I think the series of posts on cavalry charges is more or less finished now (although there might be occasional sequels in the future). This is my last post before christmas, and what better way to get everyone in a festive mood than… writing about the Holocaust?

Normally I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole, but I’ve been inspired by a post at the History Lab, and by Wulf Kansteiner’s seminar paper at the IHR which I went to earlier this month. One of his observations was that commercial computer games have generally not explored the possibilities of counter-factual history, such as “what if the confederacy won the American Civil War?”. Other forms and media have done more with such potentially controversial ideas. For example, the backstory of Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland was based on the premise that Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Even the Two Ronnies could subvert gender ideology by imagining a counter-factual England in which gender roles and stereotypes were reversed.

Kansteiner extended this line of argument to the Holocaust: games do not present a Holocaust denier’s view of history. On the surface this is true. As far as I know (and I think we would all know about it if it happened) no commercial game has ever explicitly claimed that the Holocaust did not happen. There are many First Person Shooters based on the Second World War, and they all present the Nazis as the enemy. Although you can play as the Germans in multiplayer modes (probably because challenging multiplayer games would be impossible without human players on both sides), single player campaigns are always played from an Allied (and predominantly American) point of view.

However, I see a potential problem. The in-game Nazis are the enemy, and can be assumed to be evil and inhuman, but the reasons for that assumption are left very vague. The Holocaust is conspicuous by its absence from computer games. There are some obvious reasons for this. One of the biggest is gameplay. Combat between infantry, tanks, or aircraft is easy to turn into a game, but how could you make a convincing and playable action game out of genocide? If you leave aside the moral dimensions for a moment, a 3D FPS based on a death camp would be incredibly boring.

Moving up from a tactical to a strategic level, genocide is a significant logistical problem which requires the input of adequate resources and outstanding organisational skills (which the Nazis and IBM clearly possessed). From that point of view you could make a Holocaust management simulation game which, if you’re into that kind of thing, would be no more boring than any other management sim. I’ve already noted the way that Making History: The Calm and the Storm appears to gloss over the Holocaust (see my post on Games and Simulations). This is a serious omission for a game which makes claims to historical accuracy and is marketed as an educational tool. How can you understand Nazi strategy without taking the Holocaust into account? Even in FPS, there are some missed opportunities to bring the Holocaust in. The final mission in the PC version of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault involves breaking into and blowing up a German poison gas factory (no, really). One of the mission objectives is to rescue prisoners who are being used as slave labour by the Germans. What kind of people would you expect these prisoners to be? If you’re not familiar with the game, or the genre to which it belongs, you might not be expecting captured American soldiers, but that’s what they are. I think genre conventions and marketing departments have an obvious influence here but there are some other obvious reasons for the Holocaust’s absence from games.

Time for the pull back and reveal then: I actually think genocide is a bad thing (damn, I’ll never be neutral and objective). Fortunately most people seem to agree with me. The consensus that the Holocaust is one of the worst things to have ever happened has important implications for the way it’s represented in popular culture. Appearing to trivialise the murder of 6 million people would be a public relations disaster. This means that the Holocaust can’t appear in computer games. First there are the practical difficulties of designing a playable game which represents the Holocaust at all, and designing it in such a way that it doesn’t appear to trivialise the suffering of the victims. This is difficult enough, but could be overcome by a text based roleplaying game similar to Milliways (see my post on the Game at the End of Reality), in which the focus is on creative writing, interaction between characters, and imagining emotional responses (although considering the emotional investment of Milliways players in their characters’ virtual lives, a Holocaust based version might be too disturbing to be playable). However, a more fundamental problem is that computer games are generally perceived as inherently trivial, particularly by non-gamers. If a Holocaust game was discovered by the mainstream media there would almost certainly be outrage and calls for it to be banned (especially from The Daily Maily, which also wants to deport asylum seekers, and can’t tell the difference between gays and paedophiles, but anyway…).

