Authors: Tom Chatfield
It’s tough. Incredibly tough, in fact. I can press the space bar to hide, but it isn’t long before a jeep full of soldiers catches me out in the open. The screen freezes, and another blunt message flashes up: ‘You have been captured by the militia. You will likely become one of the hundreds of thousands of people lost to this humanitarian crisis. Girls in Darfur face abuse, rape and kidnapping by the Janjaweed. As someone at a far-off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?’ I would. One child down, five to go. I select the next eldest and set out once again into the scrub, dashing towards the well. This time, playing incredibly cautiously and hiding every hundred metres or so, I make it to the well. Success! I fill my canister and am promptly told I need to be extra careful as I’ll now be moving much more slowly on my way back. Drawing a deep breath I set off for the camp, this time running towards rather than away from the screen – meaning I can’t even identify any good hiding places in advance. A jeep appears in the distance, and I try to outrun it. Just a few hundred metres short of the camp, it catches me. I’ve lost another child and still not got any water.
At this point, several things occur to me. First, I’m not having much fun. I’m a pretty experienced gamer, and what I’ve been doing so far is both fairly crude and slightly excruciating. I’d like to get some water to the camp, but I have precisely nothing to show for my efforts; the loss of one more child might well push me over the I’m-never-playing-this-again edge. Second, I’m wondering whether my not having much fun is part of the point. After all, trying to get water to a real refugee camp in Darfur is neither fun nor easy, and the game may be honestly attempting to reflect this – which is both fair enough and somewhat self-defeating. It only takes a minute to absorb the lesson that getting water is a difficult task, and after this there isn’t much to motivate me to continue in this task. As the game itself has already pointed out, I don’t actually need this water because I’m sitting safe at home looking at a computer screen. What should keep me playing is a sense of challenge, achievement and engagement, and as yet I haven’t found too much of that.
Still, there is more to the game than water-gathering. Or, to be more precise, there is more to this particular ‘narrative based simulation’ than water-gathering – the designers of
Darfur is Dying
were evidently sufficiently uneasy with the idea of referring to it as a ‘game’ that the word appears nowhere on their website that I can see. As well as gathering water, I can visit the camp itself, where I’m given an isometric overview of huts, fields and tents and tasked with assisting the residents in growing crops and maintaining the buildings. It’s an attractively drawn setting, with plenty of mouse-over information about the details of life in such a camp; what it isn’t, however, is either easy to fathom or to interact with. As I eventually work out, my job is to walk my character around the map, bringing water to and from a central supply in order to prevent the camp collapsing into chaos or starvation. Needless to say, the camp is regularly attacked and its facilities destroyed by militia. After eventually managing to make a successful water run, I manage to keep things going for only one day before it’s game over. At which point a message asks me to enter my name, reminds me of the 2.5 million refugees currently living in camps, and invites me to spread awareness of the game virally to my friends. It also invites me to take further action by donating to charities working in Darfur, or contacting my elected representative.
Ethically,
Darfur is Dying
is hard to fault. It presents a great deal of important information with concision and impact. It’s also attractively designed, well researched and has won a large audience for its message. As a game, however, its limitations are painfully obvious. It’s a little confusing, extremely hard and largely unsatisfying in game-play terms. ‘Fun’ has been rather too scrupulously avoided; or, a little more generously, its idea of ‘engagement’ is somewhat dour and limited.
Seggerman herself admires the game, but is willing to concede that there’s a significant divide in production values between most ‘games for change’ and the offerings of the mainstream industry. ‘You can look at our organisation’s website and you can truthfully say that these games do not yet stack up against the other kinds of games out there,’ she admits. But she believes firmly that the idea of using video games as force for political and social engagement is one that will come into its own with time – and is extremely proud of what has already been achieved with titles like
Darfur is Dying
. ‘This is such a new thing, it is only five years old. Like the film
An Inconvenient Truth
, there is going to be a game that really shows us what they can do, and changes the way people think. It is going to happen. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.’
Part of the problem is money.
Darfur is Dying
was funded via a competition, backed by the American television channel mtvU, a division of MTV that broadcasts across the US to college students. Its design team was led by a talented student from the University of Southern California. All of which makes the finished product still more impressive as an achievement, but also highlights its limitations. Playing it is rather like going back in time fifteen years or twenty years, back to when most games were made on similarly small budgets under similar time constraints, and when players were less elaborately coddled by extensive play-testing, networked features and so on. There is tremendous enthusiasm for politically and ethically engaged gaming within much of the industry, but not – yet – the level of support from major developers and publishers that would be needed for the phenomenon to gain critical mass in terms of design and production values.
Beyond this, there remains the question of how far ‘serious gaming’ is a contradiction in terms. The idea that I might have been really entertained by
Darfur is Dying
is a somewhat uncomfortable one. Wouldn’t the fact that I really enjoyed running a virtual refugee camp be, in some ways, inherently trivialising the issues involved? Seggerman rejects this idea, pointing to the impressive (and rapidly expanding) array of titles that her organisation is already linking to from their website, titles that model everything from Third World farming to spotting signs of addiction in others to developing sustainable energy resources for cities. ‘Games have to be taken on their own terms,’ she argues. ‘They’re not trying to replace the reality of Darfur or Rwanda. But people cannot just go and experience these places, and the simulated experiences games offer are amazing. I don’t look on games as competing with the real world and human interactions. I see them as a medium and as a path towards actions in the real world.’
