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.