The Buddy System
I knew the young men were dead the minute they started laughing. Sitting on a military hovercraft, looking less like a patrol and more like four grown boys sharing an innertube, they cheered my partner and I as we came alongside. “We’ll save you a cold one!” one promised. And that’s when I knew. A few more seconds and a Helghan RPG would turn them into ash.
It’s a quick moment and a quick heartbreak. And moments like these are crucial - because cheesy as they are, they’re a thousand times less cheesy and more plausible than the main story, about a giant war with the good guys (American-style military, good ol’ boys to a man), and the bad guys (who have glowing red eyes and bark like Boris Karloff with a headcold). Maybe some players care about the bigger picture of this game, but I don’t. I never do. There’s a war going on, but the only people we care about are the ones right in front of us.
I know nothing about military culture. But I’ve learned a lot about the macho squad culture from games like this one. Take Gears of War 2. Epic took a stab at building a world, and setting up the history and the culture behind the conflict. But it’s clear who the good guys really are: they’re the men serving right beside you. The military is sometimes helpful, sometimes deceitful. Serving your country can get you locked up. The next shit detail could be the one that kills you. And anyway, the details are sketchy. (Halo went transmedia, but I would bet beer money that only 1% of anyone who’s ever played the game could tell you what motivates the Covenant, who made the Flood, how the war started, and what the hell is up with that big ring thing, anyway?)
But you can count on your comrades. Your NPCs talk to you. They shittalk with you. And they gripe with you. They don’t know what the hell command was thinking, either, and they think you just got served a shit sandwich too. But they’ll help you eat that sandwich, and give you a beer to wash it down! And it’s funny, even though it’s a boy’s club I’m a sucker for these games. I have my tribe too. We don’t kill people, usually, but we stick together, and we trust each other, and king and country can’t compare with that.
To take another example, Far Cry 2 works best when it subverts that idea. The buddy system was ultimately clunky - or at least it felt that way for me, because I kept leaving them to die. (Whoops!) But if you’ve finished the game, you’ve seen what happens when you live a life where nobody trusts you. Going it along means you’ll get got by yourself. Say what you will about Dom as a sidekick - how he kept stupidly running into danger, and how you practically had to crouch in front of him and hump his leg sometimes to get him to heal you - but at the end of the day, you knew you could trust him, as sure as if someone had wired him that way.
I bring this up because the success of these squads shows up a bigger failure in first-person shooters: how can they create a world that’s worth fighting a war over? It’s not a problem in role-playing games, where you typically go from zero to hero and usually earn a throne or discover your destiny or marry the princess or whatever. And forget about RTS’s, where you get to run the whole show. In a game like Killzone 2, you’re just the grunt, and that’s what you’ll say. How can they take you, the Everygrunt, to an alien culture with funny names and weird planets, and then bring you up to speed so fast that you actually care about the Treaty of 2753 between the Gragleknockers and the Vulgavulves? For that matter, can they even just make you care about the military? In real life, serving means making a career. You get promotions, you earn medals. Games are too short for all that. You’re only there to kill, and anyone who’t not laying down covering fire or handing you the keys to the next tank isn’t really on your radar.
You could stretch this and ask what it says about America right now - that the biggest military games don’t glorify service, and that you have to go back to World War II to find a war everyone can agree on. A game like Gears 2 talks up the cost of war, yet the hero can crash a whole city and just shrug it off as the cost of war. (By the way, Marcus? Back in the day, the point was to destroy their cities. The Japanese didn’t drop the a-bomb on themselves.) All you can count on, all you can care about - all you can defend - are the guys by your side. And hey, it sounds like they’ve got some beer cooling. So finish that boss and get your ass back here before it’s gone.
04/03/2009 at 7:37 pm Permalink
Macho games like the ones you’ve mentioned don’t particularly interest me, I usually try to avoid them in favour of something that doesn’t scream and swear at me.
Last year though, a mate of mine gave me Call of Duty 4 for my birthday, a game which I’d originally considered similiarly macho, glorification of killing and so forth. I found though, that the more I played, the more I realized that this game is a very realistic depiction of war, from many different perspectives. One of the biggest draw ins was the chatter among the NPC squad, these characters seemed like real personalities, and between the covering each others backs in the mist of a firefight, I really grew a connection with them. Their words became influential. They weren’t gruff morons, these were people, fighting a tough cause, from many different fronts. I remember the stories of us as a group, far more than the main narrative of the game, who the terrorists were and so forth.
05/03/2009 at 9:22 am Permalink
Note that this is a ‘Rah Rah go USA’ game conceived by the Dutch. So while they have a huge problem with the Space Nazis, as any good Dutchman should, they also have a huge problem with the not-USA invading force. I’m not saying it’s a critique of war, or really more than an action game, just that I believe the designers don’t like EITHER of the sides involved, and it shows. And I think that the player picks that up too. It’s hard to buy the soldiers’ gung-ho attitude when the devs don’t.
Contrast with CoD, or more specifically CoD4, which essentially boils down complex modern world issues into ‘good vs. bad’, with you on the side of good.
05/03/2009 at 9:15 pm Permalink
What gives you the impression a real soldiers care any more about the big picture than the gamer does? (without trying to stereotype,) The US military is a place for a lot of guys who can’t do much else, where their egos and self esteem are inflated to the point where they’re too busy patting themselves and each other on the back to question or even think about the motives or driving force behind their orders.
Sure, the goal is to overthrow the enemy - but the grunts don’t have the information to connect the dots between what they’re doing and the ultimate goal, as far as they are concerned, their little bubble is the war.
05/03/2009 at 9:40 pm Permalink
@Obonicus, I’ll confess I haven’t finished Killzone and may have spoken too easily about which side was good and which was bad. I’ll keep an eye out for that attitude.
@Daniel, you make me more curious now to finish COD 4, which I’d been pushing off for the same reason as you. Macho gameplay and annoying kickback aren’t my favorite mechanics.
@Dean, I’m sure in RL many soldiers care more about the people around them and the job in front of them than what’s going on with the war. To your other point, I do know soldiers who care about the job and don’t let their ego get in the way. More than ever they can get information on what’s going on and what the world thinks of it - what they do with that is up to them.
08/03/2009 at 10:06 pm Permalink
While I don’t know how conscious it is, I think the increasing emphasis on the player’s squad mates is a movement towards making the single player experience more like the multiplayer. There’s not really any way to police multiplayer voice chat, so pushing the single player towards multi provides some commonality between the two experiences.