You’re running out of options. To the right, there’s a house where one of your friends is lying injured; he is just visible in the shadows created by the harsh sun streaming through an empty window frame. To the left is a small shack you know holds two, maybe three heavily armed enemy insurgents. The shattered doorway in front of you is your only way out, and you only have two bullets. Two chances, to save yourself, and your friend. The adrenaline is off the charts.
Though most people have mercifully never been on a battlefield or even held, let alone fired, a gun, war-themed videogames like Call of Duty, Halo and Sniper Elite have put millions around the world into virtual conflicts.
These games have been a part of the cultural mainstay for decades now, encouraging players to take up arms and defeat an ever-changing roster of bad guys, from Cold War-era Russians to space invaders. And they’re hugely lucrative – the Call of Duty franchise alone has made more than $30 billion since it launched in 2003.
But why do so many actively enjoy stories of war? It’s a question that the Imperial War Museum is attempting to answer in its forthcoming exhibition, War Games, which aims to explore the convoluted, and often complicated, relationship that this virtual sphere has with its real-life counterpart. Rather than being about spotty teens salivating over the latest battle simulator, according to psychologist Pete Etchells, these games are surprisingly complex – and surprisingly effective in helping us to process conflict.
“They’re very important stories to tell,” Etchells says. “They tend to be very emotionally relevant; they resonate with us. They’re often about loss; about dealing with how we might cope with extremely significant societal upheaval and things like that. And people are interested in those sorts of stories.”
The idea of gaming being something only teenage boys enjoy is no longer relevant, if it ever was – Etchells, who has written several books on the subject, dismisses the cliche as a result of “poor marketing decisions” made in the mid-Nineties. Today, rather than being a niche pursuit, gaming is a massive industry, expected to earn £10bn in the UK alone this year.
Action and war games form a significant part of that industry, and, as the IWM exhibition aims to show, they’ve been around for a long time and have always had a closer-than-expected relationship to developments in real-life warfare.
In the early 1900s, Edwardian revellers could play games that allowed them to “shoot” lions on a paper backdrop savannah. This very nascent technology took a quantum leap forward as the world entered the Cold War and scientists started racing to develop high-grade weapons systems. William Higginbotham, a scientist who worked on the atomic bomb, developed a very early version of Pong using technology originally designed to predict the path of ballistic missiles; a decade later, Asaki was powering its video game consoles with chips designed for US military simulators.
The intertwining doesn’t end there. “Gaming is the most familiar technology, the most widely available technology that soldiers understand instinctively, so it will find its way into weapons systems,” the exhibition’s curator Ian Kikuchi says. Battlefield simulators such as Virtual Battlespace Four, which visitors will get the chance to see at the exhibition, have been in use in militaries across the world for years; today, the US military uses Xbox consoles to operate its drones.
It’s more complicated, however, than a simple cross-pollination of technology. According to Kikuchi, the wider appeal of war games actually lies in the fact that they offer a safe space in which to experience the unimaginable – and have even been used by soldiers suffering from PTSD as a means to distract and distance themselves from the realities of warfare.
“They allow us this sort of space to experience things that we wouldn’t want to experience in reality,” but about which we are curious, Etchells explains, praising the “sense of agency” that video games give their players. Instead of passively watching video games, players become an “active agent” who drives the story forward.
As a result, players become more immersed in both the game and the feelings of its characters. This makes games such as Six Days in Fallujah – which follows the real-life stories of civilians and soldiers in Fallujah narrated by the people who experienced them – all the more emotionally powerful.
“That’s quite a powerful thing to allow people to do, especially in terms of a war story,” Etchells says. “You’re not going to have the full intensity of emotion or experience of an actual war… but you get a kind of a facsimile of it. And what that allows you to do is try and relate to people; try and relate to the situation; reflect on your own moral code.”
Indeed, far from encouraging players to enact their most violent desires (as many newspaper headlines over the years have fretted), war games allow players to operate within a “fairly clear moral universe” in which the good guys always win and the villains almost always end up dead.
“If you’re an Allied soldier, and you understand yourself to be situated within the Second World War, you know what side you’re on, and you know that the Nazis are the enemy,” Kikuchi says. “Therefore shooting them is entirely in keeping with the moral context in which you find yourself as a player.
“It’s telling that in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, its environments are often devoid of civilians, so the game doesn’t just give you the option or opportunity to shoot civilians or do anything else that might be considered conventionally immoral.”
Comforting as that is, modern war games are not all about the action. More recently, they have started to explore another aspect of conflict: the lives of the civilians it affects, and the murkier moral questions that raises for players.
Games like Bury Me, My Love (in which players take on the role of Majd, a Syrian man advising his wife Nour via messaging apps as she flees to Europe; this game boasts a daunting 30 possible endings) and This War Of Mine have set the precedent for thoughtful games that examine the wider emotional trauma of war.
This War of Mine, which also features prominently in the exhibition, is based on the siege of Sarajevo and casts the player as a civilian trying to survive in a fictional besieged city wracked by fighting.
It’s a dark premise – and indeed, Konrad Adamczewski, who works for the game’s Warsaw-based developer 11-bit Studios, says that for some of the team, the experience was so “morally exhausting” that they refused to make a sequel.
However, he’s adamant that This War of Mine was a success (not hard to argue – it reportedly made its development costs back two days after going on sale) – and that the hard work the developers put into making the game as realistic and nuanced as possible paid off.
“The game isn’t judging the player’s decision at any time,” he says. “You won’t read the message saying what was wrong and what was right, which results in the possibility of the players feeling remorse about the things they’ve done.” Critics praised the game’s “earnest human touch” and it was even added to recommended reading lists in Polish high schools – the first videogame to be included in such a list anywhere in the world.
Adamczewski also notes the impact that the game has had on some of its players, including one girl from Ukraine, who wrote to the developers from a real-life bomb shelter, having played it in peacetime – and now uses it as a manual of sorts for what to expect.
“She knows what to expect, and sometimes she still thinks that she’s still in the game,” Adamczewski says, adding that this sense of distance from reality helps her to “not lose hope.”
For Kikuchi, games – and the way they overlap with both new and old conflicts – like these are a valuable way in which we can come to terms with our “contemporary anxieties” about war, imposing order on chaos and exploring potentially thorny subjects in a safe space.
“The medium has matured,” Kikuchi says. “With a game like This War of Mine, just to focus on civilian survival and not on super-soldier heroics is incredibly subversive, because we’re so used to being the powerful one – the commander; the soldier; the pilot; the hero character. To actually find yourself in a situation where you’re just struggling to survive turns some norms on their heads.”
As the indie game sector grows, and developers who cut their teeth playing Call of Duty as children start working on new games in turn, it seems that the war game sector is only going to get larger and more diverse.
“There’s a growing appetite for more,” Etchells agrees. “Having a multiplicity of voices and therefore perspectives, you’ll definitely see more of that over the coming years. And I think that’s only a good thing.”
