World War Two Simulated

Curtis D. Carbonell

Description

This book examines how World War Two is simulated through serious computer games, such as first-person shooters, flight and tank simulators, and grand strategy games. It argues that a particular dynamic emerges in these ‘simgames’, especially when curious players begin to look beyond gameplay for how to understand the past. This points them toward a wide range of ‘simtexts’—anything from game manuals or online resources such as YouTube, to published material in the popular sphere or even monographs by professional historians. This is important because major events like World War Two continue to feature in a wide range of game genres, and this engagement demonstrates how we are learning about the past outside of traditional mechanisms such as classrooms, teachers or textbooks.

Utilizing interdisciplinary methods, this volume foregrounds the experience that simgames provide to players, especially in how they reconfigure and reimagine history. Despite its visceral power and instructive potential, the simulated digital experience created by simgames curates World War Two and other global events of similar magnitude within constrained frames that ignore much of what actually happened in the past. This suggests that as computer games continue to increase in power and fidelity—as seen with the expanding scope of virtual reality—then the range of what can be simulated will grow too. This will raise concerns about what is morally acceptable to be simulated, and what should remain unplayable.

Sujets

• 1939-1945
• Computer Simulation
• Programming
• Computers
• HISTORY
• Informatique
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• General officer
• World War II
• Games
• Computer programming
• General
• Game
• Simulation
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781804130612
• Langue: English

