Thesis in a nutshell
OK, so I dropped the ball on following up on that whole Internal
Discrepancy thing, I just couldnt get excited about it and right now I
have the luxury of being able to wait until I do.
In the mean
time, I spent the weekend out in the woods with the new members of my
uni’s outdoors club and found myself answering “so what exactly is your
thesis on…I know you’ve explained it 27 times already but still…”
way too many times. So, I have to attempt to clarify for myself and the
people who ask me, what my thesis is on - in simple and to the point
terms.
So here’s attempt number 1
This is an exploration
of the differences between how Counter-Insurgency is presented to “the
masses” in Computer-Games-As-Story vs. how experts suggest how
Counter-Insurgency should be conducted. It looks at how insights
provided by First Person Shooter games which attempt to re-create
realistic scenarios in fun ways might not be counterbalanced by insights from real life experience and the details
of actual and successful real life missions. It will then attempt to
look at how this incomplete view may be affecting public policy,
war-to-peace transitions, peacebuilding and prioritizations in
politically motivated military actions surrounding Insurgencies. I hope
to bring in opinions from military leaders, soldiers, political
analysts and commentators, game designers, naratologists and
ludologists and of course gamers themselves. Yes, I do plan on playing
(at least the demo of) the games I am analyzing as part of research.
This paper is not intended to add to the pile of literature on “Gaming does/does not have a causal link to violence”
arguments. I am not a game basher not a defender, rather this is an
attempt at looking at more abstract and “fuzzier” outcomes of gaming.
It’s way too long and still rambling.
For
millenia people have told stories to (indirectly) pass on knowledge,
moralities, and entertainment in the form of situational insights. This paper will look at how the insights
presented in the storyline of First Person Shooters (intentional or
not) may be affecting public perceptions of one of the most common (and
well funded) foreign actions the US government is currently involved in
in developing countries - Counter Insurgency. I want to see how (in)complete the insights
gained may or may not be, how military leaders and game developers feel
about their role vis-a-vis FPS-as-story, how political commentators and
analysts see public policy being affected by this and how people-as-
and soldiers-as- gamers feel about the impact these games have on their
perceptions of on-the-ground military actions taken as part of a larger
Counter-Insurgency program. In an attempt to break from the “games
(dont) cause violence” debates, this paper will intentionally deal with
perhaps “fuzzier” areas of analysis rather than attempting to find a
(dis)provable causal link.
I’ll let that sit for now, I
know, it’s still crap and confusing, but I want to move back to reading
about China’s new Counter-Terrorist training program using CounterStrike and the commentary being provided on it. It’s much more interesting 
The problem of just “being a grunt” in the games we play.
One of the obstacles I’ve been repeatedly hitting up against in my
coming to terms with this topic is that I may be dealing with apples
and oranges here.
I constantly find myself reading that the
“military” desires a certain type of operation in COIN, but in games,
we often deal with single person military “grunts” - i.e. not the
leaders and planners which the field manuals address. So, when I look
at the discrepency between the two, how do I reconcile this difference,
do I need to at all, and will it still be a useful paper.
I had
a great long post on this that Windows Vista managed to kill (I;ve been
fighting it the whole time Ive had it) and will only re-produce a small
portion here probably.
OK, FM3-24 (as is the trend right now):
This
field manual/Marine Corps warfighting publication establishes doctrine
(fundamental principles) for military operations in a counterinsurgency
(COIN) environment….
and
The primary audience for this manual is leaders and planners at the battalion level and above.(FM3-24, preface)
So,
what I’m looking at from the military side is the attempt to establish
best practices for the overarching operation (big picture). On the
other hand, games tend to look at the jobs (missions) prescribed to a
single person or team which is commanded by “the player” (i.e. the
small picture).
It is to be expected that the mission level (if
I have the scale of mission and operation the right way round - mission
here is small, single goal where operation would be a campaign,
multiple missions, with the end goal of stability) of action would
shroud a certain amount of the planning that FM3-24 discusses and in a
game this is even more so, as in the entire length of an FPS there is
maybe room for 50 minutes (roughly 2% of a game play time) of
dedicated story line or plot (often delivered in a cut scene) according
to James Portnow of Activision
(http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7153&Itemid=2).
