Depiction of War in Games: Can You Do Better?

[Music] hello everyone my name's andrew baron i'm the director of design at boheme interactive simulations and my talk is called depiction of war in games can you do better for those of you who don't know bohemian reactive simulations we've taken the first person shooter game engine behind the arma series of games and turned it into a real life military simulator that's used to train thousands of soldiers around the world each year my whole professional career i've been in and around simulations the military itself and war a little bit about myself i started off as a modder in 2002 for bohemian interactive's first game operation flashpoint in 2006 i got a job as a designer in their australian studio and we started working on virtual battlespace 2.

this was the military simulator that really changed the defense industry it became a breakaway success and really changed the way that the military thought of games they could be serious training tools not just some experiment or some toy in 2010 i moved to orlando when we opened a studio there but i was also in the united states marine corps reserve and so again in 2010 i actually volunteered for a deployment to afghanistan so i was there for about seven months and then afterwards i decided i want to go back to afghanistan so i went there as a civilian working for darpa we were making smartphone apps for soldiers to use in combat after a year i decided i was tired of that and i went back to work for bohemia this time in the prague office and there goes my slides all right and i've been in prague ever since so one of the things that i've noticed uh in my time in in defense

in simulations and around the military is that there's a bit of a disconnect between the expectation and reality uh of how war is depicted in games and in books and movies compared to how it actually is and as a veteran usually for me when i talk to civilians this is kind of how the conversations go you know might start off like hey i'm off to boot camp wish me luck buddy and then the friend just kind of not interested ah awesome kill some bad guys for me two years later i just got back from iraq i had a lot of profound and life-changing experiences friend cool did you kill anyone not very interested so in general i would say people have a deep appreciation for the military but a very shallow understanding of what it is the military does and and war itself and for example when i was in

in afghanistan i was deployed to sangon district and for years sangan was the bloodiest battleground in the entire war units that were deployed there were suffering 10 to 20 casualties each deployment ours was no exception and one of the reasons it was so so bloody is there ieds everywhere it was basically a low density minefield so we would walk in single file line like this the guy in front would have a minesweeper everyone else would walk behind in line and if you stepped off of the path that had been cleared you might get blown up or sometimes the guy in front might miss an ied he might step over it and then the next guy in line might step on it and get blown up before i got there the last unit that was there they learned the hard way that the insurgents had a little tactic where they would put ieds down behind cover so good places to take cover and then they would set up an ambush and when the marines came they would fire at the marines the marines would run to cover lay down in those places and then the insurgents would detonate the

ieds and blow up the marines so by the time we got there we were told if you come under enemy fire you just stand still and you just squat down you fire back and you don't run for cover so that's pretty much what we were deploying into and you might imagine from what i described that it must look something like this you know a lot of shooting a lot of explosions exciting stuff in reality though a typical day there looked a lot more like this and we'd basically be walking around talking to farmers about their donkey or about their house that was destroyed um in a low density minefield but just walking around talking and in the middle of this deployment there was a young marine i remember very clearly he had this quote uh he said this isn't what i expected i thought i'd be doing hero [ __ ] like in call of duty so what you might not realize is that your work as writers and as game developers really

matters it really helps set the expectation that society has of what war is and what the military is and the reason for this is because as people were designed to learn through stories and through play and through emotions we don't learn from you know history or long-form journalism unfortunately um so really you are society's teachers in a way so my question is what lessons are we teaching let's take an analogy let's say we were tasked with writing a movie about relationships this is something that most of us have all experienced so we could brainstorm a lot of different themes or different narrative topics that we could focus on you know love dating romance maybe heartbreak marriage we have this huge narrative cam canvas that we can choose from uh to write about now what if uh as we're brainstorming a movie executive comes up to us and says

hey we did a lot of market research and we've learned what excites our audience the most i want you to focus just on this one theme sex what kind of movie would be writing at this point i mean obviously obviously we'd be making porn at this point which may be exciting but it's a bit shallow and although in a relationship often there is sex of course but you wouldn't really say that a porn is about relationships so let's say we're going to write about war how big is our narrative canvas what are all the themes that we tend to choose from when we're writing i would argue that it's fairly narrow most of the time and really the purpose of this speech is to give you a few examples of what else is out there what else we can fit in this narrative so to get started my first narrative is less killing more war what do i mean by that