Extrait

World War Two Simulated
WORLD WAR TWO SIMULATED
Digital Games and Reconfigurations of the Past
Curtis D. Carbonell
First published in 2023 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR, UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
Copyright © 2023 Curtis D. Carbonell
The right of Curtis D. Carbonell to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, nowknown or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.
https://doi.org/10.47788/DRBM3952
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-80413-060-5 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-80413-061-2 ePub
ISBN 978-1-80413-062-9 PDF
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the material included in this book. Please get in touch with any enquiries or information relating to the rights holder.
Cover image: istockphoto/breakermaximus
Contents
Introduction
1 Theorizing Simulation
2 Simtexts: Reimagining the Past
3 Simgames: Shooters
4 Simgames: Simulators
5 Simgames: Strategies
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Introduction
This book argues that in today s technological societies, computer-game simulations do more than entertain; they allow players to reimagine the past, encouraging an involuntary form of learning through a dynamic that blends gameplay and the interpretations of a variety of historical and gaming texts. It takes World War Two (WWII) as a case study, focusing on core aspects of how this complex event is simulated within challenging computer games.
With a focus on flight and tank simulators, as well as first-person shooters (FPSs) and grand strategy games (GSGs), it covers a wide range of player experiences from the subjective personal frame of sitting in a cockpit or crouching in a foxhole to the broadest, such as managing national economies, armies, and policies. This book proposes the simgame-simtext dynamic ( simgame meaning a computer simulation game and simtext a digital or analog text) as a core part of the process whereby players often begin with simgames, such as a flight simulator, but then turn to simtexts as they investigate how to play a historical game. The more demanding the simgames, the more prevalent the dynamic.
Even if success in the game is the goal, an awareness of the past gradually emerges, one that often leads to traditional forms of study. When players search through these simtexts, hoping for a better understanding of how to play a simgame and maybe posing an intriguing what if scenario, they confront the complexities of a past that, while distant enough that many people view it without trauma, is still close enough to directly affect lives today. This book is being finalized as the conflict in Ukraine refracts Russian memory politics of its May 9, 1945 victory over Nazi Germany as a spurious justification for its current invasion, a clear sign that the memory politics of WWII can still have a devastating effect. In this context, remembrance is being used to further political and even military action, another clear sign that the symbols within computer games do more than entertain-they reflect real-world political action.
This project is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach to interpretation that primarily engages historical game studies. It crosses into literary and film studies, media studies and (digital) game studies, as well as digital humanities and theories on how to manage large archives of texts. It works beyond but acknowledges the well-trodden fields within military history, with its focus on strategic theory and its application of real-world policy, especially sidestepping how simulated computer games can be used for training scenarios. The project also recognizes its marked differences from important work in the history of war-gaming and its intersections with military history.
Exploring war-gaming as a broad genre in military history and gaming reveals how WWII-based simgames differ from other categories. Historians of war-gaming have noted that by the time of Georg von Reisswitz (1794-1827), who created Kriegspiel (1824), war-gaming as we now consider it was emerging as a codified structure with sophisticated rules and charts that represented the movement and activity of recognizable units, using dice to add degrees of randomness, together with time-limited turns, a referee, and so on. It could be easily packed into a box and carried from one table to another. The referee adjudicated games that could be highly imbalanced to replicate specific scenarios. The history of kriegspiel as a genre of war-gaming is rooted in the Napoleonic Wars, with the education of the rising Prussian warrior class and an interest in simulating the battlefield. According to Martin van Creveld, war games as training, rather than mere playing, continued in the decades that followed, even in the years leading up to, and during, WWII, with the Germans taking them most seriously (2013: 162).
Such war games as those staged by the Germans during WWII itself, according to van Creveld, work in a more expansive category that is not limited to playing with figurines on a table for entertainment. He sees them as just one of the various instances that have emerged in different cultures and even in other species in which war is mimicked. Following the culture-defining approach of Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) to games and play ( Huizinga, 1949 ), van Creveld situates play as integral both to human culture and to other species, finding the roots of war games in our evolutionary past. For him and other scholars, human culture has always presented play in the form of sophisticated games, such as the Olympics or even deadly gladiatorial fights. Combat, tactics, and strategy emerged on a larger scale, according to van Creveld, in a number of different forms such as medieval tournaments, eventually evolving into broad-scale mock battles (for his full argument, see van Creveld, 2013 ).
I find this comprehensive approach helpful in explaining how we arrived at a place where boardgames as simple as Risk (1957) and computer games such as Civilization (1991) that simulate contests between civilizations continue to be developed alongside a newer, digitally based approach, with serious simgames that provide an experience of the past as simulated historical configurations. This compelling gameplay is similar to other modes of representation that are considered to be part of a fantastical impulse within the broad tapestry of human creative history, which Kathryn Hume argues has challenged a dominant mimetic impulse (for how these two impulses define representation in Western literature, see Hume, 1985 ). This touch of the imaginative (what we might consider to be part of Hume s pervasive fantastical impulse) constructs the past as reimagined configurations, blending the what-has-never-been within a historical context of what-was.
My study focuses on the mimetic much more than the overtly fantastic, even though WWII games cross genre boundaries in any number of ways, such as often having a zombie mode in FPSs in which a player can gun down undead waves of enemies. A direct crossover into the highly fantastic in historical computer games can also be seen as early as the initial entry into the Castle Wolfenstein series (1981), and can thus be situated within Hume s mimetic-fantastic frame. In such a way, history and fantasy are entwined for entertainment, rather than to provide a serious approach to the past. This fantastic-history genre retreats from serious simgames that attempt to simulate aspects of WWII into other forms of entertainment; I find it interesting but less compelling when explaining the simgame-simtext dynamic that can be seen in serious simgames. If anything, adding zombies or occult forces to a WWII game might point players to other fantasy works, rather than historical ones.
However, for the case studies in this book, I argue that mimetic and fantastic digital simulations should be considered unique in that they offer unparalleled historical agency to players beyond their analog counterparts. If we focus on digital (war) simgames, rather than on analog, we can see that computing systems are flexible beyond their initial abilities to perform calculations far faster than human cognition, to store information, to facilitate communication between systems, to provide artificial intelligence (AI) opponents in the form of bots, and so on. The visual and aural fidelity that has increased dramatically since the arrival of the first personal computers in the early 1980s means that simgames are increasingly able to capture specific aspects of the past, especially simulators and shooters within close-subjective frames.
This is not to denigrate the importance of analog war-gaming, and Philip Sabin offers an exemplary and scholarly approach that shows how analog war-gaming theory can help us understand history ( Sabin, 2012 ). This indicates, however, how my thinking pivots in a different direction, even though a point of similarity exists when he moves from the common notion among military theorists that simulation is armed forces engaging in mock conflict, based on prescribed scenarios, to the concept of simulation as an actual war game within functioning militaries. He recognizes that the traditional way of thinking about such war games has been challenged in popular culture, at least, by a less well-known form of modern war-gaming ( Sabin, 2012 : xvii)-that is, commercial tabletop war-gaming. Sabin spends considerable time examining the relationship between these two, eve