http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12military-t.html
By CHRIS SUELLENTROP
September 8, 2010
Unless you regard something like "Iron Man" as a film about
Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America's contemporary wars have
consistently been box-office flops. Even "The Hurt Locker" grossed
only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current
conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters during the past
three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions
of America's current wars. Last year's best-selling game was Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which opens in Afghanistan; it was a sequel
to a multimillion-selling 2007 game that features an American
invasion of a nameless Middle Eastern country. Modern Warfare 2 has
made "Avatar"-like profits for its studio, Activision. On the day the
game was published in November, it sold nearly five million copies in
North America and Britain, racking up $310 million in sales in 24
hours. By January of this year, the game's worldwide sales added up
to $1 billion.
For years, earlier installments of the Call of Duty franchise and
other military shooters the video-game industry's term for these
games about warfare were, like cable-TV miniseries produced by Tom
Hanks, always about World War II. But the Modern Warfare series has
demonstrated that players have an appetite for games that purport to
connect them to the wars their college roommates, or their sons,
might be fighting in. Both Modern Warfare games are set in a mythical
near-future, but the weapons Predator drones, AC-130 gunships,
nukes clearly conjure Afghanistan and Iraq, as do the games' good
guys (Americans, British) and bad guys (terrorists). The appeal of
this quasi-fictional setting is one reason that Modern Warfare 2 now
sits alongside titles from more-famous franchises like Grand Theft
Auto and Super Mario on the lists of the top-selling video games ever made.
No doubt as a result, in June, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo,
the video-game industry's annual trade show in Los Angeles, it
sometimes seemed as if every studio was introducing a game about a
war against an enemy who might conceivably be regarded as part of the
Axis of Evil. In one game scheduled for release next year, the North
Koreans will mount a land invasion of the United States. In another,
American troops are sent into an improbably menacing Dubai.
Beyond their settings, what these future-war games have in common
with the Modern Warfare series is a refusal to forthrightly
acknowledge the inspiration for their subject matter. Video-game
designers and players like to brag about how "realistic" the games
are, but when gamers talk about verisimilitude, they're usually
talking about graphical fidelity, about how lifelike the characters
and environments are in an otherwise fantastical world and not
about how the medium reflects anything else about the actual world in
which we live.
The one war game at the expo that acknowledged the
ripped-from-the-headlines nature of its setting was Medal of Honor,
the latest iteration of a game franchise created in 1999 by Steven
Spielberg, in the wake of "Saving Private Ryan," as a World War II
game for Dreamworks Interactive. The new game (the 11th in the series
for PCs or consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox) will be published
in October by Electronic Arts. With it, Medal of Honor is following
the path trod by Call of Duty, "rebooting" a popular World War II
series by situating a game in something that resembles the present
day. Unlike its rival, however, Medal of Honor is not anticipating
the very near future. Instead it is delving into the very recent
past: the game will be set in Afghanistan, in the early stages of the
American intervention there.
In a darkened room at the expo, PlayStation 3s were hooked up to
HDTVs, so that a team of players, of which I was a member, could
insert themselves into the avatars of coalition soldiers in the
Helmand Valley and do battle with Taliban fighters. On the
convention-center floor, I adopted the role of a Taliban insurgent in
the ruins of Kabul, shooting at coalition (read: American) troops in
a "Team Deathmatch" mode.
Medal of Honor does not aspire to capture the war in Afghanistan in a
documentary sense, but like other shooters, it creates a visceral
sensation of combat. In essence, it forgoes one kind of realism while
embracing another. Are video games like this mere frivolities that
dishonor the real soldiers who have fought in the wars depicted as
critics, including military families, have recently charged? Or does
their popularity indicate that they are successfully conveying an
experience of war to audiences in a way that is at least as effective
and affecting as the war stories told in literature or film?
