Empire: Total Bastard

By C.T. Hutt

I’ve been a fan of The Creative Assembly’s Total War Series since Shogun: Total War made the scene back in 2000. I’ve followed the game through its many incarnations, watching the graphics and gameplay improve with time. Empire: Total War is the latest incarnation of this series and outplays it predecessors in every stripe. Empire is a country simulator which takes place in the real-world 1700s complete with historical characters, realistic tactics, and political implications for every action. Unlike most of the games I faun over, Empire has no story to speak of; if you want to know what happened during this period in human history I suggest R.S. Chaurasia's History of Europe Volume 2.

My educational background is in international affairs, so toying with this kind of game makes me as happy as a headcrab hiding in a top hat. The little touches of realism the designers dropped in make it a special treat for history buffs and tactic gamers alike. I’ve already enjoyed many hours of satisfying entertainment out of this title and would recommend it as a must for any turn-based strategy fan out there. Having played the game through, I find myself struck with a sort of post-imperial depression. Looking back at the charred ruins of my opponents’ once great cities I’ve come to ponder the philosophical and moral implications of this game and have found myself on the dark side of fake history.

Empire is such a realistic simulation that when playing it I’ve become concerned about the morality the game encourages in its players. The most effective empires in the game are the ones with the largest military, the greatest dominion over trade, and the will to suppress all forms of dissent through violence. In the campaign map the quickest way of achieving one’s objectives is to befriend the countries nearest to you then flood their lands with troops when they drop their guard. In the battle maps the surest road to victory is to toss wave after wave of peasants and lowly conscripts straight into enemy lines then pepper the entire battlefield with artillery fire. When moving into an opponent’s territory the first logical move is to destroy all cultural buildings and replace them with your own. The only thing worth less to you then the lives of your troops is the general happiness of your wretched citizenry. It is a sound policy to tax them as much as possible at all times and if any of the high and mighty types in your nation’s universities start yammering about reform or representative democracy or some other such nonsense, nothing clears them out like a good old-fashioned book burning. In your face Oxford! Ultimate supremacy in Empire: Total War belongs to the nation most willing to employ a Machiavellian foreign policy.

I’ve read article after article about the dangers of portraying violence and sexuality in video games, but I haven’t heard so much as a peep out of the same angry church moms about portraying the benefits of dictatorship and social oppression. I wonder why.

Grinding My Gears of War

by C.T. Hutt

I’m not holding back on this one folks. Fair warning, thar be spoilers ahead.

When Castle Wolfenstein 3D first reared its inflexible, muscle bound head onto the scene in 1992, the first person shooter took off. Along with this new platform came a new kind of protagonist, the first-person-shooter über-male. From Doom to Duke Nukem to Halo 3, this discount Hercules hasn’t changed much. He is mostly silent, nigh unkillable, comically large, and capable of displaying an emotional range that falls between enraged and severely enraged. While there have been some excellent exceptions to these stereotypes (I’m looking your way, Gordon Freeman), the implicit limitations of such an oafish character have resulted in some less than stellar story lines. In some cases (I’m looking your way, Quake series), there has been no discernible story at all.

After playing through both the Gears of War games with Daniel, I’ve had some trouble assigning the series to either category. There seems to be a plot in there somewhere, but I have no idea what it is.

Here’s what we know. Humankind has put all, or at least the majority of its eggs in one basket in the form of the scenic planet Serra. With the exception of razor hail falling from the sky every once in a while and some kind of explosive goop coming out of the planet’s crust, everything seems just ducky about this new terra until the neighbors show up and make things awkward for everyone by killing lots of folk and wrecking up the place. It seems that, while building the various soon-to-be-charred ruins of cities on Serra, none of humanity’s engineers noticed that the planet is a honeycomb of tunnels filled with antisocial goblins. The protagonists are COGs, an elite squad of hideously gargantuan ape men who get their jollies blasting away at any of the subterranean bad boys that poke up their heads like so many evil gophers. Something is also going down with an evil government plot, a kind of killer robot/A.I. thing, and the standard medical experiment gone wrong riff we’ve heard in nearly every shooter ever made. We are never given enough information to understand or really care about these subplots but they are in there. Bon appétit!

