Can video games reflects war’s horror or just turn it into a game?

Video games are a Plato’s cavern where players manipulate various shadows projected from a mathematical void. A calculated and spectacular simulation of unreal references: 90 % of the football matches are more boring than a FIFA match between two skilled players, for example.

Video games also mean conflict. Action. Situations to beat or overcome. That’s why most of this platonic shadows revolve around the war as a narrative show and entertainment among buddies. A virtual show that, until now, has been distant from a terrible reality. But the industry’s maturity is changing this road. To what extent? Or is it reality changing?

“The war, the war never changes”

Idealized war games have been in the market way before video games. Chess has two essential war characteristics: confrontation and a fictitious land control divided in easy tiles, borders maximum abstraction. But it doesn’t have any refugees, sacking, civil victims, the war wounded and the esquires in the battlefield trying to finish them off. Pieces leave the board by the game’s own necessities.

And something similar occurred in video games way before Ron Perlman’s big voice opened the “Fallout” series (1997): Defeated enemies disappear in the blink of an eye, they go off in millions of pixels or they directly turn into spoils of war. Limitations are grammar and technical ones.

Because, in the beginning of the industry, a fistful of programmers were racking their brains to find a way to fit seven characters instead of six in a screen with the same amount of pixels as a little corner of the IPhone 6’s screen. Realism wasn’t an option. Not for war and not for anything.

“Fallout”, however, started with a declaration of intent. The introduction already pictured soldiers with a motorized armor who were executing prisoners from behind in the only black and white television still working in the middle of the thermonuclear devastation. Vietnam, the Cold War, the Third World War… prologs for a world where every walk in their radioactive environment transmits the same: war never changes; war isn’t something beautiful.

Cannon fodder

“One single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”

We’re not sure whether it’s a Stalin’s quote, but there were indeed two games that tried to turn this statement around. “Cannon Fodder2 (1994) is a strategy and action game by Sensible (the same team behind one of the best football games of all time) that, with laughter, claimed each soldier was unique: all of them had their own names and dedicated tombstones to show that it wasn’t just about anonymous people.

Although its popularity made us for the first time consider war in a different way, satire wasn’t on the same level as “UFO: Enemy Unknown” (1993–94), a game where the Earth confronted an alien invasion that was invading cities by killing civilians… And also your own soldiers who started as anonymous creatures but became unique personalities -if they survived. And while they did it.

Gollop brothers’ video game achieved an integration of war’s disasters as mechanics: losing an experienced soldier was a painful experience, not only because of the emotional link, but also because of its meaning for the campaign. And it also forced terrible decisions: if the aliens invade a city you rely on explosives and other destructive weapons, but you can also kill civilians while fighting their thread. Another negative aspect: governments funding your army don’t enjoy when their civilians are killed.

Penalizing a player is the most basic way for the games to translate ethics to the only thing someone has to understand when using a video games controller: the rules and the mechanics. Don’t shoot civilians, don’t shoot your partners -multiplayer’s golden rule where friendly fire is present …

War’s fog

“When it comes to war, there’s nothing that can substitute victory”

General McArthur wasn’t talking about the winning desire players are full of, but its necessity in order to survive. Maybe the first video game ever to take player’s role seriously to really experience a soldier was “Operation: Flashpoint” (2001). A FPS like Call of Duty or Battlefield that, however, moved further away from the superhuman aspect of the before mentioned, where with a couple of silly movements you can get rid of a 50 caliber bullet able to bore into a tank.

In Bohemia Interactive’s game there wasn’t a clear sign of where to go to: we had to read maps or to just wait laying down and praying for minutes so that the armored patrol doesn’t see us, and the bullets killed people. To the enemies and to the player. And eight out of 10 times, you didn’t even know who killed you.

With the exception of some masochists, the game happened without much fuss: it was too hard and too cruel with the player. Also too boring. But still, “Operation Flashpoint” can’t be called a simulator. Actually there isn’t a video game that can be classified as a simulator because violence’s representation in video games is still limited, sometimes with cartoonish results. People going off like a ragdoll, rocket launchers leaving intact bodies behind, the lack of blood…

Every detail has been discussed and decided from inside the Industry. If we can blow up demons in Doom is only because they are no humans but fictions we can tear to pieces without anyone being horrified or undertaking sensitivity campaigns about what happens after playing the video game:

Horror’s true face

“Men who come out here should have no entrails”

This quote is by Joseph Conrad, author of “Heart of Darkness” that inspired the game “Apocalypse Now“. And only a few video games have tried to go that far. Vietcong is a 2003 minor shooter that tried to be distinct from its epic companions, from “Medal of Honor” and “Call of Duty”, by telling Vietnam’s war darkest side.

Ranging from not being able to see the enemies to massacres of civilians to that uncomfortable feeling of your life depending on partners and officials who have less in common with humanity than your pet.

The only commercial video game truly ambitious that has reached far into this (excluding whatever Kojima is trying to tell us with any Metal Gear Solid) is “Spec-Ops: The Line”(2012). A trip into the heart of darkness from the point of view of a non-commissioned officer who’s losing his mind in dribs and drabs. The post-traumatic stress disorder, the slaughter, battle field’s craziness… A risky video game raising issues like war crimes without relinquishing the spectacular seduction of modern video games.

But using video games to denounce war has a long standing. Newsgames -video games meant to inform- gave us examples like “September 12th“, a terrorist bombing simulator where it’s impossible not to cause civilian casualties.

And also the independent companies have taken a road to using genres and mechanics to break the industry’s mold. “This War of Mine” (2014) at Steam has taken denounce to the extreme by creating war at odds: a Sims with civilian refugees who are trying to survive in the middle of a military conflict. In other words, the same message of zombie and survival video games, currently in vogue, but told without metaphors.

Turning war into a video game

“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country”.

General Patton left some broad quotes before getting killed somewhere in Europe in a car accident trying to gain the Need for Berlin to the Russians. And some years ago several governments realized that video games are great at keeping an army. If you can find a group of people who are used to aiming guns at human figures, you’re lucky. U.S Army does even fund a video game, “America’s Army” (2002), conceived as a recruitment tool.

And intern programs of simulation and virtual reality which are the first steps to a real life X-Men’s Danger Room. They also pay attention to the players for another reason. Most developed countries don’t want soldiers on the battlefield, but remote-controlled devices: drones, futuristic tanks, unmanned vehicles driven by a kid with an Xbox controller in an office.

A whole generation used to kill everything that moves at the other side of the screen, the perfect soldier. And also another turn of the screw to “Ender’s game”: future wars will be waged as aseptic video games. Congratulations, humanity, you have turned death into a game.