Why can't I play a good 4GW video game?

Since I've revealed my true nerdiness by analogizing the plight of our modern interconnected society to sci-fi, I might as well go full pocket protector with a question that's been rattling around my head. Namely, why can't I play a video game that accurately models the processes of the new generation of warfare?

This is more than an idle question, really. Video games have come a long way since I was a kid trying to get Mega Man out of the way of the evil robots with their spiky hats and lasers. More specifically, they've acquired what can only be described as narrative significance. Games in the world(s)-spanning genre, like Civilization or Spore, tell an open-ended story about the progress of history, technology and culture; games like Halo stick to a more limited and conventional narrative with heroes and villains. But they're stories, and as processor capacity and storage media grow, they will only get more ambitious and have more room for merit. They're also fundamentally different from other forms of media in that they're organically interactive - attempts to involve readers, viewers and listeners in their books, films and music are gimmicks at best. I'm not arguing that the kill-the-bad-guys storylines that predominate in video games have much merit, but there's room there for engaging stories with - gasp - something to teach us.

I'm more of a casual gamer than anything - the only game I've bought recently has been Spore, and the only video game system I own (a Wii) is gathering dust in my parents' basement in Maine, a victim of the difference between American and European video standards. But over the years I've logged a decent amount of time with what I think is a pretty representative sample of shooter and strategy games, from Halo and Ghost Recon to Starcraft and Command and Conquer. These fall into two broad categories: shooters and strategy games.

At first glimpse, the shooters seem like a more realistic bunch, particularly the "tactical shooter" variety, like Ghost Recon and Raven Shield, in which you command a squad of soldiers or counterterrorism operatives with relatively realistic weapons, equipment and abilities. But their scope is inherently limited: the realism is mostly in the weapons mechanics and tactics, without necessarily making any deep or durable point about war. Insofar as there's anything to learn from these games, it's that violence always works and generally speaking, the more the awesomer. But when it comes to real warfare, that's clearly a mistake.

One of the rules of counterinsurgency, for example, is "use the minimum force necessary," which would presumably disappoint the legions of BFG-toting, team-killing hormone zombies who make up a large part of the audience for shooting games. Given that we're talking about warfare, that by itself would probably doom the commercial prospects for a realistic insurgency simulation: although some games in the "stealth" genre, like the Metal Gear series and the Splinter Cell games, emphasize stealth and guile over brute force, the point always comes down to a goal achievable by killing a large number of bad guys, and the scenes where the player is encouraged to get their kill on are clearly doled out as rewards for all the sneaking and non-killing. Games in this genre tend to emphasize the visceral, which is unlikely to teach the player anything about the nature of war other than "it's exciting." (That part is probably true, but it's far from the whole truth.)

So we're more likely to be looking at something like a real-time strategy (RTS) game. Few of these make many concessions to realism - many of them are set in fantasy or science-fictional settings. They also tend to vastly oversimplify the economic and military tactics of war. The classics of the genre (Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires and Command and Conquer) all operate on more or less the same basic principle: you build a base, gather resources, build (ludicrously quickly) an army of increasingly powerful and large units, and then more or less throw it at the enemy. There's no logistics to speak of, as units are almost always self-supporting once they've been constructed, very little in the way of tactics and only the most basic attempts to balance the skills of one sort of unit against another - even in a good RTS like Command and Conquer III, you can generally win by building a huge army of one or two types of the largest units and simply rolling over all opposition - after all, there's no penalty for losing half your Mammoth tanks, and you can just build more if you need them. A few games that I've played have made more concessions to the realities of war - the old time classics Total Annihilation, which despite its science fictional setting balanced units much more effectively, and Myth, which did away with production altogether and forced you to accomplish missions with the troops you were given at the outset, using tactics, formations and terrain to your advantage. But neither of these had much to say about asymmetry, which is the defining characteristic of modern war.