The main character, or at least the fellow controlled by player 1, is Marcus Fenix. Unable to decide which persona was tougher, a prisoner or a space marine, the writers opted to have Mr. Fenix be both. The series opens with him being busted out of a prison facility made entirely of skulls and dead bodies, just lovely. We never learn why he was incarcerated; I assume it was due to some kind of moving violation; the man is the size of a diesel truck and has a personality to match. Marcus is the type of person you might expect to see in the darkest corner of a biker bar, yet we later learn that he was raised by a well to do scientist on a palatial estate. Man, those must have been some awkward teenage years. Over time we discover that Marcus’s father may have been making time with the troll queen, leader of the underground baddies; this may explain why he felt less inclined to academic pursuits.

Player 2 is at the joystick of Dominic Santiago (“Dom” to his friends) who is basically a slightly smaller version of Marcus Fenix. We know nothing about Dom until the second game. Apparently, on top of being a kill-crazy badass, Dom is a family man. While we never run into his kids, we do eventually catch up with his wife who has been on the worst vacation ever for the last ten years in a modern oubliette. Apparently, Dom is also a doctor, and promptly euthanizes her like a lame horse. The scene I’ve just described is the biggest emotional hook in the entire series. While the effect on the players is more awkward then traumatic, it causes both protagonists to display their most colorful emotional state, i.e. severe rage.

That’s who you are working with, Gorilla-man Marcus and Dom “The Veterinarian” Santiago. Not exactly compelling characters, but they shine next to the parade of quarter-dimensional weirdos in the background of these games. Your military support is a Burt and Ernie duo that appears periodically to provide suppressing fire and comedic relief. There is Cole, who is aggressive and crazy, and Baird who seems to find the entire “fight for survival” thing completely boring. The antagonists, called the locusts, are evil in all the standard ways and look like larger, uglier versions of the heroes. There are a couple indistinct female characters that were probably flying the transport ship and giving you orders but they don’t even really register to the players.

That, as they say, is that. We don’t know why people settled on the planet; we don’t know much of anything about the characters; we don’t know how long this war has been waged or even if we are fighting on the right side of it. In short, we don’t know a damn thing.

In most cases, I would simply go with it. The Gears series looks fantastic and is fun to play. However, there is a limit to the number of alien heads I can explode before I need a reason why. Granted, that is a very high number, but come on, a little back-story here fellahs. I’m not asking for Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia from a game that features an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet, but in order to make this series a real winner in my book they need to give me a reason for fighting the good fight.

There is a wealth of moral and philosophical issues the writers could have sunk their teeth into but, sadly, they haven’t. It could be a story about the trials of the common soldier, but it lacks any actual internal conflict found in developed characters. It could be a story about revenge, but how are we to empathize with such a motivation without a solid beginning? Gears would make an excellent metaphor for the futility of fighting for a cause in which you no longer believe, or about humankind’s undying tenacity, yet it only touches the surface of such themes. In a time when society should be asking questions about the nature of war, even fictional war, the Gears series doesn’t even lift an inquisitive eyebrow. The end effect is like eating a bowl of very realistic wax fruit; it looks amazing, but really doesn’t sit well.

I’m very satisfied with the controls and aesthetics of this series, but without commitment to a proper story arc I’m afraid it will be nothing but another shoot ’em up, certain to be forgotten in the annals of video game history.

Modern Warfare

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

In Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler, Randy “the Ram” and a young boy from his neighborhood discuss Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare while playing an old Nintendo game. Here’s their exchange (transcript from Kotaku):

Randy: What's it about?
Adam: It's a war game. Most all of the other Call of Dutys are, like, based on World War II, but this one's with Iraq.
Randy: Oh yeah?
Adam: You switch off between a marine and an S and S British special operative. So it's pretty cool.

