I've talked about the Call of Duty demo and raved about how much I loved Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. I just completed the expansion pack for MOHAA, Spearhead. I enjoyed it, although not near as much as the original. The ending of the expansion was just as gratifying as the original, which is to say that it was the equivalent of finding an apple in your Halloween bag when you were 12. Sadly, the Spearhead expansion pack was so short (probably about 5 hours worth of play time) that it doesn't surprise me that there is no ending to speak of really.
War games have become extremely popular in the gaming industry lately. Medal of Honor showed a level of realism and immersion not seen in war games of the past. Everyone grew up in a neighborhood containing at least one middle aged man obsessed with war history (I know I lived next to one for some time in Iowa). Games of their time usually consisted of little tokens representing the cavalry making a charge at Gettysburg. We are blessed with living in an age of gigahertz, more video RAM than we had system RAM not two years ago, and a rapidly advancing 3D graphics industry. With this comes the ability to bring to life more than ever the realities of the battlefield as millions of soldiers knew it 65 years ago.
It's very rare that I pause to contemplate the relationship between video games and reality. It's a rather clear cut division for me. No matter how immersive the music is or realistic the graphics are or interactive the environment is...it's still a game and nothing will ever change that for me. There is nothing to ponder or contemplate usually. My PC and Xbox have reset buttons. Reality does not. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate what games do; nothing could be further from the truth. However, the recent explosion of war games in our technology friendly world has given me pause on numerous occasions recently.
The first that I can recall is a level in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault that will go down in infamy, in my opinion. It is the Omaha Beach assault during the invasion of Normandy. Calling it a "level" is insulting in many ways as it actually took place, but this very fact is what will prove my point. I played this level for probably 30 minutes without ever leaving the beach. Sometimes, a shell landed outside the ramp of my landing craft and made my squad mates and me in to sand. Other times, I was cut down by machine gun fire from the German nests that surrounded the beach. Still other times, I ran myself through as I crawled too close to the barbed wire after taking a few too many bullets and pieces of shrapnel. I probably died on this part of the level 45 or more times.
I was just about to get frustrated with it and started thinking to myself, "Why oh why did the game designers DO THIS?". And then it occurred to me. The boys behind MOHAA had just succeeded in placing my pasty white, geeky skin on the beaches of Normandy. And I realized that for every time my meaningless binary character had died, 53+ real men died on the sands of Omaha Beach June 6, 1944.
It gave me the shivers. You could have sewn a blanket using one of the hairs on the back of my neck as a needle.
Spearhead didn't have any moments as stirring as this, however the commentary of "Private Jack Barnes" between missions with the photograhps depicting the actual events of the mission you had just carried out from the safety of your leather reclining computer chair fading in and out before your eyes still had a powerful effect. It's difficult for me to comprehend war and the magnitude of it in terms of manpower. I see pictures of endless fields with neverending parallel lines of white crosses and I can't comprehend the sheer numbers behind it all. I don't know that I really want to either. And it fills my heart with grief to think of the people for whom those numbers and those fields hold a memory and perhaps a loved one.
I don't feel as though the existence of these "games" should be insulting to those that actually served and lived the life we pretend to live for entertainment, but I can't speak for them. But I think it's important in cases like these to reflect on what's being represented by the flashing lights before your eyes because there's real meaning behind it.