Computer games are a relatively new medium. In time they might gain respectability, as novels and films have done. In the meantime, games will have to keep on ignoring the Holocaust. This is a problem because gaming is an increasingly important part of popular culture, and is a medium which makes history particularly accessible to children. If a whole branch of popular culture doesn’t mention the Holocaust, doesn’t that inadvertently create the impression that it never happened or wasn’t important? Young gamers might be intimately familiar with the 101st Airborne’s operations in Normandy and the Ardennes, but will Dachau mean anything to them?

The big problem with the Holocaust is that we have to be careful to avoid trivialising it, but we also have to avoid denying it. If you concentrate too much on one, you risk falling into the other. The safest option is to never mention it, but never mentioning it creates more space for the deniers. Therefore we have to talk about it in order to avoid creating a false impression that it didn’t happen or wasn’t significant. But talking about the Holocaust is dangerous because you risk saying something which trivialises it, or something which inadvertently provides ammunition for the deniers. We can’t all be experts on the Holocaust, not least because the weight of evidence that it did happen is too vast for any one person to master. Nobody can know everything, and every historian makes mistakes. In most cases this doesn’t matter too much. So what if Frank Jones thinks early-modern cavalry charges were “equine battering rams”? That kind of misunderstanding isn’t going to lead to racist violence or totalitarian government. Things are very different when it comes to Holocaust denial, where there is a dangerous ulterior motive at work. Deniers will latch onto any minor inaccuracy in order to strengthen their case. If they can undermine one small piece of evidence they insist that it logically follows that the whole idea of the Holocaust is false.

It hasn’t helped that Holocaust denial became a political football during the theory wars. Extremists on one side claimed that “postmodernism” allowed Holocaust denial by making “all points of view equally valid”, while extremists on the other side blamed traditional historians for creating the “truth effect” which was exploited by deniers. This kind of petty sniping was really pointless. Surely all academic historians can agree that Holocaust deniers are evil lying neo-nazi scum. I’ve spent (wasted?) enough time arguing with BNP members on the internet to know that neo-nazis will cynically exploit anything in order to further their racist agenda. For example, when Nick Griffin was on trial for inciting racial hatred last year, the BNP started a petition in favour free speech, which was aimed at seducing secular liberals by claiming to be working against religious fundamentalists. At the same time, the BNP website clearly showed that the party supported the Christian Voice campaign to ban Jerry Springer The Opera. Free speech for Nick Griffin but not for Stewart Lee. Opposition to Islamic fundamentalists, but support for Christian fundamentalists. Holocaust deniers are no different. They will exploit any historical methodology to gain a temporary advantage and seduce people into supporting them, but their own methods don’t meet any academic standards, whether empirical, postmodernist, or anything else.

Will fear of being labelled a denier or of inadvertently helping deniers remove the Holocaust from academic history in the same way that fear of being seen as trivialising the Holocaust removes it from games? If it does, the only people to blame are the deniers themselves. If they hadn’t started telling lies in order to further their hidden (and in some cases not very well hidden) anti-semitic agenda, then we would have much more freedom to debate the details and significance of the Holocaust.

Anyway, now that I have a GeForce7600GS and a copy of Brothers In Arms: The Road To Hill 30, I’m off to shoot some virtual Nazis. I’ll let you know if I see any concentrations camps, but I have a feeling there won’t be any.

Since last week I’ve been playing the demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm. My first impressions are that it’s a good game, but it is very much a game and not a simulation. It’s hard to believe that this is what Niall Ferguson was getting so excited about, or that he could be in awe of anyone who has won as Germany. If you approach the game on its own terms (as I suggested in my first post about games and simulations), the initial strength of Germany and the inherent weaknesses of Artificial Intelligence make it quite easy to win.

The demo scenario starts in 1939 and is limited to 20 turns, so it’s hard to tell how games would develop in the long term. Although the economic element of the game looks reasonably sophisticated, it doesn’t have much effect in the short term. This is particularly true for Germany, because you start with large and technologically advanced armed forces, and a strong economy. Even the shortages of food and oil are not likely to prove fatal before the end of a 20 turn game, especially as you are in a good position to grab resources from other nations. The military side of the game doesn’t look that much more sophisticated than the board game Axis and Allies. The main difference is that you can research upgrades, as in most computer strategy games. Again, these upgrades don’t make much difference in the short term, and Germany already has a higher tech level and bigger ground forces than other European powers. However, the full game promises to be a lot more interesting as economy and technology are likely to play a much greater role in the long term. There will also be more scenarios with different start dates and initial conditions.

