Computer Games and Western Civilisation.

Computer game. Video game.

Those words are not the most respectable in Western Civilisation. Not by a long shot.

 For a long time, the average “gamer” was seen as an adolescent- or a physically mature manchild– in his parents’ cellar, shooting up exquisitely rendered simulacrums of downtown Los Angeles, or perhaps bashing orcs over the head with sub-Tolkien spells. Computer games have been made in such a broad range of genres, from chess-like strategy to the “first person shooter”, that it is inevitable that the media might seize on the less worthy examples of the medium. For some time there was much debate over whether computer games could qualify as -badly made- art. Most famously, Roger Ebert came to the initial conclusion that they were not. Due to the ability to manipulate a game and play different ways within a framework of rules, they were a sport, nothing more.

As a generation of gamers have aged and acquired family responsibilities, a market for shorter, easier games has developed. Browse the pages and forums of the game website Rock Paper Shotgun, and you will find many a thirty-something juggling their job, kids, and a little time on the X-Box. Short and comparatively simple games such as Into the Breach or Reigns have captured the attention of these increasingly responsible adults. The great time sinks such as Civilisation or Call of Duty are increasingly relegated to the fringes of their attention.

That isn’t to say that they aren’t completely absent… and they are still enjoyed by mature audiences and players across the world. There’s a reason for that.

We live in an age when literary fiction is decried as lost in woke-ness, films are increasingly mindless spectacle, and modern paintings possess the aesthetic subtleties of lego blocks. Where do you go for a modern art medium that educates its consumers in classical Western Civilisation, demands sustained attention and patience, and which provides serious philosophical and scientific depth?

As it so happens, the previous three decades have seen a plethora of computer games that aspire to some measure of respectability.

1. The Past. Armies, aristocrats and the Aegean.

Perhaps you might care to try Total War: Troy? An upcoming strategy game, you will be presented with the opportunity to replay the Trojan Wars, commanding armies from across the Aegean. Reflecting both the secularization of modern society and the willingness of modern historians to take apart Greek myths to understand their origins, the developers have made clear their intention to show a naturalistic view of the period, with the Minotore portrayed as an especially large soldier with a horned helmet, and the Trojan horse represented by earthquakes. This may not be precisely in line with academic theories on the nature of such phenomena, but it is still gratifying to see a games designer engaging in mature speculation on such matters.

The strategy genre has presented an exceptionally large cornucopia of historical games aimed at educating their audience. While it is perfectly possible to play through them without absorbing the intricate details of their simulated worlds, any inquisitive individual might find themselves browsing through the extensive literature found in such games as Age of Empires 2, Europa Universalis, or Rome: Total War. The latter game was instrumental in providing me with information for a Latin Project during GCSE, and portrayed a simulation of the pre-Marian Roman army to a reasonable degree.

Paradox Studios, they of Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, and Victoria, have been especially careful to create a respectful depiction of medieval, early modern and Victorian society. Starting with Crusader Kings, they tasked the player with leading a dynasty rather than a nation state- the family’s land holdings being a backdrop to the businesses of marrying into the right society and raising young sons fit to rule. The player has to balance the demands of their character’s chosen religion, with obligations set by rival factions, and the desires of the nobility under their control. The diversity of their world, from many types of pagan religions, through to the various character traits a dynasty can acquire, interweave with an extremely well-researched depiction of the medieval world.

Chronologically later games- Europa Universalis and Victoria– are constructed to show societal developments in world history. Rather than control a single dynasty you deal with the more abstract developments of the rule of law and industrialization, symbolizing the subsumation of individual rulers to the nation state.

Such games serve as sandboxes-dealing with the setting and general society of a historical period rather than a rigid chronology of events. If you are more interested in the latter, then Age of Empire II provides a series of campaigns and stories narrating the rise and fall of important characters- from Joan of Arc, to individuals less known to Western audiences, such as Khan Tokhtamysh of the Blue Horde.

