Anzio: Limits of Game Play

IN BORGES’ Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius the writer describes an imaginary world constructed by a secret team which gradually reveals it to a fascinated public. The parallel world offers all kinds of opportunities for participation and commentary that the real one does not and so gradually replaces it. Borges is not commenting about the transformational power of art or the emergence of the Web; he is talking about our perverse love of order— even Nazism and anti-Semitism — and mediocrity and low-grade amusement.

At the battle of Anzio, Italy, fought from January to May, 1944, casualties were very high and US commanders’ decisions remain controversial to this day.

This booklet records the names of the nine survivors of a 36-man heavy machine gun platoon that fought at Anzio.

Here are some ways Anzio is depicted in the game world...

In this version, the battle is represented as a board game, a highly theoretical exercise in military tactics. The red circle is the unit of men that included those who wrote their names in the booklet (above).
 

In this version, because the battle is defined by the game player’s individual vantage point (that is, “first-person shooter”), it makes a special kind of impression on his mind which takes on a unique feeling of personal ownership and  “authenticity”. Whatever happened in the historical past, this digital interaction now influences the player’s ideas about the actual battle and general ideas about conflict and violence.

Once that process is turned on, it’s a short step to simply give in to individualist flights of fancy and commercial exploitation. Mass culture and consumerism converge to support a culture that turns anything into entertainment. In this case, humor is a pretty thin veil for violence.

Low grade imagination and enthusiams aided by digital tools are so persuasive (“immersive”) that we have to pinch ourselves pretty hard to remind us there’s practically no correspondence between digital and real life, past or present. But even when we pinch ourselves, the hallucinations persist. Digital games have an astonishing power to impose narratives and ideas about reality and human behavior that are hard to shake.

Perhaps this reflects a general disappointment (“disenchantment’) with past and present life by people in society who are reduced to its lowest ranks — consumers.

The above photo was snapped about the time the writer, shown in the center holding a heavy machine gun, jotted his note in the booklet shown above. Notice how nothing in this photo remotely connects to digital games — which do not allow for exceptions, only patterns, generalizations, statistical calculations and feedback guided by commercial interests. Digital Anzio might depict an all white American army, but won’t reflect segregation laws that allowed Jews, Latinos, Native Americans and Chinese-Americans across the color line, but not blacks and Japanese Americans. In digital Anzio one will not find a Chinese-American sergeant in charge of white guys holding the line. But these are very difficult ideas to shake, even with a lot of pinching.

The booklet is from Company H, the heavy weapons company of the 2nd Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, owned by Second Lieutenant Albert Young (at the time of Anzio a sergeant), drafted from New York City’s Chinatown on his birthday to serve in the US armed forces during the Second World War.

Digital games of the Anzio and related sort are story types —stereotypes — perpetuated by authors with particular ideas about history and human behavior. Arguing about the technology and methods for implementing them misses the point. When Spike Lee criticized Saving Private Ryan for not depicting black soldiers, he was pointing out the monotony of the Hollywood feel-good story. Real life is rich and full of unique experiences that can both entertain and engage, but this requires real work, real creative sweat to transform them into art, to endow them with meaning.

Digital games, which some see as liberating, are constructed from the same clothe that straitjackets its users.
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Anzio: Another Approach

From http://www.gajominis.com/blog/blog%202011/blog2011no8.html

Here is a war-gamers’ Anzio created from miniatures and played out with elaborate rule sets. Are there difference between digital Anzio and war-gamers’ toy soldier Anzio?  For digital game players, play must come at once. Everything is geared towards immersing the player and immediately launching an interactive experience. The game requires that a player have no skills, no prior knowledge or life experiences that might relate to the game. The game experience is calculated to hold the player’s attention. Since much of real war consists of waiting, worry and boredom, these are eliminated.

The contrast with the miniaturists’ war game is stark. Toy-battles require a huge amount of upfront work by players, who buy or make the miniatures, paint them with accurate colors and details, and balance their forces to reflect historic organization tables and known conditions. Machines and human behavior must be translated into playable rules by players, which require research and trial and error experimentation. Toy soldier recreations are tremendous mental and imaginative investments in What if? — simulations within the control of their player-creators to change, fix or adjust, guided by historic events.