one of the things i've found over the years that's very interesting about working on military simulations is the difference between what's really in like a military fps versus what gamers think must be in there and i would say in general video games are much much more violent than real military operations or military simulations and i mean orders of magnitude more violent so for example when the military is going to attack something some defenders that are in a dug-in position typically they want to use three times as many soldiers as the defenders have so if there's 30 defenders you would attack with 90 soldiers so let's say we have a level in a video game where we're going to attack an enemy base and we're going to do it alone and let's say there's 30 soldiers in that base essentially that level you would be having the player doing the killing that would normally be done by 90 soldiers in real life in other words you could say that that level would be 90 times more violent than a military simulation and

this of course really makes sense if the only gameplay mechanics you have revolve around shooting because you have no other tool in your your toolkit to work with so some games like arma for example make simple changes to their game mechanics that really change how combat behaves so for example bullets can kill you easily if you get shot in the face you you don't get the heal these types of changes really uh make the player more cautious and much more hesitant to get involved in a firefight and by letting you have a bunch of friendly troops dozens of friendly troops troops with you it really lets it look more like a real life military operation the other thing is a lot of the combat in this game is about positioning yourself before you get into a firefight and so it really gives the player something to do other than just shooting a gun but even in milsim games like arma

the feature set tends to focus mainly on killing and you might find it interesting but in military simulations we actually have a lot of features that you would never really expect to find in a first person shooter excuse me so for example here's a convoy uh training in iraq in early 2000s uh the us marine corps was doing a lot of this using our software and what you can see here is uh there was a feature that we left out when we made vbs2 we forgot to include this feature from vbs1 and it really was crucial for their training so they wouldn't upgrade to the latest version until we put that feature back in and of course the future i'm talking about is turn signals this is a critical feature for military training at least for convoy operations why reason is in this case at least the way the marine corps operated was when they were on a convoy before they gave it made a turn

they would signal the lead vehicle would signal the other vehicles would signal behind and then that way everyone knew the turn was coming and everyone else knew that uh that that had been acknowledged so they were basically using this to train communication and teamwork and that's why something that normally you would only see in like a truck simulator game was crucial for military simulations here's another example this was for the new zealand defense force so again they wouldn't upgrade from bbs1 to vbs2 because they were doing uh training for peacekeeping operations in east timor at the time and so they were training their rules of engagement and so of course the most important feature was the ability to put a weapon on your back so uh what they were training was if there was a guerrilla fighter and he had a weapon on his back you kind of leave him alone if he had a weapon his hand he could be shot he might be threatening you so this

is how something that would basically be an emote in an mmo becomes a critical feature in a real military simulator and the thing is in vbs we have thousands of features and a lot of them are like this they're not very violent not very kinetic a lot of them are very violent very kinetic but the point is military has so many different tasks that they have to do in war hundreds and hundreds of tasks and that's why we need all these features and a lot of them you would never really see in a first person shooter but because war is so complex there's so many different things they have to train another reason that makes war so complex is that it's hard to even define what exactly you're trying to win which leads me into my next narrative one war many conflicts so one of the reasons i wanted to go to afghanistan was to try to end the conflict there bring peace to that country and i was deployed as a civil affairs specialist it's called so i had a suitcase full of money i had an interpreter and i could go talk to village elders and talk to religious

leaders hand out some money try to win some hearts and minds and one of the things i quickly discovered was that we weren't in the middle of just one conflict of like the taliban versus the government there was actually a lot of different conflicts so for example the afghan army was made up mostly of ethnicities from the north tajiks uh hazaras uzbeks and we were in the pashtun area in the south so these different ethnic groups had all had centuries of conflict with each other and even they even spoke different languages the the afghan army actually had to use our interpreters to talk to the local population one of the soldiers actually told my interpreter that uh if we just killed all the tajiks then we'd finally have peace and my interpreter was a tajik but this guy was serious

