I should have known from the box cover, a hand-drawn picture of two G.I.’s in action, blasting away in different directions.  It has the classic muted colors of a ‘50s comic or propaganda poster.  This was not the reality I was looking for.

I’m no simulationist—I don’t think video games should hew too closely to reality, but come on, killing 50 Germans with an M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle while barreling down the bombed out streets of Carentan, France is ludicrous.  Given what little I know of the reality of war, especially World War II, this sort of action is so beyond the pale of reality that it could only be classified as a tall tale.  In fact, it calls into question the narrative context being presented.  Is Call of Duty: Roads to Victory couched in the World War II of acrid gunsmoke, burnt flesh, jammed guns, cold rations and death?  Is it presenting the heroic, folk World War II where the Axis brazenly awake the sleeping giant of America and its cornfed supersoldiers who leap across the Channel to kick some Kraut ass?  Or does it simply offer a ride through a well-defined media space, the first-person shooter, lightly themed, but hewing closer to the reality of “first-person shooting” than “World War II”?  Whatever the context, apparently even “The Greatest Generation” needs high kill counts to be exciting.

For many obvious reasons, Call of Duty cannot and should not attempt to simulate the reality of World War II.  In fact, I’m generally of the opinion that close simulation is a bad thing in games.  Games are abstractions of reality.  That’s why they’re fun.  I don’t want to deal with jammed guns or eat cold rations.  And I really, really don’t want to die.  But still, a game that ostensibly takes on a narrative context needs to offer some semblance to that context.  And when I say semblance, I suppose what I mean is faithfulness to the narrative promised.  These games needn’t be faithful to reality, but they do need to be faithful to the experience they promise.  If they aren’t faithful to this, they risk falling into complete incoherence.

So to be fair, Call of Duty: Roads to Victory for the PSP basically fulfills the promise it makes.  Following some propaganda-lite newsreel footage to open the game, you are dropped into exactly the milieu that the Call of Duty series promises: barreling down the streets of a bombed out French town, shooting Germans.  The narrative content flits between the folk heroic World War II and the more abstract content of the shooting gallery on rails.  After all there are no “roads to victory” in Call of Duty.  There is only one road, winding into one alleyway, winding into one stairway leading to another road which you must follow and in which you must kill as many Germans as possible along the way.

The game faces the tension between historical accuracy and the dissatisfaction that would come from firing a rusty, battered M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle.  And the designers chose to side with you, the player.  They don’t want you to be dissatisfied.  Your gun may look like an M1, but it’s really a laser-accurate cannon from the future.

And while this “shooting gallery on rails” hardly seems like a narrative theme—it’s more of a game mechanic, really—I would have preferred the game to fully adopt this abstract mechanic as its focus, rather than reminding me that I was a soldier in World War II, reminding me that this was a real war.  While I understand that this is the folk-heroic World War II, I keep wishing it weren’t.  I wish I weren’t playing as some superhuman soldier killing everyone in sight and conveniently picking up bazookas whenever they are needed.  Despite how nicely the folk-heroic feel would seem to dovetail with the shooting gallery, I found it deeply disappointing.

I wanted to have the chance to shoot, but I wanted that chance to be couched in fear and dread.  I wanted that chance to be stolen between ducking for cover, cowering for my life.  I wanted to be bossed around.  I wanted to be required by military chain of command to closely follow a set of orders instead of having to simply follow the shooting gallery’s predetermined path.  Then, that action of shooting might feel like it had a meaning on par with the narrative of war that I am somewhat masochistically seeking, the one filled with death.  I didn’t want this game to be fun; I wanted it to make me feel the awful hopelessness of war.

I suppose this is no fault of Call of Duty‘s. I should have known from the box.  And in fact, the gameplay is fairly well done.  The shooting gallery mechanic works well with the limitations of the PSP controls.  Clever level designers have placed ammo and the aforementioned bazookas wherever you will need them.  In general, it plays well.  The aiming reticule snaps satisfyingly to targets allowing you to make quick work of any Germans you encounter.  The guns are well balanced and inflict just the right amount of damage a gun in a first-person shooter should.  It only takes a shot or two to kill people.  It’s fun.  I genuinely have fun playing Call of Duty: Roads to Victory.  And all of this was somehow my problem.  It was too easy to kill, and too fun. 

