By CHRIS SUELLENTROP
Unless you regard something like “Iron Man” as a film about Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America’s contemporary wars have consistently been box-office flops. Even “The Hurt Locker” grossed only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters — during the past three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars. Last year’s best-selling game was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which opens in Afghanistan; it was a sequel to a multimillion-selling 2007 game that features an American invasion of a nameless Middle Eastern country. Modern Warfare 2 has made “Avatar”-like profits for its studio, Activision. On the day the game was published in November, it sold nearly five million copies in North America and Britain, racking up $310 million in sales in 24 hours. By January of this year, the game’s worldwide sales added up to $1 billion.
Mark Weaver
For years, earlier installments of the Call of Duty franchise and other military shooters — the video-game industry’s term for these games about warfare — were, like cable-TV miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, always about World War II. But the Modern Warfare series has demonstrated that players have an appetite for games that purport to connect them to the wars their college roommates, or their sons, might be fighting in. Both Modern Warfare games are set in a mythical near-future, but the weapons — Predator drones, AC-130 gunships, nukes — clearly conjure Afghanistan and Iraq, as do the games’ good guys (Americans, British) and bad guys (terrorists). The appeal of this quasi-fictional setting is one reason that Modern Warfare 2 now sits alongside titles from more-famous franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario on the lists of the top-selling video games ever made.
No doubt as a result, in June, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video-game industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles, it sometimes seemed as if every studio was introducing a game about a war against an enemy who might conceivably be regarded as part of the Axis of Evil. In one game scheduled for release next year, the North Koreans will mount a land invasion of the United States. In another, American troops are sent into an improbably menacing Dubai.
Beyond their settings, what these future-war games have in common with the Modern Warfare series is a refusal to forthrightly acknowledge the inspiration for their subject matter. Video-game designers and players like to brag about how “realistic” the games are, but when gamers talk about verisimilitude, they’re usually talking about graphical fidelity, about how lifelike the characters and environments are in an otherwise fantastical world — and not about how the medium reflects anything else about the actual world in which we live.
The one war game at the expo that acknowledged the ripped-from-the-headlines nature of its setting was Medal of Honor, the latest iteration of a game franchise created in 1999 by Steven Spielberg, in the wake of “Saving Private Ryan,” as a World War II game for Dreamworks Interactive. The new game (the 11th in the series for PCs or consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox) will be published in October by Electronic Arts. With it, Medal of Honor is following the path trod by Call of Duty, “rebooting” a popular World War II series by situating a game in something that resembles the present day. Unlike its rival, however, Medal of Honor is not anticipating the very near future. Instead it is delving into the very recent past: the game will be set in Afghanistan, in the early stages of the American intervention there.
In a darkened room at the expo, PlayStation 3s were hooked up to HDTVs, so that a team of players, of which I was a member, could insert themselves into the avatars of coalition soldiers in the Helmand Valley and do battle with Taliban fighters. On the convention-center floor, I adopted the role of a Taliban insurgent in the ruins of Kabul, shooting at coalition (read: American) troops in a “Team Deathmatch” mode.
Medal of Honor does not aspire to capture the war in Afghanistan in a documentary sense, but like other shooters, it creates a visceral sensation of combat. In essence, it forgoes one kind of realism while embracing another. Are video games like this mere frivolities that dishonor the real soldiers who have fought in the wars depicted — as critics, including military families, have recently charged? Or does their popularity indicate that they are successfully conveying an experience of war to audiences in a way that is at least as effective and affecting as the war stories told in literature or film?
Electronic Arts is no doubt hoping that Medal of Honor will make it a lot of money. Video games have become astonishingly expensive to produce — the entrance fee to develop a big-budget, mainstream video game is now north of $20 million, and Medal of Honor probably cost significantly more than that to make. New games usually sell at retail for just under $60, and selling even a million copies of a new game is no longer considered an indication of success. The best insight I received into the size of Medal of Honor’s budget, during a visit in June to Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, came when Greg Goodrich, the game’s executive producer, told me that if the game doesn’t sell at least three million copies, “I’m not going to be able to do another one.”
Medal of Honor’s story begins, chronologically, just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an opening sequence, the camera — gamers describe the perspective you see in a game as “the camera,” even though video games are not really a lens-based medium — descends through the earth’s atmosphere toward Afghanistan, passing communications satellites that give off the sounds of Al Qaeda “chatter” and of news broadcasts from Lower Manhattan.