Electronic Arts is no doubt hoping that Medal of Honor will make it a
lot of money. Video games have become astonishingly expensive to
produce the entrance fee to develop a big-budget, mainstream video
game is now north of $20 million, and Medal of Honor probably cost
significantly more than that to make. New games usually sell at
retail for just under $60, and selling even a million copies of a new
game is no longer considered an indication of success. The best
insight I received into the size of Medal of Honor's budget, during a
visit in June to Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, came when Greg
Goodrich, the game's executive producer, told me that if the game
doesn't sell at least three million copies, "I'm not going to be able
to do another one."
Medal of Honor's story begins, chronologically, just before the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an opening sequence, the
camera gamers describe the perspective you see in a game as "the
camera," even though video games are not really a lens-based medium
descends through the earth's atmosphere toward Afghanistan, passing
communications satellites that give off the sounds of Al Qaeda
"chatter" and of news broadcasts from Lower Manhattan.
From there, the game places the player in the body of a member of a
Navy Special Operations team infiltrating the Taliban-held town of
Gardez, Afghanistan. Medal of Honor later puts players behind the
eyes of an Army Special Operations soldier, as well as an Army Ranger
and an Apache helicopter gunner, as they seize Bagram air base from
the Taliban, ride all-terrain vehicles through the Shah-i-Kot Valley,
snipe Al Qaeda fighters near the mountain of Takur Ghar and more.
(The game is rated M, for Mature, the video-game equivalent of an R rating.)
In the argot of video games, Medal of Honor is a first-person
shooter, meaning that players see the action from the viewpoint of
the characters they control. The term for the genre is something of a
misnomer. Properly described, these games would be called
second-person shooters, as the protagonist in them is a broadly
identifiable You, rather than a richly drawn I, a character speaking
in his own voice. In fact, the protagonist of Medal of Honor never
talks at all.
One of the most compelling things about video games is this sense of
identification between the player and the protagonist. The best games
do not give you a sense that you are controlling someone else they
give you a sense that you are someone else. For this reason, over the
course of the 10 or 12 hours that it generally takes to complete
Medal of Honor, you never see or hear any of the four different
playable characters beyond the sight of the hands that extend from
the edges of the screen to grip the weapon that you're carrying.
"Because we don't ever want to break that immersion, that it's you,
there," Goodrich told me in June as I watched him play through one of
the game's levels.
Rich Farrelly, the game's senior creative director, sat on a couch
across from Goodrich. We were in Overlord, a room on the campus of
Electronic Arts in Los Angeles nearly all the rooms used by the
Medal of Honor development team are named after military operations.
Camouflage netting lay on a counter nearby. "That's where the fun
comes in, at least for me," Farrelly said. "I've now created this
soldier fiction for the player and put him in those boots. And now
I'm making him think like a soldier."
One of the buzzwords tossed around frequently by the Medal of Honor
team is "authenticity." The game has more than 50 actors, delivering
thousands of lines of dialogue, with foreign dialogue recorded in
Pashto, Gulf Arabic and Chechen. To create some of the animation used
in the game, Medal of Honor's computer-graphics team examined videos
from Afghanistan that are posted on sites like YouTube and LiveLeak.
"We want the player to feel, not like they're in a movie, but like
they're in Afghanistan," Waylon Brinck, the computer-graphics
supervisor for the game, told me.
The scale of the effort devoted to this can be mind-boggling. Using
more than 100 microphones, audio engineers recorded actual weapons
fire at Fort Irwin in California, in a mock Iraqi village used by the
military for training. With the Pentagon's permission, the audio team
attached microphones to Apache helicopters and recorded the sounds of
takeoffs and landings, as well as the sounds of the helicopters
firing their rounds. They even hooked microphones up to the targets
that the helicopters destroyed.
Goodrich described Medal of Honor as "historical fiction," but it
felt transgressively real when I played it. The battles are fought in
civilian-free zones, where pretty much everyone you encounter is an
enemy Taliban, Al Qaeda or Chechen and a threat to your life. Or
rather (there's that sense of identification again), your character's
life. The action is sometimes slow and methodical your character is
asked to kill four enemies instead of 40, or 400 and at other times
the body count exceeds that of a 1980s Schwarzenegger movie. I killed
a lot, and was killed, a lot.