This is where my critique of Call of Duty will turn from the general to the personal.  But first, let me tell you a couple more things that I am not.  As I said, I’m no simulationist.  And I’m also not opposed to violence or killing in games.  In fact, I really enjoy shooters.  I’m also not opposed to war games.  But of late I’ve felt twinge of unease playing games that place war in even the most marginally realistic of settings, while the more fantastic ones remain somehow more palatable.

I know Call of Duty has nothing to do with the reality of World War II.  It is a heroic version of an idea that we hold about being in a war that most us of don’t remember, but only understand through movies and books.  And in this way, Call of Duty does glorify war—not real war, but our heroic vision of it.  How can I play a game that glorifies war in a time when our country is actually at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where real people are being shot and killed?

This may seem a ridiculously naïve question.  So let me outline my own internal narrative in response:

“Games are not reality.  This game clearly has nothing to do with war. It’s as much about war as, say, Chess (well, okay, a bit more than Chess).”

“Not true—it is clearly about war, albeit in a purely representational way—you play as a G.I.; you’re in the army; it’s about World War II.”

“If in fact Call of Duty is anything like war, better for me to glean some small understanding of what war is like from a game than from reality.”

“It does not offer that because the game is more faithful to the mechanics of first-person shooters than it is to the reality of World War II.  What we are to glean is an understanding of first-person shooters, not World War II.”

“It’s just a game.  Games are for escaping reality.”

“True, it is just a game.  But games and media shape how we view reality and the choices we make, tying them intimately together.”

Now my discomfort with Call of Duty is not particularly noble, because every time I put down war games, I end up picking them up again.  Why?  Well, shooting games are ultimately satisfying to me in a way few other games are.  All that shooting and falling and dying have a very real concrete feeling.  It’s a style of action which the news and movies have made me understand as reality.  It is not abstract in the way popping Chuzzles or matching gems will always be.  There is no case in human history when lining up three like objects made them disappear.  Humans do, however, shoot, kill, and die.  It is the feeling of satisfaction with the world of Call of Duty that makes me feel bad.

It plays to my ambivalent feelings about war in general, especially the start of the war in Iraq.  It’s easy to say you’re against the war now—things have gone so spectacularly wrong that hindsight is far greater than 20/20.  There were no weapons of mass destruction as Powell promised.  Democracy has not risen from the shattered state of Iraq as Wolfowitz held out.  Quite shamefully for me, I fell more for the neo-con ideology than the more popular, reasonable “imminent threat” argument.  I never bought it wholeheartedly, but I did believe with a proper multi-nation coalition and the backing of the U.N., overthrowing Saddam Hussein would be a good thing.  In a world of ideologies, the logical argument for disposing Hussein and transforming the Middle East through nation-building seemed like the right course of action.  I should have known that wasn’t the reality I was going to get.  That picture was painted in colors only a shade more complex than that of two G.I.’s firing in opposite directions.

Both this game and my initial support for the war in Iraq make me worry that I’m bloodthirsty.  That somehow, I bought into the picture Robert Kagan created in his neoconservative treatise, Of Paradise and Power, that America should act because it can act.  Though worlds apart in terms of production, seriousness and even intent, Of Paradise and Power and Call of Duty share a vision of the world.  The complete ease of Call of Duty paints a similar picture, that war is easy and winnable.  That action wins out.

In the end my critique of the game is one of context exterior to the reality within the game.  This may not seem particularly fair to Call of Duty or any work of art, but it is one I feel I need to make.  Call of Duty falls into a myth of ease.  At this particular moment, with the reality of the war in Iraq and our inability to fix that which we have broken, anything perpetuating that myth of ease is unacceptable.  War just isn’t this easy.

Read the review on PopMatters

There’s a beautiful line in Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Coast of Utopia. The frazzled Russian literary critic, Belinsky, in the midst of ranting lays it out:

When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable.

I can think of no more appropriate words for this Election Day eve. We remain embroiled in an intellectuals war in which reality continues to rebuke the hubris of strong ideas and poor perception.

Following hot on the heals of Fukuyama’s piece, Robert Kaplan addresses the current state of America’s foreign policy and the Pentagon’s new Quadrennial Defense Review in the New York Times with Send in the State Department.

Kaplan focuses on and encourages the use of small units opertaing semi-autonomously in strife torn areas.

