Tapping into the Experience of War through Video Games

Chris Hedges’s book conveys its central theme in its title: “War is a force that gives us meaning.” However, it is not any single concept, but the composite, multi-faceted nature of war that makes it appealing. It is the purpose, the challenge, the sense of belonging, and the self-growth often created by war that causes humanity’s romance with it. Sadly, these always come at a great cost of destruction of life and property. The only means of subverting war is by achieving fulfillment of all it provides by some other means. Virtual reality allows us to reap (to some degree) the benefits of war at only a fraction of its cost. Video games are the interactive manifestations of virtual reality, giving us an interface of control, an objective to fulfill, and qualitative experiences to immerse us. While games may never replace the feelings experienced when one’s life is at risk, and they provide no supreme cause that says “we are one,”[i] they can certainly provide the excitement, comradery, learning, and ultimately some of the satisfaction of war.

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