Counter-Strike and the War on Terror or: a Progressive Response to Extra Credits
A long, long time ago, The Escapist collapsed when they fired nearly all of their employees, leaving nothing but an online skeleton of what once was a very successful website, what remained was basically a glorified hosting platform for Zero Punctuation, which is a never-ending series of satirical game reviews that has been publishing new videos since the dawn of time.
The collapse itself wasn’t that surprising since the website was mismanaged into oblivion by a group of people that had direct ties to Steve Bannon, although that also makes you wonder how a website that used to host so many popular and progressive content creators such as Jim Sterling, Bob Chipman and Extra Credits went so wrong… but that’s a question for another time.
Despite all the controversy Escapist Magazine managed to be relaunched by (apparently) sane people in 2018, with some creators returning, but many didn’t come back after they created independent platforms of their own that have proven to be very successful and influential, with Extra Credits being one of the many examples as they went into exile years before, after which they formed an empire of their own, creating an extremely successful and influential channel that today boasts more than two million subscribers.
Video Games And…
The Extra Credits that I first knew was a smaller video series about game design and analysis that was hosted on The Escapist, and despite all the growth and changes they have retained many of their positive (and negative) qualities over the years. I think their success is based on an effective formula that allows them to easily create informative and entertaining videos, but it’s a very constraining formula that often leads them to create fairly tone deaf content, I remember this being the case ever since the series started.
The problem is that they mostly make short and simple videos that are meant to be accessible and easy understand, which often leads to oversimplification, to the point that the ideas explained might end up losing much of their meaning and weight. Another problem is that a few of the arguments are sometimes based on spotty research, which is inevitable when you are making short animated videos on a tight schedule.
One of the oldest examples I remember was their 2012 video about the importance of video games and their potential future, which was a decent video for the most part, but it had one small mistake that was rather jarring, and I think it shows the limitations of this type of content.
None of the games that are used to illustrate the point about the industry moving away from “Call of Duty clones” are actually Call of Duty clones. Which points towards a different problem, which is that video game writers often have fairly limited knowledge with regards of the wide variety of games that exist, and yet they often end up trying to address those topics anyway, because it’s their job. Either way this was just a small mistake and clearly the results of their own limitations.
My stronger critique towards Extra Credits would revolve around other issues, such as the fact that they barely addressed the GamerGate harassment campaign back in 2014, although that’s a problem with the gaming industry in general, and it’s something I might address in the far future.
However, the previous nitpick is representative of a more significant issue with the type of content they create, which leads to much bigger problems when covering complex and controversial topics, such as loot box addiction (Jim Sterling has made some great videos covering this topic) and the way in which violence, war and human conflict is depicted in video games.
Blood Is Compulsory
Extra Credits has made some videos that have been controversial for different reasons, but the main problem is often the same, their dedication to bite-sized analysis leads them into a path of oversimplification and superficial analysis that’s inadequate for explaining and debating more nuanced problems. This also makes them vulnerable to very harsh criticism, some of which is completely unfounded, after all their video on the normalization of Nazis was obviously mass downvoted by… Nazis and other sorts of reactionaries.
However the video was extremely flawed anyway and I think it made a really poor job explaining some of the valid points it was trying to make, which is especially critical for dealing with reactionaries on YouTube, and elsewhere, since many of them do respond positively to nuanced critiques, as evidenced by Caleb Cain’s experience and his reaction towards progressive YouTubers like Destiny and ContraPoints. I personally have heard about many people who have had similar experiences with de-radicalization.
Going back to Extra Credits, in their video about normalization they make a series of arguments against the idea of playing as Nazis or Terrorists in online shooters without the developers providing any extra context. The arguments they make include many emotional, moral, mechanical, educational and historical points explaining why they think this is a bad idea.
I find the emotional arguments to be rather weak, people can react badly to being forced to play as Nazis, but that’s a conscious choice most players make when deciding to play a game about WWII, and playing as a Nazi in a game is not gonna make me forget about Schindler’s List, The Diary of Anne Frank, or my childhood visit to a Holocaust Museum. Young people should learn about the horrendous atrocities that the Nazis committed, but that’s something that should be ingrained by the community and the education system, the so-called free market is clearly not gonna deal with this issue properly.
The argument about moral equivalency makes a bit more sense, and the idea of actually showing the atrocities of the Nazis is certainly compelling, although I wonder how many game developers are interested in making a first person game set in Treblinka II… either way, showing more context is probably a good idea, although I am not sure if it should be something to be expected in mindless multiplayer shooters.
Using history as window dressing for a PvP shooter might have some issues, and it’s obvious that none of the popular games are historically accurate, excepting for something like the Red Orchestra series which tries to be way more accurate and actually depict the horrors of war in the Eastern Front of WWII, but that also points to another flaw in the argument, which is that even though the Nazis were the most depraved faction by far and forced soldiers into battle, many of the Soviet soldiers weren’t recruits either.
This points towards the major problem with the video, which comes from carelessly comparing World War II with the modern War on Terror, and assuming Counter-Strike doesn’t have anything to say about modern war.
Serious Lore Analysis
My favorite Extra Credits video is their take on Missile Command that explores how a seemingly innocuous and simple game can explore profound ideas with its mechanics. It’s such a great essay because it explains how such a seemingly unassuming game can have a fascinating narrative.
Which is also why their take on Counter-Strike is so inadequate, they don’t address the mechanics of the game at all and just assume that the games are obeying the logic of the modern War on Terror in which perfectly ‘legitimate state armies’ fight against ