Fighting on a virtual battlefield

Should we be worried about “war games”?

In my fourth and final installment in the “Colin blogs about war” series, I want to take on the portrayal of warfare in video and computer games.  While this is especially interesting to me as a gamer, it’s also more important than you might think: the latest “war game” to be released, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, boasted the biggest launch in the history of entertainment, raking in $550 million in the first few days of sales.  The game’s producer reported that gamers spent over 5.2 million hours on MW2’s multiplayer platform during its first day.

Needless to say, lots of people are shooting lots of virtual people on LCD screens.  This particular genre (first-person shooters, or FPS) is not without controversy, however.  While games have featured often gruesome amounts of violence since their inception (along with movies, books, and most other forms of entertainment), some new developments have made the intersection of games and battle a bit more complicated.

To begin with, games are now depicting real-life conflicts.  In 2003, Command & Conquer: Generals allowed gamers to play as the freedom loving Americans, Jihad-driven Arabs, or Empire-hungry Chinese.  Playing as the “terrorist” sect, or “Global Liberation Army” as they are called in the game, allowed users to utilize suicide bombers, truck bombs, and biological attacks.

Konami recently cancelled a game titled Six Days in Fallujah, which was designed to take players through actual events in Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 71 U.S. troops and over 1,600 insurgents.

The America’s Army series is probably the most problematic from an ethical standpoint.  These games pushed the envelope in two ways: the game is actually produced and funded by the U.S. Army itself, and it is marketed to players as a “realistic virtual experience” of soldiering.  But is this franchise truly designed to give insight into life as a soldier (the four roles it offers are “rifleman,” “automatic rifleman,” “grenadier,” and “marksman”), or is it really about capitalizing on the popularity of FPS gaming, and drawing a connection between virtual battle and the “real thing” for the purposes of recruiting and propaganda?

In a way, the problem with war games is not much different from the problems with attack drones or private military companies, which I covered in previous posts.  All of these new developments draw us back to ethical questions about the connection between battle and honor.  The thought here is that if we must wage war, we ought to at least fight honorably; we must do it for the right reasons and we must do it with a heavy heart.  Turning battle into a profitable exercise, or in this case, into a technical, virtual, or entertaining exercise, diminishes the gravity of the situation.

It should be said, however, that neither the sentiment or the method are entirely new.  It has always been the task of military recruiters to convince young men and women that soldiering can be fun, interesting, and rewarding.  And our appetite for simulated violence, realistic or fantastical, can’t be directly linked to actual militarism.

After all, I’ve been playing these games since I could pick up a controller, and I’m about as peacenik as they come.

-Colin

Image by jakelamotta82 used under a CC license.

Related posts:

  1. More on war games
  2. Ethics 101
  3. The drone dilemma
  4. Ivy League vs. armed forces
  5. Missing what’s in front of you

November 23, 2009 · Filed Under Colin, War

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One Response to “Fighting on a virtual battlefield”

  1. More on war games : The Public Philosopher on November 30th, 2009 11:12 am

    [...] week I wrote about the depiction of war in video games and suggested that the line between virtual and actual [...]

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