It is not ours to reason why...

It's June which means it’s E3, the biggest industry expo for the “interactive entertainment industry” a huge event of conferences and promotional speeches about the best in upcoming games and technology. As part of their efforts to pour more kerosene on the Flaming Catherine wheel of hype Ubisoft have released their cinematic trailer for Assassin’s Creed 3. As ever it’s a damnably entertaining 3or so minutes which gives a reasonable impression of the game-play but making the most of their marketers licence to make it as bombastic as possible.

Set in the Revolutionary war our hero manages to turn the tide of a battle being fought by the British against the nascent American revolutionaries. What’s interesting is that ever since the new setting was revealed Ubisoft have been adamant in stressing that Asscreed 3 will not just be The Patriot 2:Now with Assassins. For those of you who haven’t seen The Patriot it’s Mel Gibson’s admirably balanced and unsentimental dramatisation of the American Revolution.

This hand-wringing over whether or not the Brits will take umbrage at the scores of red-coats you’ll likely be mowing down got me thinking. Assassin’s Creed have always been very careful in taking a politically correct stance, yet their less than edifying depictions of characters from history, be they Christian, Muslim, French, Italian, Turkish or otherwise has never really been particularly controversial. Assassin’s Creed 2 ends with a fist-fight with The Pope but there was narry a peep from the Vatican press office. No doubt much of this has to do with the fantastical framing of their re-telling of history. The people you murder are not chosen because of their race, gender or religious beliefs, they are all either “Templars” or their agents. In the game the Templars were not an order of Christian warrior monks who guarded pilgrims and holy sites in the 11^thcentury, they were a secret society who seek to reshape the world using alien artifacts, restructuring society according to their own dogmatic views which sacrifice humanity’s free-will. The Assassins are the guardians of that free-will, hence their creed “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” The autocratic philosophy of the Templars is attributed to many a historical figure, and though its complete bunk historically, it provides a great narrative context for an entertaining and politically uncomplicated stabathon through history.

Why then did Ubisoft feel the need to reassert the position that Assassin’s Creed isn’t about pitting one nationality against the other? After all, as anyone familiar with the franchise knows, it’s about Templars and Assassins, both of whom recruit from any race, religion or nationality. Perhaps it’s because that while the medium is maturing, many of it’s consumers are not, you only need read under the comments section of a Youtube video about a game and you’ll quickly find comments in which someone will refer to someone as a “n****r loving fag, who should eat my ballsack” for simply expressing a preference for one game or another. The internet has allowed for this very loud, very public feed-back to influence consumer opinion. Being British we have the advantage of being fluent in the chosen language of the worldwide web and the second biggest market for games after the United States. Perhaps Ubisoft are worried that without subsequent placation the infuriatingly loud and entitled minority will prove a significance enough disturbance to effect the units shipped come October. I’d call them out for their lack of backbone were it not for the significant financial risk all AAA game-developers put themselves under, and the recent fan furore over Mass Effect 3, which has forced the released of unscheduled additional content.

However I wonder what the gaming world would like if all games had to worry about how they portrayed the nations of the world, and in what context they framed their interactive conflicts. For the moment games are predominantly experience the world through violent action, even the apparently innocently innocuous Mario mainly interacts with people by stomping them to death. Whom then do we aim our guns at? Most games involve an inordinate amount of murder, so if we’re going to be doing a lot of it, we have to be sure there’s at least a modicum of justification for doing so.

Nazis are a popular choice, as in terms of politics they are pretty much unambiguously evil, and not just because they’d force everyone into their versions of Scouts and Brownies. Zombies are great too, humanoid, unthinking, unfeeling, they are the cultural canon-fodder of countless games, comics and films. A zombie can be shot, beheaded or bludgeoned to death with a frying pan and you need never worry about the moral implications. He wants to eat you, you don’t want to be eaten, he can’t help it and neither can you, so we might as well get on with the killing have fun while we’re doing it.

Aliens are another popular choice, in Gears of War they burst out of the ground to bring ruin to the human population of Sera, issuing garbled threats and appearing in various terrifying forms. In Halo it was the ambiguously motivated Covenant, a collection of various races all of whom had it in for humanity. They later gave way to the more monstrous Flood a fungus that turns everything into well, a space-zombie. However with both Gears of War and Halo we were given some insight into the alien’s motivation for attack. In the end, the protagonist of Halo teams up with his erstwhile foe and forms a joint alliance of Covenant and Human forces with a view of protecting themselves from the fungal space zombies. Only later finding out that the whole war was just a deliberate misunderstanding by the Covenant's religious overlords. In Gears too the original enemy become overshadowed by a similarly zombified version of themselves, their attack on humanity motivated by their attempt to escape their infected counterparts.

So the most popular gaming conflicts between humanity and an alien races have essentially devolved into a deferred war between humanity and space zombies. Like I said, you can’t sympathise with a zombie whatever form it takes, but it’s hard not to extend some grudging respect to a character given a rationale and a motivation, even if they do have four jaws.

It's cool man, I'm with you

It’s only when we cross into the territory of military shooters do the deviations into why the conflict has occurred become more muddied. Despite their great potential to explore the themes and issues of our most recent conflicts, military shooters have been content to explore war in the most ridiculously and bombastic fashion  possible (Call of Duty) or simply frame the action in the context of you Spec-Op soldier, them terrorist. There was no public conciliation toward the Russian gamers when Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 came out. I understand that diplomatic relations between Russia and the West oscillate between cautiously warm to sub-zero, but having them as the instigators of World War 3 seems a bit much. Perhaps the hyperbole of the action is what gives COD free-reign to play fast and loose with accurate international relations, but nevertheless it can’t be nice to be a Russian gamer mowing down countless of your countrymen because “they started it! C’mon they’re Russian!” I won’t even go into the cultural implications of Call of Duty: Black Ops which has you replaying several missions of the Cold War, Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs included. What next a positive re-telling of America's support of Pinochet? 

If Gears of War and Halo are prepared to explore a sympathetic angle in regards to their inhuman antagonists then it’s surely conceivable that First Person Shooters can do the same to real-world nationalities?

The current fetishisation of black-operatives and global conflicts in games is a somewhat disturbing trend when viewed in conjunction with the wider media narrative on the War on Terror. With the news becoming ever more immediate, right down to the footage from drones of successful strikes against “terrorist outposts” that later turn out to be civilian compounds, the casual re-imagining of these conflicts as a black and white affair between morally vindicated super-powers and its enemies veers dangerously into the territory of propaganda. In years to come the current "War on Terror" will be viewed in the cold-light of historical objectivity, and the alarmist rhetoric regarding the various Islamic and other extremist groups will dissipate. The War on Terror will one day be revaluated outside of the current narrative of us vs the bad-guys, into its component parts of social, economic and political factors all of which resulted in a “war.” A war which has had a terrible human cost for both sides. As a result the attitude of some games’ that reduce nationalities and races into a justifiable target to killed without thought or mercy will look highly dated and somewhat suspect.

However there are signs that attitudes toward the framing of player as US Marine vs world is shifting away from the political and moral certainties of Modern Warfare, Battlefield and Medal of Honour. In Rainbow Six the antagonists are not foreign terrorists but home-grown ones, angry at the financial sectors ability to play the game and lose for almost everyone but themselves, a very real and a very relevant social subject. Watchdogs deals with our current reliance on not only technology, but governments’ willingness to outsource public services to private companies. While Spec-ops: The Line despite being about American spooks being sent to war-torn Dubai will be mainly fighting, other American marines. Here’s hoping that as Games settle into their place in the cultural discourse that their creators are prepared to address the responsibilities that come with artistic legitimacy.