Take the Horn of Africa, a low-profile theater where small American military teams comb a large region and engage in military training and civil affairs projects with local forces as a way to build relationships in advance of a major crisis. Never again should we be in the situation that we were in on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where there were no intelligence assets on 9/11 because we had closed all our networks the decade before, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Kaplan goes on to urge the involvement of the State Department in these missions. This suggests that we need to not only equip military units to operate with force, but to be able to initiate if not state-building, then village-building projects that go beyond picking up garbage or short-term humanitarian relief. Perhaps units will be equipped with city planners or with political scientists who can begin to work with local residents to initiate new institutions. In his article The Mayor of Ar Rutbah in Foreign Policy last November, James Gavrilis suggests the need for such a change. An Army Special Forces officer, Gavrilis had first hand experience with insitution and city-building as his group moved through Iraq. As his unit passed through the town of Ar Rutbah, they stopped and attempted to help the local population implement civil institutions. He writes:

Because we didn’t receive any guidance for governance or reconstruction, and certainly not for spreading democracy, I had to make up everything as I went, based on the situation on the ground and what I remembered from my Special Forces training and a handful of political science classes. I entered the city with only our strategic objective for Iraq in mind: to establish a free, democratic, and peaceful Iraq without weapons of mass destruction. And that is what I tried to achieve in my own microcosm of the war.

In his book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda suggests that war has seen a constant evolution based on changes in tactics and technology. He sees military operations set up as machines that run, consuming resources. He tracks the evolution of organization within military efforts, from the swarming machines of barbarian raiders to the supply-side machines of Napolean’s army. Often these changes are predicated on a shifts in technology. For example, the accuracy of the conical bullet provides a technological tipping point for military organization, allowing military organization to shift from large lines of rifle volleys to smaller, more independent units.

The implementation of smaller units that operate not only militarily, but also diplomatically suggests a further evolution of the military machine. The military evolves from not only destructive to constructive work. In DeLanda’s book he raises the ire of actual robots powered by artificial intelligence conducting military operations. Obviously, we have already reached this state of affairs with smart bombs. But each unit as a machine of combat and construction is far more intriguing. In this situation you have the destructive force laying the ground work for re-construction. Focus on re-constrution would seem to be a good development. One of the glaring missteps in the Bush Admininstration’s plan for Iraq was simply wiping away instituions without replacing them. The quagmire in Iraq illustrates the clear need for quick and constant attention to immediate building of civil institutions. As the army and special forces are especially equipped to be deployed quickly and widely, they should carry construction as an implicit goal.

Each group of special forces would serve as a little repair cell, equipped with both military power, and repair power. The unit would take on the task of both military exercises and implementing governmental institutions. Rather than state building, they would be individual units of village-building. The super-structure of the army would connect these individual areas of repair back to the central nervous system of the state. In this way, the structure of the army would then provide the initial network of connecting civil institutions.

While I think the trend to more autonomous and complete units is good, it is not without problems. My biggest fear with this is we tend to build things in our own image. If the military is the organization laying down civil institutions, what sort of civil institutions do you get? In the development of the military machine does embodying both destructive and constructive force in one institution create a sort of perpetual state machine?

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Francis Fukuyama disavows neoconservatism, writing, “Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.” A little late to the party, but it’s nice to have him anyway.

Fukuyama argues instead for working through institutions, rather than force. The most interesting idea in the article comes when he suggest, “The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a ‘multi-multilateral world’ of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.”

This would seem to suggest a marketplace of authority and action. This certainly seems a valuable idea to explore. Though it could certainly be problematic, it may offer an interesting conceptual model for sussing out order. Has the all-consuming idea emergence taken over diplomacy as well?

So probably the most affecting story of the last year for most Americans finally gets mentioned 45 minutes into the President’s State of the Union. And six sentences later everything is made better and the people of Louisiana can rest easy knowing how important they really are: not at all.

I’m sure the President and his administration are deeply embarrased about the handling of Hurricane Katrina. But I think they should be equally embarrassed about again ignoring the events and the deep social and economic divides it began to reveal. Ignoring it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I thought object-permanency was something we picked up around age three.

Instead the nation is treated to a greatest hits of the Bush Administration’s “Why we must fight a never-ending war on terror” against our unnamed “enemy,” who Mr. Bush came close to singling out as radical Islam, but left vague enough that we can really go after whoever we please.