Critics of the war in Afghanistan (and perhaps even its supporters)
will detect at least a whiff of jingoism in the game. During one of
the game's levels, as the Rangers approach the Shah-i-Kot Valley in a
helicopter, one of them describes the flight's "main course" as
"all-you-can-eat Taliban" and adds, "Hope you like foreign foods."
Within sight of the Pakistan border, a Ranger says, "We'll be going
there soon enough." At another moment, a character brags that "we're
going to make it farther than the Russians did." The game ends with a
dedication written by its consultants, who are veterans of the
Special Operations community.
There are limits to the game's aspirations to realism. I was
repeatedly told that Medal of Honor intentionally avoided the subject
of politics in favor of "telling the soldier's story." Goodrich also
told me, "I don't want to make the bummer game." Still, mistakes are
made in the game by American troops and commanders. Friendly fire
accidents happen. The intelligence agencies get things wrong. No
matter how skilled a player is, Americans will die. The general arc
of the entire game is consistent with the theme of most war video
games, which Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and an author of
several books on video games, summed up to me this way: "War is
horrible and badass."
In what may have been the first and sometimes feels like the only
time that someone suggested video games are making humanity less
violent and militaristic, a 33-year-old Stewart Brand, writing about
the video game Spacewar in Rolling Stone in 1972, opined that
"Spacewar serves Earthpeace." Invented by a band of students at
M.I.T. in 1962, Spacewar is regarded by many observers as the first
successful video game. Brand was smitten. He wrote that this new form
of digital play ("the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters") was
"heresy, uninvited and unwelcome" in a world of "passive
consumerism." Spacewar, and by logical extension the new medium of
video games, was remarkable, Brand went on, because it was "intensely
interactive in real time with the computer," because it "bonded human
and machine," because it "served human interest, not machine" and,
perhaps best of all, it was "merely delightful." (Brand also wrote
that the fact that "computers are coming to the people" was "good
news, maybe the best since psychedelics.")
In the intervening four decades, most of the rhetoric, if not the
evidence, has been on the other side of the debate. Not many of the
first observers of video games were willing to give Earthpeace a
chance. From almost the moment that arcades and consoles appeared in
America's shopping malls and living rooms, critics have charged that
video games "add to the dehumanization and objectification of human
beings," as a rabbi from the Philadelphia suburbs put it on "The
MacNeil/Lehrer Report" in 1982, a time when the country came down
with a seemingly anodyne bout of Pac-Man fever. Six years before
that, the nation had already seen what one historian of the medium
calls "the first major moral panic over the content of a video game"
when "60 Minutes" examined the controversy over 1976's Death Race, a
sort of proto-Grand Theft Auto involving rudimentarily animated cars
that drove over rudimentarily animated pedestrians. The apotheosis of
this critique could be heard years later, in 1999, when the video
game Doom was blamed, implausibly, for helping to prepare Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris to carry out the Columbine massacre.
As video games have become a more-or-less accepted form of mass
entertainment for adults, arguments like these have been heard with
less frequency and mounted with less vigor. But many people still
find something unsettling about the medium. A mini-scandal over Medal
of Honor played out in August after Karen Meredith, the mother of Ken
Ballard, an Army lieutenant killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, went on
"Fox and Friends" and said that any game based on a continuing
conflict was "disrespectful" to those whose family members have died
in the war. "Families who are burying their children are going to be
seeing this," she said. Not long after Meredith's interview with Fox
News, Britain's defense secretary, Liam Fox, called the game
"un-British" because, in its multiplayer incarnation, it will allow
players to fight as the Taliban against coalition forces. "I would
urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban
this tasteless product," he said. Earlier this month, a Defense
Department agency asked GameStop, a chain of video-game stores, not
to sell Medal of Honor on Army and Air Force bases.
