From Cambridge the game spread to other campuses. By 1963, so popular had it become that Stanford University’s Computer Studies Department for one was obliged to announce a “no Spacewar” policy during business hours and enforce it rather strictly. As the price of computers started declining in the 1970s, they became more affordable, if not yet by individuals at home, then by commercial operators in arcades. Not all video games designed for the purpose sought to represent some kind of violent struggle, but many if not most did. As one of the early programmers noted, it seemed as if players could not have enough of them.72 Three notable early games were Tank (1974), Sea Wolf, and Space Invaders (both 1978). The players in Tank maneuvered their vehicles, avoided mines, and fired, victory going to the side with the highest number of points at the time the game ended. In Sea Wolf they sat behind the sights of a submarine and launched torpedoes at various kinds of “enemy” ships. Space Invaders showed the aliens advancing in a massive, relentless, rectangular formation of eight by five. Players had to shoot them down before they could reach the ground while avoiding descending enemy missiles. Additional points could be earned by blowing up flying saucers that flew across the screen from time to time. Since the friendly “turrets” only offered limited shelter, and since the aliens kept on increasing the pace, there was no way a player could stop them in their tracks and win the game. The best one could hope for was to obtain the highest score for the day.
As one of Russell’s original comrades in arms later wrote, “these [games] are pretty much all of a piece. After some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone’s name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go trekking off through the universe to punch up the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few planets, kill all sorts of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time.”73 Usually that was all there was to it: some subsequent games presenting the player with multiple opponents also demanded that, before responding, he or she evaluate those opponents by the speed with which they made their advance, the amount of “damage” they could inflict, and so on. In a real war of any size, of course, these functions would be performed by numerous individuals working as a team, or else, as with anti-aircraft and anti-missile defenses, by teams made up of both humans and computers or even of computers alone. Unsurprisingly, on occasion so great were the demands that a game made on players that it had to be withdrawn.74 All the player’s actions were carried out not in writing but by manipulating levers, moving joysticks, and pressing buttons. Compared with chess as well as Reisswitz- and BOGSAT-type games, the greatest advantage of shooting games was that players did not have to take turns. To that extent they were much more realistic than any kind of board or map games could ever be. The absence of turns also enabled play to develop much faster than before. Gone was the need for day-long sessions and adjournments. These were major reasons for the shooters’ popularity.
Early on, the fact that the games were associated with pinball, which in turn was supposed to be associated with the Mafia, who were said to be blackmailing arcade owners, worked against them. Some attempts were even made to ban them altogether.75 Later the reasons for opposing them shifted. Not everybody liked the emphasis the games placed on manual skills as opposed to intellectual ones. Some critics claimed, as they always do when youth is interested in things they themselves are too old to learn, that the games were devoid of “educational” content. As such they were a waste of time, led to that worst of all bad things, addiction, and sometimes involved extreme brutality that might turn players into raging psychopaths (if, perhaps, those who played them were not psychopaths already). Since many players moved their hips in a suggestive way while hitting the firing buttons in particular, the games also threatened their sexual morality. In November 1982 no less a figure than the US Surgeon General, Dr. Everett Koop, publicly stated that the games were causing extensive mental and physical harm. Everything in them was “zap the enemy,” he claimed, and nothing “constructive” was being done.76 Apparently learning to “fly,” say, a World War II Mustang aircraft, as well as mastering the kind of sophisticated background knowledge required to select various missions and “fight” Messerschmitts in a sensible way, do not count as “constructive.”
Koop himself was sufficiently fair-minded to concede that he did not have evidence to back up his claims. But this did not prevent the media, parents, and of course scholars from such disciplines as psychology and sociology from taking up the issue. Some of the criticism stuck, leading to “voluntary self-restraint” on the part of the industry and/or the introduction of various rating systems. On other occasions media reports that a game was indeed extremely violent merely led to attempts to get around the systems in question and may actually have increased sales, as controversy, attempts at censorship, and the publicity that attends them so often do.77 The ability to tolerate the occasionally unearthly noises the machines generated apart, the chief qualities players required and still require are good eyesight, excellent motor coordination, and extreme concentration. All three are highly relevant to waging real war, especially modern war, and especially at the technical and tactical levels where individuals or small numbers of troops fight each other at close quarters. From President Reagan down, this fact caused some pundits, tongue in cheek, to suggest that America’s youth might be provided with an unlimited supply of quarters so as to train for it.78
Since then, the poor misguided teenagers who played the games during the 1980s have grown up and raised teenagers of their own. Pace Koop and countless others, most of them seem to have developed into normal functioning human beings. Nevertheless, concerns about the games remain as lively as ever. Just one article, entitled “Video Games, Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life,” was quoted no fewer than 783 times in the scholarly literature alone.79 Needless to say, it argued that “real-life violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency . . . [whereas] academic achievement was negatively related to overall amount of time spent playing video games.” Some games, notably one called Medal of Honor and set in Afghanistan, gave rise to objections not because they were time-consuming or addictive or brutal, but because they permitted players to “fire” at troops belonging to their own countries. Both the Canadian and British ministers of defense have denounced the game as unpatriotic, and in the US it was banned from being sold on base.80 One can only conclude that the rules that govern real-life war also apply to that which is waged onscreen. For us to inflict violence on others is OK, but for them to do the same on us is not.
