More games and simulations
Since my previous post about Niall Ferguson’s article on computer games and the Second World War I’ve had some more ideas and found some new information. While I was searching Google for something else, I came across the article Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex by Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood. This article looks at the development of computer simulations for training the US military, and the relationship between the defence industry and the games industry. It includes a particularly interesting account of an attempt to reconstruct a battle from the 1991 Gulf War.
The battle in question is known as 73 Easting and took place on 26th February 1991. In the space of about two hours the US 2nd Cavalry Regiment defeated a larger Iraqi armoured force, destroying around 130 vehicles and inflicting 600 casualties. This was recognised not only as a significant victory, but also as an excellent example of armoured tactics which could play a valuable part in future training. Furthermore, existing computer simulations (using a networked system called SIMNET) had played a large part in preparing US tank crews for action, so it made sense to combine them. The plan was to reconstruct 73 Easting in as much detail as possible and turn it into a SIMNET scenario.
Work on data gathering for the simulation began one month after the battle had taken place. The data assembled by the team included battle site surveys and interviews with participants. Documentation included action logs, oral and written interviews, recordings from radio nets, and soldiers’ own tape recordings made during the battle. In addition, overhead photography made before and after the battle was obtained. On the battle site itself, trained observers marked friendly and enemy positions including tank and other vehicle hulks that littered the terrain. Troopers from the 2d Cavalry accompanied the DARPA team members to reconstruct the action moment-by-moment, vehicle-by-vehicle. The IDA brought the soldiers who had actually taken part and had them sketch out the battle. They walked over the battlefield amidst the twisted wreckage of Iraqi tanks, recalling the action as best they could. A few soldiers supplied diaries to reconstruct their actions.
Some were even able to consult personal tape recordings taken during the chaos. Tracks in the sand gave the simulators precise traces of movement. A black box in each tank, programmed to track three satellites, confirmed its exact position on the ground to eight digits. Every missile shot left a thin wire trail which lay undisturbed in the sand. Headquarters had a tape recording of radio-voice communications from the field. Sequenced overhead photos from satellite cameras gave the big view. A digital map of the terrain was captured by lasers and radar
Now that’s what I call an “astonishing quantity of factual information”. There might still be room for some uncertainty, but this is a level of detailed knowledge about a battle which had never been attained before. While this shows that technology now makes accurate reconstructions of battles from the very recent past possible, it also suggests that trying to reconstruct the Second World War is futile. The simulation of 73 Easting only recreates the experience of one regiment for a period of two hours. Reconstructing the whole of the Gulf War in that much detail would be a daunting and very expensive task. For earlier wars, we can’t get data with the same level of detail. Furthermore, the simulation only recreates the battle on a tactical level, which is relatively unproblematic. It doesn’t include any operational, strategic, economic, or political complications.
Computer simulations like this, which were developed for military training, have had a major influence on gaming. The main point of Lenoir and Lowood’s article is that the military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex, in which the defence contractors and game designers derive mutual benefits from developing new simulation technology. The First Person Shooter genre owes a lot to tactical training simulations. For example, the distributed network topology pioneered by SIMNET facilitated the multiplayer mode of Doom, and a modified version of Doom was developed for training the US Marines.
Ferguson acknowledges that Second World War FPS games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty are derived from US military simulators, but in his view this reduces their accuracy. I don’t really understand why he thinks that. Surely the mechanics of running around and firing a gun haven’t changed that much. MOHAA and CoD attempt to represent squad level tactical combat, which should be easier to recreate than even the regimental level of 73 Easting. No reconstruction is ever unproblematic, but the smaller the scale and the lower the level, the more problems are excluded.