The Command and Conquer series has made a few gestures in that direction of asymmetric warfare, with the evil Brotherhood of Nod representing a stateless, terroristic threat against the industrialized, hierarchical Global Defense Initiative (read: USA). But in terms of actual game mechanics there's not much difference: Nod has bombers and heavy armor and superweapons too, they just work slightly differently than GDI's. GDI suffers no penalty for losing hundreds of infantry or bombing civilian structures in the course of fighting Nod; nor does Nod suffer any penalty for using suicide bombers against GDI. I haven't played the modern-war-themed Command and Conquer: Generals, but from what I've read the mechanics are pretty similar: the terrorist faction has weaker units than the American or Chinese factions, but due to play balance issues they end up with units and abilities that no stateless actor would ever have in real life. The problem is partly that game designers haven't been particularly creative in how they balance factions. In all of these games, they simply give all the factions comparable categories of units with slightly different stats. In Command and Conquer III, for example, both GDI and Nod have medium tanks - GDI's is slower and more expensive but more heavily armed and armored. Never mind the fact that a real stateless actor wouldn't bother to waste time and resources building tanks that would almost certainly be obliterated by the overwhelmingly powerful air force of an industrialized foe, we'll just fix that by giving the terrorists planes too. So what's supposed to be a battle between industrialized/mechanized and distributed/stateless plays out like a less organized, smaller Battle of Kursk, with lasers. Fun, maybe, but in no way accurate. What I haven't seen any game do is accurately simulate how two completely different forces would actually fight each other.

I'd like to see a game that gives the industrialized force vastly more powerful units, but also huge restrictions to operate under - you can have heavy tanks and strategic bombers galore, but if you blow up that hospital you lose half your money and your opponents get a bonus. You'd also have to deal with logistics* issues: one of the biggest vulnerabilities of real industrialized armies is their constant and overwhelming need for more bullets, beans, bombs and (especially) gas, which is why we're in a pickle right now in Afghanistan with the closure of the Manas airbase. I'm probably in a very small minority of gamers who want their games to have more logistics rather than less, but honestly it bothers me when I can send an armored force halfway around the map behind enemy lines with no support and expect it to fight effectively and indefinitely. I'd like to see the effects of non-military forces on the battlefield: public opinion and media coverage, for example, which if properly managed could be a boost to your war effort or could seriously hinder it. I'd like to see organizational hierarchies represented in the simulation: a powerful military dependent on the survival of its leadership vs. a decentralized insurgency only defeatable through comprehensive methods, not simply destroying their headquarters building. And I'd like to see a game that offers some serious penalty for wanton killing of civilians, although most strategy games solve that conundrum by simply removing them from the equation, or rendering them bulletproof, which gives a spectacularly unrealistic view of the 21st century battlefield.

I realize that these suggestions don't necessarily automatically equate to fun. And I'm not arguing that smooth and intuitive gameplay should be sidelined by the need to endlessly direct supply trucks from Base A to Forward Outpost B, or by forcing the player to go into the Katie Couric Interview Simulator every ten minutes. But think about a game like Civilization, which managed to streamline the running of an entire civilization into an enjoyable, engaging and (dare I say it?) informative experience, all without washing out important details the way its spiritual successor Spore does. The video game audience is huge and increasingly composed of adults, and if you could work even a few details about the way modern wars are really fought, it might seep into the collective imagination. And from there, some more sense might even make it into our national conversations about war and peace.

A long shot, maybe. But the fact that video games are interactive positions them uniquely to speak directly to their audience, and deliver a message in a way that no book or film could.

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* The one series of games that I can think of that addressed these issues was the Civ series, which allowed you to choose a Democratic or Republic form of government which incurred substantial social bonuses but charged you and hurt your public opinion if you went to war or deployed military units outside their home cities. What I'm saying is that I'd like to see that implemented on a smaller scale game.

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You know, I write this whole post only to find out that I'm completely wrong. What could be more realistic than taking control of 50 Cent as he runs around the Middle East killing terrorists? That's fourth generation warfare right there. I stand corrected.