Investigations of a Dog

Brett at Airminded has produced statistical evidence to show that Investigations of a Dog is the third most popular military history blog. It’s nice to be popular, but beware of the truth effect. As Brett says, the figures have their limitations, and a lot depends on how you define a military history blog. I’m all too aware that this could make me complacent. When I started this blog last year I worked really hard to build up a reputation, but recently I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been busy moving websites to a new server, setting up the Military History Carnival, writing an actual article for an actual real journal, and various other things. But when I haven’t got much to write about, I can always fall back on computer games…

Just after Christmas I wrote about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, a World War 2 first person shooter which is, unsurprisingly, an incremental improvement over Call of Duty. After finishing that (only on “normal” difficulty though — “authentic” must be insanely difficult!) I moved on to the next instalment: Earned In Blood. In a lot of ways it’s the incremental improvement over Road To Hill 30 which I was expecting, but the designers also did some surprising things with narrative.

First the incremental improvements. There’s a new single player skirmish mode in addition to the campaign storyline, and it lets you play as the Germans as well as the Americans (no British unfortunately, but you can’t have everything). I was quite excited about that, but it turned out to be very disappointing. The map design is severely lacking in imagination. Everything is just as linear as the campaign levels. There’s usually only one right way to do it, which you have to find by trial and error. The most annoying thing is that there’s no respawning. If you get killed you have to start all over again, which makes things even more boring and frustrating. I know it’s not realistic to be able to respawn, but I think a skirmish mode should be much more of a game. It should be fun. Above all, I want a sense that there’s a battle going on around me and continuing without me, rather than being the centre of attention all the time. For all its limitations, Star Wars Battlefront is still my favourite FPS because the gameplay gives me more or less what I want (although I had to mod the weapons to make them more “realistic”). I’d probably still play it a lot if I only had time to finish some new maps.

So the campaign is still the best part of Earned In Blood, if only by default. There are some definite improvements here. The level design seems to be a lot better than Road To Hill 30. While it’s still quite linear, there is at least a bit more freedom to manoeuvre. There’s still usually only one workable solution to a level, but they seem less arbitrary. The Germans seem a bit more intelligent and a bit more mobile. There are still levels where you have to capture a Panzerfaust to deal with the tanks, but they’re more reasonable this time: you get decent cover, and plenty of opportunities to outflank them. I was particularly impressed by a level where the Germans have a mortar position to their rear. The mortar team reacts realistically, trying to get the range, so that if you leave your squad in the same place for too long they get hit. This is a big improvement in the way artillery was handled from MOHAA right up to Road To Hill 30, with explosions being placed as static objects which go off at regular intervals — the trick was to learn the pattern and time your run carefully, something which goes right back to 80s platform games! And I obviously wasn’t the only one who took exception to the Panzer IVs in Road To Hill 30, because this time they’ve got it right: long barreled guns and desert yellow colour scheme.

So on to the story. I have to say that as a player I’m not particularly interested in the narratives of FPS. Just give me an objective and let me get on with it. I don’t care about the character I’m controlling, his motivation, his cod-profound thoughts on the morality of war, or what he had for breakfast. I like to think that the tedium of badly written and badly acted cut scenes compensates at least a little for the complete absence of marching, digging, and waiting from every FPS, but really I play games to be entertained. Like Road To Hill 30, Earned In Blood is told in flashback. This time the central character is Joe Hartsock, and the containing narrative is his debriefing with an intelligence officer on about D+15. Again this gives plenty of scope for voiceovers which seem oblivious to their own ridiculousness, but that’s no surprise.

The first surprise was that the flashbacks take the story right back to D-Day. I was expecting the story to follow on from the end of Road To Hill 30, on D+8, at which point Hartsock was promoted to squad leader to replace Matt Baker, who became platoon sergeant. In fact, Earned In Blood follows Hartsock right from D-Day and overlaps with some of the story in Road To Hill 30. My first impression was that this seemed a bit forced. Although the continuity more or less matches up it somehow feels a bit too much like Back To The Future. It’s hard to believe that Hartsock would be off leading a squad and doing all these extraordinary things in between being just another of Baker’s fire team.

For most of the first week, these are just two separate stories which happen to take place at the same time and occasionally join up. The biggest surprise came on D+7 at Hill 30. Unsurprisingly, this battle was the climax of Road To Hill 30. Like the climax to MOHAA (the Alistair Maclean-esque escape from the poison gas factory) this was a difficult, annoying, and profoundly unrealistic level. Baker was sent off on his own to find and bring back some Sherman tanks which had been called in to assist but couldn’t find the airborne position on Hill 30. Therefore you just had to rush through the German positions as fast as you could, gunning down infantry and dodging tanks, with no squad and no tactics. Things improved once you linked up with the Shermans, as with two of them you could fix and flank the StuGs that were guarding the roads. There was at least an immense sense of relief when you finally got back to Hill 30 and rescued your platoon. It was a fairly clichéd ending: Baker the sensitive intellectual who didn’t want to be a sergeant turned out to be a proper hero.

Except that in Earned In Blood Hartsock claims that it didn’t happen like that. In the cut scene which introduces Hartsock’s experience of Hill 30, the intelligence officer mentions that Baker saved the platoon and Hartsock contradicts him, asserting that Leggett, the radio operator, guided the tanks in. It’s implied that Baker is an unreliable narrator, who might have imagined the whole thing after being knocked out by a shell blast. I found that idea very interesting. Some people might say it can’t have been a dream because Baker actually did it: they not only saw him do it, but guided him through it. But how real is a computer game? People outside gaming who don’t get it would dismiss all games as not real and therefore not important. The average gamer, while recognizing that games are not the same as reality, would probably assume that everything within a game is on the same level and equally reliable. In narratological terms all elements of the plot give us an equally unproblematic view of the story. In films and novels it’s much less unusual to encounter major doubts about the reliability of a narrative. It’s more or less futile to try to work out what “happened” in a David Lynch film. Games are still young and don’t often reach this level of sophistication. There are probably other games which have already played around with these assumptions, but the World War 2 FPS genre is one of the last places you’d expect to find it.

Earned In Blood is only beginning to hint at it, and ends up being a bit of a cop-out. Once Hartsock has cleared the left flank at Hill 30 (which seems quite leisurely compared to Baker’s mad dash on the right flank), he returns to find Baker and the Shermans mopping up the German paratroopers, pretty much as it happened in Road To Hill 30. The only real difference is that the Panzer IV in front of the position has had an upgrade and a new paint job! The game still makes an interesting point about differing perceptions of the same event - Hartsock’s view is different from Baker’s - but it sacrifices a lot of ambiguity by making it clear that one is right and one is wrong. If only history was that easy!

I don’t know what happens next. The battle at Hill 30 is only half way through Hartsock’s story, which goes on for another week, but I haven’t had time to play any further.