»Thermonuclear warfare« is the game the military computer »Joshua« proposes to hacker David Lightman in the American thriller »Wargames« from 1983. On the two-colour screen – hopelessly outdated by today’s standards – appears a low-resolution map of the world. When choosing what side to be on, Lightman decides, without a moment’s hesitation, on the Soviet Union, and promptly designates the targets for the first wave of atomic missiles. Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Seattle – the city where he is at the time. What David does not know – and the film goes on to make only a mediocre plot out of the fact – is that the computer Joshua leads the USA to believe that it is really being attacked by Russia. In his typical teenager’s room in idyllic Seattle, much too far away from Washington and Moscow, sits an adolescent computer genius and triggers the real Third World War, starting with the symbolic representations on the screen and completely convinced that he is playing a fictional game.

At present, sparks are flying so fiercely at the point of contact between wars played in reality and fictive games that the old/new school of critique can barely keep up with its attempts at interpretation, if it even makes any. In the (for the time being) last part of the popular realtime strategy series »Command & Conquer«, which came out last November, the military line of approach for 2003 was anticipated with great foresight. Up to now, all the games in the series put out by Westwood Studios were set in a fictive future that hinted at references to real political configurations, but never made them explicit. Against the new background of world politics, this setting would seem to have had its day. In »Command & Conquer: Generals«, the player takes over either the role of China, America or the GLA (Global Liberation Organization), an Arab terrorist group. Appropriately enough, the first mission of the Americans is to capture Baghdad. The GLA, which supplies the player with suicide bombers and Scud missiles equipped with chemical warfare agents, has a different set of jobs to do, in accordance with its political line: among other things, to attack a UN aid convoy, and to kill at least 300 civilians as the game goes on. It was this »Command & Conquer« series that established the genre of »Realtime strategy«, which is characterised by its unusually stable command language with only a few varying dialects. The players control various units within a limited landscape at the same time as their human or algorithmic opponents, and mostly also have to take care of obtaining various resources to ensure they have adequate supplies. Different plot lines can be created within this strict formal framework, according to the game concerned. For instance, as well as contemporary conflicts, there are historical games and science-fiction and fantasy scenarios. In a military regard, these games are too simplistic to convey any serious tactical skills. Accordingly, the connection between real conflicts and their adaptations in games is, as I have said, very heavy-handed and superficial. The connection is much more complex in the field of »first person« games. At present, the most popular example of this genre, at least among network games, is »Counterstrike«.

Interestingly enough, this is not a commercial product, but a modification of the 3D engine of the game »Half-Life« by Valve Software, programmed by fans. In »Counterstrike«, two teams fight against one another as »terrorists« and »counter-terrorists«, using realistic weapons. In contrast to most of the other network games, team work is much more important than fast reflexes. What is promoted is the coordinated running of a program with few variables. The US Army has been using such programs for training purposes for quite some time. The software it employs corresponds for the most part to the civilian versions on the games market; this ensures that the manufacturers have a wide range of buyers and saves the Pentagon considerable sums of money. Even the second first-person game to appear, »Doom«, was used for training infantry in a slightly modified form (»Marine Doom«). Cooperation between games developers and military strategists is now even more intensive. For example, the Institute for Creative Technologies, whose founding fathers include the convinced Nietzschean and Hollywood director John Millius, is at present developing a kind of software that is both to serve the military and be available to end consumers under the title »C-Force« at the end of 2003. In addition, a realtime strategy game is being planned that is said to set new standards in exactness of detail; this makes it interesting for the STRICOM, the "U.S. Army Simulation, Training & Instrumentation Command«. The Pentagon is at the moment developing a 3D database of large American cities as a virtual training area. The simulations match their real models down to 15 cm. But the principle of first-person games has long begun to leave the bounds of training rooms. Telecommunicative distance to the actual fight, as Paul Virilio so aptly described it, which at present is still the domain of command centres and the air force, is now being adapted for the last, apparently indispensable link in the chain: the infantrymen/women. Pacific Consulting, a subsidiary of the American arms multinational Pemstar, has received a commission worth 59.9 million dollars to get its »Land Warrior System«, already introduced in September 2000, ready for series production. The foot soldiers of the US Army will in future be equipped with the satellite location system GPS and networked computers. The fighting can also be observed via a display in the helmet, which shows visual information from the camera fitted to the weapon. Thus, even for the infantry, the opponents they are meant to kill will soon disappear behind the electronic screen of abstracted perception. Complex networks have long since replaced the system of the company. The soldiers, dependent upon one another, act as individual command strings of a governing program. Rambo particles on patrol. Anything that could not be simulated in advance, as is the case with guerrilla tactics, confronts the machine with serious problems or forces it to simply ignore facts. This is perhaps an explanation for the long period of hesitation before the army tried half-heartedly to stop plunderers in Baghdad.

The new campaigns are carried out within variable, but hermetic systems, and aesthetic mechanisms of transmission draw a new, clean picture of the war of the computers, in all areas. It is no coincidence that an increasing number of Hollywood war films, like »Black Hawk Down« by Ridley Scott or Phil Alden Robinson’s »Sum of All Fears«, use the design and dynamics of video games. The latter film, based on a novel by Tom Clancy, who also sells his own series of games, introduces every change of location with a satellite picture of the scene. For the audience, a view opens up on an infallibly factual pattern of electronic perception, and over it is written, in futuristic letters, »Vienna«. It was Brian Doherty who wrote in the introduction to his book »Inside the White Cube«: »Seen from a certain height, people are generally good.« However, it is not possible to agree with him completely; for sometimes, seen from a certain height, people are only parts of an abstract system – the cybernetic war machine. Points of light on the display of an American soldier.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---