Unlike Niall Ferguson, I tried not to bring any historical knowledge into the game. Instead I used my gaming experience to test the AI, combat system, and economy, and find out what I should be doing to win. At first I tried to make allies with anyone I could. This is a hangover from playing Diplomacy, and turned out not to be appropriate here. In fact, the last thing Germany should ever do is make an alliance (with one exception — more on that below). The game system agrees with history that Germany needs to avoid a war on two fronts. You need to choose your wars carefully and apply maximum force to one enemy at a time. Alliances will screw this up for you, because they drag you into wars you don’t want. The first time I played, I agreed to an alliance with Italy, but the stupid Italians went and invaded Greece, which brought Britain and France into the war, giving me the war on two fronts that I was trying to avoid.

This situation wasn’t too bad in the short term, as I quickly finished off Poland with Soviet help and turned on France. Conquering western Europe was easy enough (France is surprisingly weak) but I was left with the problem of Britain, with its huge navy (although I see from the Making History forum that some players have managed to outmanoeuvre the British AI and land on the mainland). All historical expectations would have been confounded by the Russians sending armies to help me invade France. Apart from being a bit unrealistic, this also gave me an idea for a lame exploit. Since armies can move through the territory of any allied nation, all you have to do to beat the USSR is make an alliance with them, move all your armies to their main economic centres, then declare war!

Nevertheless, I tried to find a more sensible strategy. The USSR clearly has to be taken out early in the game, before they can build too many units, and it’s vital to avoid war with Britain, France, or the USA until you’ve achieved this. Avoiding war with the Allies isn’t too difficult because their AI is very predictable and not very aggressive. They will declare war if you invade Poland, Greece, or the low countries, but they don’t care about Scandinavia, the Baltic republics, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey, or Persia. Therefore it’s possible for Germany to build a huge empire to the north and south of the Soviet Union, provided that they leave Poland alone. It’s hard to tell how well this strategy would work as 20 turns isn’t enough time to conquer all those countries and the Soviet Union. I tried a half size version of it by taking Hungary, Rumania, and the Baltic republics before starting on the Russians, but it didn’t work too well. Although the Rumanian oil was useful, capturing it caused delays and attrition, while the Russians were building more units.

To get a lock-on victory against the Soviet Union you have to go to the other extreme: the Baltic rush. In the first turn, start Berlin making tanks, adjust your economy to make sure you have enough arms, send the East Prussian army to conquer Lithuania, concentrate your navies in the Gulf of Finland, and start shipping all your ground forces (yes, ALL of them — you can leave Germany undefended because Britain and France won’t attack you) to East Prussia. Once you’ve conquered the Baltic republics, merge your forces into three armies, one in Wierland, and two in Livonia, and concentrate your air forces in Livonia. Keep ordering the new tanks from Berlin to Livonia (you should get a new division every turn). Send the Wierland army to capture Leningrad, one of the Livonia armies towards Moscow, and the other one south. There will then be some big battles, but you will win them. Leningrad usually falls in one or two turns (so much for the 900 days!). Set it to produce arms and send some forces south while leaving a strong garrison there. The central army and/or the reinforcements from Leningrad should take Moscow fairly easily, while the southern army should take Kiev and Podelia. With all those regions under your control you have as good as won. Without their main production centres at Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, the Russians can’t make reinforcements fast enough, and the food from Moscow and Podelia will solve Germany’s food shortage. After that you can send some tanks south to grab the Caucasian oilfields, then it’s just mopping up isolated resistance.

The other nations don’t have such easy options. When I tried a similarly aggressive strategy as Russia it turned into a throwback to the early-modern period as I got invaded by Turkey and Sweden while my biggest armies exhausted themselves trying to conquer Rumania!

