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by
Andrew Kurtz
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in other words, this is a version of modern warfare in which the United States never loses, that ignores the complexities of post-Soviet geopolitical relations, and which consequently becomes the expression of a seeming disdain for actual historical realities. |
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What I am about to embark on in the following is a meditation on the ways in which dominant media and government navigate the tension between chaos and order to create an acceptable version of modern warfare. By acceptable I mean warfare that successfully promotes an array of ideological values, from U.S. economic and military supremacy to the pivotal role played by the individual citizen in the support of U.S. foreign policy; in other words, this is a version of modern warfare in which the United States never loses, that ignores the complexities of post-Soviet geopolitical relations, and which consequently becomes the expression of a seeming disdain for actual historical realities. My point of reference for this analysis will be the events surrounding efforts by the United States and the United Nations to quell famine conditions in southern Somalia between 1991 and 1993. More specifically, I am concerned with the so-called "Battle of the Black Sea" of October 3, 1993, in which over 500 Somali citizens died during a bungled raid to extract operatives of clan-leader Mohamed Farrah Adid from a private residence in Mogadishu. I believe that the range of cultural texts that have been devoted to these events attest to hegemony's failure to incorporate Somalia into the ideological structures that form its understanding of warfare and political conflict. There are many possible reasons for this disconnect, not the least of which is a near total ignorance of Somali culture and the role of the clan in everyday life. Notwithstanding the importance of Somalia's cultural history in the critical analysis of texts such as Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down and Ridley Scott's film of the same name, my goal in this short piece is to show how Novalogic's first person shooter (FPS), called Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, demonstrates a contradiction between a nostalgia for a war on two fronts -- the good versus the bad, us versus them -- and a postcolonial context that is, in Samir Amin's words, "a sort of military framework to accompany the savage order of neoliberal capitalism." (120) Additionally, in reproducing a range of narratives that underlie and legitimize military aggression in the global south, the Novalogic game inhabits a representational space that articulates racist ideologies endemic to popular culture in the United States. |
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it would be a mistake to suggest that a game such as Medal of Honor is realistic in any conventional or theoretical sense of the term. In the historical FPS, realism is a mask, a series of costumes and set-pieces, arrayed to resemble not a documentary but rather something like a Hollywood film. |
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At the same time, it would be a mistake to suggest that a game such as Medal of Honor is realistic in any conventional or theoretical sense of the term. In the historical FPS, realism is a mask, a series of costumes and set-pieces, arrayed to resemble not a documentary but rather something like a Hollywood film. In this sense, it is even further removed from reality than its Hollywood cousin -- it is a representation of a representation, and as such, its ideologies are shrill and unambiguous. For example, Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks collaborate to seduce the viewer into thinking a character's heroism is all the more real because it is suffused with ambivalence. When Private Ryan witnesses the death of Captain Miller, the viewer understands the 'true' meaning of heroism. While far from a subtle message, even this cannot be conveyed in the first person shooter, precisely (and maybe ironically) because its limiting factor is interactivity, which is structured around an inherently Machiavellian dynamic. When Lieutenant Powell is sent off to rescue a bazooka team behind enemy lines, he does not question his orders; he cannot swerve from the correct path; he cannot lay down his two pistols, sniper rifle, Thompson submachine gun, 5 grenades or 1200 rounds of ammunition. He must only complete the mission or die in the process -- left-click to begin again. |
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Just as it would be a mistake to affix
the label of realism to the historical
first person shooter, it would also be
wrong not to acknowledge that such
a critique utterly ignores the cultural
milieu within which such representations
are produced and consumed.