Liam Fox is a member of Britain's Conservative Party; others, on the
left, have raised their own reasons to find Medal of Honor
disquieting. An editor at Mother Jones, Adam Weinstein, blogged in
August that the game is "war profiteering of the first order," and
Adam Serwer, who blogs for The American Prospect, wrote, "Realistic
war simulations have always bothered me." Serwer added, "I'm playing
video games to escape from the frustrations of the real world, I
don't want to be thrust into another, realistic existence far more
bleak than the one I'm currently living."
Many gamers, however no matter their politics subscribe to a
McLuhanesque notion that only the form, and never the content, of
this medium is of significance. Video games, in this view, are about
problem-solving and game play, the captivating, kinetic interaction
between the movements a player makes on a controller and the
simultaneous action on-screen. And it's surely true that Medal of
Honor's game play will determine whether it is a best seller or a
bust. "Whether this is set on Afghanistan or set on the moon, it
doesn't really matter," Geoff Keighley, a video-game journalist who
hosts a show on Spike TV, told me. Will Wright, the designer of games
like SimCity and The Sims, has seemed to embrace this view, saying
that games are about agency (the ability to navigate a virtual
world), not empathy (relating emotionally to the particulars of that
world). But in many ways, the main project of the past several years
among video-game developers has been to try to prove Will Wright
wrong. Maybe the agency that games allow can, in the hands of the
right storytellers, lead to empathy. Maybe the interactive nature of
video games can, when combined with narrative elements like story and
character, evoke feelings in players in a way that is unique to the medium.
After all, the video gamers who choose to play military shooters
typically take the fictional elements of these games quite seriously.
A survey conducted by Joel Penney, a doctoral student at the
University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication,
found that these gamers viewed their chosen pastime as something more
than simple escapism or problem-solving exercises with good sound
effects. The players adults mostly between ages 18 and 29 (though
some were in their 50s), largely Americans and almost all men said
playing the World War II versions of Medal of Honor or Call of Duty
made them feel empathy for their countrymen. One wrote that, after
playing the games, his "feelings have deepened in respect for those
who have died."
Greg Goodrich told me that the "holy grail" of his medium was to get
game play and fiction to interact in such a way that the fusion of
the two would affect players in ways that movies and books cannot. "I
think you have the potential to touch them in a more emotional and
engaging way because they took part in it," he said. Penney's study
suggests that military shooters, by grounding their stories in the
lived experiences of American soldiers, have had more success in this
realm than their designers are given credit for. Feeling empathy for
real soldiers fighting in foreign wars is not the same as feeling it
toward fictional characters, but without being moved by the fiction
in these games, it's hard to see how players were subsequently moved
to feel more humanely toward their fellow citizens.
At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, video
games are taken more seriously as a form of entertainment than ever
before, even by the priests of high culture. Nicholson Baker recently
wrote in The New Yorker that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 might be
"truer, realer than almost all war movies." Junot Diaz cheerfully
reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV the kind of game that once provoked a
moral panic with every sequel in The Wall Street Journal a couple
of years ago. And in The London Review of Books last year, John
Lanchester called the first Modern Warfare game, published in 2007,
"more involving" than the Hollywood movies with which it might be
compared. "The next decade or so is going to see the world of video
games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists,"
Lanchester wrote. "If the good guys win, or win enough of the time,
we're going to have a whole new art form."
But the feeling among many video-game players is that the artists
lost an important skirmish a little more than a year ago. In April
2009, the video game Six Days in Fallujah was canceled by its
Japanese publisher, Konami, in the very same month that the game's
development was announced to the public. Six Days in Fallujah had
been billed as an "interactive documentary" about the second battle
of Fallujah in 2004. In addition to working with actual Marines who
fought in Fallujah, the game's developers said they were talking to
Iraqis who lived through the battle both civilians and insurgents.
Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic Games, the North Carolina-based
studio that was developing Six Days in Fallujah for Konami before it
was canceled, told me this summer that "the heart of the controversy
that caused Konami to pull out of the project" was the combination of
"the stereotypes that are associated with the word 'game' and the
incompatibility of that with the word 'Iraq.' "
Read Omohundro, the captain of a Marine company that fought in
Fallujah, served as a consultant on the game. "It's very important to
have the enemy's perspective of what's going on," he told me. "You
have to understand the environment, and if you just see it from the
American viewpoint, that's all you know."