From there, the game places the player in the body of a member of a Navy Special Operations team infiltrating the Taliban-held town of Gardez, Afghanistan. Medal of Honor later puts players behind the eyes of an Army Special Operations soldier, as well as an Army Ranger and an Apache helicopter gunner, as they seize Bagram air base from the Taliban, ride all-terrain vehicles through the Shah-i-Kot Valley, snipe Al Qaeda fighters near the mountain of Takur Ghar and more. (The game is rated M, for Mature, the video-game equivalent of an R rating.)
In the argot of video games, Medal of Honor is a first-person shooter, meaning that players see the action from the viewpoint of the characters they control. The term for the genre is something of a misnomer. Properly described, these games would be called second-person shooters, as the protagonist in them is a broadly identifiable You, rather than a richly drawn I, a character speaking in his own voice. In fact, the protagonist of Medal of Honor never talks at all.
One of the most compelling things about video games is this sense of identification between the player and the protagonist. The best games do not give you a sense that you are controlling someone else — they give you a sense that you are someone else. For this reason, over the course of the 10 or 12 hours that it generally takes to complete Medal of Honor, you never see or hear any of the four different playable characters — beyond the sight of the hands that extend from the edges of the screen to grip the weapon that you’re carrying. “Because we don’t ever want to break that immersion, that it’s you, there,” Goodrich told me in June as I watched him play through one of the game’s levels.
Rich Farrelly, the game’s senior creative director, sat on a couch across from Goodrich. We were in Overlord, a room on the campus of Electronic Arts in Los Angeles — nearly all the rooms used by the Medal of Honor development team are named after military operations. Camouflage netting lay on a counter nearby. “That’s where the fun comes in, at least for me,” Farrelly said. “I’ve now created this soldier fiction for the player and put him in those boots. And now I’m making him think like a soldier.”
One of the buzzwords tossed around frequently by the Medal of Honor team is “authenticity.” The game has more than 50 actors, delivering thousands of lines of dialogue, with foreign dialogue recorded in Pashto, Gulf Arabic and Chechen. To create some of the animation used in the game, Medal of Honor’s computer-graphics team examined videos from Afghanistan that are posted on sites like YouTube and LiveLeak. “We want the player to feel, not like they’re in a movie, but like they’re in Afghanistan,” Waylon Brinck, the computer-graphics supervisor for the game, told me.
The scale of the effort devoted to this can be mind-boggling. Using more than 100 microphones, audio engineers recorded actual weapons fire at Fort Irwin in California, in a mock Iraqi village used by the military for training. With the Pentagon’s permission, the audio team attached microphones to Apache helicopters and recorded the sounds of takeoffs and landings, as well as the sounds of the helicopters firing their rounds. They even hooked microphones up to the targets that the helicopters destroyed.
Goodrich described Medal of Honor as “historical fiction,” but it felt transgressively real when I played it. The battles are fought in civilian-free zones, where pretty much everyone you encounter is an enemy — Taliban, Al Qaeda or Chechen — and a threat to your life. Or rather (there’s that sense of identification again), your character’s life. The action is sometimes slow and methodical — your character is asked to kill four enemies instead of 40, or 400 — and at other times the body count exceeds that of a 1980s Schwarzenegger movie. I killed a lot, and was killed, a lot.
Critics of the war in Afghanistan (and perhaps even its supporters) will detect at least a whiff of jingoism in the game. During one of the game’s levels, as the Rangers approach the Shah-i-Kot Valley in a helicopter, one of them describes the flight’s “main course” as “all-you-can-eat Taliban” and adds, “Hope you like foreign foods.” Within sight of the Pakistan border, a Ranger says, “We’ll be going there soon enough.” At another moment, a character brags that “we’re going to make it farther than the Russians did.” The game ends with a dedication written by its consultants, who are veterans of the Special Operations community.
There are limits to the game’s aspirations to realism. I was repeatedly told that Medal of Honor intentionally avoided the subject of politics in favor of “telling the soldier’s story.” Goodrich also told me, “I don’t want to make the bummer game.” Still, mistakes are made in the game by American troops and commanders. Friendly fire accidents happen. The intelligence agencies get things wrong. No matter how skilled a player is, Americans will die. The general arc of the entire game is consistent with the theme of most war video games, which Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and an author of several books on video games, summed up to me this way: “War is horrible and badass.”
