I have a memory from a firefight in 2008. It’s blurred around the edges and foggy at parts, but there is a distinct sequence in which I bring the optic to my eye and fire at a man’s head. From there the memory fades out. Some say his head exploded in a pink splash, and others say the light machine gun next to me killed him, but I don’t think anyone really knows.
This event has stuck with me because for some reason it has attached itself to a question that I’m asked surprisingly frequently when my experiences in Afghanistan come up.
“Is it like Call of Duty?”
I attended a charity event with a friend of mine who had lost both his legs in Sangin, Afghanistan, and after an hour of schmoozing he was descended on by a group of six-year-olds who, after realizing he had lost his appendages in some sort of explosion, proceeded to ask what his favorite weapon was in Call of Duty and if shooting people in real life was the same as in video games. I stared in horror at their parents who sat unfazed in the background, but my friend just smiled and proceeded to placate the kids with some anecdote.
This question isn’t limited to six-year-olds, mind you. Last week I was asked the same thing by a twenty-something after my French class.
This question has persisted throughout the years because some people think that video games are a medium that edges closer to warfare than books or films.
This is not the case. A film or a book might be less participatory than a video game, but they still contain the human element. You grow attached to characters and mourn their departures and tribulations. A video game in 2013, no matter how sexed up and cinematic it is, is just some iteration of Doom for DOS. You walk around and shoot people.
Combat is about relationships. It is about people. It is about how you see yourself as a person and how you treat your comrades in the direst of circumstances. Video games have tried to recreate the human element of combat through cut scenes and sophisticated graphics, but will always fail because they only ask one thing of the player: to shoot other people, or get shot and regenerate. No lingering doubts, no remorse, no cost—just bodies on a screen, blasted into oblivion.
Video games lack reflection and human response. Killing a member of your own species is the most intimate thing a human can do. It is an act that volumes are written on, with more volumes still to come. Yet, it is around killing that video games couch their mainstay. Everything in a video game is anchored in killing. It is the obvious, the thing you will do unquestionably; yet, in modern combat, killing is the pinnacle. It is the end of the road. It is where childhoods go to die and lifetimes are forever altered.
Combat veterans play video games because within them are specters of their old selves, a homage of sorts to the most enthralling moments of their lives in a sycophantic kind of way. However, people who have no experience with warfare think that by playing video games they are getting some sort of glimpse of a life they could not even start to comprehend.
Video games are the sitcom of combat, quick and painless and wrapped up quickly. And just like sitcoms give us a skewed perception of reality, video games do the same for warfare.
And while this seems blatantly obvious, the question still persists.
“Is it like Call of Duty?”
That memory— the one I talked about in the beginning—is from my first firefight from my first deployment. It was the first time I experienced combat and that memory is there because in that infinitesimal moment before I pulled the trigger I distinctly remember thinking:
“I’ve done this before.”
This column is the second in series on how the warrior and civilian experience are portrayed through various media in the 21st century.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a columnist at War on the Rocks. He served as an infantryman with 1st Battalion 6th Marines from 2007-2011 and participated in two deployments to Afghanistan. He is a student at Georgetown University and a deputy editor at The Hoya.
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It’s interesting how common it is for military-folk to get asked “is it like X game.” I’ve had that same question asked of me.
I wrote about this before on my blog. To me, war and military service is less like Call of Duty and more like Mass Effect.
And then there are tools that seem to be intentionally blurring the lines:
http://blogs.militarytimes.com/gearscout/2013/10/02/trackingpoint-going-tactical
Short answer is NO. There are no tactile senses in video games. No smell, no temperature, no exhaustion, no adrenalin, no weight, no light/non-light, no water/lack of, no… ad infinitum. The levels of emotion, confusion, clarity just don’t compare. In the future, technology may approach that – but I don’t want to play.
I’ll also take this opportunity to comment on the aspect of the question it self; or a version of that question – “Did you KILL ANYBODY!?” How rude to ask such a thing. And, I generally tell the questioner just that, “How rude!”. I further explain that all life is precious, even that of my enemy, and taking any life is far more serious than anything one can imagine. I don’t regret my service – in fact, I’m proud. But, I don’t also trivialize the import of actions in that service either.