None of this has prevented the game designers from creating more and more sophisticated games. The number of shooter-type games, including those that involved not soldiers but gangsters or aliens, which have been brought to the market must run into the thousands. They sport not only soldiers and guerrillas but cowboys and gangsters and aliens and every kind of imaginary monster. Many only sold a few copies and rapidly disappeared, attracting little notice. A few became bestsellers that enriched those who designed them, produced them, and sold them. Space Invaders apart, computerized shooter-type games that have sold millions of copies include Missile Command, Space Armada, Space Battle, Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War.81 The last-mentioned focuses on the troops of Delta Squad, an elite force made up of somewhat wild-looking types who seem much more like GI Joe characters and “professional” wrestlers than the kind of soldiers one meets in the field, let alone on the street. They fight to save the human inhabitants of a fictional planet from a subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde.82 Some games, in particular one called Doom (1993), are notable for allowing players a wide choice of weapons. They include a pistol, brass-knuckled fists, a chainsaw, a shotgun, a chaingun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, and the immensely powerful BFG (Bio Force Gun) 9,000 firing green plasma shells.83 Doom, incidentally, made it to the list of the top fifty video game weapons of all time. Some players even claimed it made them “swoon.”84
In the manner of H
ollywood follow-up movies, many games have been updated and expanded at least once. Indeed some are based on movies and TV series, and the opposite is also true. As the number of computers used in every field of life grew, the borders separating entertainment from “serious” gaming and “serious” gaming from war became increasingly fuzzy.85 Perhaps the best-known movie that was turned into a game was Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, but others are not far behind. As with a great many other commercial products, predicting which game would be a flop and which one would succeed was, and remains, almost impossible. Apparently a number of factors are involved: ease of use (the harder a game is to learn, the fewer, presumably, the people prepared to make the effort needed to master it), imagination (an elusive quality, but one that is absolutely essential), characters that players are able to identify with, and much more. Realism and artistic quality (including the quality of the graphics), special effects (such as sound) can also be very important. Extreme brutality may be attractive to some. Some players would like nothing so much as to drop a nuclear weapon on Mecca; here and there a designer was shocked to receive letters from players who, contrary to his own intentions, seemed to enjoy killing off entire “populations.”86 However, as with all other features, there seems to be no simple link between the amount of onscreen gore and the number of copies sold.
As with movies, timing may be critically important. Quite often external events that have nothing to do with a game’s contents, its characteristics, and its quality will have a determining impact on whether or not it succeeds in the shops; realizing this, producers have been accelerating the speed with which a “real” war is transformed into a game from weeks to days. Finally, customers’ demands do not remain stationary but develop over time. As new games are published, older ones, again like so many other products, are pushed aside. Which is not to say that, as also happens with so many other products from vintage cars down, there are no aficionados who will continue to look for them, buy them, and play them for precisely that reason. Indeed some producers, notably id Software, have generously allowed not only some of their games but the code in which they were written to be published online. They thus enable those aficionados to tinker with them and come up with their own versions.
Looking back over the decades since their inception, three inter-related factors in particular seem to be driving computer wargames along. First, individual games often provide far more options than their predecessors did. Many if not most games may be played at various speeds, increasing levels of difficulty, and so on. Instead of only being able, say, to “fly” one kind of aircraft, players may choose among several different ones. “Action” may take place during daylight or, if one prefers, by night. Missions can also be varied. Instead of using one kind of ammunition against the “enemy,” many recent games allow players to select among several different ones, thus exercising their knowledge and skill in matching means to ends. All this bears some resemblance to various kinds of gladiators being matched with each other for added interest, and greatly increases what is sometimes referred to as a game’s replay value.
Second, contrary to the popular image of them as empty-headed teenagers who get a kick by zapping whomever and whatever they meet onscreen, many players are highly educated and curious. To suit them, many games have special boxes that the player can open by the click of a mouse, allowing him or her to obtain more information, either in order to make an informed choice concerning their play or simply by way of background knowledge. Of course there is the danger that the introduction of too many different features will confuse players. As long as that does not happen, though, it probably makes play more interesting and extends the life of any given game.