In what may have been the first — and sometimes feels like the only — time that someone suggested video games are making humanity less violent and militaristic, a 33-year-old Stewart Brand, writing about the video game Spacewar in Rolling Stone in 1972, opined that “Spacewar serves Earthpeace.” Invented by a band of students at M.I.T. in 1962, Spacewar is regarded by many observers as the first successful video game. Brand was smitten. He wrote that this new form of digital play (“the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters”) was “heresy, uninvited and unwelcome” in a world of “passive consumerism.” Spacewar, and by logical extension the new medium of video games, was remarkable, Brand went on, because it was “intensely interactive in real time with the computer,” because it “bonded human and machine,” because it “served human interest, not machine” and, perhaps best of all, it was “merely delightful.” (Brand also wrote that the fact that “computers are coming to the people” was “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”)
In the intervening four decades, most of the rhetoric, if not the evidence, has been on the other side of the debate. Not many of the first observers of video games were willing to give Earthpeace a chance. From almost the moment that arcades and consoles appeared in America’s shopping malls and living rooms, critics have charged that video games “add to the dehumanization and objectification of human beings,” as a rabbi from the Philadelphia suburbs put it on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” in 1982, a time when the country came down with a seemingly anodyne bout of Pac-Man fever. Six years before that, the nation had already seen what one historian of the medium calls “the first major moral panic over the content of a video game” when “60 Minutes” examined the controversy over 1976’s Death Race, a sort of proto-Grand Theft Auto involving rudimentarily animated cars that drove over rudimentarily animated pedestrians. The apotheosis of this critique could be heard years later, in 1999, when the video game Doom was blamed, implausibly, for helping to prepare Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to carry out the Columbine massacre.
As video games have become a more-or-less accepted form of mass entertainment for adults, arguments like these have been heard with less frequency and mounted with less vigor. But many people still find something unsettling about the medium. A mini-scandal over Medal of Honor played out in August after Karen Meredith, the mother of Ken Ballard, an Army lieutenant killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, went on “Fox and Friends” and said that any game based on a continuing conflict was “disrespectful” to those whose family members have died in the war. “Families who are burying their children are going to be seeing this,” she said. Not long after Meredith’s interview with Fox News, Britain’s defense secretary, Liam Fox, called the game “un-British” because, in its multiplayer incarnation, it will allow players to fight as the Taliban against coalition forces. “I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product,” he said. Earlier this month, a Defense Department agency asked GameStop, a chain of video-game stores, not to sell Medal of Honor on Army and Air Force bases.
Liam Fox is a member of Britain’s Conservative Party; others, on the left, have raised their own reasons to find Medal of Honor disquieting. An editor at Mother Jones, Adam Weinstein, blogged in August that the game is “war profiteering of the first order,” and Adam Serwer, who blogs for The American Prospect, wrote, “Realistic war simulations have always bothered me.” Serwer added, “I’m playing video games to escape from the frustrations of the real world, I don’t want to be thrust into another, realistic existence far more bleak than the one I’m currently living.”
Many gamers, however — no matter their politics — subscribe to a McLuhanesque notion that only the form, and never the content, of this medium is of significance. Video games, in this view, are about problem-solving and game play, the captivating, kinetic interaction between the movements a player makes on a controller and the simultaneous action on-screen. And it’s surely true that Medal of Honor’s game play will determine whether it is a best seller or a bust. “Whether this is set on Afghanistan or set on the moon, it doesn’t really matter,” Geoff Keighley, a video-game journalist who hosts a show on Spike TV, told me. Will Wright, the designer of games like SimCity and The Sims, has seemed to embrace this view, saying that games are about agency (the ability to navigate a virtual world), not empathy (relating emotionally to the particulars of that world). But in many ways, the main project of the past several years among video-game developers has been to try to prove Will Wright wrong. Maybe the agency that games allow can, in the hands of the right storytellers, lead to empathy. Maybe the interactive nature of video games can, when combined with narrative elements like story and character, evoke feelings in players in a way that is unique to the medium.
After all, the video gamers who choose to play military shooters typically take the fictional elements of these games quite seriously. A survey conducted by Joel Penney, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, found that these gamers viewed their chosen pastime as something more than simple escapism or problem-solving exercises with good sound effects. The players — adults mostly between ages 18 and 29 (though some were in their 50s), largely Americans and almost all men — said playing the World War II versions of Medal of Honor or Call of Duty made them feel empathy for their countrymen. One wrote that, after playing the games, his “feelings have deepened in respect for those who have died.”
Greg Goodrich told me that the “holy grail” of his medium was to get game play and fiction to interact in such a way that the fusion of the two would affect players in ways that movies and books cannot. “I think you have the potential to touch them in a more emotional and engaging way because they took part in it,” he said. Penney’s study suggests that military shooters, by grounding their stories in the lived experiences of American soldiers, have had more success in this realm than their designers are given credit for. Feeling empathy for real soldiers fighting in foreign wars is not the same as feeling it toward fictional characters, but without being moved by the fiction in these games, it’s hard to see how players were subsequently moved to feel more humanely toward their fellow citizens.
