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.

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.