Third, and in the view of some most important of all, the quality of the graphics has improved dramatically. In first-person games this applies to the window through which the player watches whatever is being displayed. It may, say, be made to look like the cockpit of a real aircraft, complete with functioning instrumentation that will display such things as the aircraft’s angle to the horizon, airspeed, a gain or loss of altitude, remaining fuel reserves, and the like. In third-person games it also applies to the figure, say a muscleman or a soldier or a tank or a ship, which represents the player on the screen and whose movements and actions he or she controls. In both kinds of games it applies to the opponent or opponents that must be shot at or otherwise overcome, as well as the environment in which the action unfolds. Gone are the days when games were necessarily played in empty, featureless space. Greater computing power also permitted shading to be introduced, causing games to lose most of their original, rather garish character. Overall, the effect of improved graphics has been to close the gap between reality and what was now known as “virtual reality.” As an ad for Call of Duty 2 (2005) put it, “this is as close to war as you ever want to get.”
This was particularly the case because the games’ big brothers, i.e. flight simulators, also started making use of computers from the late 1960s. As before, one objective was to help pilots acquire better flying skills, practice various emergencies that were too dangerous to be rehearsed live, and the like. From the point of view of wargames, of greater importance was the attempt to represent the outside world more accurately while also achieving a better match between the moves of the simulator and what the pilot could see of that world. From there it was a short step to adding more blips that represented enemy aircraft as well as other kinds of targets, such as anti-aircraft defenses or oil refineries or power stations, that had to be attacked.
At first it was necessary to build dedicated machines for each type of aircraft and environment, an enormously expensive proposition. Later general-purpose computers with sufficient power changed this situation. To replace an American F-16 fighting an Iraqi Mirage F-1 by a Soviet MIG-29 fighting an American F-15 all a player had to do was to change a cassette or disk. At some time during the 1970s simulators and shooter-type games met, just as the Mississippi and the Missouri do. Later they became almost identical. A simulator was little more than a complex game, whereas a game was but a simplified simulator. An important step in this direction was a game by the name of Battlezone (1980), which actually had a sort of periscope players had to press their faces to, creating the illusion of viewing the world through the vision slit of a tank.87 Indeed a cynic might argue that the most obvious difference between them was that games (and movies) had music whereas simulators (and everyday reality) did not. A teenager with a personal computer and a few dollars to spend could now play at being, say, an F-18 pilot setting out on a mission to enforce the “no-fly zone” in Iraq. Conversely, the F-18 pilot could do more of his training at home.
As episodes such as the Japanese preparations for the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Midway illustrate only too clearly, high-level wargamers have often come under political pressure to modify either the games themselves or their outcomes. The switch from manual to computerized ones did little to change this fact: the higher the stakes, the less likely it is that commanders and other senior decision-makers will change their views merely because a young computer programmer, exercising what to many people is an arcane art, has made things turn out in such and such a way. By contrast, shooting-type games are used mainly at fairly low levels – hardly ever above that of the battalion. Most represent companies, platoons, squads, or even individual soldiers. Hence there is some reason to think that they are less affected by this problem.
Other things being equal, the best education and training have always been of the kind that soldiers found challenging and that they engaged in not just because they had to but freely. As computer-driven technology enabled simulations that were closer and closer to reality to be created, the distinction between education and training on the one hand and entertainment on the other began to be lost. Nor was it long before the services started thinking of ways to take advantage of this fact. Recruiters prowled arcades, looking for youths who might like to switch from, say, an onscreen tank to the r
eal thing. Generals called on commercial wargaming companies, examined what was available, and signed contracts to modify existing games or design new ones. Among the earliest products was Army Battlezone, a variation on the previously mentioned Battlezone reprogrammed in such a way as to take into account many different kinds of tanks and other vehicles as well as more realistic ballistics. As in many other fields since 1990 or so, military and civilian technology began to converge.88
Particularly successful in this respect, and an example for all the rest, was America’s Army. Paid for by the government, it may be downloaded for free. To quote the designers, the objective was to offer potential recruits “the most true-to-life Army experience, allowing players to create a soldier and lead him through the excitement of an Army career.” Some follow-up versions can even be played on a mobile phone. Needless to say, there were complaints about the game serving as one more tool in the ongoing militarization of American society. Such claims, incidentally, date back at least as far as the last years of the nineteenth century when similar ones were made in reference to toy soldiers.89 They did not, however, affect the game’s popularity.90 As one insightful critic wrote in the New York Times: “Nothing beats going in and seeing what the Army really does . . . without actually having to do it.”91
Wargames Page 42