Operation Flashpoint: Lessons Learned

I think that in an adequately sim-like FPS, it's reasonable to expect that a given soldier is not going to kill more than two or three enemies before he dies. Elite troops can inflict massive casualties in modern war, but then again, Poole mentions an Israeli commando team that landed on an infiltration mission in Lebanon, but was spotted by a random farmer paid to do sentry duty by Hezbollah; all six commandos were killed by a single claymore mine. Even elites can get unlucky. All told, a dynamic that we might recognize from the primary cultural conflict in the US -- the question of sexuality -- applies here. Most people who have sexual intercourse have children, and most people who fight in close combat die; the sooner you stop trying to cheat your way out of these facts with things like birth control and artillery barrages, the better things will go for you as a civilization.

Corrollary: any civilization that doesn't have a warrior religion, loosely defined as one in which dying in battle is one of the best things one can do with one's life (the Vikings, Muslims and Japanese come to mind here), is going to find long wars psychologically unsustainable; and even a civilization that does have a religion like that is going to find war demographically unsustainable, if it goes on long enough.

(Pete Takeshi also mentions what the Air Force calls "the Golden BB." When you're flying in five tons of metal at a significant fraction of the speed of sound, seven thousand feet up in the air, all incoming fire is serious incoming fire; all it takes is one stray small-arms round to completely ruin your day.)

Also mention that war is slow. Pete Takeshi mentioned, in a conversation a long while ago, a sniper who once spent eight hours crawling across a hundred-yard field, moving slower than the human eye can see and once spending thirty minutes getting a drink from his canteen. You can bet that he found the experience an extremely engaging one; but you can also bet that any game player (well, any [[normal]] game player) who was asked to do this would get bored part of the way through and wander off to play Dwarf Fortress. All war is like submarine war, long periods of boring watchfulness interrupted by confusing, deadly moments of terror; to ask a player to go through the boring parts is a little bit too much.

Perhaps the frequent deaths and reloadings that one sees in realistic FPSes (at least if not taken to the puzzle-game extremes of Ghost Recon) can be justified as this -- "reconnaisance by suicide" as opposed to "reconnaissance by binoculars." Spending four or six hours reconnoitering a target is not much to ask if a hasty attack on the target would probably cost you your life; but it is too much to ask if you're seeing the target from the other side of a computer monitor.

Not to mention that the intuitition and active senses that you can develop when doing real woodcraft -- especially the variety that includes guns -- are just not available in a first-person shooter. One flight-sim player argues that the best view to use is a chase camera, since an in-cockpit view deprives you of the inner-ear sensations, awareness of gravity, and peripheral vision that are crucial to real-world aerial warfare; how much more so for a way of war in which the sense of _smell_ can sometimes be decisive -- Poole mentions a patrol in Vietnam where the point man, to determine which of two forked paths the NVA they were pursuing had taken, knelt to the ground and checked which one smelled like sweaty feet; he then threw a grenade up that path, and "all hell broke loose" -- the NVA had set up a hasty ambush at very, very close range. He also mentions an old ninja strategy of slightly opening the mouth, closing the eyes, and straining forward, to pick up even the slightest scent or taste of body odor, soap, army rations, rifle cleaning oil, or whatnot that might at present be out there on the wind: another thing a first-person shooter can't possibly simulate. Honestly, I like heads-up radars on that account: they provide a visual substitute for the situational awareness that a real infantryman would certainly have.

So the right style of FPS -- if we assume that Serious Sam-style cartoonishness (and Far Cry 2-style [[magic regeneration]]) is out of the question -- is probably something that also operates at a higher level. Envision a game where you're the disembodied voice giving briefings, as well as the foot soldiers who carry them out (probably commandos or equivalent, for the sake of sanity, survivability, and flexibility, although Ghost Recon by way of TIE Fighter suddenly starts to sound like a promising idea). Imagine a game where the player was the collective consciousness, guardian spirit, or whatever of an elite unit, able to hop into the mind of one or another of the troops, and collecting some kind of benefit for future soldiers if one who was currently in play died. You would have to expect a lot of failed missions in a situation like this -- whether from teams being wiped out, or from objectives not being where or what you thought, or just from not having enough time to fully reconnoiter and make an effective attack -- but this is to be expected; the enemy would be experiencing a lot of such failures, too, and the course of the war would probably come down to decisions or mistakes or economic strengths and weaknesses on a higher level than the player's, although a decisive success or a decisive failure -- as in Wing Commander 1 and 2, now that I think of it -- would certainly have its effects at higher levels of command.

And unlike even Operation Flashpoint -- where I ended the infantry segment of the game with a kill count of over sixty men, plus two tanks -- there would be no continual savings and reloadings, and no cartoonish kill counts like my own.