Those familiar with the plot of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare might say that this is not an entirely accurate description, since the game isn’t actually set in Iraq. Here’s a brief summary: the United States invades an unnamed Middle Eastern country that is currently being ruled by a brutal dictator who assumed power un-democratically and who is suspected of having ties to a terrorist group and possessing weapons of mass destruction.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

In an article on Destructoid, Anthony Burch makes the excellent point that all of the spectacular graphics, affecting first-person storytelling and gripping action sequences are in the service of a plot that is intentionally irrelevant:

“The battles presented in Modern Warfare don’t recreate or parallel the ambiguous skirmishes of the Iraq War; they take place within a ‘War on Terror’ which doesn't actually exist -- within the world of Call of Duty 4, there really are evil Muslims and Russians in the Middle East armed with nuclear weapons.” (Full article here)

It seems clear that Infinity Ward intended to make their game non-controversial by setting it in a fictional conflict. In his article, Burch calls this a “missed opportunity,” explaining that a truly unique and valuable experience could have been crafted by setting this game in Iraq and addressing real questions (like the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist).

It’s more than a missed opportunity. Instead of making a game about actual modern warfare, Infinity Ward idealized war, stripped it of its controversy, removed it from reality, and made it palatable for public consumption. In this alternate-reality Iraq, no political forces brought the new dictator to power; he simply killed the previous ruler of the country. There is no question as to the regime’s connections to known terrorists; those connections are clear and easily traced. And there is absolutely no doubt that they have weapons of mass destruction and the intent to use them.

With a setting so strikingly similar to Iraq, these omissions are more than just missed opportunities; combined, they turn this game into a propaganda piece for the “War on Terror.”
It’s no surprise that Adam from The Wrestler thinks that the game is set in Iraq. He sees Iraq on television, he sees locations and situations in the game that look similar, and he equates the two. But what does this game teach him? It teaches anyone unfamiliar with the actual circumstances of the Iraq War and other modern conflicts that these battles are simple: there are no innocent bystanders, the enemy is always clearly identified and shooting at you, and the path to victory is a forward march over the bodies of one’s enemies.

Further, it presses the importance of the “War on Terror”; in Modern Warfare, global catastrophe results if you fail in your mission.

While this makes for an entertaining video game, this has very little to do with modern warfare. The weaponry and locations may be modern, but this is ultimately the same martial vision that we see in Infinity Ward’s World War 2 shooters. The sense of black and white morality remains, and clearly villainous enemies organize their forces against the heroes. They have moved the year forward, but the central ideas have remained the same.

A true “modern warfare” game would likely not be enjoyable. Imagine waiting by a military jeep, holding a gun, wondering whether anything will happen. Maybe nothing does, and you wait all day, and then head home; that would be a good day. Maybe you’d feel like you kept the peace and did the neighborhood a favor, even if not everyone appreciated your presence. On a bad day, shots are fired at you from windows, or a passing person turns out to be strapped with a bomb; you or one of your fellow soldiers winds up dead or crippled for life.

Infinity Ward certainly made the right business decision when they simplified their vision of modern war. (For comparison, see these kotaku articles on Six Days in Fallujah, a game based on the real Iraq War, and that game’s quick cancellation.) But in doing so, they failed to deliver on their basic premise, they failed to show “Modern Warfare.” In Call of Duty 4, the armed conflict starts for all the right reasons, has a clear, defined ending, and serves a greater purpose that we can all agree is for the best. The larger question here is this: does Infinity Ward have any social responsibility, or is it enough to deliver a compelling gaming experience? If they tell their audience that they are going to deliver a realistic modern war but instead provide a piece of propaganda - intentionally or otherwise - have they done something morally reprehensible?

With Modern Warfare 2 fast approaching, here’s hoping that they don’t continue to oversimplify war.