Of this milieu, Baudrillard writes,
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In spite of the fact that the mission to Somalia occurred under the auspices of the United Nations and was framed within the discourse of "peacekeeping," landscape and language in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down provide an overall context that situates game play within a straightforward ideological dynamic that we may very simply call "us versus them." The representation of people in the game works to intensify this impulse. Two distinct groups populate Mogadishu, U.S. Special Forces and the anonymous "black sea," most of whom carry one of several types of weaponry, including the infamous rocket propelled grenades -- in-game called "RPGs" -- that fell 2 Black Hawk helicopters. Whereas it can be argued that the landscape gives itself as the imaginary third-world environment appropriately cast as a kind of hidden, yet all-encompassing enemy, a more complex identification occurs in the representation of people. Because the first-person shooter assumes the presence of a central point of identification and a series of violent encounters under the guise of that character, it is reasonable to conclude that the choices made by game designers become limiting factors and can only ever present a myopic version of the historical narrative. People are facts of history as presented by the game to the player, as are the landscape and the language. All of these foreground "the other" as that which must be contained and eliminated. But because the weight of representation falls to the first person interface, representations of people become far more important to the ideological dynamic of the game. Told from the perspective of a Delta Force commando, otherness is represented as a homogenous mass of skinny, gun-toting, dark-skinned, goateed Africans, historically differentiated from each other only on the basis of Novalogic's promotional claim that some of them run with "oppressive Somali warlords." As is the case in virtually all first person shooters, the fact of otherness comes with the assumption that the other is an enemy who will die. And thus, facts of people, facts of otherness, are also facts of agency and awareness, coded into the game by its designers. |
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Told from the perspective of a Delta Force commando, otherness is represented as a homogenous mass of skinny, gun-toting, dark-skinned, goateed Africans, historically differentiated from each other only on the basis of Novalogic's promotional claim that some of them run with "oppressive Somali warlords." |
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In Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, landscape, language, and people are designed to create a set of binary elements (here / there; us / them; self / other) that are as much a function of the technology making the representation possible as they are elements of hegemonic discourse. Indeed, one should not separate the two. For both the code and the historical representations made possible by the code are symptomatic of hegemonic discourse. Acknowledging this fact allows us to understand this particular game as a special iteration of the FPS, produced, distributed, and consumed in a historical moment overdetermined by racism and the economic inequities created by globalization. |
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Novalogic's own awareness of what it would undoubtedly label a misinterpretation of the game's intention is symptomatic of a historical disconnect. While the game is attempting an accurate representation of a historical event, it is conceived, produced and consumed on another historical terrain altogether, one that is characterized by bell hooks as "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." Such a constellation of oppression suggests the cynicism of Novalogic's promotion of the game, a strategy that can be described as follows: make the people of color disappear from its commercials, magazine articles, and web site, and the problem will go away. Hide behind a cloak of patriotism and historical accuracy by inviting Rangers from the battle itself to act as consultants for the development team, and donate a portion of the proceeds to veterans groups. Wait until the outbreak of another war, one heavily promoted by media and government, to emphasize ideologies of patriotism, national security, and democracy, to release your game. Then dump it in the laps of white male middle-class young adults. Unaware of the game's racist logic, it simply becomes woven into the fabric of their political unconscious. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down certainly is not the only computer game to find a connection to racist ideology. Games such as Grand Theft Auto, Gang Wars, not to mention Resistance Records' own Ethnic Cleansing, all partake of and reproduce the racist discourse subtending much of everyday life in the United States. What makes Black Hawk Down different, though, is its relationship to history. Felix Guatarri writes that, "There are periods when everything seems to hang in the balance: the signifying chains of structure lose control, events are written into 'reality itself' according to a short-term, inconsistent, absurd semiotic, until a new plane of reference 'structured like a language' can be established." (180) It may be that Black Hawk Down is a single, relatively minor iteration in such a restructuring. As the South is made to deal with economic and cultural exploitation from the North, the chaos that erupts from such incursions threatens capitalism's spread to these regions, and must be countered both militarily and ideologically. Somalia and Iraq twice over are clearly examples of how, at least in the short term, military aggression becomes a single powerful option for the institutions of capitalism. But as Guattari suggests, such conflicts are also conflicts over representation that must find ideological purchase in the minds of people "back home," as it were. Black Hawk Down is an aspect of this reportage, establishing an absurd semiotic; absurd because the facts it posits are at once meaningless and transparent; yet they also clearly resonate with dominant ideological structures. Novalogic's PR man articulates the logic of this absurdity, saying, "We're committed to getting this as right and fair as possible, and setting the record straight." (Mayer 55) If anyone is able to set the record straight, to iron out contradiction, and obscure the political stakes of racism and globalization, it's the codemasters at Novalogic.
Works Cited: |
In War and Cinema, Paul Virilio maintains that
communication technologies have had an undeniable
impact on the ideological precepts subtending
the manufacture of war in the popular imagination.
In language that immediately brings to
mind the events of September 11, Virilio writes,
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is
part of a relatively new trend in game
development that began around 1999
with the release of Counter-Strike, a
fan-created modification of the popular
FPS Half Life. Throughout the
'90s, the vast majority of FPS titles
employed the generic conventions of
horror, science fiction, and espionage
thrillers to create the semblance of a
narrative. However hackneyed, the
narrative of a game such as Unreal
or Half Life performed the critical
function of lending some interest to
gameplay that would otherwise be
simply the same violent scenario
repeated ad infinitum, much as in a
pornographic film. In almost all of its
aspects, from the narrative and setting
to smaller details such as
weapons, clothing, even interface
design, the FPS had only a very limited
connection to plausibility, much
less historical accuracy. Counter-
Strike is notable, therefore, because
of its contemporary setting and
weapons modeled after actual product,
like the AK-47 and Glock 18C. In
themselves, these minor aspects of
the game do little to make Counter-
Strike less fantastic than its predecessors.