Being able to win by exploiting AI weaknesses is no surprise, and certainly shouldn’t be held against this game in particular. All computer strategy games suffer from predictable AI, because AI technology just isn’t advanced enough for what it’s being asked to do (at least within the resource constraints of the average home PC). In order to get anything like a challenging single player experience game designers usually have to cheat by giving the computer players extra resources and more powerful units, but this just makes it even less like playing against a real person. The Making History demo doesn’t give any idea what multiplayer games will be like, but there is a lot of potential for interesting games there.

So, it’s a fun game but doesn’t always bear that much resemblance to history. Muzzy Lane are aiming for the education market, but this seems to be as much about image and marketing as substance. Making History is educational to a certain extent, but then so are Civilisation and Total War. It will teach school children something about the Second World War, although it could be counterproductive in some ways. From a postcolonial point of view, the ideological map is a bad joke. Britain and France are shown as democracies. Fair enough, but British and French overseas colonies are also shown as democracies. What do the colonised have to say about that? For academics the game isn’t a serious tool for testing counter-factual hypotheses. That might change to a certain extent if they release mod tools so that we can change things rather than being bound by Muzzy Lane’s design decisions, but it’s never going to be a satisfactorily complex representation of war and economics.

Of course Muzzy Lane didn’t intend this game for academics to test counter factual scenarios, whatever Niall Ferguson says, so it’s not really fair to criticise their design decisions on those grounds. It’s primarily a tool for teachers, and now also an entertainment product. I don’t know enough about teaching to know how useful it will be in the classroom. As a gamer I know it’s impossible to tell from a single player demo how good a strategy game will be, since a lot depends on how the multiplayer mode works and how many people take up playing it online. It remains to be seen whether both markets can be catered for at the same time. When it comes to the big question of gameplay versus realism, Muzzy Lane don’t know which side they’re on, and perhaps want to be on both sides at the same time. Isn’t that the dreaded war on two fronts?

The free demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm 2.0 is now out, but be warned it’s 251MB! I talked about the game and Niall Ferguson’s view of it it two previous posts (games and simulations, and more games and simulations). Now I can try it out for myself, so expect to see another post when I’ve played it.

Other news:

Children’s history writer and researcher Gary Smailes has started a blog at Breathing History, which is well worth reading.

History Carnival XLIII is now up at Axis of Evel Knieval (clearly the best name for a blog ever). Next edition is on 1st December at Barista. Submit posts about any aspect of history using the submission form.

Esther MacCallum Stewart has recently started a new blog at Glod’n'Epix which covers her work on computer games (in addition to her First World War stuff at Break of Day in the Trenches). Reading this has made me realise that I have no reason to be ashamed of liking computer games. Gaming isn’t a waste of time and can even be a valid subject for academic study. Meanwhile, Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb posted a link to an article by Niall Ferguson about a computer simulation of the Second World War. This led me to think about how games can be used by historians, and what they can and can’t tell us. It’s probably no surprise that I don’t agree with Niall Ferguson on this (or lots of other things).

The software in question is Making History: The Calm and the Storm. The original version was marketed as an educational tool rather than entertainment and was mostly sold to schools. Version 2.0 will be released to the public soon, but the demo isn’t available yet so I haven’t played it myself (and so a lot of my speculation could be wrong). Niall Ferguson believes that simulations like this can be a valuable part of learning about history, particularly by playing out counter-factual scenarios. He used it to test some of his hypotheses about the Second World War and found that his strategies didn’t work. “Play the part of Britain in September 1938 — during the crisis over Czechoslovakia — and you quickly discover (as historians have long maintained) that Britain’s pace of rearmament cannot be accelerated.” This is based on the assumption that Making History simulates the war accurately enough to make the outcome of a game a reliable guide to what would have happened in reality. Is Making History accurate enough for that? Can any simulation be accurate enough?

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time playing Real Time Strategy games. This has taught me that every game needs to be approached on its own terms. If you bring in any preconceptions, such as historical knowledge, or common sense, you will lose. If you want to win you need to learn how to play the game, and that means unlearning what you have learnt from real life, and even from other games. There are some transferable skills which you can use to learn how to play strategy games, but the emphasis is always on learning how an individual game works. Structuralism is a useful way of looking at games: each game is an arbitrary system which is fixed in relation to itself but has no fixed relationship with the real world (the relationship between multiplayer roleplaying games and reality is potentially much more complex, but the structuralist analogy is good enough for strategy games). Which strategies are most viable depends on arbitrary decisions by the game designers. These decisions might be aimed at promoting gameplay or realism, but in either case they are still arbitrary.

