War Games

These thoughts were written by Gabe, one of our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

At a time when there is a proper reckoning about the monuments we uphold, perhaps it is time for our gaze to fall too upon the games we uphold.

Quarantine bathed me in free time. Between suddenly finding myself in St. Louis three months earlier than expected, and online school that was a total joke on its best days, I found myself able to do basically anything I wanted. Given that I couldn’t go anywhere, I spent most of my time playing video games.

Dominating my time since March has been Hearts of Iron IV. I’ve logged around 300 hours since March. That’s 12.5 days, which, coincidentally, is nearly the same time as the Coronavirus’s incubation period.

Hearts of Iron IV is one of many “Grand Strategy” games on the market, and it focuses exclusively on WWII, running from 1936 to 1948. Players can take control of any country that existed at the time and lead them however they see fit. That being said, “however they see fit” will always include warfare. The development team has ensured it will. As Nazi Germany, the player can fire a Wehrmacht coup d’état, installing August von Mackensen, World War I field marshal and war hero as the leader in the interim.

In the post-war vacuum, the player is given two options: restore the Kaiserreich, and effectively repeat World War I; or the player can produce a constitutional monarchy and turn Germany democratic. A democratic Germany, no Hitler, at that point you’ve basically averted half of World War II, right? Japan would still attack China in 1937 following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, but the European theater would never open. It shouldn’t.

However, if the player initiates a Wehrmacht coup and deposes Hitler, France will either become fascist and join Italy or become communist and join the Soviet Union. If they go fascist, they’ll declare war on you. If they go communist, they’ll declare war on you. Hearts of Iron IV is hard-coded to always drive towards world war. Even the best attempts to handle every event diplomatically will fail to the AI nations directly attacking and plunging the world into conflict.

Hearts of Iron IV cannot exist without warfare. It is the driving force behind all aspects of the game. Research improves weapons so that you can war better, espionage gives you more information so that you can war better, the national focus trees exist to develop your country so you can war better. If you don’t, then you lose.

As the Steam Summer Sale kicked off, I started to consider the games to which I devote my time.

They are dominated by war.

Which, unfortunately, makes a lot of sense. My entire life has been beset by war. The United States has been at war in some capacity for around 94% of my entire life. I certainly don’t remember any of the 6%, given I hadn’t even turned one yet.

In kindergarten, a friend of mine’s dad was a pilot in the Air Force. He came into the class one day to talk about flying planes and being a soldier. I don’t remember much, aside from the pictures of warplanes he showed the class. That was 2006, America was at war. He was deployed five years later; it was the same war. Four years after that, I was starting high school, and the war was still going on, with only the vaguest promises of returning soldiers home. Now here I am, 14 years after meeting a soldier who wasn’t retired for the first time, and the same war is going on. 9/11 was 19 years ago. People born after the war began can now serve in it. There are stories of fathers and sons who both served in Afghanistan. They’re written as PR puff pieces, but they’re terribly depressing. The war can’t be lost; America doesn’t lose. America just sends its fathers and their sons to die ad infinitum. But that’s alright, supremacy of will is our savior. We’ll never give up, because if we give up, pull out, end the war, whatever, with anything less than absolute victory, then we have lost.

And that mentality has weaseled itself into almost every game I’ve ever played.

The first game I can remember sitting down and completing by myself was Halo 3: ODST, a spin-off game that was technically an independent project and didn’t even have Master Chief, the namesake of the franchise. Most of the campaign saw the player character navigating rainy city streets to find the rest of their squad while haunting jazz music fills the void and the occasional squad of enemies patrols the area.

Halo isn’t terribly subtle in its world-building. Taking place across the 26^th century, every game has the player almost exclusively play as soldiers of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC). The UNSC, and by extension, all of humanity, are locked in a war with a theocratic alliance of alien races called the Covenant.

The first Halo game was released in November of 2001, not long after the War in Afghanistan began. Now, almost two decades later, Halo: Infinite, the twelfth game in the franchise is set for a late 2020 release, the war that welcomed the series’ birth patiently awaiting its newest development.

After completing ODST, it became time for me and my brother to graduate into the next level of first-person shooters. We raced to the end of Call of Duty: World at War. Opportunity for a co-op campaign meant we shot our way through ruined city streets and open fields together, as brothers do, I suppose. World at War was as subtle as a slap to the face, in true Call of Duty fashion. The first scene has the player character bound by Japanese captors. You watch them stick a lit cigarette in the eye of another POW and then slit his throat. You’d have to properly try to make your character the bad guy.

That’s not exactly true. In the campaign of World at War, in a mission on the Eastern Front, Sergeant Resnov (voiced by Gary Oldman) tells you to shoot a group of wounded Germans on the street. That’s a war crime. The rules about hors de combat (lit. “out of combat”) are very deliberate. If an enemy is unable to fight because they are wounded and you shoot them, you have committed a war crime. This is not the only war crime in the Call of Duty franchise, nor is it the only war crime in World at War.

There are 18 titles in the franchise, each game virtually indistinguishable from the others, and I’ve played 13 of them. I didn’t realize that I committed war crimes in following the campaigns until I began piecing together information for this essay.

As I grew, so did my taste in games, the FPS fell to the RPG, which I found far more entrapping, in part because I could choose my own path, I could avoid war. Or, more accurately, I could try to. Game after game ended in warfare. Fallout 3, a game in which your driving motivation for the first act is “I need to find my dad”, ends with a giant metal robot marching to the Jefferson Memorial shouting about how “Death is a preferable alternative to Communism” while you fight an army that, canonically, is the United States government.

