Even while I write this, I have misgivings. Maybe all of this was in some way planned. Maybe there is supposed to be a real question of warfare morality couched in the single player experience. Is this possible? Sure. Anything is. But with the sheer number of games that follow this same basic principle of fighting terror with terror, I fail to conceive this as anything more than a love of the valiant warrior, felling evil with a godlike justice, even if the message is sullied by that puff of red that blossomed on the woman’s shirt.
With Paez secure, we make our way to a refugee camp to take down a dangerous warlord who was apparently in on the bomb trade that we are fighting to stop. Clancy and Company present this guy in true dictatorial fashion: dark aviator sunglasses, beret, and soldered-on sneer. The important part in designing this guy was that he have absolutely no redeeming qualities. Villains in games like Ghost Recon must be comically over-the-top evil so as to avoid any question as to whether or not Geneva Convention-breaking assassinations are inappropriate, or even their own sort of (lesser?) evil. Throughout, we’re freeing these refugees from the tyrannical rule of the man who has stolen their food and enslaved them. It reminds me of the scene in Apocalypse Now where, after napalming a village, the cavalry lands among the terror they have wrought, and starts proclaiming “We are here to help.”
My squad is advancing through the refugee camp. Our mission is to walk right through the middle of the camp in our invisible clothes until we reach our target, and kill him. We will do this by marching in plain sight, blending into the fabric of the burlap tents, the arid dirt of the desert, and movements of the commoners. We will remain hidden, right until the moment that we want to be seen. On the way there, we perform casual bits of synchronized assassination, dropping men two, three, four at a time. They hit the ground and the innocents scream and scatter in all directions, knowing only that the men were killed, but not of what nor by whom. We are here to help.
It is in this way of shifting in and out of invisibility and making people see the brutality of our efficiency that shakes me. The cowering animations are all essentially the same on those who are not our enemies. They beat feet as far away from the blossoming flower of maroon mud pooling from the fallen man’s head as they can. We are here to help.
I remember putting my four men in position, hidden from the warlord and his three bodyguards and turning to my friend, confused that there wasn’t a cut-scene of taking this guy into custody. “Am I just supposed to shoot him?” I asked my friend. “Yeah, you kill all of them.” There’s no trial here. It should be noted that the warlord guy was on the phone talking about missiles or some other dastardly weapon of war. I set up the four assassination assignments and gave the go-ahead. The next second, the four targets hit the ground with a startling finality. I am not the jury or the judge, just the executioner. Don’t worry, we are here to help.
Through the rest of the mission, I deal with legions of the terrorist threats, trying to find us in their terrorist humvees through terrorist sand storms. Finally, we make it to the evac point where, in true military shooter fashion, we must hold off the hordes of soldiers arriving with their decade-old, Russian-manufactured AK-47s while the space-aged chopper replete with all manner of high-caliber guns mounted on its hull makes a thrilling rescue. To watch the chopper arrive in the nick of time and mow down out-gunned terrorists while being blasted by a hard rock guitar riff conjures up the image of a bald eagle with a single tear rolling out of its eye with a buffeting american flag behind it and glittery letters promising to NEVER FORGET.
It would be less offensive if you didn’t know this wasn’t supposed to be a farce. It smacked of the Bush era Axis of Evil presentment of war — a definitive all-powerful democratic Right, fighting the absolute jihadist Wrong.
When I finished the second mission of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, I had killed more people than I cared to think about. I have left a city quaking in the wake of our mission to rescue a person who, given even slightly different circumstances, I would have been sent in to kill. While protecting him, I killed an innocent woman who got caught in the crossfire. I kicked a hornet’s nest of bad men who, after I left, would probably take out their rage, frustration, and depression out on the innocents we left high and dry. I left my friend’s house sometime later, feeling uneasy by the carnage I had wrought.
When I turned on my car, NPR was running a feature piece about reformed guerrillas who had once been the exact same sort of person I had just finished mowing down. It was a story of attempted salvation — of humanity lost, recanted, and refound. It was a discussion of these soldiers who had run away from the insurgent paramilitary organizations they had joined and had attempted to fix the atrocities they had perpetuated. There were stories of attempted redemption, trying to make amends to the families they had torn apart by their violence. These were just men — not psychopaths nor cold-blooded killers. They had committed atrocities, yes, but these acts were not committed in a vacuum. These people were distilled in that alembic of western exceptionalism, living through a lifetime of sorrow before they were ten, watching as foreigners roadie ran through their streets in space-age fabrics, blowing fist-sized holes through their bedroom walls before jetting out in a helicopter, leaving in their wake a smoking crater of collateral damage that included their mother whose white blouse was soiled in her own blood.
I talk about this not to proclaim that all of the people who fight in the name of some dictator or warlord will eventually make a recompense to the societies they have ravaged, but only that the million minion militias of dictators past, present, and future are not the nameless and faceless antagonists games like Ghost Recon make them out to be. Lost in this war are the human stories of attempted redemption.
Where is the game where you play an ex-paramilitary killer, trying to salvage his humanity by helping those families whom he has ruined? Would this sort of thing pass the muster of an American audience? I do wonder. I hope it would. What makes games so great and so powerful is that we can experience the life of another with a greater acquity than any other medium can provide. No other medium can get as close to seeing what it is like to walk in another person’s shoes. What I’m asking for are more varied experiences that help us what it’s like to be the other.
Game journalism has a role here as well. All of the press of this game has been based on whether the game is “good.” As said a thousand other times in a thousand various outlets, it’s no longer enough to talk about games in this way. In a world where the videogames have a hand in the cultural zeitgeist, AAA game developers and reviewers have a duty to discuss the topics presented in a game’s narrative, and not shy away from these troubling issues. Indeed, the more that we continue to speak of videogames as a product as opposed to the locus of a promulgated propaganda, we do ourselves and our audience a disservice by allowing these sixty-dollar propaganda posters to continue unabated. Enough about gameplay, let’s talk experience. Enough about graphics, let’s talk aesthetics.
There are games out there breaking the mold. Games like Spec Ops are challenging a marketplace laden with meatheaded monomorality by showing the true terrors of war, but in large part, we’re subjected to more of the same drowned out brown shooters that seem so indelibly linked to the modern military shooter.
I don’t say these things to damn the developers of Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, or Splinter Cell, but more to the games industry as a whole. We’re better than this. Let’s give the player something to at least consider while they’re mowing down terrorists. Let’s evolve this propagandized schlock into something that looks and feels more important. And as writers, let’s take our content more seriously, because if we don’t, surely no one else will. Let’s make death and destruction the tragedy that it is and stop glorifying and gamifying the dead bodies of those who will never have that chance at redemption because we called the shot.