Nevertheless, the game
seemed to have opened the door for
more sophisticated elements of realism
to be injected into the genre.
Subsequent games such as
Operation Flashpoint,Delta Force,
and Global Operations shifted the
thematic emphasis away from horror
and science-fiction to engage traditional
military themes, the mainstay
of turn-based war games. EA Games'
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2001)
became the first FPS to simulate a
real historical event. Set during the
Normandy invasion, the game is
played from the perspective of
Lieutenant Powell who is given a
series of increasingly difficult missions
to complete in the French countryside.
Place names, uniforms,
weaponry, even the French and
German spoken by non-player characters
point to an effort by game
developers to create a heightened
verisimilitude approaching something
like historical accuracy.
What, then, are the facts of October
3, 1993, as presented by the game
developers at Novalogic? Although it
would be possible to delve into the
games' representational minutia, I
rather think that larger swathes of
description will better convey the ideological
elements of the game. First,
there is the landscape. Mogadishu is
represented to the player through a
series of establishing shots, to borrow
cinema terminology. These
establishing shots are literally birdseye,
POV -- from the perspective of
the player. What stands out in the artwork
is that nothing really stands out.
Once again, borrowing from film,
there is no dominant contrast to the
frame, nothing that gives indication
that any place is more important to
the plot or gameplay than any other.
The landscape is a bleak mixture of
dusty browns and tans; the square,
flat-roofed buildings can be distinguished
only by their relative size.
The occasional palm tree -- green in a
sea of tan -- merely serves to punctuate
the barren monotony of the
cityscape. The lack of contrast and
variety to the color scheme is heightened
even more by the technology
used to create the scenes. Far from
being photorealistic, the models
seem more real than real -- the desert
tan is a color that exists only in one's
imaginary of the third-world landscape.
It is a color that does not contradict
-- it is perfect. Similarly, spoken
language functions to articulate with
the individual player's limited historical
understanding of military jargon,
and like the landscape, is indebted to
cinema. There is what we might call
"mission-specific language." These
are details of the current operation
being undertaken by the game character.
Written in a kind of 5th grade
military speak sprinkled with enigmatic
acronyms and bereft of articles, the
mission briefings are interesting
because of their ambivalence toward
historical specificity. For the missions
themselves are not, strictly speaking,
simulations or enactments of real historical
events, as might be the case
in a squad-level wargame. Rather,
the missions are more or less historical
probabilities -- they might not have
happened, but they surely could
have. In this context, facts display
their facticity but are cloaked by the
use of proper names, such as Habr
Gadir and other clan names,
arguably deployed for verisimilitude.
More interesting are the in-game
remarks of non-player characters.
Rendered in a stereotypical military
drawl, these are generally comments
upon the situation that, like the birdseye
shots of the landscape, establish
a context for the gameplay. In many
instances, non-player remarks relay
the theme of chaos. For example,
while flying into a U.N. compound to
extract hostage U.N. workers, one
character remarks "It looks like a riot
down there." The obvious implication,
the fact carried in this remark, is that
the player will create order out of
chaos by simply eliminating chaotic
elements.
I would like to expand on this point by
amplifying a fairly obvious aspect of
the representational scheme
described above. In Novalogic's
game, facts of otherness -- represented
mainly by the character models --
are also more accurately facts of
race. In the history of computer gaming,
this has never been more the
case. While the game developers
could easily ascribe this to historical
accuracy (it is another fact, after all),
Novalogic nevertheless is aware that
these representations contain the
seeds of a potentially market-busting
controversy. In September 2002,
Computer Games magazine ran a
cover story on Delta Force: Black
Hawk Down, which, through an interview
with Novalogic representative
Wes Eckhart, called attention to precisely
the problem of the representation
of race in the game: "Eckhart is
conscious of the sensitivity of this
issue. 'It's the nature of where you
are,' he says, admitting he's a bit worried
about how people will react to a
game where everyone you shoot is
dark-skinned." (Mayer 53) Novalogic
confronts this problem by incorporating
it into the game play itself.
Missions taking place in public areas
cannot be won if non-combatant
casualties are "excessive." This, says
Eckhart, because "we do [sic.] want
to communicate to the player that not
everybody in Somalia is a bad guy."
(Mayer 53) Eckhart's charming liberalism
is interesting because it
obscures the question of the game's
racism by shifting the issue to one of
national identity. Quite clearly,
though, the logic of his statement
resonates precisely at the level of
race -- invoking a syntax similar to
that of the racist who declares not
all blacks or not all Jews to be bad.
Novalogic's more overt promotion of
the game obscures the question of
race even further. Of the 50 official
screenshots of the game released
over the past 12 months, only one
contains a depiction of the enemy.
This is unusual, indeed unprecedented,
for a game in which the
main attraction, in fact its only
attraction, is the player's confrontation
with the enemy.