Recently I was thinking about the impact of realities presented in video games on the perception of our “not-virtual reality”. As a child of the 80s and early video game enthusiast I am probably not an expert on video games history but still aware of the development video games took especially in the 90s (and even though I am not an active “gamer” anymore I still follow gaming trends from time to time to see what´s going on).

There are tons of games referring to places, actors or events taken from the “real”, or rather “historic”, world, lots of  them simulating war and conflicts. Since animation was a technical problem on early mainstream computers first examples can be found in real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996). Like other games of this genre, Red Alert was designed as 2D environment controlled from bird-eye view with a limited set of colours and forms. More intensively than the original part of the series from 1995 the game features “real” individuals like Hitler, Stalin, Einstein, collective actors like the Soviet Union, China, European nations and of course the real world´s geographic appearance in an alternative scenario of history caused by time-travel featuring.

Before the first ego shooter in a real world environment appeared, history based 3D video games could be found e.g. in flight combat simulators that came into being in the early and mid 90s. Simulators inherently refer to a real experience, insofar there´s a small step from science fiction combat situations to historical war scenarios. An important brand in the 90s was Jane´s Combat Simulations publishing about 20 games, of which I particularly remember Jane´s IAF: Israeli Airforce (1998). IAF offers the replay of most historical war campaigns that determined Israel´s foreign politics until then: the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Lebanon War in 1982 and Operation Opera, in which the player has to bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Like other simulators it also – and that´s a crucial point – offers future war scenarios in which Israel faces aggresions from the syrian, the iraqi and the lebanese border. Like in most other games of that time the campaigns are built as a one-track narrative with a fixed role for the player. This way history is affirmed by reproducing it while not calling into question the historical background. In context with the historic wars the additional campaigns create vectors that point to present and future assumptions about the character, moral, involvement and relation of certain actors (like “Iraq”, “Syria” aso) and of course: a moral habit to cope with them.This type of closed narrative very much resembles to the structure of books with the difference that here the “reader” is not a silent observer of but an actor within the narrative and thus described by the story itself in terms of character, moral, involvement and relation to other actors.

Cover of the extension “Play the world” (2002)

The problem of the closed historic narrative is even more visible in games that try to open it up and – instead of merely retelling a story – use history as a medium. This happens e.g. in Sid Meyer´s Civilization (first version 1991), in which (in short) the gamer as the ruler of a nation has to create an empire throughout human history by improving technology, regulating the economy and maintaining regional power. The game uses historical ethnic designations and political terms (monarchy, anarchy aso) as well as a timeline of technological improvements propped up to the “actual” history of technology. The game is not deterministic at all in terms of historical events but it is – like any other game – deterministic in terms of the code it is written in (which is basically “how the game works”) and deictic in terms of it´s clear reference to our “real” world. The idea of an open “real” world covers up it´s underlying discourse.

But what is the “real” world in Civilization? The best way to answer the question is to look for the most striking acting strategies and limits given in the game we can identify in comparison to our conception of the “real” world. Most interesting to me appears the position and role of the main actor, the player. One example: The developers did not focus at all on “internal politics”. There can be riots in cities, however, they are not actors but rather consequence of general conditions like poverty, taxes or danger. Same thing concerning politics: In the game the player can choose between different political systems (Despotism, Feudalism, Monarchy, Facism, aso) but never share decision-making powers as the system organizes the behaviour of the citizens and doesn´t create political actors but only pragmatic strategies for the player (check this summary of “political systems” in Civilization III). Insofar there is just authoritorian politics, interstate diplomacy and war in Civilization. History is determined by power politics of single persons representing or even personifying homogeneous, collective actors. This game mode is usually referred to as “God game” (Burns 2002: 2 quoted by Prensky 2000: 139). It also implicates the fact that the main actor in the game acts throughout time which – rather than producing the idea of god – produces the idea of nations or states as coherent collective and particularly historic actors. The actor design in Cilization seems to be strongly influenced by neorealistic perspectives that strategically understand states as the main decision-maker in an anarchical structure, where power is the decisive factor for whatever happens in the world.

Interestingly Cilization in it´s 3rd version had become a widely accepted educational tool  to teach students about history, geography, politics, although this was not intended by the authors. This shows how much “virtual realities” and “reality” can be blended. In a text analysis of discussions between Cilization III modders Trevor Owens has stressed the fact that modders and players don´t just accept the way the game works but have their own critical thoughts on it and “freely discuss the same issues as professional historians, philosophers, and sociologists.” (10) However, the assumtions on “how the world works or worked” that can be found in games as in other historical representations are not arbitrary and – depending of the authority we internalize to attribute to it – structure the way we perceive the world and determine the actions we take. Of course games are not identical with our “real” world. In fact the word “game” implies an irreconcilable difference, but as we´ve seen virtual realities can and want to establish close links to the real world that break down thoughts on how the “world” or specific parts of it work, what is moral and immoral what can be done and what has to be done.