In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell introduced us to a profusion of concepts that are especially relavant in today’s culture. Terms like Big Brother, thoughtcrime, doublethink, and Room 101 have all spread through modern society, but there is one line that resonates strongly in the world of video games: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”
In the novel, it’s a prime example of doublethink, where people can simultaneously agree with two contradicting points of view. While doublethink is all over video game punditry in a thousand different forms, it’s this last part that I feel needs to be focused on. “Ignorance is strength” is the idea that the masses can live in blissful and perpetual incomprehension of the truth, and somehow gain a sense of power from this.
“War. War never changes.
The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.
But war never changes.”
– Fallout (1997)
I think we can all agree that in video games, it all starts with the Nazis. Inspired by the Muse Software games Castle WolfensteinBeyond Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992 and is now widely considered to be the grandfather of the first-person shooter. The game follows William “BJ” Blazkowicz as he attempts to escape from the titular castle after his capture by the Schutzstaffel (SS). However, all that is seen by the player is a floating gun as they run through stages, taking down Nazi enemies before engaging in a showdown with Adolf Hitler, who is armed with a robotic suit and four chainguns. Not only does Wolfenstein 3D establish the run-and-gun archetype that many games still use today, it also set up the running theme of using Nazis as the bad guys in video games. Indiana Jones did it earlier, but Wolfenstein put it on your computer monitor.
“Mein leben!” [“My life!”]
– Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
I mean, you can’t really blame them. The Nazis symbolised everything that people fear: racism, funny accents, snappy outfits, crazy good organisational skills, and stupid catchphrases. Nazis also serve a great narrative purpose – doing all the murdering until the heroic English and/or Americans turn up and nip it in the bud. If you want to sell games in the West, that is one way to do it. Next came Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942, Hidden And Dangerous, Company of Heroes, Brothers In Arms, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, Hour of Victory, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, The Saboteur, Red Orchestra, Velvet Assassin, and, of course, Call of Duty. The fascist buggers are still causing trouble even to this day in recently released Sniper Elite III. By 2014, killing Nazis in video games has pretty much become a sport. The great thing about the Nazis is that, as an organisation, they committed genocide, which makes them undeniably evil. You can kill as many Nazis as you please and no one will look down on you. It’s very easy to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. That’s a lesson that we brought forward into other types of first-person shooters; however, nowadays, the lines of morality are a lot blurrier.
“All warfare is based on deception. For years, the West’s hypocrisy has made the world a battlefield. The corrupt talk, while our brothers and sons spill their blood. But the deceit cuts both ways. The bigger the lie, the more likely people will believe it. And when a nation cries for vengeance, the lie spreads like wildfire. The fire builds, devouring everything in its path.”
– Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
Then, on September 11, 2001, the world changed again. Between 8:46 AM and 10:28 AM, four coordinated attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda hit New York City and Washington D.C., killing 3,000 people and causing ten billion dollars worth of damage to property and infrastructure. However, the longer-lasting effects were much worse. In the following months and years, the United States, and its allies, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. A new “universal enemy” was identified: Terrorists, specifically those of Middle Eastern descent. Going from the fields of France, Belgium, and Russia to the deserts, villages, and destroyed cities of the Middle East was, at the time, an interesting change of pace. Some of the names we already knew came back to treat us to more senseless murder of the ultimate evil. Medal of Honor – both Frontline and Warfighter, Battlefield (including two installments of the Bad Company spinoff series, then 3 and 4 in the main series), Operation Flashpoint, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, Tom Clancy’s EndWar, America’s Army, and, once again, Call of Duty. Like I said, it is important to know who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are, but this time it’s not as easily discernible. Sure, it could be that guy wearing a headscarf and sporting a beard. Or it could be just a kid who is really confused about why all these white people invaded his village. A kid who is angry at the fact that his brother was killed in that bombing last week. Nevermind that, though – he is just another faceless terrorist who has to die.
“It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It’s an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines. War, and its consumption of life, has become a well-oiled machine. Genetic control. Information control. Emotion control. Battlefield control. Everything is monitored, and kept under control. The age of deterrence has become the age of control. All in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction. And he who controls the battlefield, controls history.”
– Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots (2008)
Video games, like most mass market entertainment, paints evil with a broad brushstroke. Now, in 2014, those lines are blurrier still. Now begins the wave of the evil corporation. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google store your entire life on servers behind military-grade security. Comcast and Time Warner are merging to create a monopoly on your Internet access, determining who is allowed some Internet and who isn’t. Twitter owns your off-the-cuff reactions, deepest thoughts, and terrible jokes. Surely it can’t be long until Google tries to secede from the union and amass an army of hipster soldiers, complete with Google+ accounts. And I’m 90% sure Richard Branson wants to use Virgin Galactic to make most of Mars his new tennis court.
Naturally, video games have grown to reflect this. Even as far back as 2008, Metal Gear Solid 4 brought forth the idea that a war was no longer waged between countries but between private military companies. Games like the Splinter Cell trilogy, Ghost Recon, Apache: Air Assault, and, of course, Call of Duty, all hint at the concept of the PMC. There was even an on-rails shooter for the Xbox 360 called Blackwater, which casts the player as a fictional unit of the titular company, a private military corporation that in real life came under heavy scrutiny for tactics employed in the Middle East, being accused of war crimes such as murdering non-combatants. Blackwater has since undergone two name changes; first to Xe Services, and then to Academi. In the end, what’s great about all of these war video games is that they let you experience how awesome it is to endlessly murder pure evil in its corporeal form. It makes us feel good. Like we, behind the controller, are the good guys. Except that’s wrong. With the Nazis, it was easy to know who the bad guys were. But these days that distinction is not so easy. What modern war video games do so well is present the morally ambiguous horrors of war with a delicate, and deft, touch. (I’m joking, of course.)
“When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics.”
– Josef Stalin (1943)
You could say that games belittle the memory of wars past, that they take advantage of our men and women in uniform, that they trivialise what our veterans went through. You could say that video games have made 1940s German and modern Middle Eastern men caricatures of the immoral. But video games don’t. They just portray the exact types of war we want to play: simple and easily definable. Games are only indifferent to the act of war because people are. The mainstream media will try and tell the world that video games have desensitised the game-playing population to the realities of war. On the contrary: video games serve as a reminder to how the world sees war; they are proof that the mainstream news cycle is sadly apathetic to those realities and that games are simply a reflection. But who are we to care? We are desensitised and taught not to worry. Thus, this article hath gone full circle. We live in the world that Orwell predicted. It’s a sad incomprehension of the facts, but, wait a minute, is that an M16? Time for some shooty-shooty bang-bang.