Semper Fidelis
I tried to explain to my son that this Call of Duty Playstation game will never replicate the sounds and smell of actual war. Losing virtual teammates in a game is very different than losing them for real on the battlefied.
I think its unfair to blanket video games as combative. I just got done with a game of Pandemic, which while being a TableTop game, is collaborative. Such games are unsurprisingly more popular in Europe, and I suspect they have similar video games as well – no combat or struggle against fellow players. It could be said the game is the combatant, but I think its an important distinction. I guess I suspect that combat and killing, like rape, abuse, and many other things, is something understood only after being there. Nothing in a game has ever compared to the attack I experienced in Kandahar, and I assume until I kill someone I’ll never understand the subtle reality of doing it myself.
Cold-War old fart here. Closest I ever came to combat was having a round with a defective time fuze pop over our FDC, and some fragments bouncing off the camo nets. All I’ve shot were targets, but a fair number of those.
That said, I get this “Yeah, right.” feeling when a gamer says of one of my firearms “Oh, yeah! I use that all the time in CoD!”. I can only imagine what y’all go through.
Killing a member of your own species is not the most intimate thing a human can do. I suppose it is if you are a social failure. Being with your loved one(s) is far more intimate and rewarding.
As far as childhoods dying… that’s just weakness. Nothing changes. The capability, imagination and desire to have fun on a very basic (childlike) level still exists unless you choose to feel sorry for yourself. Apparently Americans can not prepair themselves for combat prior to participating. Maybe its our inability to read war memoirs and non-fiction. People who have strong mental facilities are very capable of fighting well in a firefight and continuing to carry on with successful, emotinally stable and socially contributing lives. The weak ones fail to ever recover and dwell on it for the remainder of their lives. They would have trouble with the grim realities of life regardless. Its disheartening how emotionally weak our Nation’s Warfighters are. The youth have no coping skills. Mental weakness is everywhere. Get over it and live life to its fullest potential.
This is a very, very valid point. The United States does not have a warrior culture. Warriors understand that they are not defined by war. They are people who cherish love, passion, kindness, joy, peace, etc. It is because they cherish these things that they go to war. And when, or if, they return then they fully intend to go back to living a life full of those good things.They don’t fight to define themselves, but to provide an environment where peace can thrive–whether for themselves or for others–and they believe it in their hearts. They are passionate for peace and it is this passion that motivates them to enter the hellish nature of war and put down the wolves.
You misunderstand the author. Intimate is a word that has several meanings, one of which (according to Dictionary.com) is: “very personal or private.” There are few things more personal and private than killing another person through optics or up close.
[this comment was edited to reflect the collegiality its author surely intended]
Unfortunately civilians have been force fed a steady media diet of sanitized and hyper glorified violence for years.
So is it possible to reframe the conversation for all? For example, if vets recognize us civs are brainwashed about the realities of war then they can know that civilians ask these sorts of questions not out of rude disrespect but out of ignorance. Then the vet can take these idiotic questions as opportunities to explain how incredibly hard the real life job is and how complicated battle can be on multiple levels?
Maybe I’m being naive, but can we turn these uncomfortable conversations into real teachable moments?
That’s a very interesting article but what did you mean by the end? It seems like the whole point is that battle is not like call of duty and then the last line seems to say that it is. Are you saying, that before you pulled the trigger you mistakenly thought it was and now you think differently? Your service is appreciated.
So I’m not a soldier, and I probably will never find myself in a combat situation…but I’m pretty sure that when I play a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, my brain recognizes it for what it is, a game.Whereas, if tomorrow I were to find myself in the Army and get dumped in Afghanistan with an M4 Carbine, I’d recognize that I have a real weapon, shooting real bullets in a real war at real people who cannot “respawn” when killed.
Having said that though, I do think there’s one game out there that does disturb me, and that’s Battlefield 3. Maybe the graphical engine crossed some kind of threshold, but I feel like it looks TOO realistic in a way that other shooters don’t, and it’s to the point where it seems to make a mockery (intentional or not) of real life wars and the people who die in them. But that’s me…