Six Days in Fallujah proposed adding "a layer of moral ambiguity" to
warfare that Jamin Brophy-Warren, a former Wall Street Journal
reporter who now publishes Kill Screen, a magazine about video games,
says he hasn't seen in other military shooters. Brophy-Warren says he
was "kind of blown away" by the demo for Six Days in Fallujah that he
saw last year in San Francisco during the annual Game Developers
Conference. "There's an Iraqi who picks up a gun, and you don't know
if he's an insurgent or not," he said. "Do you shoot him?"
Omohundro described the reaction from the public, especially from a
group of mothers whose sons had been killed in action in Fallujah, as
"blinded by fury." Beth Houck, the mother of David Houck, a Marine
rifleman who was killed in Fallujah in 2004, told me that her
objections to Six Days in Fallujah apply to Medal of Honor as well:
despite the genre's claims to authenticity, military shooters do not
show the toll the wars have taken on the homefront. "They don't show
the heartache of family members who are left without a spouse, or a
father, or a child who does not return," she said.
Omohundro says he is disappointed the game was never completed. A
video game, he suggested, can portray combat in a way that is
impossible to achieve in another medium. "In a movie, you don't get
the opportunity to make decisions that have consequences," he said.
"You simply watch what's on the screen that's in front of you."
The Marines that Six Days in Fallujah planned to portray would have
been based on real people who fought in a real battle. The soldiers
in Medal of Honor, on the other hand, are fictional characters. But
some of them are inspired by the careers of real service members, men
now working as consultants to the game who have experience in Special
Operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. On Father's Day, I met with
three of them for brunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey,
Calif. They did not tell me their names and instead asked to be known
by the handles Coop, Dusty and Vandal by which they are known
inside Electronic Arts. They said they have done "extensive work in
the two main theaters, and theaters outside of those as well," as
Vandal put it. Greg Bishop, a retired lieutenant colonel who worked
with the Medal of Honor team for two years as the Army's liaison to
the entertainment industry, told me later that the men represented
themselves accurately. Vandal and Coop said they came from a
background in naval special warfare meaning the most elite Seals
and Dusty is a former member of the Army Special Operations unit
commonly known as Delta Force.
None of the three men would discuss their current work, but a Central
Intelligence Agency contractor with the handle of Dusty is mentioned
in the book "Jawbreaker," by the former C.I.A. field commander Gary
Berntsen, as a participant in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. They did
not sport beards or balaclavas and wore sunglasses only because we
were sitting outside. They all wore taut T-shirts and jeans or
khakis. Dusty brought his wife. They addressed one another openly by
their first names.
The day before, Dusty sat for an interview for a promotional Web
video for the game. In a nasal Georgia accent that was obscured,
along with his face, when snippets of the interview were posted on
the Medal of Honor site, Dusty talked about riding in a pickup truck
from Jalalabad into the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001. He
stood on a ridge only about 3,600 feet from an Al Qaeda camp. He
watched planes drop 675,000 pounds of bombs on the camp over the
course of 72 hours.
But even a man who may have come painfully close to killing Bin Laden
feels the need to look cool for a teenage child. "The reason it was
important for me to be involved in the game was so I could impress my
19-year-old son," Dusty said. "He was like: 'You? They asked you? For
your advice, Dad?' " More important, Dusty went on to say, "I want
people to come away with an honest feeling of what it's like to be
out there, doing some of that stuff."
At the Ritz-Carlton, Coop, Dusty and Vandal acknowledged that one of
the things they asked the Medal of Honor developers to do was to make
the game less realistic than its creators initially envisioned. In a
document called "Faceless" that the consultants wrote and circulated
to the Medal of Honor team when they first joined the project, the
men explained that their cooperation was dependent on maintaining
their community's reputation as silent professionals. "People want to
know who these men are," they wrote. "With MOH" everyone at E.A.
calls Medal of Honor "MOH," pronounced like the Stooge or the
bartender from "The Simpsons" "they are going to get a little slice
of that. However, a little slice is all they should get." At the
men's behest, Medal of Honor refers to these elite members of the
Special Operations community merely as "Tier One."
