History and Games
Volume 1 | Issue 1 - Conflict
Article by Dane Close. Edited by Victoria Ryves. Additional Research by Lauren Puckey.
History is central to our popular culture. It has been the basis for songs, films, and books, but has recently become the subject for a glut of video games. This is notable in the flood of World War II titles that take great pride in their historical credentials while claiming to place you in the shoes of a soldier at the heart of the conflict.
To pick one from the many that flood the market, the case of Call of Duty: World at War (CoD) proudly places itself as the most ‘visceral’ and realistic WWII game. Within seconds of starting the game the player is assaulted with movie reels and clips from the period and confronted with stark lettering proudly displaying its historical knowledge of the road to war. From this sea of images and dates the player is immediately granted control of a soldier in 1944 who has a name but for all intents and purposes remains an extension of the player’s will, flitting between different soldiers across armies and continents.
This poses a unique problem in that, whereas any medium portraying history can lead the audience to take it at face value, the most popular genres of games place you as an individual separated from the times and people they aim to represent. By placing the player in the midst of the past it leads to a one-sided view of history, with players unwilling to view themselves as the enemy. While they may be happy imagining themselves fighting in the Pacific in CoD they are less likely to want to round-up civilians or eject ethnic Germans as occurred after WWII.
History is based around unique periods of time with their own norms and situations yet when playing a game the player is expected to interact with a very closed off section of the past. They bring with them their own preconceptions of what the war was about from the present, but rather than observe they are led to view themselves as a direct part of the conflict.
A major element of this is the expectation for violence generated by other mainstream games, focussed almost entirely around killing the enemy before they kill you. While this may suit games based around combat in WWII this mentality does not derive from the setting itself but is imported from expectations from other games, whether they too are set in the past or on sci-fi planets. You are propelled along a linear path, the path to progress (and victory) being clearly marked out by in game objectives. Everything in-between is merely a target, justified by pantomime villains whose cruelty is shown in isolation to the player with little purpose other than to fuel the action of the next level. For the moment this remains the dominant form of storytelling in chart games, and it is unlikely a more nuanced telling of the past (in this case WWII) will arise in the immediate future.
Likewise such an approach glosses over the dynamics of history. The player, as the individual, is seen as the vehicle for historical change: battles hang in the balance until you intervene and scripted events happen only when you approach. It is understandable why games such as Call of Duty place such emphasis on the player and player alone, it’s difficult to imagine enjoying a game where the narrative occurs off-screen regardless of your involvement.
Nonetheless, it is due to this inherent nature of the game medium that it ignores the entire context within which events took place. For example, the surrounding society is often brushed aside by games, allowing ideas of two homogenous sides clashing to predominate, with the player’s avatar as just a manifestation of an entire society. Society was split along racial, class and gender lines. It is difficult to imagine a game that can portray the fragmentation of a “People’s War”. The homefront was not static and the demands of war led to a wave of strikes in 1942 and, contrary to subsequent portrayals of willing soldiers, the US draft was resisted by up to 350,000 participants. Likewise there were notions of race and gender in the mind of participants that are unlikely to exist in a similar way to the player when they are inserted into WWII. To a player the scores of faceless allies are unlikely to be differentiated from one another despite the very real tensions between black, white and colonial troops in the war.
On one level this is no different from the depiction of history in film, yet the scope of games as a whole remain limited. Films and other media can, and do, depict a more varied view of past society but games often concentrate on elements that easily fit into existing game genres such as “First-Person Shooters”. As such the depiction of elements outside the battlefield is lessened considerably, and even then is moulded to fit around the player.
The thoughts and opinions about the conflict in which contemporaries found themselves are removed when a player with a modern world view is placed within their world and is asked to actively participate rather than observe. With this the standard elements of videogames takeover and, rather than be seen as a tiny element of a wider conflict, the player plays through the entire war, with everything else relegated to the background.