At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, video games are taken more seriously as a form of entertainment than ever before, even by the priests of high culture. Nicholson Baker recently wrote in The New Yorker that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 might be “truer, realer than almost all war movies.” Junot Diaz cheerfully reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV — the kind of game that once provoked a moral panic with every sequel — in The Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. And in The London Review of Books last year, John Lanchester called the first Modern Warfare game, published in 2007, “more involving” than the Hollywood movies with which it might be compared. “The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists,” Lanchester wrote. “If the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form.”
But the feeling among many video-game players is that the artists lost an important skirmish a little more than a year ago. In April 2009, the video game Six Days in Fallujah was canceled by its Japanese publisher, Konami, in the very same month that the game’s development was announced to the public. Six Days in Fallujah had been billed as an “interactive documentary” about the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. In addition to working with actual Marines who fought in Fallujah, the game’s developers said they were talking to Iraqis who lived through the battle — both civilians and insurgents.
Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic Games, the North Carolina-based studio that was developing Six Days in Fallujah for Konami before it was canceled, told me this summer that “the heart of the controversy that caused Konami to pull out of the project” was the combination of “the stereotypes that are associated with the word ‘game’ and the incompatibility of that with the word ‘Iraq.’ ”
Read Omohundro, the captain of a Marine company that fought in Fallujah, served as a consultant on the game. “It’s very important to have the enemy’s perspective of what’s going on,” he told me. “You have to understand the environment, and if you just see it from the American viewpoint, that’s all you know.”
Six Days in Fallujah proposed adding “a layer of moral ambiguity” to warfare that Jamin Brophy-Warren, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now publishes Kill Screen, a magazine about video games, says he hasn’t seen in other military shooters. Brophy-Warren says he was “kind of blown away” by the demo for Six Days in Fallujah that he saw last year in San Francisco during the annual Game Developers Conference. “There’s an Iraqi who picks up a gun, and you don’t know if he’s an insurgent or not,” he said. “Do you shoot him?”
Omohundro described the reaction from the public, especially from a group of mothers whose sons had been killed in action in Fallujah, as “blinded by fury.” Beth Houck, the mother of David Houck, a Marine rifleman who was killed in Fallujah in 2004, told me that her objections to Six Days in Fallujah apply to Medal of Honor as well: despite the genre’s claims to authenticity, military shooters do not show the toll the wars have taken on the homefront. “They don’t show the heartache of family members who are left without a spouse, or a father, or a child who does not return,” she said.
Omohundro says he is disappointed the game was never completed. A video game, he suggested, can portray combat in a way that is impossible to achieve in another medium. “In a movie, you don’t get the opportunity to make decisions that have consequences,” he said. “You simply watch what’s on the screen that’s in front of you.”
The Marines that Six Days in Fallujah planned to portray would have been based on real people who fought in a real battle. The soldiers in Medal of Honor, on the other hand, are fictional characters. But some of them are inspired by the careers of real service members, men now working as consultants to the game who have experience in Special Operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. On Father’s Day, I met with three of them for brunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Calif. They did not tell me their names and instead asked to be known by the handles — Coop, Dusty and Vandal — by which they are known inside Electronic Arts. They said they have done “extensive work in the two main theaters, and theaters outside of those as well,” as Vandal put it. Greg Bishop, a retired lieutenant colonel who worked with the Medal of Honor team for two years as the Army’s liaison to the entertainment industry, told me later that the men represented themselves accurately. Vandal and Coop said they came from a background in naval special warfare — meaning the most elite Seals — and Dusty is a former member of the Army Special Operations unit commonly known as Delta Force.
None of the three men would discuss their current work, but a Central Intelligence Agency contractor with the handle of Dusty is mentioned in the book “Jawbreaker,” by the former C.I.A. field commander Gary Berntsen, as a participant in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. They did not sport beards or balaclavas and wore sunglasses only because we were sitting outside. They all wore taut T-shirts and jeans or khakis. Dusty brought his wife. They addressed one another openly by their first names.
The day before, Dusty sat for an interview for a promotional Web video for the game. In a nasal Georgia accent that was obscured, along with his face, when snippets of the interview were posted on the Medal of Honor site, Dusty talked about riding in a pickup truck from Jalalabad into the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001. He stood on a ridge only about 3,600 feet from an Al Qaeda camp. He watched planes drop 675,000 pounds of bombs on the camp over the course of 72 hours.