If you’re looking for further evidence that games are serious tools for purposes other than entertainment, it can be found in a field whose aims appear very different to those of Games for Change – the military. The US military alone now spends around $6 billion a year on various kinds of virtual and simulated training programs. Not all are video games in the strict sense, but the military were undoubtedly among the very first to realise the potential of games for both training and tactical development; and the brutal realities of their profession are such that there’s little chance such an amount of money would be wasted on something that doesn’t work.
War games themselves are almost as ancient as warfare; and many of the earliest games played in human societies were based around combat or fighting of some kind, from duelling and wrestling to javelin throwing. The earliest video games, too, found a rich resource for game designs in everything from hand-to-hand combat to virtual military campaigning. In fact, it’s probably fairer to say that video games found the military, rather than the other way around.
The iconic first-person shooting game
Doom
, made by id Software, came out in 1993 and rapidly became one of the most successful titles of all time, not least because it was one of the first games to allow up to eight friends to link up their computers and chase each other around a landscape of bunkers, courtyards and hidden sniping points that they themselves could create customised maps for. In 1996, seeing how popular
Doom
was among soldiers, the US Marine Combat Development Command decided to produce a specially modified version of it.
Marine Doom
, as it was inevitably known, was little more than a carefully reconfigured version of the existing game’s run-around-a-maze-shooting dynamic. What it introduced was ‘realistic’ weaponry and a series of carefully structured environments, designed to train a team of marines in such disciplines as conservation of ammunition, the proper sequence of an attack and mutual support. It was also, not unimportantly, great fun. By modern standards the graphics were crude, but the experience was immediate, absorbing and nail-bitingly anxious, as well being notably effective at building the skills of communication and coordination necessary for a team to survive within it for any length of time.
As well as strategy and teamwork, hurtling around in-game environments proved a fantastic way of training soldiers to identify and memorise locations suitable for hiding, sniping, taking cover and regrouping, skills that were soon harnessed by the decision to construct training levels based on the precise floor-plans of various worldwide US Embassies. This meant that, for example, hostage recovery scenarios could be rehearsed within accurate representations of actual Embassy buildings. As any gamer will tell you, there are few better ways of memorising the layout of a space than running around a virtual representation of it a few hundred times under intense pressure.
Marine Doom
was a hit within the corps and, when a version of it was subsequently released for general consumption, outside it, a response which suggested a valuable secondary use for military video games, in parallel to their potential as training environments. They could also, the army realised, function as highly effective recruiting tools. What better way to harness the willingness of millions of gamers across the world to blow each other up in fantasy scenarios than to offer them a taste of the real thing – or, at least, to offer them a stamp of interactive military-grade authenticity? The result, released online in 2002, was the game
America’s Army
, ‘the official army game’, as it bills itself on its slick website: simply download, create an account and you can start playing in a patriotic blaze of red, white and blue. Or rather, you can start training:
America’s Army
isn’t quite your standard blast-till-you-drop affair.
The first thing the game invites you to do is not – as some users might have hoped – kick some terrorist ass, but learn how to fire a gun in a training range, including full instructions on the importance of knowing how to unjam your rifle, conserve ammunition, and fire from standing, kneeling and prone positions. That done, it’s on to an obstacle course – at which, during my first attempt, I manage to hurl myself to my death with an over-enthusiastic rope descent from a tower. The tone throughout isn’t quite that of your ordinary gung ho game environment either: apart from paeans to the virtues of the American soldier on every loading screen, there’s a strong emphasis on listening for and obeying orders, putting your safety and that of your comrades ahead of blasting or running around, and above all on maintaining what the game calls ‘honour’. This is a kind of experience system that rewards players for ‘honourable’ actions, like aiding a comrade or achieving an objective, and punishes them for ‘dishonourable’ ones, like shooting civilians or allies. Fail to stick to the rules of each engagement and your soldier is likely to end up in prison.
America’s Army
, has been an unprecedented success, winning grudging respect even among the notoriously hard-to-please ranks of professional games journalists: a testament, among other things, to the money the military have invested in creating a product of commercial quality. At the time of writing, the PC version boasted 10,063,499 registered players (including this author). There have been no fewer than twenty-six editions of the game since its original release, spanning consoles as well as computers, and taking players through scenarios from special forces infiltrations to all-out assaults on terrorist bunkers or reconnaissance missions. It even holds the coveted Guinness World Records title of ‘Most Downloaded War Game’.
Again, though, the basic tension between the idea of seriousness and the idea of entertainment rears its head. Is the triumph of
America’s Army
as propaganda a tacit admission that the entire point of video games is the lack of certain kinds of real-world seriousness within them? You can certainly make the military seem a thrilling and thoroughly contemporary occupation by packaging it up in a hot new medium. Exactly how ethical an activity this is, however, remains open to debate. Indeed, as is often the way with modern video games, dissident voices have begun to be heard within the game itself, with a number of members of the public choosing to make ‘virtual protests’ against the actions of the US military by, among other things, registering accounts under the names of soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq.
Think too long or hard about the ethical intricacies of a simulated environment modelling a combat situation and you’re certain to experience a peculiarly modern kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s something described in detail in reporter Evan Wright’s
Generation Kill
, an account published in 2004 of the author’s experience of being ‘embedded’ with the First Recon unit of Marines on combat duty during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The young men he watched fighting represented, he writes, ‘more or less America’s first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.’