50 minutes spread out over 40 hours of play time is not a lot in order
to get across all the complexities of COIN political action.
So,
I am looking at two different levels of action here - the desires of
the military at the planning level, and the actions of a person wanting
to shoot stuff and get an adrenaline fix on the other.
The best
way to look at this, in my mind, is to take it to a slightly more
abstracted level on the side of the games - by looking at the genre
rather than specific games.
This is probably obvious when you think
about it, of course I’m looking at the genre, but then I’m a little
slow at times and this is my thought process
The problem then becomes not that individual games portray COIN ops as shoot to kill, only shoot, always shoot, but rather that the
majority of FPS portray a system where COIN has a primarily military
solution and that military action is a solution in itself.
Let me come back to an earlier post on
“insights” which are provided by games (I will expand on the notion of
“insights” later on) - Most of us (again, “us” refers primarily to
north america and europe in all my posts) get our insights into
military COIN ops from 2 sources, unless we are related to or know
someone in the military, which I would assume is not most people. These
2 sources are a) the (TV) media (FOX, CNN, BBC etc.) with their
“embedded” news media which has been invented in the last few years and
being the sole provider of “from the field” coverage which would be too
difficult for most to access for travel reasons. And b) computer games.
Let me go into that “b) computer games” part because, well, that’s why I’m here.
Computer games, since their inception have strived for greater
immersion, reality, graphical representation - something
theatre/movie/story people call the suspension of disbelief (I have to
give credit to Rick for introducing this theory to me with the
creative, if childish, use of a teddy bear). The end goal of all the
R&D money being poured into gaming technology is to come up with
hardware, software engines and story lines which allow people to
believe they are running actual military style missions. Games are
marketed as “designed with general x” or “modeled on real historical
battles” or “relive the storming of x”. Gamers are told, and have
little reason to believe otherwise, that games are made and modeled on
real events with real military experts to lend credability to these
statements. when they are then confronted with a realistic looking
enemy, responsive and immersive gaming systems and allow them to
suspend their disbelief, then gaming and the action involved in it
becomes a legitimate (in the players’ mind) source of “insights” into
war/COIN.
Again, however, all insights are inherently limited and without other
sources of insights, peoples’ “knowledge” of a topic can become
slanted. Let me draw analogies from TV shows.
CSI, the popular crime drama, has led several police forces to comment
that it is making their lives more difficult - people seem to believe
now that all police forces have extremely advanced machines, always
find a hair, blood stain, rare fibre or other tiny insignificant piece
of material evidence, run it through said expensive equipment, look at
eachother with surprised faces and then get a confession out of someone
previously thought innocent - all in the space of a 1 hour eppisode. In
other words the limited “insights” provided by CSI have slanted public
opinion on crime fighting because they havnt been balanced out by
people’s first hand experience with the boring, tedious and long
process which it actually is - and why would they, it’s boring.
24 - again, a popular TV drama, this time involving someone
interrogating (torturing) a witness at the last minute before all hell
breaks lose and in order to stop it breaking lose, then it is ok, or
even necessary to “cap someone in the knee” to get useful information -
which they always do. Someone high up at West Point (it;s somewhere on
the Small Wars Journal if
you want to read about who, I am reproducing this from a 2nd hand
source, so go find it yourself before you re-quote a re-quote that
might be wrong) had such a problem with new recruits having such a
slanted opinion of interrogation from the limited insights provided by
24 (that is gets useful results in a short period of time and is always the only answer to solving the impending crisis
when in realitiy it usually backfires, you get bad information, it
takes a long time, and only creates more enemies, especially when it is
inevitably leaked to the media) that he actually flew to hollywood to
ask the producers to stop or make a show where it does backfire - i.e.
to provide a different set of insights.
So, what I need to do is to identify the insights provided by the genre
of FPS games, how to they match the reality that the military is trying
to produce and how much stronger are these insights than those created
by news media, soldier accounts, independent reports etc.
