhile, he must also pay attention to his ammunition, his amount of jetpack energy, his relative position to the ground and other objects and players nearby, etc., resulting in a fairly demanding dogfight. His individual battle plays into a larger one, in which team leaders issue orders to destroy or construct defensive emplacements, attack certain enemies, or defend a map area. Because of the potential for advanced strategy embedded in the game, Tribes was initially aimed at being played in a competitive ladder system between registered teams. By these teams (“clans”) always practicing and competing together, their command structures and strategies solidified, enabling them to execute complex battle plans, adapt to unexpected situations faster, and become more efficient and more competitive overall. At higher levels of competition, this also resulted in comradery and friendship among members, especially when the stakes were prestige or money. While it may not compare to that experienced in actual war, “clan” comradery can be so strong that significant real-life favors are traded. Many more computer games played on the internet possess similar characteristics to Tribes, except with even much more dramatic technological improvements in a broad variety of genres.

Despite all these benefits, some object to the violent nature of the vast majority of video games. A common grievance against violence in media, particularly video games, is that it “desensitizes” children- and even adults- to the horrors of violence. This is tantamount to blaming oxygen for fire. It implies that our emotional sensitivity to violence determines our attitudes toward it. This may be the case for many people, but then does the problem lie in what they are exposed to, or in what they use to form their attitudes? Granted, our natural aversion to violence is perhaps a built-in moral safeguard against wrongdoing, but what would make us different from animals if we relied only on innate predispositions? Simply put, an experience does not have to be emotionally traumatizing for it to bear moral significance. In the absence of moral values, fear, ignorance, and indifference are the only real deterrents against wrongdoing; when something disrupts this contingent balance, it is disingenuous to blame the disruptor and not the conditions that preceded it.

Likewise, there are concerns that our military is utilizing technologies which make soldiers more and more detached from the foes they vanquish. The same argument stated above applies: equip them with the tools to consciously, not innately, understand the moral weight of their actions. Thucydides said, “Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.” The “Land Warrior” referred to by Perlmutter would not need to stumble into a shell-hole and encounter an enemy soldier to realize that he is killing another human being like himself, unless he is a fool.[ii]

Advanced, “arm-chair” military technology in many respects is subject to the same class of opposition against the modern video game (and modern media). The rhetoric is “too much distance, too much efficiency, not enough feeling” and “too much realism, too much fun.” Opponents of both believe that we would be better off without them, but the oxygen and fire analogy holds. Advanced military technology has the potential to save thousands of lives (on both sides of a conflict) and lower the costs of war; video games can teach us faster reflexes and better hand-eye coordination, improve our critical thinking, allow us to explore a broader variety of situations, increase our understanding of those situations, and entertain us. Should we reject these great innovations, which would improve greatly the quality of our lives, on the grounds that humanity is too stupid to handle them? Instead of abolishing oxygen, we need to stop leaving flammable materials lying around unattended.

[i] Chris Hedges, War is a force that gives us meaning (New York, NY: First Anchor Books, 2002)

[ii] David D. Perlmutter, Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 228

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It is impossible to perfectly stratify discussion about video games in society into neat categories. With that in mind, one must contemplate the following facts when considering the place of video games in society, as I will in this paper. Video games are the product of the brilliance of technology, and conceptually they are the single medium that will come ever closer to the fullest representation of reality and pseudo-realities. However, there exists a conservative element of society that imagines that video games are empty, brain-draining activities upon which children and adults spend wasteful hours, leading them to violent or lewd behavior and to the breakdown of society.

Part of this element comes from inexperience with and ignorance of video games; another part comes from an arbitrary view of society and morality; and another part, fundamentally, comes from a subconscious hatred of the good for being good. Video games are not just mindless, substance-free, sugary candies for the brain. They, like all other media, have the ability to be beautiful, emotional, intelligent, poetic, reflective, or any other adjective one can find to describe a piece of art, yet they can do it in an exceptionally new way. They put the consumer in the driver’s seat, saying, “make this experience your own,” whether it is in custom character creation, open-ended problem-solving, or pervasive ethical quandaries. A full understanding of the educational and entertaining possibilities to be offered by the medium of video games, as well as the nature of its enemies, can lead to the full realization of its potential benefits.

Video games as simulations of an alternate reality

A false assumption to make about video games, especially in the modern day, is that they are ergodic- predictable, repetitive, or otherwise banal. Quite contrarily, the nature of logic and modern technology’s ability to manifest that logic on the computer screen has demonstrated repeatedly that video games (and their scientific counterparts, computer models) have lead to new kinds of situations, interactions, and understandings of things never observed before. Even in terms of game design, games have been played and optimized beyond ways that game developers would have ever expected. Though older game design may have been more directly and linearly construction with fewer possibilities, newer games have capitalized on the presence of new technologies- as well as the experiences learned from past greats- to create dynamic gaming experiences.

The more characteristics and variables programmed into more individual objects and entities, the greater and greater exponentially the possibilities become. The gradual evolution of video games is not toward “realism” per se, but toward immersion: natural consistency and dynamics. It is nonsensical to ask for realism in a game about Dungeons & Dragons, a universe jam-packed with magic, but that does not mean that anything goes: the magic must act as believably as it can, as though the game were saying “if magic actually existed, this is how it would behave.”

