This week I have been mostly reading Keith Jenkins and 6 years worth of Scary Go Round. I’m also looking after a coal fire, which means breathing in an unusual amount of hot ash and carbon monoxide. Therefore if I post any really mad ideas in the next few days it’s probably best to ignore them.

The other thing I read was an article by Brian Rejack about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (the WW2 computer game that I posted about ages ago). First thought: if only I’d known you could get published in Rethinking History just by writing about how BiA isn’t as realistic as it claims to be. He didn’t even have to cite Derrida (although there is a bit of Barthes). Second thought: if only I’d bothered to look at the extras in BiA. I ignored them on the grounds that I already know quite a lot about WW2 and that I have the research skills to find out even more whenever I want. Do I need to be patronized by pop history factoids? Well, it turns out there’s a lot more to it than that.

One of the central points of the article is that extras can change the way a game (or DVD, where this idea started) is perceived and interpreted. The photos in the BiA extras are a major part of the games claims to realism. They include composites of original photos of WW2 mashed up with screenshots taken in-game, with only the change from black and white to colour showing where one begins and the other. (I’ve also just noticed that one of the composite shots is on the back of the box, but I don’t think I ever looked at the back of the box. So much for close reading…) With this attention to historical detail, surely Gearbox can say “This is How It Really Was”. But it doesn’t really work. When I wrote about the game I was mostly interested in tactical realism, which I think it ultimately fails at, despite being an improvement over MOHAA and CoD. They might have based the levels on maps and photos of the real Normandy, but does the real Normandy have those strange earth banks in the middle of fields with convenient dips in them that you can shoot over when you’re in the right position. If so who put them there and what are they supposed to be for?

Rejack takes a different approach, pointing out that the characters in the game are not emotionally engaging and don’t react to anything like real people. Even the death of Baker’s best friend in a cut scene isn’t particularly moving. Another weakness is that the game “presents a view of history as a straightforward sequence of events, with no sense of competing interpretations or multiple viewpoints”, although the sequel Earned in Blood does attempt something like that (as I mentioned here).

As a comparison, Rejack offers Facade, which involves more sophisticated interaction with NPCs and much less shooting. I’m not sure how excited I can get about a dinner party simulator, but I’ll report back after I’ve tried it.

Via Grand Text Auto I found an interesting article in Fibreculture about gendered space in computer games and virtual worlds. I definitely agree with the authors that game designers tend to cater for a very narrow range of gameplay styles which conform to a particular masculine stereotype. Anything which encourages more diverse experiences through different gameplay and different concepts of space is very welcome. On the other hand I was a bit disappointed that the article seems to reinforce gender stereotypes more than questioning them. Although the authors claim not to be calling for more “pink” games but to be encouraging an “androgynous mind”, they still seem to be assuming that violence and competition are male concerns which are of no interest to women. For example they refer to FPS as “distinctly masculine”. Defining games as “male” or “female” is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s frustrating that the authors recognise this and try hard to avoid stereotyping women and feminine games (occasionally failing, as when they say that in Second Life “fashion is a prevalent form of player productivity, dominated by female players”), but easily fall into the trap of stereotyping men and masculine games.

Also they seem to have got the links between gender, spatial reasoning, and FPS the wrong way round. The cognitive research they cite to support the argument that FPS favours males isn’t quite as recent as the research I mentioned here which shows that playing FPS increases spatial reasoning skills and that girls don’t benefit from this as much as they could because they’re put off by the idea that FPS is just for boys. This perfectly illustrates the problems caused by stereotyping games as masculine or feminine.

Chris at Mixing Memory has posted about a psychology experiment which suggests that playing First Person Shooters improves spatial reasoning abilities, which also leads to improvements in mathematical skills. This is interesting in itself, but it also relates to his previous post about gender in maths, science and engineering, which looked at evidence for stereotype threat: the expectation that women are weaker in these areas causes them to perform below their potential, and this adds to the myth that women are actually worse, so the stereotype is perpetuated. There is plenty of evidence that on average women do worse at spatial reasoning than men, but the evidence from the experiment Chris cites strongly suggests that this is down to cultural factors rather than innate sex differences. A group of people who didn’t normally play FPS was made to play Medal of Honor, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in spatial reasoning abilities in both men and women. It seems likely that women have failed to benefit from this effect in practice because the perception that FPS games are only for men puts them off.