Having finished the single player campaigns of MOHAA and CoD I can agree with Ferguson that they are not accurate recreations of Second World War combat, but my reasons are different. The real problem is that games are commercial entertainment products. As I said before, good gameplay has a higher priority than historical accuracy. But with FPS it’s even worse than that, because genre conventions can compromise both realism and gameplay (although they also create an opportunity for applying formalist criticism, so it’s not all bad). The shooter genre can be traced back to Space Invaders, via the scrolling shoot-em-ups of the 1980s and early 1990s. Ferguson is absolutely spot on when he compares FPS to Space Invaders. Despite the advanced 3D graphics and surround sound, the gameplay of some levels of MOHAA and CoD is exactly the same as Space Invaders. Other levels which promise free movement turn out to be as linear as a 2D one-way scroller of the 1980s, and levels where you have to run backwards and forwards to hold different parts of the line or get more bazooka shells can be quite reminiscent of Defender (a great game in its own right, but it’s surprising how little gameplay had changed over 20 years).
Some levels are more realistic than others. I found the Omaha Beach level in MOHAA terrifyingly convincing. It’s strange that Ferguson picked on that one when there are so many levels in the same game which are so much worse. Some of the missions are more like films of Alastair Maclean novels: sneak into the German base, steal the secret plans, sabotage something or other, fight your way out killing hundreds of Germans in the process, and make your dramatic escape just in the nick of time. Call of Duty promised more realism and better gameplay. The St Mer Eglise level which was used for the free demo blew me away (literally: the first time I played it I was hit by a mortar bomb while hiding behind a dead cow!). The level design and Artificial Intelligence programming seemed like great improvements over MOHAA, making it feel like being part of a functioning squad in a real battle rather than taking on the whole Third Reich single-handed. Unfortunately the rest of the game didn’t quite live up to this and still owed far too much to Alastair Maclean, Space Invaders, and the “do I have to do everything myself” conventions of FPS. If only the designers had spent less time implementing Hollywood style car chases. Someone should tell the games industry that “cinematic realism” is an oxymoron.
Is Call of Duty 2 any better? I’ll be finding out as soon as I can afford a new graphics card…
Comment by redrob64 — 2:55 am, 15 November 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
You should give “Brothers in Arms” a try. It attempts to replicate squad tactics with the player as an NCO in charge of one or two fire teams. There is still a lot of the “’do I have to do everything myself’ conventions of FPS” in it, but it does a much better job of deterring the “John Wayne” style of play — you tend to get shot. There is also a good deal of explanation of the situation being simulated and on the design efforts that you can chew over for criticism.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 1:30 pm, 15 November 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
I didn’t know about that but it looks really good, and there are cheap second hand copies on Amazon. How well do you think it would run on a Radeon 9600 non-pro?
Comment by redrob64 — 4:25 am, 17 November 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
I confess my ignorance about things computistic (that is the correct word, yes?) and can only say that I run it on a low end eMachine with a Radeon X700Pro and an old CRT monitor. It is supposedly compatible with the 8500, 9000, and X series cards, so I would guess that it should work. You may find some of the scenes a little jumpy on occasion, but that and a tendency for the sound to be scratchy is all I’ve trouble with. The sequel is pretty good too. I’m working my way up to the “realistic” level.
Good luck.
Comment by Gary Smailes — 11:15 am, 17 November 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
Perhaps the most successful conversion from training simulation to popular computer game in the Operation Flashpoint series. This series of FPS games was based directly on Virtual Battlefield Systems, a training tool for military agencies round the world, among them the US Marine Corps.
Pingback by Barista » Blog Archive » History Carnival XLIV — 2:01 pm, 30 November 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
[...] The dog inquisitive has another treat. The history of modern military campaigns is documented digitally from bullet to laser cannon. It gives us an entirely new way of doing history – building computer simulations, games driven entirely by their devotion to accuracy. This approach is distinctly different to the average war game, which simulates merely a certain kind of isolated hero. With a certain affinity for matters digital, the pooch has also been thinking about the way “technology has brought huge changes to historical research and opened up new possibilities.” That is a casual introduction to a huge topic. [...]