City building games have also offered much. One company in the early 2000s, Sierra, offered a series of games based around building a Roman, ancient Egyptian, and Chinese city- Caesar (I, II, and III), Pharaoh, and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. All three encouraged players to develop a knowledge of aqueducts, pottery production supply chains, and early Egyptian monuments like mastabas. Their manuals were akin to miniature monographs, containing detailed histories of those civilisations. Currently a modern sequel is in development focusing around the city of Babylon.

2. The Present. The playground of the enlightenment.

Perhaps you might like something of a scientific nature? Well, try out Kerbal Space Program and compete to send small muppet-like creatures into space, according to simple yet accurate Newtonian physics. This game has been created to provide an intuitive understanding of the movements of the planets and the equipment required to put space vehicles into orbit. Authentic astrodynamics play a key part in the game. Players can make use of authentic oberth manouvres and retrograde orbits. Would-be engineers can also install orion nuclear pulse units and heat radiators on their spacecraft, and colonise the solar system with space stations. What could have been a dry piece of work is instead an informal seminar on the multi-disciplinary nature of space travel. Even children can get to grips with it, as seen here.

If you wanted a truly rigorous examination of space travel and how to manouvre spacecraft, Orbiter is a more specialized game that examines the precise and complex manouvres required to travel between planets in the solar system.

Closer to earth, there are the great Microsoft simulators and the tycoon series of games.  With Transport Tycoon, you can create a transport network in the modern day or 19^th century. On the other hand you could fly aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator, utilizing procedures so accurate that my local cadet unit utilized it for tuition purposes. My personal memoires of such games involve Railroad Tycoon II. I spent many hours familiarizing myself with the workings of the stock market to float a company and raise funds to plant track and purchase stock. No sex, violence or swearing, just a light lesson on 1920s railway infrastructure (plus the vicious thrill of forcing my economic rivals into liquidation. Mwa ha ha!).

3. The Future and elsewhere.

Let us move on from machines and kings. What of ethics and philosophy? Are there games that question how we would react in any given situation, games that force us to examine or even judge ourselves?

How would you react under extreme pressure surrounded by others with murderous intent? How much value do civilian lives possess in a warzone? At what point should we sacrifice them to defend ourselves against a hostile force?

Spec Ops: The Line is ostensibly about fighting off raiders in a destroyed Middle Eastern city. All the usual tropes of a first person shooters are there. You gun down different types of enemies, fulfil missions set by allies, and participate in “set –piece” battles cooked up by games designers to impress and thrill.

One of those set-pieces is a phosphorous mortar strike to clear out a nest of enemies…. Only you find the charred corpses of civilians twisted among the ruins. Congratulations- you are now responsible for a war-crime.

Of course, that isn’t your fault as the player. It’s only a game, the white phosphorous sequence was mandatory, you had no choice if you wanted to proceed through the rest of the game….right?

In an interview touching on problems raised by the mortar strike sequence, the game developers made clear that if you were horrified enough, you could simply stop playing. Of course, it’s only a game, and none of this was real. How did you feel about this?

There was one more sequence of significance towards the game’s end. A crowd of refugees pushing, jostling and becoming violent. How do you get rid of them? At this point, the main character has executed prisoners, killed civilians en-masse, and even doomed the remaining survivors to die of thirst to hide his war crimes (if you chose to destroy some water-trucks). After all your misdeeds, how might you react to this last moral test? Would you fire into the crowd, or over their heads? How do you think they would react? How would you handle the consequences of your actions?

Woven in with these moral tests are comments regarding the common “lone wolf” hero game stereotype that saves the day against orders. Here it gets people killed- orders exist for a reason. What is the right way to intervene when a foreign nation faces a natural disaster? When is the right time to go in alone and save the day?

Spec Ops: The Line has rightfully been seen as one of the most intelligently made games of the 2010s. In poking holes in the patriotic shooters of the 2000s, it has shown that an intelligent critique of the supposedly “mindless” shooter genre is possible. The player should be made to think about the ethics of their killing sprees.

