Investigations of a Dog

Gary at Victoria’s Cross linked to yet another piece of lazy journalism about computer games. This is the other side of the coin from why aren’t there any World War I games: Why Are There So Many World War II Games? There are so many things wrong with this article that it should have been easy to knock up a critique of it in a few minutes, but I’ve been too busy with other things so I’ve only just got round to it. Anyone with half a brain might want to skip the rest of this post. Lazy blogging which just points out the obvious errors of lazy journalism in far too much detail is arguably as bad as the lazy journalism itself.

So an amazing 23 WWII games were released in 2006. Is that a lot? I don’t know. 23 out of how many? If it includes every genre and every platform then it might actually be a small minority. But anyway, what is the reason for this (possibly spurious) trend? Maybe we should ask some people who work in the industry. They’ll know. The problem is that they’re not necessarily an unbiased source. They’re hardly going to say on record something like “actually it’s because the game industry has become very conservative and is unwilling or unable to take risks with anything too unfamiliar”. From a historian’s point of view what they actually have to say seems quite ignorant on the surface, but offers some insight into how the games industry thinks about the past.

Randy Pitchford said:

soldiering is one of the most interesting human experiences

Billy Bragg said:

Digging all day and digging all night,
To keep my foxhole out of sight,
Digging into dinner on a plate on my knees,
The smell of damp webbing in the morning breeze

This isn’t the first time I’ve pointed this out, and it probably won’t be the last time, but games usually only include the “exciting” bits of war, with all the drill, marching, carrying, digging, waiting, peeling potatoes etc left out (although digging, building, and foraging often do play a part in Real Time Strategy games). And the other truism can’t be far behind: games are more heavily influenced by cinema than by history.

It’s true that WWII is the largest war in history, and that therefore there is huge scope for different settings. So why do WWII games tend to be so narrowly focused? I don’t want to make lazy generalizations of my own, but in my experience Normandy and the 101st Airborne are very over-represented. Gearbox supposedly “studied many wars in many periods and discovered a unit of paratroopers in WW2 that saw a lot of fighting meeting the most significant objectives of the operations they were involved in.” And after all that they just happened to pick… the 101st in Normandy. I suspect that this is mostly down to the influence of Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers, so Dave Karraker is spot-on here. Unfortunately he puts his foot in it by going on to say “Naturally, it also helps if we actually won the war, which is why you probably don’t see many Korean War games”. Leaving aside postmodern/postcolonial objections to the “we” and accepting that it means the US and their allies, in what sense can the US be said to have lost the Korean War? That’s not a simple question. At times the US and South Korean objective was to unite all of Korea under non-Communist rule, and at the tactical and operational level the UN forces suffered some serious defeats in the early years of the war. However, the ultimate outcome of the war was to stabilize the border at the 38th parallel, which had been the initial objective of the UN forces, so it’s not really a defeat. It’s true that while there are a few games featuring the Korean War there aren’t many. But Vietnam was a major defeat for the US and is widely perceived (rightly or wrongly) as one of the most embarrassing episodes in US military history. That hasn’t stopped Vietnam games from being made.

So “a large majority of games involving conflict and soldiering are thereby centered around the Second World War”. This sounds like a very hyperbolic claim. It might be true if it was qualified as “a large majority of First Person Shooters involving historical conflict and soldiering are thereby centered around the Second World War”. It’s another case of confusing FPS with all games. How many WWII MMORPGs are there? Furthermore it completely ignores science fiction and fantasy. How do they compare to WWII games? Again I haven’t done any detailed research but I have a strong suspicion that games with SF/fantasy settings are far more numerous than WWII games. Even if we’re only looking at the most well-known shooters, WWII is just a sub-genre. Are even MOHAA and CoD as “big” as SF themed games like Doom, Quake, Half Life, Unreal, or Halo? There’s quite a respectable number of games devoted to Star Wars alone. Nothing like 23 a year, but Lucasarts came out with 4 new SW games in 2005 and 2 in 2006, not including expansions and reissues. Maybe intellectual property rights have an influence here too. Despite the influence of cinema on WWII FPS, history is in the public domain in a way that Star Wars isn’t. Would there be so many games about the 101st if the screaming eagle was a registered trademark of George Lucas? Nevertheless, put all the different SF and fantasy universes together and you have a very big genre. Then there are games which aren’t about war at all. For example, sport sims might not be to everyone’s taste, but there are lots of them.

But if you haven’t noticed any of these problems you must be convinced that WWII is the best war and that it’s natural and inevitable that there are so many WWII games. So you might find it a surprising non-sequitur when the article suddenly turns round and says: “At some point, however, World War II games are sure to become less popular. What shall we do to get our conflict fix then?” How do we know that the conflict itself won’t become less popular? At any time there are likely to be up to 40,000 people logged into Second Life and only a small minority of them will be fighting (but then there’s plenty of scope to debate whether SL is really a “game”). Anyway, assuming that war will continue to be a popular theme (and I’d guess that it will be), their suggestions for unexplored periods are laughable. Ancient/medieval/renaissance/enlightenment warfare has been covered extensively in strategy games such as Civilisation, Total War, Age Of…, Rise Of Nations, and Cossacks. And presumably the complete lack of ACW games is the reason why Brett Schulte had to give up his American Civil War Gaming blog. Clearly he had nothing to write about. But of course “games” means FPS…

That’s as far as I can go writing off the top of my head and checking a few facts on the web, but I’d like to know more. How many games have been released in different genres/settings over the years? Are there any interesting patterns? How easily can we classify games? I think there’s potential for some Franco Moretti style work here, and while his methodology has some problems it might be easier to apply it to computer games than to novels. There’s plenty of data available on the web at sites like Gamebase and Gamespot, and Wikipedia seems to be quite strong on games. Maybe someone’s already done something like this, or is doing it. In any case I don’t have time right now, but it’s something to think about for the future.