War in Video Games

I've been thinking a lot about the intersection two conversations we had on Thursday - video games as mass produced art and war as the ultimate mechanical and technological reproduction. The first person shooter is a comsumer item touting an ability to recreate the experience of war from the safety of one's couch. There has been much debate on the tastefulness of this fact, but I want to highlight the sheer weirdness of this idea: often times these games are judged on their immersive experience; for example, in Killzone 3, a new science fiction first person shooter, one of the major positives in reviewing was that it felt more real thanks to the 'heft and swing of the weapons.' (Killzone 3 review - IGN). This is strange in itself - future weapons feeling more real while one is using joysticks? People like the ability to destroy the environment and experience more brutal kills. (Caveat - I enjoy these games as much as the next person and rarely feel particularly guilty about it, any more than reading Starship Troopers (though no necessarily agreeing with the politics!). Your faceless avatar (one assumes that he represents you, especially since they rarely talk in-game) also can absorb a certain amount of bullets before dying, but never less than 10 or so. Anything less is unfair.

I believe the strangest video games are shooters set during World War 2 - a past event which perhaps exemplifies war as mass production. The villains are invariably German or Japanese soldiers being gunned down en masse by a lone American soldier, using perfectly functioning virtual recreations of historical weapons. I remember in particular the last level of Call of Duty - World at War, a game whose innovation was the inclusion of levels set on the Eastern Front. The player is a faceless private in the Russian army storming the Riechstag in Berlin, killing hundreds of Wermacht and SS soldiers (who, besides the uniforms, have remarkably similar 20-something faces). Here lies a strange disconnection with history, though. While it is true that the Russian Army took the Reichstag, the Germans were almost all the irregulars of the Wermacht; all the 20 and 30 year olds had been killed long ago, leaving only those younger than 16 and older than 50 fighting. Your character ought to be gunning down children and grandparents.

Furthermore, as your character hoists the hammer and sickle on the roof, he receives a fatal wound; the last moments of the game are his vision fading as your allies cheer around you. I would almost say it is an undercutting of Soviet propaganda and the glory of war, but there is little to suggest it a true undercutting. But these games are based off of a strange pleasure of gunning down Nazis, some of the only 'safe' historical villains. These games are a disconnection of history and reality, but at the same time are through their medium supposed to bring us closer to the 'history' of our grandparents by putting a remarkably accurate virtual version of the M1 Garand into the hands of children.

Games are weird.