Once I do that, then I can relate the two together, look at how the
gaming industry treats the insights it might provide, why non-military
sides of COIN were deemed “un-fun” and maybe, how to get them into
games to provide a more rounded set of insights.
So, Thought o’ the day:
By aggregating FPS games and their “insights” into a genre, I can
see where the discrepancies between the insights provided by FPS meet
or diverge from those desired. Then, by adding in an industry point of
view, I can see where these insights were left out and where they can
perhaps be added back in - but that might be for another paper.
The lack of “other organizations” in FPS games
OK, reading through FM3-24 (that counter insurgency field manual) there are a couple of things that hit me straight away about the discrepancies between pop-gaming and desired reality. Most significant of them is the discussion of the need for coordination between military and non-military entities.
This is perhaps the most glaring difference I can think of right now between the depiction of the undertaking of counterinsurgency (COIN).
In a broad, grotesque generalization of both military and gaming COIN I’m going to say that FPS focus on creating the hero “army of one” image where you single handedly (tactically and very skillfully) blast (point and click with auto-target) your way to victory. On the other hand, FM3-24 states that:
As important as they are in achieving security, military actions by themselves cannot achieve success in COIN…Essential though it is, the military action is secondary to the political one… (sections 1-29 and 2-1)
And the document goes so far as to explicitly state that Focus[ing] special forces primarily on raiding (section 1-29) is and “Unsuccessful Practice” - yet that’s what’s most “fun” in an FPS: The adrenaline pumping raid on an enemy stronghold.
I cannot think of a mainstream FPS that deals with COIN which included anything to do with coordinating with NGOs, politicians, community organizations or other non-military entities except to escort, assassinate, interrogate, or provide civilian shields for terrorist in missions where the primary goal is to “kill the bad guys”
Obviously, as a military game the player has to be engaged in action (that is why they bought it) and the action should be military in nature (i.e. killing or defending against (by killing) bad guys) because it is a military based game. Driving down a road in front of an aid convoy and keeping a starving populace shouting at you in a language you don’t understand in order without shooting would be a hard sell in an action game.
So, quick thought o’ the day:
Is there a medium somewhere, where you can get this coordination idea across in a meaningful way without glorifying the go-it-alone rambo/delta force military only, military always underpinning?
Saint Jerome, Foucault and “What is an Author”
Reading through this suggested text by one of my profs, who called it “a very readable text” makes me realize, perhaps I can’t read, or perhaps my prof really is a genius because it’s anything but “easy.”
But that aside, I want to focus on a couple of thoughts/quotes:
The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which give rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence. (p 123, language, counter-memory, practice)
According to Saint Jerome, there are four criteria [for attributing a work to 1 author]…the author is defined as a standard level of quality…the author is defined as a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence…the author is seen as a stylistic uniformity…the author is thus a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge. (ibid. 128)
So, if we are talking about a computer game, who is the author? The lead designer, the script writer, the programmers, the studio?
The lead designer is responsible for quality control, the studio usually gets its name associated with the body of work it has created (except, for example “Sid Meier’s…” games where the game is given credit because of the author of it. this being the later stages of the creation of an “author”), there is no one historical entity which exists in a set period of time, the games industry is still too young to see how long game houses will exist, but they will definitely outlive their staff and many designers, studios etc change genres, and styles - at least the big ones do.
Then there is the question if if games even have authors - do they create a discourse or are they more in line with what foucault says about people who originate scientific disciplines.
So, thought o the day, because my brain is too tired to tackle the problem of if games have authors or not when, as interesting as it is, it is really rather minor to the task at hand:
Assuming games have an “author” who is that author, and what discourse are they creating - amongst which discontinuities do they exist and what discourse can we say they create or encourage?
There has been significant discourse around violence (GTA, FPS etc), the role of face to face interaction in society (second life, WoW, Facebook et al.) but is that the continuation of an existing discourse, or can we see the authors of games creating it?
