I have played a lot of war themed games. I want to make them distinct from simply violent or aggressive games, like GTA or Skyrim, a lot of the things I'm going to say will be applicable in some senses to them, but tonight I'm thinking about war.
Of course war is a terrible thing. Obviously there is a staggering amount of human suffering. Naturally it is not something one should want to live through. Yet delusional or not it is somehow simulations of it (in all media) remain ever popular.
It's not odd in itself; war, especially The War is not very far in the public conciousness, partially because it is constantly revisited in film, game and book. It also has a strong moral resonance; the NAZIs presented posterity with the perfect villains - Cold, distant, militaristic, fanatical, sexy uniforms. Even their race; chiselled cheeks, strong jaws, blonde hair, steely eyes etc. were in retrospect perfectly suited to the games and films of the future. So on one side countless ranks of faceless, helmet-wearing, freedom-crushing supermen, marching over Europe to the music of Wagner, and on the other the multi-ethnic, khaki-clad, larger-than-life, every-man army of the USA (with the perfunctory daring and dashing Parisian Partisan, the obligatory moustachioed, Eaton-accented, tea-drinking Britisher to make up the numbers); a match made in moralist heaven.
What is odd is the self-concious selling of that ideal, while unflinchingly portraying the cruel and brutal realities of probably the most cataclysmic six years in history. And what is odder is that after all that gritty realism of huddled bodies frozen in the basements of Stalingrad, gutted in the villages of France, bombed in Bastogne, drowned in the Atlantic, suicidal under Berlin, the final message somehow always remains 'War is Cool', or at least 'War makes a Smashing Film'. One ends the film or more likely ends the mission not really thinking of the millions of deaths that the narrative they have just witnessed is surrounded by and riddled with, but rather how good this or that actor was, or how their tactics could be improved, or how bloody long it took to storm that hill.
Abandoning all pretext and turning to games exclusively; I recently bought Company of Heroes 2. The second instalment in a super-realistic World War II RTS. The first title, which won awards, focussed on the D-Day landings and the liberation of Northern Fance, first by the Americans and then by the British. As I said above the plot is straight forward; Allies arrive, they fight hard, lose friends, kill Krauts/Huns and those that survive tell their stories with pride that they fought in a Company of Heroes.
There was an expansion that introduced a rather shorter German plot with two Prussian brothers leading the defence of occupied Holland against the aborted Operation Market Garden, though this was rather flat, the main characters being filled mostly with wistful melancholy about the war that was tearing their country apart. Rather reminiscent of Mitchell and Webb's 'Are We the Baddies' sketch.
The sequel, rather more ambitiously tackles the Eastern Front, with the player fighting through the personal story of an ill-fated officer in the Red Army from the fighting retreats of Barbarossa, the Russian winter, the Battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad, the drive Westward, the 'Liberation' of Poland (complete with dashing and daring Polish Partisans) and finally the attack on Berlin and the
infamous raising of the Red flag over the Reichstag, and the innevitable deportation that followed the victory.
A monumental period of history and a four years more soaked in blood than anywhere else - six million Jews died in the gas chambers, twenty-six million Russians died between the Volga and Berlin. To their credit the game makers of CoH do not flinch from the boundless oppression meted out by the Stalinist regime on a casual basis; the game play is punctuated by shouts from those on high that 'it doesn't matter how many die, take the objective', and the ever motivational; 'if your men freeze to death, they cannot die for the Motherland'. Nearly every cut-scene has someone (usually a person close to the protagonist) being summarily executed (usually by is direct superior) for running away, failing to take the objective, deserting their post to rescue a friend, being Polish, and finally 'crimes against the Revolution'.
But I couldn't get too caught up in the human drama of a man being dragged through the first eight chapters of 'History's Biggest Bloodbaths, Volume Seven' because between those scenes there was about an hour of game-play were, thanks to the moral grey-area of video-game death, it really doesn't matter how many of my men died. I recall the old Command and Conquer games where not only were you told the number of your men who fell under your command, but a series of screams and shrieks was played over the counter just to emphasise that it's not just a number.
I'm not gunning for a moral crusade, I'm not even against violence, death, and war as a concept - of course I avoid causing and participating in them, but to oppose something which has been a constant in human life, and life in general, from the word go seems rather futile. There are things to say about that idea, but that will come later. For now I want to make the point that even when directing a battle, even when watching the most tear-jerking war film (for the record: the German film Stalingrad) one never really sees war, or understands war.
In films and in games war is a plot device and a setting, a way of developing characters and having high octane action sequences. It follows the story, it does what it is supposed to, and it ends, for better and worse. In real life war doesn't follow a story; living through a war, not even in a battle, just in the war, is not and cannot really be glorious. Valour in Combat and Martial ability are virtues invented to justify killing ones neighbour and taking their stuff. Day do day as food runs out and the only soldiers you see have missing limbs, hour by hour when the sounds of gunfire and the smoke of burning towns gets closer, or minute by minute while being raped by the vengeful enemy that killed your husband, brother and son. That is not glorious. Dying in a trench is not glorious, dying on a beach is not glorious, dying for an idea is not glorious.