Another Mixing Memory post on the subject of games mentioned an experiment which found that the amount of blood in Mortal Kombat affects the aggression of the players. I can see right-wing alarmists who hate games deliberately misinterpreting the word “arousal” to portray gamers as sadistic perverts,but it looks like an interesting piece of research. I don’t know if this research has anything to say about gender (I can’t get at the paper itself) but studies of aggression are highly relevant to investigations of the relationship between war and gender, such as Joshua Goldstein’s work (which I really want to finish reading when I’ve got out of the quagmire of English Civil War historiography!).

(I also regret deleting the Gender category. I wasn’t using it for anything that wasn’t also covered by women’s history, but it would be quite useful here.)

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).

I’m trying to get some “proper” English Civil War related work done this week, but at the weekend I did some more First World War stuff. In April I posted about World War I on Flickr, when I uploaded my great-grandfather’s photos from Cottbus PoW camp. Now I’ve added his letters, and another photo which I got from ebay. Although he isn’t on it, it was taken in the theatre at Cottbus and one of the men has the same “Bing Bong Boys” navy outfit:

I’ve now put each letter/postcard in its own set to make the link between the front and back of the same document more explicit. The sets are then arranged into collections. Some people on the Great War Forum were able to help me locate Cottbus Camp No. I, so now most of the photos have been placed on the map.

I also discovered that another Wenham brother might have died in the Great War. I don’t know why I hadn’t ever looked for Wenhams on CWGC before, but I found a Charles Wenham who could well be one of William’s brothers. Some of the evidence is circumstantial and I need to do more digging to be sure, but the epistemic probabilities are quite high. So far it looks like he joined 10th Lincolnshire Regt (Grimsby Chums), served overseas, was wounded and sent back to England but died of his wounds. Unlike the soldiers who died overseas, his body was brought home and buried in Cleethorpes cemetery. Again the Great War Forum has been a great help, and you can see more details on this thread.

And with regard to the other World War, I played some more of Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood. I was still a bit curious about the post-Hill 30 storyline, but so far it’s been quite boring, and I gave up when I got into a silly tank level that’s suspiciously similar to the silly tank level in Road To Hill 30 that I complained about before. But there are more trees this time…

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.

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.

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.

Last week I played and finished Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, yet another First Person Shooter set in the Second World War. It focuses on a squad of the 101st Airborne Division over a period 8 days in Normandy in June 1944. From what I’d heard about the game before I bought it, I was expecting it to be very different from Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. The biggest difference is that it’s a tactical shooter in which the player has to command a squad rather than doing everything single handed. In some ways Brothers In Arms lived up to my expectations, but in other ways it didn’t.

The first thing I noticed was that there is no way of customising the controls. This proved very annoying as it often led to cock-ups like accidentally sending my fire team into the open when I intended to aim my rifle. Once I’d got over this, the game did seem to be much more realistic than CoD or MOHAA. Reloading when your magazine isn’t empty wastes ammunition, whereas other games put in exactly the number of bullets you need to refill your magazine. The weapons are very inaccurate and difficult to aim, so you are only likely to hit at close range and when an enemy’s full body is exposed. This means you have to use tactics rather than l33t skillz.

The game trains you in the doctrine of the four Fs: find ‘em, fix ‘em, flank ‘em, fuck finish ‘em. When playing with a full squad, you can use your fire team to suppress the enemy while your assault team moves around the flank of their defences to shoot them at close range with sub-machine guns. The Germans are programmed to react realistically to suppressive fire by keeping their heads down and only firing occasionally, unlike the fearless but brainless drones in MOHAA. For beginners an icon above their heads indicates how suppressed they are, but this can be turned off for extra realism. There is also an option to view the battlefield from above in order to plan your attack, but again you don’t have to use it if you think it’s too unrealistic.

Notice that I’ve used variants of realism/realistic four times in one paragraph. This should be a good reason for suspicion. What do I really mean by “realistic”? I’ve never been in combat, so I wouldn’t actually know whether the game was like reality or not. I always like to point out that “cinematic realism” is an oxymoron, but I have to admit that my current benchmark for “realistic” Second World War infantry combat is the TV series Band of Brothers! Band of Brothers claims to be authentic and realistic because it’s based on a book by distinguished military historian Stephen Ambrose, and because both book and TV series were based on the testimony of men who were Actually There. At this point post-structuralists will be crying “truth effect”, and even the most objectivist empiricists will have a great deal of scepticism about the reliability of non-contemporary oral testimony. I’m not going to discuss historical truth today, because I really want to look at genre conventions.