Comment by Battlefield Biker — 5:43 pm, 7 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
I was in Fox Troop 2/2 ACR and protected Ghost Troop’s flank during the battle of 73 Easting. As alluded to by GR, another important point about the gathering of modern battlefield data is that some first hand accounts can be uncorroborated by the facts on the ground, which allows a far better understanding of the true nature of the battle and hence, far better, more relistic training. In the past, these type of reports (and I’m talking about altruistically, neutral and non-altruistically motivated accounts) were subject to the individual historian’s “belief” or “gut” as to whether they were true or not. Some of my recent research on the battlefields of the English Civil War showed some battlefields with 3 distinct possibilities for some of the action (Langport) based on each historian’s view of the the first hand accounts. Had we not had the technological detail of the 73E, we would not understand it this well either. The amount and quality of detail that we are beginning to see from battlefield autopsies, electronic governmental evidence, hourly economic data and ubiquitous CCTV / satellite data will surely make training /decision making more effective. Now, using that same information in real time…that’s another question altogether that my colleague, H R McMasters, has written about.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 4:39 pm, 8 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
Yes, the availability of this kind of information could mark a major watershed in military history, and also put the cat among the pigeons in theoretical debates about how much we can know about what really happened in the past. On the one hand it now looks like we can get something like a god’s eye view of tactical and operational movements without having to worry about perception, memory, the meaning of language, or the relation of text to reality. Will post-structuralists be able to argue with that?
On the other hand, this is likely to provide concrete empirical evidence of the unreliability of individual perceptions and memory, especially in combat situations. Will empiricists be able to argue with that? We might be forced to abandon everything we thought we knew about battles before 1991.
In practice it’s probably more of a continuum than a drastic break. Information tends to get more complete and reliable the closer you get to the present (although there are exceptions). The research I’ve been doing on the First World War is so much easier than researching the seventeenth century because the records are more complete and more detailed (and also better sorted and indexed). I’ll never be able to pinpoint the exact spot where my great-grandfather was captured, but I’ve been able to narrow it down to a fairly small area that I can point to on a map with more certainty than I can locate most things that happened in the English Civil War.
Pingback by Investigations of a Dog » The Game at the End of Reality — 4:47 pm, 18 December 2006 [permanent link to this comment]
[...] The development of new technology was a necessary condition for this situation to arise, but it’s not a sufficient condition in itself. People who thought that ever improving technology would have to do all the work in catching up with unchanging reality were barking up the wrong tree. The real and the virtual are converging from both directions. Reality is getting more virtual at the same time as the virtual is getting more realistic. Culture is just as important as technology. When the media we habitually use to interact distance us from the reality we’re interacting with, a convincing simulation only needs to simulate the medium, not the reality itself. This negates the technological limitations which have dragged down attempts to simulate direct interaction between a person and a virtual environment. Simulations of tanks and planes were the earliest success of VR, because when you’re driving a vehicle, that vehicle is a medium which distances you from the rest of the world. The primary role of the simulation is to simulate the cockpit, a much easier task than simulating direct contact between a human body and a whole world. In the 1980s, even home computers like the C64 could simulate flying a plane quite convincingly (or at least more convincingly than they could simulate most other things). The SIMNET tank simulator used by the US Army is realistic enough to be a substitute for real exercises (see my post on More Games and Simulations). [...]
Comment by William — 2:50 am, 1 September 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Regarding a quality military-entertainment complex product, see Battlefront.com and the ‘Combat Mission’ series, particularly the latest ‘Combat Mission Shock Force’ game. Actually, Battlefront didn’t originally develop these from military ‘sims’. They were built from the ground up as games…albeit by military history and simulation fanatics. The various ‘Combat Mission’ games are by far and away the most realistic simulations of tactical ground warfare ever made available to the public as a commercial product (that I am aware of). MOHAA, COD, OFS, etc. are essentially action shooters by comparison.