Her challenge, and yours, is not to escape but to endure.Īt a press conference in February, 1991, General Norman Schwarzkopf told the American people that war is “not a video game.” Nevertheless, as the University of Georgia professor Roger Stahl argues in his book “Militainment, Inc.,” games like Call of Duty are “increasingly both the medium and the metaphor by which we understand war.” Authenticity is central to the contemporary military-themed video game’s approach. Without wood, she cannot light her stove, either to cook the scraps of meat that she catches in traps or to heat the room. These are the essentials of survival in the besieged city. Even if Katia got her hands on a book, she might soon trade it to a haggard local for some fuelwood or bandages.
It establishes a regular rhythm of existence: nighttime is for roaming and scavenging, daytime for eating, sleeping, and bartering (all of it to keening electric-guitar accompaniment, as though the XX, or some equivalently mournful group of musicians, were holed up with you). “A good book could help us forget the horrors of war.” Those horrors are visible both outside the building, in the burning silhouette of a war-withered city-the game was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 1992 to 1996-and inside, where hunger, sickness, and boredom flourish.
“We miss books,” Katia, an ex-journalist, says, in the game’s opening scenes. Not that the surviving residents of the shell-pocked building in which much of the game takes place are likely to come by a whole lot of Hemingway.
The Polish-made video game This War of Mine, by contrast, begins with the same quotation every time, a paraphrasing of Hemingway at his most macabre: “In modern war you will die like a dog, for no good reason.” A few of these snippets of wisdom speak to war’s sorrowful costs, but most aim to inspire or ennoble.
In most iterations of the American-made series, which has generated more than ten billion dollars in sales since its début, in 2003, the screen consists of a still image and a quotation, usually of the martial variety-something attributed to Churchill or Stalin or Sun Tzu. Before a player of Call of Duty returns to the virtual front line after suffering a defeat, he must enter the purgatory of the game’s loading screen.
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