But even a man who may have come painfully close to killing Bin Laden feels the need to look cool for a teenage child. “The reason it was important for me to be involved in the game was so I could impress my 19-year-old son,” Dusty said. “He was like: ‘You? They asked you? For your advice, Dad?’ ” More important, Dusty went on to say, “I want people to come away with an honest feeling of what it’s like to be out there, doing some of that stuff.”
At the Ritz-Carlton, Coop, Dusty and Vandal acknowledged that one of the things they asked the Medal of Honor developers to do was to make the game less realistic than its creators initially envisioned. In a document called “Faceless” that the consultants wrote and circulated to the Medal of Honor team when they first joined the project, the men explained that their cooperation was dependent on maintaining their community’s reputation as silent professionals. “People want to know who these men are,” they wrote. “With MOH” — everyone at E.A. calls Medal of Honor “MOH,” pronounced like the Stooge or the bartender from “The Simpsons” — “they are going to get a little slice of that. However, a little slice is all they should get.” At the men’s behest, Medal of Honor refers to these elite members of the Special Operations community merely as “Tier One.”
“They’re selling authenticity and realism,” said Coop, a thick man with a Boston accent; he looks not unlike one of the muscled space marines in Gears of War, a popular sci-fi video game. “We wanted to help bring that to the table,” he said. “But we also wanted to make sure it didn’t go too far.”
Last summer, Goodrich showed the men storyboards for a game, with the title Medal of Honor: Anaconda, that would be something like a “Black Hawk Down” for Afghanistan: it would be based on the disastrous 2002 operation known as Anaconda, including the battle of Takur Ghar, in which Neil Roberts, a Navy Seal, fell out of a helicopter and was dragged away to his death by Al Qaeda fighters. The game “resembled very closely events overseas that involved friends of ours that had been killed,” Coop said. “We thought it hit a little too close to home” and would “put a sour taste in our brothers’ mouths.”
That night, Goodrich told the men at dinner that he would excise the scene with Neil Roberts from the game and change the game into a work of historical fiction rather than a sort of docudrama. In Medal of Honor, when a helicopter is hit over the mountain of Takur Ghar, the men on board leap out and take the fight to the enemy. Goodrich says the consultants helped to make the game “authentic and plausible” rather than “accurate and realistic.”
“There’s nothing so close where it’s a re-enactment,” Coop said at brunch. “In my eyes, that would be wrong.”
Not all soldiers are eager to endorse video games as a medium for helping audiences understand the nature of combat. As an Army platoon leader in 2002, Andrew Exum found himself in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, where he killed a man for the first time in his life and then found the gear of three dead Rangers who had been sent to try to rescue Neil Roberts. “I can tell you I’d probably be a little offended if things were exactly modeled on some of the things that happened during Anaconda,” Exum, now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “Returning that gear to those guys who were in the First Rangers, it was a tough thing.”
Exum emphasized that he is not outraged by Medal of Honor or any other military shooter. But he can’t help, he says, being a little bit bothered by these games. “This is the thing,” he told me. “Point 5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts.” Nearly 80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2 million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last fall. “There’s something annoying that most of America experiences the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place, through a video game,” he said. Would he feel similarly, I later asked, if Americans were heading to a movie called “Medal of Honor” about Operation Anaconda? “I think there is a difference between being a participant and an observer,” Exum replied in an e-mail.
All war fiction, granted, reduces combat to something less than what it is in reality. “ ‘The Iliad’ trivialized war into something ancient feasters could listen to while they ate,” Roger Travis, a classics professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote earlier this year on his blog about video games. But it does seem a fair critique to suggest that military shooters turn the classic description of war on its head, converting the experience into long periods of sheer terror punctuated by moments of boredom. “Real war’s a lot more like ‘Catch-22’ than ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ” one veteran told me. “No one would dramatize the real experience” of a platoon in Afghanistan “because it’s too boring,” he added. “How do you make a game out of drinking chai with an elder?”
The Onion actually gave this a shot last year, with a mock news broadcast about “Modern Warfare 3,” described as “the most true-to-life military game every created, with the majority of game play spent hauling equipment and filling out paperwork.” In this nonexistent game, the single-player campaign lasts “a record 17,250 hours.”
To be fair, comedy is easy. Making video games is hard. Medal of Honor may not reinvent the first-person shooter, but some in the industry — including several who worked on Six Days in Fallujah — hope that its mere existence is a brave and incremental step that will pave the way for nonfiction approaches to war in the medium. A video-game documentary about Iraq or Afghanistan is inevitable, whether it is a Medal of Honor sequel, or Six Days in Fallujah, or another game altogether, Read Omohundro told me.
“I think that eventually it will be permitted,” he said. “And if it becomes permitted, it will be accepted. It’s just going to take a while.”
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