Titel-Serie

Ed Halter

War Games

In March 2003, Fox News interviewed US Secretary of State Colin Powell just
after news reports of the first US casualties in Iraq began to appear. The
stock market was plummeting, and mainstream American journalists had begun
to criticize the American strategy. In response, Powell reminded the Fox
anchorman that "people have to understand this isn't a video game. It's
a war. It's a real war." In its very offhandedness, Powell's comment points
to how commonplace the comparison of modern warfare to videogames has become.
In the American media, the metaphor was first popularized by the near-abstract
media representation of the Persian Gulf War; its roots stretch back at
least as far as the 80s, as shown in such historical artifacts at the 1983
Cold War hacker-hero movie WarGames (whose posters asked "Is it a game,
or is it real?") and deployed in criticism of President Reagan's never-realized
"Star Wars" missile defense system, which detractors frequently dismissed
as an Atari-influenced fantasy.

In fact, the history of interrelation between video games and war goes far
beyond the metaphorical level. The early development of digital computing
in the 1940s was shaped by the needs of World War Two artillery-tracking
systems; post-war, the US Department of Defense remained the primary funder
of computer technology research until the rise of the personal computer
industry as late as the mid-1970s. The invention of videogames occurred
in the mid-1960s as a cultural side-effect within this milieu: early MIT
hackers programmed "Spacewar!", the first widely popular computer-based
game, while working on the earliest monitor-display microcomputers (whose
monitors were, in fact, modified from military radar technology). Once video
games had achieved commercial success, some aspects of their technological
development began to outstrip parallel fields within the defense industry.
The case of Atari's 1980 console game Battlezone is an oft-noted early example
of the military seeking to learn from the advances commercial gaming sector:
the US Army hired the original designer of this pioneering 3-D shooter to
retool the game into a real-life tank trainer.

Though the Army's Battlezone project likely never saw widespread use, the
evolution of what American futurist John Naisbitt dubbed "the military-Nintendo
complex" (the latest incarnation of the old military-industrial complex
for the new media age) quickened soon after, engendering a rich two-way
flow of information, personnel and technology between the military and the
growing video game industry. By the late 80s and early 90s, many successful
military contracting firms found ways to profit from the expanding entertainment
sector. For example, Martin Marietta, one of the largest military contracting
firms, created a graphics-chip-manufacturing subsidiary in order to work
with Sega on new console and arcade systems.

The most striking collaborations have occurred in the realm of simulation-based
training for soliders. Glimmers of the prominence that video-game-like
training systems would take on can be seen in projects like SIMNET, an early
multi-user virtual reality network created for the Army by Mäk Technologies
in the late 80s, and Marine Doom, a modification of the popular open-sourced
first-person shooter deployed in the mid-90s to train four-man Marine fire
teams. Since then, computer-based simulation training, including the use
of reworked commercial games, has been heavily encouraged within all branches
of the military, promoted as safer, more adaptable to theoretical future
situations, better at teaching creative thinking and problem-solving, and
user-friendly for a new generation raised on gaming: as one Marine colonel
said in National Defense Magazine in 1999, "Generation X is very comfortable
operating in a simulation environment." As part of larger trend towards
private contracting, defense budgets in the 1990s restructured in such a
way that allowed for an increased interaction between private gaming companies
and military training-system developers. Today, simulation training accounts
for a reported 10 percent of the US military's entire budget.

Though few would argue against training soldiers with the best technologies
available, the ways in which real-world military themes have begun to invade
the post-9/11 commercial sphere have led some critics to question whether
the once-rebellious video game has become a new vehicle for neo-patriotic
pro-war propaganda. America's Army, launched July 4th, 2002 as a recruitment
tool for the US Army, has become one of the popular online games worldwide,
although its success at getting notoriously housebound gamers to sign up
for service in the Middle East remains open to question. A less direct PR
effect came from Full Spectrum Warrior, a gritty squad-based tactics game
released last summer for Xbox. Set in the Iraq-like fictional nation of
Zekistan, FSW was developed as a training tool by the Army's Institute
for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California with
game publishers THQ, who retained the rights to release it commercially,
with minor modifications. Destineer Studios is currently readying a multi-platform
release for Close Combat: First to Fight, a game similarly developed as
a simulation trainer for the Marines, which includes characters based on
actual Iraq-stationed Marines.

Though military spokespersons stress that America's Army, FSW and Close
Combat are less gory than their purely commercial peers, and only allow
players to succeed by following official rules of engagement, one cannot
help but ponder what message this officially-sanctioned, highly sanitized
version of real war conveys. The curiously empty streets of Full Spectrum
Warrior, for instance, contain clearly delineated enemy combatants and
almost no civilians. Perhaps more insidious is the gung-ho jingoism that
has crept into the new commercial trend for gaming real wars, as seen in
purely commercial titles like the WWII-set Call of Duty, Vietcong: Purple
Haze, and Conflict: Desert Storm. The last game, released in late 2002 as
Bush upped his call for the invasion of Iraq, was promoted with a tagline
that could have been written by Donald Rumsfeld himself: "No Diplomats.
No Negotiation. No Surrender."