Investigations of a Dog

Still catching up on things that I meant to write weeks ago. Last month there was a post at Glod’n'Epix about First World War computer games. Esther linked to this Guardian article about a planned WWI FPS and was rightly critical of its assumptions that there aren’t any WWI games and the spurious reasons for that. As she points out, there are loads of First World War games, but I’m going to attack from a different angle.

The Guardian said:

The static nature of WW1 is a trickier design proposition than the more fluid WW2, and you can imagine the developers - Kuju Sheffield - having to be more than a little creative with the truth. How will they capture the boredom/terror of life in the trenches without resorting to fantasy? And what about the unreliable and basic weaponry?

Idiots!

Where do you start? Let’s get the “unreliable and basic weaponry” out of the way first. Well, you know, in WWI they had unreliable and basic SMLE Mk.IIIs but by WWII they’d invented the technologically advanced… SMLE No.4 Mk. I. Meanwhile the Germans, with their typical ruthless efficiency, forged ahead with the astoundingly sophisticated Kar98K. StG 44s weren’t nearly as easy to get hold of as most WWII FPS games seem to imply. Mark Grimsley points out an annoying idiosyncrasy of the M1 carbine, a weapon featured very prominently in Call Of Duty and Brothers In Arms. And the earliest version of the M16 was notoriously unreliable compared to the AK-47 but that didn’t stop a whole rash of Vietnam FPS a few years ago. In fact one of the weapons in the British missions in MOHAA: Spearhead was an SMLE and it worked pretty well. Slow rate of fire, but long range and very accurate even without a telescopic sight, making it easy to pick off Germans from a safe distance. Furthermore this slow rate of fire might be quite unrealistic. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the British Army required infantry to be able to fire at least 15 aimed shots per minute. This video shows someone firing 22 shots from his SMLE in a minute, despite having to deal with a jam. That bolt action rifles in FPS games don’t tend to fire this quickly is down to the prejudices of the game designers rather than the limitations of the real weapons. One day if I have too much time on my hands I’d like to investigate this further and get some actual data on firing and reloading rates in WWII FPS. Finally, Esther points out that there was lots of technological innovation in the First World War.

What about the boredom and terror of life in the trenches? Well, there was plenty of boredom and terror in WWII. In Britain things got so boring that people started calling it the “Phoney War”! The phrase “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror” has become such a cliché that I can’t track down its origins but I have a feeling it might come from a Battle of Britain pilot. The 101st Airborne feature in many WII FPS, but they didn’t earn the name “battered bastards of Bastogne” for doing glamourous exciting things, but for holding the line and enduring artillery bombardments, just like First World War soldiers. Digging trenches was as much a part of WWII as WWI. Games only present a narrow range of experiences of war, not too boring, not too horrific. Drill, marching, digging, cleaning equipment, filling in forms, rape, genocide, hunger, disease etc don’t fit into FPS so they get left out no matter which war the game is set in.

And you probably know what’s coming next. The idea of static WWI and fluid WWII is completely false, as I’ve discussed in more detail here and here. The tactics used in the great advance on the Western Front in 1918 were not so very different from those used in WWII. The fixing and flanking small unit tactics developed by the British Army would easily make a playable FPS. Brothers In Arms is already very close: just substitute the fire team’s BAR for a Lewis gun and give the assault team bayonets instead of Tommy guns and you’re there. Even in the “static” years on the Western Front there’s plenty of scope for exciting FPS action. Trench raids and night patrols could make interesting and challenging levels. Then there are amphibious operations like the Zeebrugge raid. Esther points out that the Western Front was not the whole of the First World War, but even if it was, I can’t see any practical problems with turning it into a game. The only problem I can see is that if they did make a realistic WWI game lots of people would say it was unrealistic because it doesn’t fit the popular myths. (For an example which also relates to perceptions of weapons, see this review of Brothers In Arms which complains that the game is unrealistic because the weapons are too inaccurate!)

But all this is so obvious it hardly needs saying. The really surprising thing is not the Guardian journalist’s ignorance of the history of WWI (lots of people still believe those myths), but his ignorance of existing WWII FPS games. How will the game designers represent WWI without resorting to fantasy? Designers of WWII games have no need to resort to fantasy, but they still do. As I’ve said before, some levels in MOHAA and CoD owe more to Alistair MacLean than to actual history. It’s hard to decide which is the most ridiculous example. Maybe CoD’s sink the Tirpitz level - surely anyone who knows anything about WWII knows that the Tirpitz was crippled by midget submarines and finished off by the RAF, not boarded and sabotaged by commandos! If this isn’t fantasy…

Anyway, we all know what it was like: going over the top, facing murderous machine gun fire, seeing your friends cut down without firing a shot, trying to find cover in No Man’s Land, getting held up by barbed wire, shell-shocked soldiers cowering in fear, artillery shells going off all around you. Then you finish the Omaha Beach level of MOHAA. Aaahh! Pull back and reveal! Yes, isn’t it interesting that the style of fighting characterized by the Great War myths actually crops up in WWII FPS! In this particular case it’s not that surprising because in some ways Omaha Beach really wasn’t very different from Third Ypres: a costly but successful assault against strong defensive positions. But there are many more levels where you see it from the other side: defending a position while endless waves of Germans come towards you in predictable patterns without taking cover and get cut down by your machine gun. The same thing happens in CoD and even BIA. It’s not very realistic, and it doesn’t match popular perceptions of WWII, so where does it come from?

One thing that Niall Ferguson and I agree on is that this type of gameplay is suspiciously like Space Invaders. The best example comes in the Normandy mission of MOHAA, just after Omaha Beach: defending the back of the farmhouse from the Germans. On the surface it’s not that similar. Realistic looking 3D Germans in a realistic looking 3D environment are a long way from the crude blocky monochrome 2D graphics of the original Space Invaders machine. But, as Chris Crawford would say, what’s the schwerpunkt? Move from side to side between cover and open, shooting waves of advancing enemies, and if they get right up to you, then you die. The gameplay is exactly the same. The computer games industry has a long history of valuing impressive graphics and sound over enjoyable gameplay (I’m still annoyed about wasting my pocket money on Knight Games!) but the trend seems to be more pronounced in recent years. It probably has a lot to do with money, marketing, and things like that but I’m trying to avoid going into a Nietzschean rant about the mediocrity of popular culture. Let’s accept that games often have bad gameplay. Why this particular style of bad gameplay?

I’m really not sure yet. I’ve already got enough conjectures to write another post, but some actual evidence would be useful. I’ll have to end with the historian’s equivalent of “that would be an ecumenical matter”: more work needs to be done.