Thoughts on War in Video Games

Kotaku posted a short, sweet, but slightly useless editorial today. Useless mainly because the point of the article is a quick, delicious burst in the middle surrounded by more dancing than Step Up 2: The Streets. The article, written by a PhD on the eve of Modern Warfare 3 (sequel to the fastest selling game of all time), is lamenting the fact that most war games (or war in any media really!) reduces the horrors of war, the complexity of its consequences, and the politics which surround it to a bunch of guys playing paintball in a corridor.

To be fair, I would say that Modern Warfare 2 kind of approached this problem but it looks like Modern Warfare 3 is just going to recycle the same trick. I agree with the PhD though, war games barely touch the real consequences of war.

But this is really a criticism of games in general. As it stands, the consequences of your actions in any game are completely limited by the code the team was able to piece together by launch, which usually means consequences are limited to "it's easier to kill X". It's very hard/expensive to make a game that can even remotely model geopolitical interactions, environmental shifts, or technological innovation unless it's the full focus of the game. I think the best we've seen is a few RPGs (Persona 3, Persona 4) which manage to track the player character's social life and consequences in a relatively realistic way. It'd be nice if we had an action game where your actions had huge effects on the game's world.

I remember back in the day I really wanted to make an action game where you played a mercenary and you would take contracts for various battles in a fictional continent's history. The game would have unbelievable replayability because you could dramatically change the course of history. It was pretty baller, then Atlus published Spectral Force and I got the feeling the idea wasn't so great. But maybe that game just sucked (it WAS another generic anime tactical RPG like all of the trash NIS released after Disgaea, rather than a decent Dynasty Warriors or amazing Devil May Cry experience).

Anyway! I think what Dr. Huntemann really wants is what hilarious Faux-Game Designer Peter Molydeux once quipped: A system where you kill a soldier in Modern Warefare 3, and then see his son crying in the crowd when you boot up FIFA. But given that AAA game companies are still in the process of hiring one man to design hands, I don't think those kinds of reactive systems are going to get the Modern Warfare treatment for awhile.