Game Security – Part III: Militarism

//War-games
If we believe this potential could be realised in the future then, as participants in gaming as a wider society, we need to start carefully examining those who would look to control these depictions of war. War’s a dirty game – they say the first casualty is truth, and so we’re careful about the media outlets we trust to report on what’s going on. When we watch the news, we consciously know we’re being told a perspective on a story, and we compare it carefully against what we already know, if we know what’s good for us. If we think we’re being misled, we can think about it critically. But what if perspectives of war are presented to us as mere interactive entertainment, dressed up as fun and not as news? Would we still think critically, or would be more subconsciously and unquestioningly take the view of the game’s maker, because they decided the perspective from which we saw events? The danger is that we wouldn’t, and this has already been noticed. Entertainment can be a back door to our minds, a way of putting ideas in while we’re distracted – and games are probably the most powerful form of entertainment ever concieved, and they’re growing at an astronomical rate in user base and capability. The potential for abuse is arguably already being exploited.

What do the US Army, Hezbollah and the US hate group National Alliance have in common? They have all developed and distributed a videogame depicting their own take on world conflicts – America’s Army, Special Forces and Ethnic Cleansing respectively. These three groups have all realised that games are a real and powerful way to get their ideas across, primarily in all three cases for the purposes of recruitment. The Hezbollah and National Alliance games are unsubtle, especially the obvious, comical racism of the latter – but although America’s Army is more palatable, its methods are no less questionable. Shouldn’t military organisations, however legitimate and noble, stick to defending their countries? Surely games development is far outside their remit?

Even though AA has proven a success and has gone through multiple iterations since its original release in 2002, its popularity is still outweighed by commercial, non-military games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty, but it is becoming a major player, helped by its free nature. As AA catches up with the graphics and gameplay of its rivals, it and games like it will gradually allow governments and armies to affect more profoundly than ever before our perceptions of what our armies are and what they do. It is safe to assume they will not want to make us dislike them. Instead, they will paint a positive picture of themselves, most likely continuing to depict not real wars, but fictional ones which approximate them. And if, as the danger is, generation after generation pays more attention to these biased, deceptively entertaining forms of military information than to more reliable sources, we could sleepwalk into a society run by governments that use videogames to manufacture consensus for new and potentially unjust wars. It’s a real possibility, as real now as if someone suggested ten years ago that millions of people might log in daily to a persistent online game, a few of them seeing it as being nearly as important – more, even – than their own real lives.

//Potential futures
Games can be used to help us understand the world around us. As juvenile and childish as some may think they are, games have potential to help us understand, to learn, to cope. Their growth has profound ramifications for not only the future of entertainment but of society. But like all technology they must be protected from abuse. Games can help us understand war and its causes, can inform us about past conflicts and maybe one day even help us to learn how to prevent future ones, all the while still entertaining us. But something so high-tech, so new and with so much potential should not be used to reinforce the status quo, or to encourage unintelligent, unthinking subscription to old and dangerous ideas. War is vicious and brutal and cold and almost always wrong – gamers know this, whether they play mostly Animal Crossing or Battlefield Vietnam. They shouldn’t be encouraged to take part in it, or to see it merely as a technical exercise rather than a destroyer of lives – and they certainly shouldn’t be subjected to such cynical backdoor-warmongering recruitment as America’s Army , and similar games we’re likely to encounter in the next few years and onwards.

Videogaming is, we must keep reminding ourselves, in its infancy, and so too is its presentation of our world. Games will become both more complex and more accessible, and a subset of them will become more discursive and emotionally and intellectually probing than we can currently imagine. If we cherish values of fun, technical innovation and diversity, games have the potential to make a vital and positive contribution to the way we understand our world, by allowing us to do rather than see, to participate rather than spectate. We’re all about to keep on finding out what games are capable of.

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