It is thus a misconception that video games provide the same singular, preprogrammed experience that movies or television provide. Though, of course, individuals have subjective responses to the same content in movies and television, games provide subjectivity of two orders: the first of the player, and the second of the content that is experienced itself. Beyond the simple spontaneity implemented into the games (randomized behavior of enemies, item appearances, etc.), the actual subjective presence of the player- whether it is in his ability to operate his character or his choices of action- affects the outcome of what actually occurs on-screen. The greater in complexity a game becomes, the more and more this becomes true.

This facet of video games- their non-ergodicity- is by far their most important characteristic. It is, as we have seen, what makes them unlike any media ever before. Generally speaking, the power of computers has given us the ability to imagine different objects of totally diverse natures, program them into a system of laws of interaction, and then sit back and watch the show. Biologists can now see things that are very logically real, but do not have to be directly observed or deduced by hand anymore; one researcher speaks of DNA shuffling for forecasting genetic behaviors: “we used thermodynamics and reaction engineering to evaluate and model this complex reaction network so we can now predict where the DNA from different parent genes will recombine.”[1] Economists can imagine economic actors of certain preferences, assume they are utility maximizing, plug in the amount of resources available, and learn about what kinds of things people will produce. In the same regard, the video gamer can ask, “let’s say we have a mountain lion fighting a huge wasp; who will win, and will the fight be awesome or lame?” The process is about imagining independent things and making assumptions about their characteristics, and then throwing them into a figurative box, shaking it, and then pouring it out to find out what is there.

Gaming as Art and Narrative

Some have argued that video games offer no valid mode of expression. In April 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Sr. ruled that video games are not subject to first amendment protections under the constitution: “[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.”[2] Nothing could be farther from the truth, even besides the point that board games and even athletics can, too, be artistic in the creativity that goes into their rules and aesthetics. The games contemplated and cited in the court opinion, “Fear Effect,” “Doom,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Resident Evil,” were not only six to nine years old at the date of the court opinion, but had titles falsely cited as “Mortal Combat” and “Resident of Evil Creek.”[3] This is testament to the fact that inexperience with video games has a strong positive productive relationship with total, ape-like ignorance about them.

Though to some degree this paper is guilty of it, the primary problem with much formal academic research into video games is its insistence on “boxing” characteristics of games into neat little propositional packages. Usually, it is the result of an infrequent video game player conducting a study, or a frequent gamer attempting to appeal to a broader audience with his writing. The problem with this approach lies in attempting to convey the facets of such a complex kind of thing to someone who has never experienced it. Simply to say, “imagine something like a movie, where the player holds a controller that moves a character around on screen and makes him do things” clearly fails to capture all the qualitative essence of video games, especially in the present-day context. It is the equivalent of trying to explain to an 11^th-century Catholic Bishop the concept of a car as “imagine something like a carriage, but one that moves by itself.” He, too, would condemn it, probably as the product of witchcraft, because he would not understand how it worked. The attempt, then, to “sound-bite” video game research certainly creates skewed perceptions of their supposed social implications.

Video games are free speech

Thankfully, the 7^th District Court (which affected a much broader jurisdiction than the Limbaugh ruling) had previously upheld video games as free speech. The bottom line is that inanimate visual art, audio, and films are protected under freedom of expression, no matter whether their substance is contributory to public discourse or not. The same should go for video games, and relying on prejudice against the “new guy” will not suffice. Many games require just as much, if not plenty more effort than a single painting or a book. Development teams often number between thirty and two thousand people, frequently allocating many members simply to developing the plot and characters and making them believable. Besides all the technological input that must go into the game in order to make it playable on the user’s computer, the art for the “look” of the game must be drafted and implemented into three dimensional graphics, while voice-overs and sound effects must be created and integrated into the entire process seamlessly. A good game must be one with entertaining gameplay, an interesting plot, and appealing graphics and sound, meanwhile operating on a budget and somehow turning a profit.

Interactivity and character

The desire for interactivity in entertainment is, in some regards, a product of social evolution. Instead of watching television, children often play in imaginary worlds. Many adventurous persons have a passion for exploring the wilderness or traveling to different cities, to enjoy the alternative aesthetics and atmosphere. It is this same spirit that leads to the appreciation of quality video games. Movies and books do not afford the reader the kind of flexibility and freedom that video games do; the actions of the characters always happen no matter what the reader says or does, and all he can do is try to imagine otherwise. The video game provides the interface by which the audience can instead be the protagonist, for a change.

Many games, especially role-playing games, offer character customization schemes that both affect the aesthetic role of the character on screen (clothes, hair and skin color, body shape, facial features, etc.) as well as his substantive role (attributes, skills, and abilities). Throughout the game, characters can collect items or earn experience that gives them more abilities, often at the player’s choice. The result is character development, which leads to close identification with the character at play and even sentimental value (try deleting someone’s character in World of Warcraft and receiving an indifferent response).

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