The computer game as fictional form

And yet there was something here that was as intriguing as it was disturbing. A game that was marketed through a rhetoric of authenticity', as ‘realistic' and a ‘simulation', had led to a substantially inauthentic deviation from its ostensible historical referent. In layman's terms, somewhere in the interaction between myself and the game a fictional version of a historical military campaign had been created. That I had largely been led by the nose through a series of extremely restricted episodes representing small-scale military conflicts in order to construct this narrative did not interest me so much as the process of construction itself. Perhaps there were the first signs here of a form of fiction that I had not been aware of before, the creation of a new type of ‘text’ that required critical reading in a way that differed from the critical reading of novels, films or television texts? As an increasingly popular form of fiction that made grand claims for authenticity and realism in its marketing, and presented a type of what I thought I recognised as storytelling outside language, the computer game certainly seemed to demand further consideration.

At the risk of indulging in the sort of pretentiousness that sees academics making an occasional unwelcome appearance in Private Eye magazine’s ‘Pseuds Corner’, it also seemed that I had encountered something that might have at least tenuous connections with what has come to be termed counterfactual’ history and has seen popular expression in novels such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1965) or, more recently, Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1993). I had, in my own limited and solitary way, been as much engaged in the exploration of the historical ‘what if?’ as any of the contributors to Niall Ferguson’s edited collection of essays, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1998). There was a tension inherent in this form of game between historical truth claim and fictional possibility. Its counterfactual potential might have been severely limited (the Allied defeat at 'the bridge too far’ at Arnhem is a historically verifiable event, as well as a successful film) but it was nevertheless present (the extent of that defeat was nothing like the game experience). The extent of the deviation from the report of historical event, apparently, had been my responsibility. Fiction and history appeared to be caught in a complex relationship that needed teasing out.

Computer wargames such as the Close Combat series display a near-obsession with questions of historical authenticity and realism. In terms of the details of weapons performance, unit deployment, and terrain modelled on period aerial reconnaissance photographs, Close Combat seeks to attain a level of detail that would satisfy the most retentive of military history’s trainspotters. In a phrase discussed further in Chapter 4, the manual for one game in the series declares that it ‘puts the emphasis on real* within the genre of‘real-time strategy’ games. Yet it was something that had emerged out of a lack of correspondence with real event that is inherent in this kind of game that had most disturbed me (the variant narrative that I had constructed, or at least been complicit in constructing), and notions of fiction-making that had most interested me.

The initial feelings of disquiet remained, however. The very abstraction of the games structure, and its status as (just a) game, provided a defence against some of the most obvious forms of criticism that such a fiction might encounter. This was the kind of‘clean’ representation of warfare of which Brussels and Washington can only dream. No Dutch citizens are caught in crossfire or risk reprisals - this German war-machine is the product of programming information and not of an economy dependent on slave labour. The politics of the story are just not an issue. The armchair general faced with a computer did not have to concern himself or herself with questions of right or wrong, or separate the good guys from the bad guys. It all depended, quite literally, on your ‘point of view’. In this text the human tragedy and drama of the Second World War, and even the human evil of Nazi militarism, had no relevance - all that was offered were a series of equations and apparent facts free from the implied moral judgements of storytelling as I moved the mouse and tapped the keyboard.

I was reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s famous and oft-quoted statement on the consequences of the experience of modern warfare in A Farewell to Arms (1929):

[there] were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.1

What Close Combat seemed to provide was a version of post-Hemingway recounting of war, albeit one with which even such a believer in the beneficial nature of sports and games with clearly defined rules might well have had little sympathy. Hemingway’s narrator is seeking escape from the betrayal of a particular kind of narrative, that of propaganda: the player of Close Combat was freed

has different demands, constraints and freedoms, as well as conventions of representation, than the telling of a story on the stage, or on film, or on television, so the telling of stories within computer games works with different conventions that are not solely located in its foundation on the basic binary operation of the computer's processor. The technology deployed in the service of the computer game is important, and requires due attention, but it is at least as important to pay close attention to the ways in which games designers and players have exploited the strengths and weaknesses of the modern computer as a vehicle for the delivery of fictional texts.

The computer game’s claims to authenticity and realism, whether in terms of historical simulation and the accuracy of its data arrays, the‘real physics engines’ of flight and road simulations, the advances in graphics that now see mirrored reflections off surface water and deep shadows cast by flickering light sources, or the complex algorithms that lie underneath the often jolly graphics of management games such as the Civilization or Sim City series, all seem to demand a particular kind of investigation. The fundamental differences between these various forms of computer game also need identification if we are to comprehend their varying intersections and engagements with the terms ‘realistic’ and ‘simulation’ that so often appear on their packaging.

The invitation to a particular individual and even unique form of‘reading that such games offer within a reader-text interaction that is qualitatively removed from that offered by other visual or written forms similarly requires examination. If we accept that we are confronted with a form of narrative storytelling where the production of story is the end result of play, as well as with a game where ‘winning’ is everything, then analysis of those storytelling processes becomes necessary. As a primarily literary critic, with some background in academic historiography (the study of how history is written), this new mode of computer-based storytelling seems to me to be both amenable to contemporary

literary-critical practice, and related practices deployed within cultural studies, and to demand a somewhat different critical approach. The formal characteristics of this as an independent form need examination if the computer game is to be treated with the seriousness, as a massively popular form of cultural expression, that it deserves. To simply condemn or ignore this developing form of fiction as ‘childish', rather than recognise its ‘immaturity', might well be a mistake. This study offers suggestions, through example, of a practice of reading computer games that in no way constitutes a rigid methodology, but might be among the first faltering steps towards such a critical undertaking. I make no apology for the concentration on questions of narrative practice that may appear to be fairly old news for those who are familiar with contemporary critical theory as it has been read in relation to literature and film. Such areas as I attempt to cover in detail, including narrative ‘point of view', the possibility of‘subversive readings',‘closure', the meaning of terms such as ‘realism', ‘counterfactual historiography' and the handling of time within narrative are in no way original to me -the originality of the intervention I intend to make is in my consideration of these terms and ideas when we look at specific works in detail, rather than fall into the trap of writing in vague and general terms about the computer game in the abstract.