the afghan police they were pashtun actually but they were from different districts there were a lot of fun to hang out with but they were really corrupt people so they usually knew where the taliban were they knew where they were hiding and who was supporting them but they weren't really interested in doing much about it instead they focused on getting money out of the locals they would throw people in jail for example and then demand a bribe in order to release them and the thing is in in pashtun society you have this concept of pashtun wall-e which is like this honor code uh that really drives the culture and part of part of the honor code is revenge so if someone wrongs you you've got to get revenge on them so you end up with a lot of these blood feuds going on between different people and different tribes in the area and really they're trying to leverage us the marines or the afghan government or the police they're trying to use us

to further their feud and we had to be very careful not to get wrapped up in that and so eventually i started understanding that it's not just two conflicts but it's actually a pyramid of conflicts this is a good way to visualize it you have uh at the top you have just a few conflicts which are global but then you go down this pyramid and you get more and more conflicts as you go down and these are conflicts with smaller and smaller groups but there's more and more of them so uh for example uh it starts with the you know al qaeda and uh the us and gets down to these blood feuds i'm talking about and really if it sounds familiar with all this intrigue and alliances that form and then they break and they shift and they they backstab each other it sounds a lot like game of thrones and that's really the best way to describe it so if you want a good dramatic example of it look at game of thrones and it's really complex in this book you might know it's actually based off a

real war uh from english medieval history at least that's how part of the inspiration and it's really complex but audiences really love this why why is that so i would argue that they love it because it's this narrative loop of discovery and surprise so you enter the world you're naive you're not quite sure what's going on you start to learn the game that's being played around you uh you start to learn who are the players and and who's who and and what are the rules and just when you think you have it figured out something surprises you and you got to learn everything all over again so this is a great narrative for for tv and books but does this work in video games i would say there's a good example in crusader kings 2 for example this is a game that's basically a medieval politics simulator and there's thousands of nobles and they're all vying for power against each other and they're breaking alliances and forming alliances and having intrigues and it's a very powerful engaging gameplay loop and six years later this

game is still popular a more recent example might be the witcher 3. so in this game they have a pyramid of conflict similar to what i described earlier which is kind of the backdrop of the the world at the very high level you have nilfgaard versus the northern kingdoms and then you have these lower level conflicts like the different clans and the scalia islands that are fighting each other and debating whether to join the bigger war and then you have personal conflicts and this gives a really interesting complex backdrop that the writers can use to make all sorts of plots all sorts of quests and they can all tie into each other if they want to and and these are just examples of what you can do if you have a little bit less killing in your games you open up space for things like this and and this complexity is something that a lot of audiences really enjoy and find really engaging which brings me in my next narrative narrative number three moral complexity so first of all let me define what i do

not mean by moral complexity moral complexity is not moral simplicity it might sound obvious but we get them mixed up a lot so for example if it's clear all your choices what your choices are and if it's clear which choice is right and which choice is wrong then you're actually faced with simplicity not complexity just because you're given a choice doesn't make it complex moral moral ambiguity is also not what i'm talking about here so moral ambiguity is where there is no right there is no wrong everything is just kind of gray but that's not that's not really how how war is if you're a soldier in a war your job is to do the right thing but complexity means it's it's hard to figure out what the right thing is you have to do a lot of work to figure it out and you don't have a lot of time to figure it out sometimes and lives are on the line so let me give you an example so one day one of our bases got attacked

by a rocket uh maureen got thrown out of the guard tower um luckily he was completely uninjured about a week later we were on patrol near that base and we just randomly ran into two civilians on a motorcycle and hanging off the side of the motorcycle were bags of rockets so the point man on the patrol immediately threw up and said uh pointed the the motorcycle and said put up your hands so the guy here that you can see um he threw up his hands and he surrendered the other guy on the motorcycle ran away the point man shot at him as he ran away he got hit but he ended up escaping and we found out later he bled to death so the question is how do we know if this is the right thing to do in that situation and in fact we actually have a legal code called the law of land warfare that helps us here and one thing you'll notice about this guy is he's not wearing a uniform he's looks like a civilian he's trying to

