A Very British Adventure.
By Koworld

Playtime plastic-soldiery is big business. Indeed it is now possible to make a better living as a virtual soldier than as a real one – twenty times the pay with exactly none of the danger. And perhaps virtual soldiery is actually less futile than the real thing – game wars aren’t about territory: they are about rankings and scores, every mission might reset to zero and all the flags go home but at least the gamer is left with an improved score and a higher position on the ladder rather than a shattered infrastructure and millions of ghosts.

Go get 'em soldier!

War is rules and games is rules and life is art and both will imitate. There is a scene towards the end of the war classic ‘The Big Red One’ that entirely proves this: Lee Marvin’s character, a scarred spring-steel sergeant, is unaware that the war has ended as he drives a blade into the stomach of a surrendering German soldier. He cradles the corpse and is found by his squad who then tell him the war has been over for four hours. The sergeant is a play-by-the-rules soldier and is shot into deep agony and guilt that he has murdered rather than killed. And he finds a pulse, faint, but there – and the credits roll as the squad pour medicine and bleed heart into the near-dead German soldier: now a brother human-being not an enemy. The clocks have been reset and the counters rolled back to zero. This is war and it comes in a box with a manual.

As the Rodent team sat and pondered our War issue we naturally came around to considering the games themselves and this thing about reality and play really did sit very heavily on some of our shoulders: how can we enjoy this stuff given that so much of it is a damn-near historical record of real people’s fighting lives. And that got us to the idea of sketching out our own first person shooter based on a life of war, as opposed to the relatively narrow battle scenarios we’ve been fed so far. This is what we came up with: our starting point is ‘your’ birth in 1893. That date enabled us to set the game right inside one of the world’s most turbulent modern fighting periods: 1893 to 1943. War a-plenty!

As you are born a voice-over explains that the American Civil War is as recent and significant in your parents’ memory at that moment as Star Wars is in yours today. An intro movie then plays through the Boer War and on towards the first rising of the Dervishes and the Mad Mullah in Somalia, Queen Victoria dies and shortly after that you arrive at 1911, your 18th birthday, and find yourself at the door of a recruiting office. And pretty much from that point on, you fight and you fight and you fight: you fight in the second rising of the Mad Mullah, you ruck with the Ottoman Empire, take to the field at the Somme, fly against the Red Baron, drop down to East North Africa and fight alongside Lawrence, you act under the British Mandate in Iraq, fly an Army Engineers string-and-canvas airplane over the Nazcar lines in Peru, then it’s into Rhodesia and finally back home to Blighty for tea until 1939 and it all kicks off again – although by now you’re in your late 40s and the game drops the pace a bit and puts you into logistical puzzle-solving mood before leaving you to retirement in 1943 as WWII continues to rage (we liked the idea of a bit of futile irony).

But most of all you kill. Die during the game however and that’s it – no auto-saves, no restarts and no refund. It’s kill or be killed: so you choose to shoot other human beings; to direct mortar teams to kill human beings in trenches; you hang a number of human beings by their necks; and at one point after a devastating set-piece desert aircraft crash, your broken skull is fixed and you are nursed back to health by, of all people, the enemy. You drop grenades from Sopwith Camels; you go over the top; raid desert forts and you stick a bayonet into the belly of a realistically-rendered person.

And you do all this, in the defence of, or for advancement of: your country – Great Britain. You both cheat and bring death and you do so in desert levels, trench levels, Arabian levels, European levels, jungle levels, aircraft levels, vehicle levels and even onto puzzle levels.

Except, and here’s where game war reality and real war reality switch back like, well, like a bullet through the brain: this isn’t really a war game we’ve plotted out safe here in Rodent Towers. This is the real life of my Grandfather: a real person who shares my DNA and who made baby-noises at me when I was new. All the blood, death, toil, adventure, fun and visceral entertainment: its reality and it’s sad.

Where our game or any other war-game, doesn’t take you is to your life post-military career: alcoholic, enraged, devoured by guilt, haunted by nightmares and hard-wired into loss. And it doesn’t take you onward through your inability to relate to your family until it was almost too late and then to dying in a 1970s Plymouth hospital.

October 2005

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