War at the time of video games

In the last 15 years, video games underwent a dramatic evolution, becoming the medium able to convey deep messages that we now know. Its maturation has made possible to handle issues of a certain weight, and now video games can contribute to people's cultural formation.

The result, however, has opened the flank to the intrusion of other spheres of our daily life that found in video games a new chance to influence and direct the perception of reality. I’m referring to the use of video games for propaganda purposes, a phenomenon that we can recognize in ISIS recruitment message its most recent iteration.

Before ISIS highlighted this issue so dramatically, the practice of propaganda had already been widely tested. The only difference is that, due to cultural alignment reasons, it was not perceived in the context of Western society. Now that the tool is being exploited by third parties, it’s easier to understand the potential problem. But how did we come to this?

As mentioned, the formula isn’t new. Just look at the totalitarian regimes of the early '900 and their use of mass media as a tool to control public opinion. In more recent times, cinema has played a decisive role in the American propaganda, with several movies where the pounding message of the terrorist threat was accompanied by a fair amount of libidinal investment (from 1997 - Escape from New York to Independence Day). The ludic component is the preferred channel and, as the new generations watch television less and less, video games become the new perfect choice.

The wide use of video games for propaganda purposes starts immediately after the World Trade Center events. September 11th is considered by historians and essayists as a point of no return, where the cognitive short-circuit has led to an overlap of the imaginary with the real. From "it seems so real" to "looks like a movie", the tragedy of those terrible days has not been properly metabolized by our value system. From that moment on, our way of enjoying certain content has changed, even in video games. Especially because there's a new factor: the interactivity.

Contents that were exclusive to particular scenarios, entered our daily life in a surprisingly easy way, making taboos like the violence of war a matter of profit even outside of the conflicts themselves.

A first confirmation comes from the analysis of one of the video game genres most used to tell war stories: shooters. For their physiology, the First Person Shooters represent one of the most immediate forms to propagate this kind of content. The immediacy of the first-person view and the setting of the gameplay mainly based on shooting have been a fertile ground for the representation of certain themes.

The result was a production boom in the category that reached its peak during the second phase of the seventh generation of consoles. Out of over 700 FPS titles released between 1970 and 2015, more than 50% were released between 2001 post-9/11 and today.

A hypertrophic production, a representation of a trend that crosses transversely every aspect of the daily life of that moment. War enters homes like never before, doctoring the image of conflicts, with absurdly super-heroic traits. Good in Stars and Stripes VS rest of the world.

The shooters, like the rest of the entertainment world at that time, legitimize a vision of reality that shows all the distinctive traits of the propaganda. Out of all the titles released during the period 2001-2015, many show a war scenario close to the contemporary one and will let the player impersonate a character or an American faction. The game structure amplifies the message, with a story that always shows the good triumphing over the evil, whether it is an overseas threat or an extra-terrestrial one.

In that period, we have titles like Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2007), the first chapter of the saga to reinvent itself with a modern concept, abandoning the historical locations of the World Wars, Battlefield 3 (2011) which recreated an extremely credible modern Middle Eastern war scenario; we should also mention the ARMA titles, which stand out for the realism of their war simulations.

The latter is nothing but a revisited version of simulators produced by Bohemia Interactive for military training converted to entertainment purposes. Known among the professionals with the name of Virtual Battlespace, these simulators allow training by experimenting with multiple scenarios of War, ensuring a significant saving of energy in recreating the various situations and nullifying with the VR experience any safety risk. No wonder then that these products have also attracted the attention of terrorists, who use the same methods for recruitment, and have mods to dress the protagonists with the same turbans that they have and use images and video games slang for a thing that we can easily label as a loyalty program.

A similar practice was carried out by the US in 2002, with the release of America's Army, developed by Rival Interactive, an internal study of the US military, designed specifically to encourage recruitment. The game recorded more than 3 million users. A third of them downloaded the enrolment forms.

Via The Guardian 

And what about the stealth genre, which completely reverses the war scenario, drawing from what is called information warfare, the race to obtain sensitive information to avoid conflicts or change their fates. Although Kojima has set the standard with the saga of Metal Gear, it’s Ubisoft that perfectly frames its current meaning with Splinter Cell. A video game that makes of limited resources and careful evaluation during infiltration its strength. The title requires excellent fast-thinking skills, the same ones that special services seek out in the recruiting of new spies. It is no coincidence that the British secret services have rented an advertising space within SC: Double Agent, openly admitting to exploit new methods of recruitment.

The saga of Splinter Cell also gets the recognition of having cleared taboo subjects like the controversial prison of Guantanamo in Splinter Cell Blacklist, a title that also offers a 360 ° intel experience alongside the tested gameplay investigations around the world with the Gone Dark metagame.

There is also an underworld of countertrend titles, whose virtuous mission is to tell the other side of War, undoubtedly the most uncomfortable: titles like This War of Mine, which show the misery of the nightmare of war from the point of view of civilians in a survival game, or Liyla and the Shadows of War, the contested mobile game that tells the experience of a Palestinian girl in a war-zone. There is also Need to Know, inspired by the events of Edward Snowden, which gives a taste of what it means to be spied and constantly intercepted by the secret services of the world.

We can easily spot the contaminations: developers take references from the military world to recreate more and more realistic experiences while the war industry uses this ever more blurred boundary between real and virtual to infiltrate the daily life. A reality where a war title can be banned from the market of a nation, such as the case of Battlefield 3 in Iran, where creatives can be arrested because they are considered spies like it happened in the case of the Bohemian Interactive guys while collecting references for the development of ARMA3 in Greece. A reality where, without experiencing the military conscription, we can easily distinguish an M4 rifle from an M16, know military slang, vehicles, tactics of engagement.

That how the military entertainment industry, the militainment, works, and its users are all virtual-citizen soldiers.

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