A more large scale philosophical game going by the name of Alpha Centauri examines the moral consequences of scientific progress and the price of taking the hard choices necessary for human civilization to survive. Starting with a small colony on an alien planet, you are required to expand and exploit your environment to improve your chances of survival. Along the way you ally with various faction leaders- an industrialist, a sociopathic communist, a Christian fundamentalist, environmentalist, and so on. Such people represent a philosophical movement at its most extreme- unfettered capitalism, environmentalism, collectivism, and so on.

However, what could have started out as a nihilistic screed against all philosophies (or worse, a biased slant against one side) turned out as a balanced exploration of the ethics of state building. Technology might be the salvation of humankind, but it came with a price. An early structure that could be researched by players was called a “recycling tank”. A harmless enough name, but having researched (and probably installed) some, you would learn that these tanks recycled everything…. including human bodies. Whether this involved live humans is never stated.

Over time, you could make more and more efficient and powerful technologies to control and improve your burgeoning colony. Research labs, artificial intelligence, and weapons galore. The money stacks up, your population increases, and your ability to control the planet’s weather and environment only increases in sophistication.

Your citizens aren’t happy though.

Have you used crowd control measures to keep them in line? Has your economic policy created a monopoly that crushes the competition and enslaves your citizenry to a single highly-priced product?

Have you tried nerve-stapling?

With such a technique, you can easily keep the citizens in line, and make the population as productive as you desire. Sure, your allies might declare war on you for such a despicable practice, but you’ll easily outpace them with the rewards of a compliant populace. What’s there to worry about?

The game can come across as surprisingly traditionalist in its attempt to examine the role scientific progress plays in corrupting us.  Out of all the democrats, industrialists, and utopianists vying for power, it is the Christian fundamentalist who makes the most poignant observations of using science without a moral framework. After building an Orwellian “self-aware colony” with ubiquitous surveillance capabilities, you are treated to a video of protestors taking up her call to arms against such dystopian methods (and getting vaporized for their troubles). Taking her faith into account, it appears that the game developers wanted to make clear that a Judeo-Christian moral framework could be of use in taming unchecked scientific advancement.

It is not possible to sum up every game’s philosophical position, but we may briefly note a few more especially good examples, should you wish to pursue them. There are many articles online that examine the politics and philosophy of a particular game in detail, and these games have been featured often.

Star Wars: Tie Fighter: As would be expected for a game with “Star Wars” in the title, this game plays out as a pulpy space opera. However, one mission sequence contains a subtle examination of the morally grey areas of imperialism and liberal intervention. Flying a TIE fighter for the Galactic Empire, you intervene in a civil war to prevent two sides from massacring each other, only to find your actions uniting them against you. Subsequently, you are forced to conquer them to uphold the empire’s reputation as an invincible military power. A good representation of the perils and benefits of being a superpower.

Papers Please: You work at immigration control in a dystopian Eastern European state. You have a family to feed, but you can only be paid by passing incoming travelers through immigration control. Some travelers are ordinary people, yet they are nonetheless banned from entering. Others are genuinely vial individuals that shouldn’t be let in, like a sex trafficker, but their paperwork is all in order. Thing is, your family isn’t going away, and they’re hungry. Do you risk letting in the ethical individuals through subversive means? Do you defer to the law and throw away your ethics for a few loaves of bread? Who’re you going to let in?

Despite being a very low budget game, Papers Please does a magnificent job of challenging your sense of ethics. It also somehow manages to make paperwork fun.

To be clear: these are all games. Your choices will have effects that are completely fictional. Then again, morally improving films and books are often fictional too. A Dickens novel or David Lean film would likely have as much basis in the truth as many of these games.

Thus, it should be clear that games possess an increasing degree of maturity and sophistication. One can only hope that over the next few decades, that maturity is sustained and improved by equally grown-up gamers and developers that appreciate the value of bringing a balanced viewpoint to any medium.

While other art forms are lost in abstractionism, ignorance, minimalism, and the appalling “woke” movement, games can continue to provide an interesting look into the better parts of the modern soul. It is high time they were recognized for their contribution to Western culture.