If Making History shows that the pace of Britain’s rearmament couldn’t be increased in 1938, that is because the designers at Muzzy Lane have decided it should be so. Their decision might even have been influenced by the historians who long maintained it. On these grounds I agree with Ferguson when he dismisses all other Second World War games as unrealistic and ahistorical. However, he makes a special case for Making History because “it is based on a quite astonishing quantity of factual information about the war”. Even if we take a purely empirical approach and leave aside any theoretical questions about how much we can know about the past, this seems dubious. Any empirical reconstruction of the Second World War faces two major problems (in addition to the problems of definition that I talked about last week): not enough information, and too much information. We can’t reconstruct everything that happened because we don’t have a complete record. On the other hand, the quantity of surviving records is too vast to be dealt with easily. While I don’t have any direct knowledge of the Making History game engine or data, I suspect that its model of the war is very simplified.

Simplification might not matter. We don’t necessarily need to know everything about the war in order to simulate it at a strategic level. Common sense suggests that unknown quantities at the tactical and operational levels would tend to average out and not have a disproportionate strategic impact. But I’m usually suspicious of “common sense”. What if war is a chaotic system? In chaos theory outcomes are not random. They are determined by the system and the initial conditions. However, small variations in the initial conditions can lead to disproportionate changes in the outcome, making outcomes difficult to predict. If this applies to war, it makes simulations even more problematic. In order to simulate the Second World War accurately we would need to know far more about it than we currently know, or perhaps can ever know.

Perhaps one of the most unpredictable systems is the human mind. Different individuals can react in different ways to different circumstances. Whether Germany is played by a computer or another human player, it certainly isn’t played by Hitler himself. Then there’s the question of how far one individual, even a dictator, can really be said to be in direct control of a state, an economy, or an army.

Ferguson mentions that the branch of mathematics known as game theory grew out of attempts to simulate the Cold War. One of the limitations of this theory is that it usually assumes rational players who are aiming to optimise the outcome of the game. In practice, ideology can lead to irrational decisions (it could even be argued that the decision to go to war is always irrational because the costs of war nearly always outweigh the material benefits), while rational gameplay can lead to ahistorical outcomes.

If I was playing as Nazi Germany and trying to win the war, I wouldn’t want to commit genocide. This isn’t anything to do with bringing my own personal ethics into the game. It would just be a huge waste of resources which could be better employed fighting the allies. On the other hand, if I was playing as Britain I might want to murder all the Italian prisoners of war in order to save resources. In the real Second World War ideology didn’t allow this degree of agency. That could be simulated in a game by denying the British player the option of committing war crimes (although that in itself would be an arbitrary decision based on a particular ideological position), but what about the Nazis? Their racist ideology could be simulated by making wiping out the Jews one of their victory conditions, but I can’t imagine Muzzy Lane getting away with selling an educational game which encourages genocide. It’s interesting that Ferguson doesn’t mention this ethical dilemma despite placing racist ideology at the centre of his account of 20th century wars in his recent book War of the World.

Seeing games as tools for testing counter-factual hypotheses doesn’t overestimate them, it underestimates them. Games are games, not simulations. They need to be studied on their own terms. They are not research tools but primary source material for cultural history which are at least as important as novels, plays, films, and music. Looking at it this way, a game being an arbitrary system which is unconnected to reality isn’t a weakness. The design of the game tells us something about the cultural assumptions of the designers and the target audience. There is huge potential for the theoretical apparatus of cultural history to be applied to gaming. The idea of a player making the meaning of a game is immediately much easier to grasp than the reader making the meaning of a book. Games are very obvious examples of Baudrillard’s simulacra: systems of signs not related to an underlying reality. Representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the non-human in games will provide plenty of material for Marxism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial criticism, and eco-criticism. A whole new field of game studies is opening up exciting possibilities for future research. This is yet another opportunity for military history. Representations of war in computer games can be just as interesting and important as representations of war in film or literature.