"They're selling authenticity and realism," said Coop, a thick man
with a Boston accent; he looks not unlike one of the muscled space
marines in Gears of War, a popular sci-fi video game. "We wanted to
help bring that to the table," he said. "But we also wanted to make
sure it didn't go too far."
Last summer, Goodrich showed the men storyboards for a game, with the
title Medal of Honor: Anaconda, that would be something like a "Black
Hawk Down" for Afghanistan: it would be based on the disastrous 2002
operation known as Anaconda, including the battle of Takur Ghar, in
which Neil Roberts, a Navy Seal, fell out of a helicopter and was
dragged away to his death by Al Qaeda fighters. The game "resembled
very closely events overseas that involved friends of ours that had
been killed," Coop said. "We thought it hit a little too close to
home" and would "put a sour taste in our brothers' mouths."
That night, Goodrich told the men at dinner that he would excise the
scene with Neil Roberts from the game and change the game into a work
of historical fiction rather than a sort of docudrama. In Medal of
Honor, when a helicopter is hit over the mountain of Takur Ghar, the
men on board leap out and take the fight to the enemy. Goodrich says
the consultants helped to make the game "authentic and plausible"
rather than "accurate and realistic."
"There's nothing so close where it's a re-enactment," Coop said at
brunch. "In my eyes, that would be wrong."
Not all soldiers are eager to endorse video games as a medium for
helping audiences understand the nature of combat. As an Army platoon
leader in 2002, Andrew Exum found himself in the Shah-i-Kot Valley,
where he killed a man for the first time in his life and then found
the gear of three dead Rangers who had been sent to try to rescue
Neil Roberts. "I can tell you I'd probably be a little offended if
things were exactly modeled on some of the things that happened
during Anaconda," Exum, now a fellow at the Center for a New American
Security, told me. "Returning that gear to those guys who were in the
First Rangers, it was a tough thing."
Exum emphasized that he is not outraged by Medal of Honor or any
other military shooter. But he can't help, he says, being a little
bit bothered by these games. "This is the thing," he told me. "Point
5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts." Nearly
80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2
million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last
fall. "There's something annoying that most of America experiences
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place,
through a video game," he said. Would he feel similarly, I later
asked, if Americans were heading to a movie called "Medal of Honor"
about Operation Anaconda? "I think there is a difference between
being a participant and an observer," Exum replied in an e-mail.
All war fiction, granted, reduces combat to something less than what
it is in reality. " 'The Iliad' trivialized war into something
ancient feasters could listen to while they ate," Roger Travis, a
classics professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote earlier
this year on his blog about video games. But it does seem a fair
critique to suggest that military shooters turn the classic
description of war on its head, converting the experience into long
periods of sheer terror punctuated by moments of boredom. "Real war's
a lot more like 'Catch-22' than 'Black Hawk Down,' " one veteran told
me. "No one would dramatize the real experience" of a platoon in
Afghanistan "because it's too boring," he added. "How do you make a
game out of drinking chai with an elder?"
The Onion actually gave this a shot last year, with a mock news
broadcast about "Modern Warfare 3," described as "the most
true-to-life military game every created, with the majority of game
play spent hauling equipment and filling out paperwork." In this
nonexistent game, the single-player campaign lasts "a record 17,250 hours."
To be fair, comedy is easy. Making video games is hard. Medal of
Honor may not reinvent the first-person shooter, but some in the
industry including several who worked on Six Days in Fallujah
hope that its mere existence is a brave and incremental step that
will pave the way for nonfiction approaches to war in the medium. A
video-game documentary about Iraq or Afghanistan is inevitable,
whether it is a Medal of Honor sequel, or Six Days in Fallujah, or
another game altogether, Read Omohundro told me.
"I think that eventually it will be permitted," he said. "And if it
becomes permitted, it will be accepted. It's just going to take a while."
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