Fallout: New Vegas, a game in which the only official backstory your character has is working as a mailman, ends with the “Second Battle for Hoover Dam” and every single faction in the game making some sort of appearance, from a bomber flying overhead to a geriatric group of soldiers dropping behind enemy lines with plasma weapons. It’s a bit odd when it’s typed out, but the Fallout franchise takes place over two hundred years after a nuclear war, it’s been odd since it was created.

The Fallout franchise is defined by dystopias: farming is barely able to take place in most of the games; there are roving legions of bandits that exist only to kill and rob people; and fresh water is so much of a commodity that Fallout 3’s main quest revolves around a water purifier. Conflicts exist almost exclusively under the lens of resource. That is true of the endgame battles to the most mediocre of side quests.

Yet, even in games that are distinctly not dystopic, war is everywhere. Skyrim, another RPG I have dedicated too much time to, takes place in a lush, alpine landscape. There are fields of wildflowers, large farms, hearty forests, and a robust network of settlements across the landscape. It’s all the fantasy stereotypes pulled into a single locale with a tidy bow, and the largest side quest in Skyrim is literally a civil war. Skyrim lets you kill dragons and eat their souls, and the game expects you to participate in the civil war too. The main quest won’t proceed unless the player character intervenes in some capacity. There’s opportunity for an armistice to be drafted, but even this is a temporary measure. Immediately following the signing of the treaty, the player can join a side and finish the entire civil war.

My childhood was precipitated by war on all sides. I was one and a half when the Forever War in Afghanistan began. No media was safe. War was in the TV shows; war was in the YA books; war was in the music; war was on the stage; and war was in the video games. This isn’t to suggest war is suddenly gone from any of those places nowadays. In 2018, shooters made up 20% of total game sales. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600,000,000 in it’s opening weekend, nearly double what The Avengers (2012) made in it’s opening weekend and just short of what Avengers: Infinity War (2018) made in it’s opening weekend. Large amounts of people shell out equally large amounts of money to play these games. I don’t know how many of Modern Warfare’s 20 million or so owners have played the campaign. What I do know is that the odds they committed a war crime at some point in the campaign is near 100%.

It doesn’t have to be this way. War doesn’t have to be everywhere.

And in my favorite game, it isn’t anywhere to be found. I’ve logged upwards of 4000 hours into Minecraft, moved hundreds of thousands of virtual cubes, placed hundreds of thousands of virtual cubes. Minecraft, ultimately, takes place on a world that is utterly indifferent to the player. You can terraform, the world will not respond. You can destroy, the world will not respond. You can create, the world will not respond. There is one formal objective, and it’s entirely optional, though not completing it limits access to certain loot.

And it is one of the loveliest gaming experiences I have ever had the pleasure of partaking in. I always find myself becoming a farmer when I play. I put together a simple field, a few pens for animals, and I build a house.

And Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time. It’s sold 200,000,000 copies. It has a 70,000,000-unit lead over the second best-selling game, Grand Theft Auto V. There’s certainly a demand for games that don’t ask the player to commit war crimes.

But damn, do games make it fun to violate the Geneva Conventions (or the Hague Conventions or whatever event you use to mark your list of war crimes). I had a blast the first time I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The level design was compelling, the characters were interesting, and the graphics felt amazing (which, by 2009 standards, they were.) The first time I ever played the mission “Just Like Old Times” I was an action movie character. It was the penultimate mission, and it was exactly what the game had hyped it to be, opening with one of the most unnecessarily intense monologues ever, where Captain John Price declares that “out of all our vast array of nightmares, this is the one we choose for ourselves.” I was in the fourth grade when I completed Modern Warfare 2 for the first time. I memorized Price’s speech. It made me feel like a badass. My friends who’d played the games knew it too. We’d talk about our favorite missions in the game. We’d talk about our favorite maps. We’d talk about our favorite quotes from the game.

Our favorite quotes were always from the campaign, but never from when we died during the campaign. In the Call of Duty franchise, when the player dies, the screen covers itself with blood and (with a few exceptions) gives a quote related to war or the campaign. They’re never terribly “pro-war” messages. They range from Ernest Hemingway’s “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime” to General Omar Bradley’s “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” Occasionally they just read “Cost of a single B-2 Bomber: $2.2 Billion” or give the price for some other piece of military equipment. We didn’t talk about those quotes, in part because that would admit we had failed at some point in the mission, and no one wanted to be the guy who died enough times in a single checkpoint to see every death screen.

So, we never admitted to our failures, only the war crimes. I remember a conversation, some time in the fourth or fifth grade, with friends about one of the levels in World at War where you’re asked to shoot wounded soldiers. Everyone in my friend group who had played shot them, except for one. We asked why. His answer? “They die anyway, you can save the ammo.” He stopped himself from killing hors de combat so he could shoot more combatants without reloading. It’s not a terribly noble reason, but at the end of the day, he didn’t commit a war crime. The rest of us? Well, we were “just following orders,” which you might recognize as the same defense that Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, and others attempted to use at the Nuremburg Trials. They were executed.

The games we play will stop demanding we become war criminals when we demand they don’t. Hell is hell, and war is worse. But so long as the entertainment we produce and consume orders us to commit virtual war crimes and praises us for doing it, the very real war crimes that happen to the people of this Earth will remain unaddressed, explained away, or at worst, praised.