Make-Believe War Never Changes, But Real War Changes Everything

“War...war never changes” is the perpetually pessimistic opening of “Fallout 3”'s dreary diatribe against humanity's predisposition towards total annihilation. What utter nonsense—war has changed fundamentally, from tribe against tribe with rocks and arrows to state against state with machine guns and artillery to bloc against bloc with nuclear missiles. The Neanderthals and homo sapiens could never have imagined 200,000 people could be incinerated in an instant, merely at the behest of a man sitting in an excellent suit behind a fine desk 10,000 miles away. 

 The perspective and scale of war has changed tremendously, and while it is perversely comforting to shrug and say that boys will be boys with a coy smile while exactly such a Rwandan boy hacks another apart with a machete, people too have changed to cope with ever improving scale of warfare we have unleashed time and time again in effusive fits of spastic slaying.  

 From Maxim's World War I killing fields to the systematic, expertly engineered Holocaust to the completely de-mechanized but nevertheless methodical extermination of Rwandan Tutsis, in the aftermath of war people have invariably tried to make sense of the devastation. Past atrocities inspired great artists and works of art—today, as Jack Daglish said in “Hotel Rwanda,” “I think if people see this...they'll say, 'oh my God that's horrible,' and then go on eating their dinners.”

 Today, fine art that expresses real anguish and dread is for the sole perusal of snobbish “New York Times” art critics, who are relegated to irrelevance in the public eye while the Hoi Polloi subscribes to the mass media for endlessly regurgitated opinions about why people hurt each other.

 But “we can all talk about war in the abstract, and about how it advances or distorts American interests, but we only occasionally get to see the faces and hear the voices of the people who actually do the fighting,” and Rod Slemmons' words are the crux of why video games are the newest, most important medium for coping with war.

 Game developers have an obsession with war—one that easily exceeds Hollywood's, at least proportionally—if not because they seek to understand it, at least because their consumer base is equally obsessed. Until recently, the most popular video games used war as a colorful plastic backdrop for the player's egomaniacal rampage under the guise of an overpowered immortal one-of-a-kind supersoldier. The war of games like the “Halo” series is consequence-free and painted in black and white; its only purpose is to provide targets. This attitude stretches back to the days of “Doom,” “Quake,” and “Enemy Territory;” being the only good guy made it easy to figure out who to shoot, and any background these war games had was peripheral—seasoning to give the slaughter some semblance of a point. At least 1999's “Unreal Tournament” accepted that there was no method to its madness—its strange and unfocused story of a bloodsport tournament pokes fun at itself and other games that use violence as a blank-slated justification for play.

 The earliest games were constrained by a reliance on pure text to situate the gamer within a convincing world, and storytelling was of the utmost importance. Even when games began to utilize graphics and sound, they were primitive—there were no realistic facial expressions or intonation—and so when a game explored a theme, it was largely a textual and plot-driven exploration. As the resources available to developers grew, they nevertheless remained limited, and developers therefore had to make a choice between storytelling and gameplay.

 The original 1997 iteration of the post-apocalyptic adventure “Fallout,” now just another cult classic with loads of critical acclaim and a weird sense of humor, is draped with a palpable sense of loneliness in the wake of war that broke through the barrier of simplistic graphics. And while parts of it are fun, the pacing is slow and the action staggers. Gamers flocked to “Fallout” for the story and to “Unreal Tournament” for the explosions.

 Perhaps the first game to be universally lauded for successfully combining excellent storytelling and engaging gameplay is “Deus Ex,” from 2000. As the video game industry began to see the light of legitimacy and the rewards of exponential advances in technology, vast resources became available to game developers. They could now express ideas through characters that were more human-like than ever before, and could speak to the player through the sights and sounds of the world instead of a text box reading “it is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”

 But instead of following “Deus Ex”'s example, the most popular video games of the early 2000's were the likes of the “Halo” and “Command & Conquer” series, which exploited a backdrop of war for the immediate justification to shoulder an assault rifle without exploring war through their highly detailed and expressive—if scripted—characters.  

 “Half-Life 2” may have been the greatest exception, and it won much deserved recognition for its emulation of “Deus Ex”'s equal focus on storytelling and gameplay, as well as using a well-crafted physics engine to immerse the player. However, the real triumph of “Half-Life 2” was combining all of its innovative elements into understated instances that defined the world and conveyed a message.

 When Gordon Freeman, the protagonist, first steps off of a train into the oppressive autocratic fiefdom of Doctor Breen's City 17, his—and the player's—very first impression of the city is a robotic scanner that curiously floats towards his unfamiliar face and snaps a picture of him with a brilliant flash. The feeling of being constantly monitored and controlled is compounded by myriad security cameras and gas-masked police as the player wanders outside into the twisted world he will have to fight against.  

 His world will come to be defined by war, but as a means to an end—the quest for freedom that is the real justification for Freeman's actions. By placing control over Freeman's fate in the face of these complex themes, the game ties the player into its story through the gameplay.

 Games like “Half-Life 2” or “Deus Ex” are not the norm, which is why they receive such high marks in the critical sphere. But games like these are becoming less exceptional as each generation of best-selling games takes greater advantage of the opportunities for amazing storytelling and gameplay that the medium offers.

 The most direct input to the player is the character or characters that the player controls, and games of late—instead of relinquishing their reliance on war as a foundation—have put more effort into using those characters as a lens through which a player can get a better sense of the war that defines the game's world. Games with a first-person perspective that place the player inside of the character's head have seen the best use of this synthesis between story and gameplay, character and player, though some real-time strategy games, like “Company of Heroes,” have made an effort in their cutscenes.

 The fast track to making a character accessible to the player instead of just a puppet that responds to button presses is scaling the character down from superhero level to just another soldier. “Call of Duty 4,” the 2007 competitor for the affections of the “Halo”-obsessed gaming populace, places the player in the combat boots of a U.S. Marine and a British special forces soldier instead of a genetically-modified, armor-clad, supersoldier of earthshatteringly awesome proportions. Even the next expansion to the “Halo” franchise, the upcoming “Halo 3: ODST,” features the player as an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, i.e. one of those guys that never survives the first 30 seconds of the mission in any other “Halo” game.

 If game developers continue to rise out of their shamelessly exploitative slump and instead express war's insidious, universal impact through every avenue—storytelling, gameplay, characters and the world they inhabit—they will be well on their way to making better games that could hold an important message or even the potential to fully legitimize the gaming medium. With bigger budgets and better technology than ever, games now pay the greatest attention to detail and realism; but they must also treat war realistically.