Romance of War

There once was a time when war was something alluring, awe inspiring, enticing. It brought pleasure to gods, it brought glory to nations, and made boys into men. War was, to mankind, something beautiful, poetic, and powerful, but the idea of glorious combat started to die off in time.

War turned into horror in the 19th-20th century. Conflicts became global endeavors, and troops were sent further and further away from home to fight in alien dwellings. With more sophisticated capabilities, mankind created new weapons: tanks, machine guns, ,mustard gas, fighter planes, battleships, attack choppers, missiles, napalm, atomic bombs.

War stopped being a matter warriors clashing blades to defend dominions and became a world wide, expensive, excruciatingly efficient, killing contraption that is far too much of a worry than it’s worth.

Gradually, our planet became interconnected, as affordable and convenient means of communication and transportation became common place. International communities were formed allowing for things like trading and negotiating to be the most viable and effective ways of nations obtaining resources. Since before the stone age, it was often simpler to just kill people and take the stuff they had, than to try and bargain for that stuff.

War, for a while became something revolting, to most… and then video games happened.

Now this isn’t about “how games make us violent” or another Diatribe on Modern ,Patriot FPS, this piece is ,(ironically) about the true glory of war.

Now yes, I know what I said in the beginning about the gases and the bombs ,and YES I know: 

War Is Bad

,but one can’t deny that there was a reason humanity was so enamored with the concept of conflict for such a long time, something beyond the resources, something primal. We humans love to overcome, love to dominate, love to fight. This isn’t even a malevolent desire, it’s a lust to conquer challenges, puzzles, obstacles, and odds, and war provides such hurdles in surplus.

Tacticians try to anticipate, and counter the efforts of their enemy equivalents, soldiers have to out man, out play, and out gun their opposition, politicians try to out encourage and out propagate against their enemy counterparts, and civilians are encouraged to work harder ,in an effort out preform the economic and industrial efforts of civilians in enemy nations.

War is, at its base, people trying to win a game against there enemy equivalents with very real consequences on the line. The reason war lost its romance is because, in an interconnected, empathetic, less barbaric world people had to start focusing less on the game and more the consequences that arise from it. In video games, however, there are no consequences.

When you kill a soldier in a game you are not removing an individual that was birthed and raised with an entirely unique set of emotions, ideologies and philosophies. When you kill someone in a game you don’t end a real life, or kill someone’s father, mother, son, daughter, etc , etc, you are only racking in points.

I really want to emphasis this idea because I’m inclined to believe that once the real life human suffering is out of the equation, war is something fun. The hundreds of pirates and mercenaries that you slaughter in FarCry are unconvincing, expendable, and very, very common. The infected you mow down in Left 4 Dead aren’t real humans suffering from a real disease, they are easy to kill cannon fodder at best, and an annoyance at worst. That Russian soldier with the red text over his head isn’t real Russian infantry, he’s actually an electronic puppet being controlled by a Danish man that has , for some reason a very high pitched voice, which makes killing his character hilarious when he screeches in frustration over the microphone.

There’s a satisfaction in killing AI specifically designed to be killed, but there’s a true joy that comes from killing other players. The last stand of the 300 hundred wouldn’t be so memorable if the Spartans were fighting, I dunno, bears, because most people would know that killing an army of animals wouldn’t be much of a fair fight. Mowing your way through a bunch of computer controlled adversaries isn’t as memorable as slaughtering human controlled enemies, because computer characters (currently) lack the complex, adaptive decision making capabilities that humans have.

This is why (some) games make war fun. Games take everything about war: the tactics, the violence, the heroics, and the defeating of other humans, and omits the real life death and suffering.

Team Fortress 2, at it’s base is a game that is the living embodiment of classic American war propaganda posters, from it’s look to it’s themes, to it’s feel. Team Fortress 2, or TF2’s art style was designed after the artistic stylings of early impressionists like Harvey Dunn, Norman Rockwell, Dean Cornwell ,and J.C Leyendecker. Impressionism, with it’s emotive, and evocative feel, made it a perfect fit for propaganda. it’s no wonder that the most iconic pieces of propaganda are in this impressionist style.

TF2, like that propaganda shows the exhilaration, and might of conflict, (granted in a heavily comic, and parodied form) without the economic, social, moral ,and emotional aftermath of conflict. But unlike propaganda, TF2 isn’t any call to real violence, or glorification of real war.

TF2 tries to encapsulate of the thrill of battle that those impressionist posters set out to advertise. TF2, itself is a propaganda poster that doesn’t really propagate, but instead indulges in the content of the poster.

Does that makes sense?

Another game I think that has a great “war feel” is the original Ace of Spades, the one before the ,awful Jagex reboot on Steam. Ace of Spades is an online, pvp (player vs player), multiplayer, first person shooter that revolves around three elements: digging, building, and shooting. The game world is comprised entirely of blocks (yes like Minecraft) that the player could destroy using a shovel or their main weapons: a frag grenade, that created a considerable explosion that launches shrapnel everywhere, and a single gun: A long range rifle, a medium range machine gun, or a close range shotgun.

Largely every match in the original ace of spades was a game of capture the flag ,and to win the game you had to, of course capture the enemy’s flag (briefcase), by taking it and returning it to your team’s base, while simultaneously trying to stop the enemy team from doing the same.

Ace of Spades, or AoS had very simple mechanics, and a very basic aesthetics, but from it’s simplicity it had allot of possibility space. Players were free to go anywhere within the boundaries of the large map and were free to do anything with the tools at there disposal. Battlefields were playgrounds, sandboxes that allowed every individual player the opportunity to play any combat role they wanted.

You could dig under an enemy advance, resurface behind enemy lines ,and blast away at there backs with a shotgun. You could volunteer to camp in your spawn, letting your teammates go on the offensive, and build a nice fort that will be sure to thwart any enemy’s attempt at an easy capture, so long as you and other players can fend them off.

You could dig a snipers nest in the face of a cliff that, if made well enough wouldn’t draw any suspicion, leaving you free to snipe enemies at your leisure using the rifle (like a blocky version of Vasily Zaytsev), Until you die from either an enemy player digging a tunnel into your nest and killing you, or an enemy player counter-sniping you fair and square.

AoS had a great “War feel” because it allowed players the ability to experience the many different combat roles you’d see in a war, without being bound to that specific role, like Team Fortress, or the aforementioned new Ace of Spades that divides the available experiences with seprate playable classes. AoS allows you to look at the battle from a different perspective and role any time you liked.

Games that have a very strong  “glory war” feel have always resonated with me. They’re full of the organic excitement, sorrow, and drama that other, big budget war games try, and fail to grasp.

Real life, for really real war is, again NOT GOOD. No matter what any ignorant, hyper confrontational mouth breathing drone, or hollow ghoul of a politician says, WAR IS NOT GOOD. Even if none of our troops have to set foot on foreign soil to fight. Even if every battle was fought with bombing drones, WAR IS BAD. There’s no real justification for the storm of psychological trauma, death, rape, torture, and destruction that real life war brings.

When I say that “WAR FEEL IS GOOD” I’m saying that the raw un-muddled experience of fighting against odds is good. Video games allow us humans of the modern age a chance to take out the hard parts of war and find what our ancestors found so enticing.