blend in with the civilian population that makes him what's called an unlawful combatant so he and his buddies were unlawful combatant and it's illegal to fight them until they surrender but how do you know uh who's an a combatant and who's a civilian when they all look the same so the law actually again gives us a guide on this if somebody is engaging in a hostile act against you or if they're demonstrating intent to engage in such an act then you have an inherent right to self-defense and you can fight so it sounds pretty simple but it actually gets really complicated in practice here's an example of uh insurgent tactic in iraq so in this case you've got a freeway overpass [Music] yes you've got an overpass and you've got two insurgents standing on it and they're not carrying any rifles any weapons visibly and one guy is the observer he's watching for the convoy the guy behind him is holding a homemade bomb and when the

observer sees the convoy go under the overpass he signals to the guy with the bomb who's going to drop it down on top of the vehicles inside that hole and to blow up the crew inside so and then they run away usually so imagine you're on a convoy and you see this happen to the vehicle in front of you and let's say a few of your friends get killed and then let's say a week later you're on a convoy again and you're driving down that same road and you're coming up on the same overpass and you see somebody watching you and you're pretty sure that's the same guy you saw last week so what do you do are you witnessing hostile intent here should you defend yourself right now maybe you shoot that guy maybe you're trying to protect your friends and maybe afterwards you go search his body and you find a bomb on it and so maybe you were right you protected them but maybe you search them and you don't find anything and he was just some innocent civilian that was just

in the wrong place at the wrong time or maybe you don't do anything because you can't be sure and then maybe the vehicle in front of you gets blown up and your friends die or maybe there's some other choice that you're not seeing maybe you can tell the convoy to stop and maybe someone we can send a team up there to search those guys the point is in in modern warfare and 21st century warfare there's all sorts of events like this where you have just a very little amount of time to decide what to do and how to how to act military spends a lot of time and effort trying to train soldiers for these situations so that they'll know what to do when they're in them but you know this is all very interesting but is there any way to put this into a video game and would it be interesting in a video game and i would argue that the telltale games series do a great job of this all the time so in these games you're given a very small amount of time

to make very big decisions and your decisions have consequences and it's not always clear what's right and what's wrong and these are very engaging games and they're very very complex decisions that you have to make you could basically use the same techniques here the same narrative techniques the same gameplay techniques put this in set this in the iraq or afghan war and you'd have one of the most realistic and immersive war games ever made another good example comes from spec ops the line in this scene you come across your squad mate lugo who was just killed by an angry mob and then they're now surrounding you and they're screaming and they're yelling and they're angry at you and your other squad mate who's still alive he's he's getting nervous he's afraid that you're gonna get killed as well by this cro crowd and he's asking for permission to shoot the crowd

and you have to make a decision and it's really interesting because actually in vbs we have a lot of features that are designed to train soldiers for situations like this so the the technique you're supposed to use here is actually called escalation of force and the proper way to handle this both professionally and morally is you start with the lowest level of force that will diffuse the situation and that'll keep you and your friends safe so that might start with strong language it might escalate to like warning shots uh and but if necessary then you go to lethal force but only if necessary if nothing else will work but interestingly uh a lot of players when they're faced with this situation the game will actually let you fire a warning shot and it will defuse the situation the siblings will run away but most players don't even try doing that at all they're faced with all this pressure they've got their their buddy yelling at them to shoot the crowd their other buddy just got killed they're nervous

and they're angry and they just shoot the civilians and the civilians run away and the soldiers the soldiers make it out alive but there's women and children that are just lying dead and so that's sort of some of the complexity uh that can be faced and and that brings me to my last narrative narrative number four the civilians pay the highest price so this is a pretty taboo subject really to to touch or to talk about in a video game especially uh even in in regular conversation it's something we don't really want to talk about um so i wouldn't blame anyone if you wanted to avoid this this topic but let me give you an example of what this looked like in saying at least so here's a picture of an ied in the ground and what you'll see is you'll see a series of stones this was placed there by the taliban in order to warn the civilians that there's an ied there to stay away so the civilians the taliban rather

