War’s new fronts

The time: 1967. The place: A quiet village in the verdant thicket of Pleiku, near the Cambodian border, a jungle outpost where U.S. infantrymen from the nearby Nui Pek Army camp are debriefed before their next mission. Sgt. 1st Class Steve Hawkins, an operations and intelligence specialist, has been dispatched here by his commanding officer, but no sooner does he alight from his jeep than a volley of gunfire sends everyone scrambling for cover. Hawkins fires multiple rounds from his M-16 and lobs a grenade, but it’s too late -- he’s been fatally wounded.

This isn’t an outtake from “Platoon”; it’s leisure-time kicks, a scene from Vietcong: Purple Haze, one of a handful of new video games that use the Vietnam War as a historical backdrop. For the intensely competitive, $20-billion video game industry, the appropriation of Vietnam as a new field of battle for “shooter” games like Vietcong: Purple Haze, Battlefield Vietnam and Shellshock: Nam ’67 is a significant development. And it’s not only ‘Nam that’s getting gamers fired up. There are also new titles featuring the 1991 Gulf War, the 1980 hostage crisis, even the current Iraqi conflict. When it comes to video war, everything is fair game now.

During the last decade, a time when the video game industry experienced its most rapid growth, war games trafficked for the most part in the unambiguous, good-versus-evil conflicts of World War II, in which players could blow away Nazis and kamikaze pilots and feel virtuous about it. Electronic Arts has sold more than 3 million copies of Battlefield 1942, one of the most popular World War II titles, since 2002. With a few exceptions, Vietnam was considered off-limits -- it was a raw wound that hadn’t healed, a protracted conflict that had ended in bloody ignominy for the United States. But now that the audience for video games has matured -- the average player’s age is around 28 -- it’s a subject ripe for commercial exploitation.

The producers of the most popular games argue that, for the biggest slice of their audience, the collective memory of Vietnam has been forged from the second-draft interpretations of Hollywood movies. They have no personal claims on Vietnam; it’s an abstraction, a conflict from another time and place. “It’s an issue of age and memory,” says Scott Evans, the executive producer of Battlefield Vietnam, which has sold nearly 1 million copies for Electronic Arts since its March release. “If you’re over 36, you remember the uneasy feelings associated with Vietnam, the body counts and TV images. If you’re under 36, you don’t really get it. Even the recent films, like ‘We Were Soldiers,’ tend to focus on the individual experience of the soldiers, the music, the feel of being there.”

For gamers in search of the next dopamine high, Vietnam is fresh terrain, a new field of battle for those players who have grown weary of Luftwaffen firefights. From the industry’s standpoint, new wars are the best way to maintain interest in the product -- in short, it’s reinvent the genre, or perish. “Even though my dad served in Vietnam, it’s nothing other than a dark historical period for me,” says Daniel Morris, the 29-year-old editor of PC Gamer magazine. “Battlefield Vietnam is such an unapologetically slam-bang shooter game, it’s hard to take seriously as a transgressive take on a controversial period in our history. There’s no deep political content there -- it’s just trading on our collective pop-cultural interpretation of Vietnam. If I was looking for a larger truth behind the sudden glut of games, I’d just say it was a strictly commercial decision.”

One new title, to be released in October, tries to place the war in its proper social context. Vivendi Universal’s Men of Valor features an African American protagonist who must grapple with institutionalized racism in the Army and ignorance among his fellow grunts. For source material, the game’s developers passed over Hollywood treatments and turned to oral histories such as “Bloods,” Wallace Terry’s 1984 chronicle of 20 black soldiers in Vietnam. “We have situations where white soldiers call black soldiers ‘boy,’ and we address the ways in which the North Vietnamese used propaganda against African American soldiers,” says head developer Kris Jackson. “They would try to convince the black soldiers not to fight for a country that considered them second-class citizens. All of that is in the game.”

The new games are seductively immersive; most of them can be played online with other gamers who can switch identities to join the ARVN, Viet Cong or U.S. Army. Vietcong: Purple Haze uses a multilayered narrative to hook its players. Grunts must endure basic training and intelligence briefings before they can go out on a mission, and rules of engagement (don’t move without someone covering you with gunfire, etc.) must be mastered before a player can advance to large-scale battles.

Purple Haze’s violence is somewhat muted; there is little blood, and just a metaphorical red screen whenever someone is hit. Battlefield Vietnam is a straightforward shooter, with soldiers slithering through dense underbrush or lobbing artillery at their North Vietnamese adversaries from helicopters. Gamers playing Shellshock: Nam ’67 might come across severed heads on punji sticks or gruesome torture scenes.

“Developers finally have the tools to create the rich, lush jungle environments that exemplify what it was like to be in Vietnam and capture the intensity, paranoia and constant ‘between a rock and a hard place’ feeling that a soldier of the time must have felt,” says Paul Eibeler, president and director of Take-Two Interactive Software, whose Gathering label published Vietcong: Purple Haze. “We wanted to be as accurate as possible with the details and history of the conflict, but at the same time we wanted to create an engaging story that would resonate with players.”

A more immediate war

For some gamers, even Vietnam is a little too quaint, a yellowed textbook chapter. They need the adrenaline rush of contemporaneous warfare, and KumaWar delivers. The online, multiplayer platform, which is produced by Kuma Reality Games, specializes in Middle East conflicts. Players can become members of Delta Force and transport themselves to Iran in 1980 to free the American hostages, or they can battle Saddam Hussein’s troops in the 1991 Gulf War. The KumaWar version of the Iraq conflict is an ongoing narrative played out in various situational video missions. Mission 9, Fallujah Abizaid Attack, challenges members of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to “root out and immobilize the would-be assassins” and rescue Gen. John P. Abizaid, who has been ambushed. “Don’t underestimate the enemy’s resolve or the magnitude of this mission. You and your men control not only the destiny of General John P. Abizaid but also the future of war operations as we know them.”

KumaWar makes every attempt to obliterate the boundary between fiction and reality. Based on Associated Press wire reports, satellite photos and Pentagon releases, the games are a simulacrum of a war whose outcome has yet to be determined, and can thus offer wish fulfillment, Rambo style, for players who want to write their own versions of history. The producers like to think of the games as tutorials in military tactics and strategy. “One of our missions might cover an event that CNN might spend a minute talking about,” says Kuma Reality Games CEO Keith Halper. “It’s not often that correspondents are on the ground in the middle of a firefight, but we can go there.”

KumaWar is a hit, but some irate war gamers have drawn a line in the sand. “We have a lot of readers in the military who are appalled at Kuma/War,” says PC Gamer’s Morris. “They just can’t believe that our troops would have been dead for less than two weeks and Kuma is going to be profiting from it.”

One thing is certain: In the virtual universe, nothing is sacred anymore. “I would say it’s a fact of the world,” Halper says. “It’s the entertainment choice for people growing up today. We can allow it to lie fallow or we can do important things with it.”