In the Band of Brothers TV series, the claims to authenticity and realism are often in conflict with the genre conventions of film and TV drama. The first time I watched the series it seemed radically different from any portrayal of the Second World War I’d ever seen before (and I’ve seen a lot!), but the more I rewatch it, the more conventional it seems. It’s still full of film tricks like flashbacks, voiceovers, and incidental music which emphasise artificiality rather than authenticity, although the balance between realism and convention is different in each episode, since they all had different directors. I would have preferred it to be more “realistic”. I’d like to see a dogme approach to war films which shows combat in real time, constantly follows the point of view of one squad, doesn’t have any music or voiceovers other than what the characters can actually hear, and doesn’t have a coherent narrative structure. I can’t say that my point of view makes any sense. A dogme war film would be no closer to the reality it claims to represent than a conventional war film, and would arguably be dishonest in creating a truth effect. A story told in flashback with a voiceover explaining what’s going on and overdubbed music to add atmosphere might be cheesy and cliched, but at least it honestly proclaims “this is a film”.

Maybe “realism” is itself a set of genre conventions, rather than anything to do with actual reality. Real soldiers spend a lot of time marching and digging holes, but I can’t say I’d enjoy films or games which focused on those aspects of war. Even the most “realistic” representations of war in those media are just edited highlights, with all the tedium and squalor taken out.

Whether realism is anything to do with the real or just another set of artificial conventions, it conflicts with other conventions in films and games. The need for engaging and challenging gameplay adds a third conflicting factor in computer games. After a promising start, Brothers In Arms turned out to have more in common with CoD and MOHAA than I hoped. The genre conventions of games and films both feature heavily. The central character, Sergeant Matt Baker, introduces each mission with a cod-profound but unintentionally hilarious voiceover. Maybe his agonising and self-doubt are meant to add humanity or perspective, but they just didn’t convince me at all. After this, you usually have to sit through a badly written and badly acted cut scene, which you can’t ever skip as far as I can tell. Again it’s probably meant to emphasise that the soldiers are “real people” but to be honest I’d rather send them all to their deaths than listen to their tedious banter.

The level design is just as linear as CoD, MOHAA, and their distant ancestors. Although success depends on outflanking the enemy, your options tend to be very limited. As is often the case in single player FPS, there is usually one right way to finish a level which has to be found by trial and error. This is made more frustrating by the absence of a quick save option. Getting killed means reloading the last checkpoint, and the checkpoints are not always in the most logical places. Many of the usual genre cliches are still present: Space Invaders levels, death runs, reel around the Panzer. Although the final mission, which puts you in charge of two Shermans, allows some more sophisticated armoured tactics, German tanks are often like end of level bosses.

Here is an example of the “realistic” tactics in the game. You and your squad are pinned down on one side of a farmyard. There are German paratroopers in position behind walls on the opposite side, and a tank in the far corner, covering the whole yard. You have no anti-tank weapons and no possibility of artillery or air support. What do you do? According to the game designers, you assault the German position and hope that they happen to have a box of Panzerfausts behind the wall. Yes, I’m sure that’s just what Dick Winters would have done…

I have to say I like the fact that all the German armour in Brothers In Arms consists of Panzer IVs and assault guns. MOHAA and CoD give the impression that Tigers, King Tigers, and Elefants were far more common than they actually were. Unfortunately all the German vehicles are painted Panzer grey. WRONG! Every tank nerd knows that they were painted desert yellow from 1943 onwards (Band of Brothers got it right), although it’s better than the inexplicably green German tanks in MOHAA. Also the Panzer IVs appeared to be early versions with short barrelled 75mm guns which I think would have been upgraded or replaced by 1944.

Although the gameplay could be frustrating at times, it was nowhere near as bad as some of the arbitrariness in MOHAA. I thought playing Brothers In Arms on normal difficulty seemed about as challenging as CoD on the hardest level, but I finished the whole campaign in four days. I’m not sure if this means it was easier, has less content, or if I just played it more intensively. Overall, this is an improvement over previous Second World War FPS games, but only an incremental one. I’ll almost certainly be buying the next instalments, and I’d also like to compare it to Call of Duty 2, which I still haven’t played.

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…