they're trying to win hearts and minds just like we are so they don't want collateral damage of civilians they want to avoid it if they can so when we first got to sangin the civilians knew where the ids were but they didn't really want to tell us they didn't really trust us after we'd been there for a while we we must been doing something right they started trusting us more i guess and they started coming to us and telling us where these ieds were and we would send our eod teams out there to disarm them so the taliban didn't really like that so they stopped telling the civilians where the ieds were and then it ends up looking like this so in case you can't tell the ied is buried right there now obviously these are very hard to spot and they're also very deadly if you step on them so i have a question for you do you think those two kids would be any better at spotting those ieds than you would be

so let me tell you another story so one day we were at the base we heard an explosion we checked on the radio none of our patrols that were out got hit by anything and we found out about a week later that a young boy stepped on an ied and got blown up it's not the kids pictured here but it's actually very similar they were similar in age uh about a week later we had a patrol that was out near the same house where that one boy got blown up and they saw uh heard an explosion and they saw smoke and they rushed over to help and what they saw was another boy similar age again not pictured here and he was laying there with his legs blown off in a pool of his blood uh bleeding to death and his parents were nearby and they were watching this and they were screaming they were watching their kid die in front of them and it was actually the same parents that lost their other son a week earlier

so our the squad leader that was with that patrol and his interpreter ran over and started putting tourniquets on the the stumps of the kid's leg but uh yeah he bled out he died um and the thing is that those ieds that those kids stepped on those weren't meant for those kids those were meant to kill us to kill the marines and they were there because we were there we were fighting in this kid's backyard and so there were bombs there if we wouldn't have been there those bombs wouldn't have been there and this kid would have been okay so this is a pretty dark topic obviously um and the question is can games touch on this and there's a few good examples of it one example is a game called this war of mine it's actually a game set in a war but you don't play as

soldiers you play as civilians and your job is to try to stay alive in the war it's very dark but it sold two and a half million copies and it's received widespread critical claim very well received 10 out of 10 on steam another example is from bohemia interactive i don't work on arma by the way um but i was really interested in this dlc it's called the laws of war and in it you play as a uh aid worker basically a humanitarian aid worker which sounds super boring for a game about shooting people uh and one reviewer called it a walking simulator because you spend most of the game walking around disarming land mines but that same reviewer was like it was great it was one of the most emotionally impactful experiences i've ever had in a first person shooter and there's a lot of other reviewers that say similar things uh it's rated nine out of ten on steam so there is maybe some space for even uncomfortable topics like this and even in a game about war so

to review war what else is there what else can we write about my first narrative was less killing more war remember war there's hundreds of tasks uh not just shooting combat should be dangerous and if you change your mechanics it can be not a cartoon and if you give the player less killing to do you have more space for other experiences some of them can be violent some of them can be less violent some of them can go from non-violent to violent in the moment in a very short amount of time next narrative one war many conflicts remember there's sort of a pyramid of different conflicts uh global local all the way down to personal and this can lead you to a narrative loop of discovery surprise and rediscovery as you start to unravel all these conflicts and as you work your way through it and again a great example is game of thrones number three moral complexity again there's a difference between this and moral simplicity and ambiguity this means you have to work hard to figure out the right thing to do but you're

trying to do the right thing the problem is in modern warfare you're forced into a lot of these complex situations and you don't necessarily have a lot of time to figure out what's right so a great way to implement this in games would be things like time limited decisions branching narratives etc and finally number four civilians pay the highest price both sides in the conflict are always going to cause collateral damage there's no way it can be avoided no matter how hard you try this is a very dark and risky subject really to touch on in a game but if you try and if you do it successfully this can lead to some powerful memorable experiences and i really just want to kind of close on that note i want to remind you that stories are very very powerful things and writing itself is is not easy writing like doing good writing is is very hard for me this speech was very hard to write and it's not even good that means if you're a writer and you're a good writer and you're an effective writer then you're a very powerful person you

can tell stories that are very powerful so you have powerful things in your hands and i would just ask you to please use those things responsibly thank you very much you