Perhaps this whole trip through the looking glass has been in vein, and perhpas Dorfman’s quote from Reading Donald Duck is more appropriate:
The father must be absent, and without direct jurisdiction, just as the child is without direct obligations.
p 31
The “author” (father) must be absent from their game and has no say on how people play or what they learn, while the player (child) has increasingly less obligation to play the game as intended (”emergent gameplay”) and can take from it what they wish.
Gender Studies and Foucault
One of my professors came through with some help I never expected, and as always from an angle completely unexpected.
Pulling old notes from a “Sexual Ethics” class (one of the more interesting classes I ever took I must add) has led me down the path I spoke about yesterday - that In
order to legitimate itself, the law first produces then conceals the
production of its subjects.
And then this got extended by Foucault’s “What is an Author” (which I still have to read) but as this prof notes it is:
about the creation, and subsequent hiding, of the modern
author. This might be of interest to you as games have authors. And games,
maybe even more so than novels, need to hide their authors.
One of the things I have been struggling to put into words in my own head is the way in which games are stories written by a biased (perhaps interested is a better word?) author/developer and that story is then passed off as just a game, completely harmless, completely safe for consumption (minus the blood, guts and ass of course) by all ages - much like disney or sesame street.
The interesting thing about games however, much like Brynen and others point out in their analysis of TV and movies, is that they tend to reflect, and push the boundaries of, existing global socio-political events.
It is easy to see the progression of bad guy themes from Russian Communisits to Chinese and North Korean Communists, followed by a brief stint of WWII military games in the wake of “Saving Private Ryan” and now we are on to Arab/Islamic terrorists - themes which are in the mind of the population, on the news and needing exploring or release.
But more on that another time.
Though o’ the day:
Game authors are real people with real bias, but in order for games to be “just games” for the mass consumer, they must hide the fact that their stories were created. They present themselves as a legitimate source of fun and more importantly here, content, which just “is” and is just the way it was meant to be played to steal someone’s marketing phrase. This can allow the re-enforcement or creation of stereotypes and perceptions in a way that involves minimal challenge because it is both just a game and just there.
I think I will avoid going into the male gaze too much in this thesis, but the gender boundaries of male/female may be interesting to look at from a development perspective.
Perhaps the portrayal of women-as-prostitutes in GTA as they relate to under-developed US neighborhoods (such as Harlem)
Culteral Imperialism, Judith Butler and Computer Games
Started reading “How to read Donald Duck” today, and something Kunzle said in the introduction jogged the brain a bit and brought together a few different thoughts:
If we are talking about games and development, then we cant look only at the cultural imperialism which is imposed (in terms of both morals and values they hold and the viewpoint/bias they hold counter strike vs. night of bush capture) bus also the fact that these values are then hidden as “natural” within the current world system.
We cannot deny that we live in a world which by in large is “run” by a capitalist system built upon a generally Christian/Western morality base. When this coincides with the content and storyline of a computer game, then it is seen as acceptable (i.e. counter strike) otherwise, it is shunned as a propaganda tool made by extremists (i.e. night of bush capture).
Judith Butler (I think it was her) wrote about how systems (specifically the “male” in the gender system) create a power hierarchy, legitimize it and then hide the creation of it to make it seem natural…or something like that - I’m trying to track down the exact argument to see if it applies.
But, if it is the argument I think it is, then we can see how that could fit into the system of cultural imperialism in gaming quite closely - the “it’s just a game” and the western-centric view of acceptable content come together to create a system where we play “a game” and dont question where that content came from, the bias it may represent, or the impact it may be having on a population’s collective psyche.
So, thought o’ the day:
Do computer games present themselves as naturally “just a game” when in fact they are an outgrowth of a military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex (Ed Halter and others) imposing a western system of what is right, wrong and indecent upon the rest of the world?
Does this then play into the legitimization of certain actions by western governments - such as the war on terror (counter strike is good, NoBC is bad - attacking islam is good, attacking bush is bad?) or perhaps the distribution of foreign aid based on the rules of games like Civilization or Sim City.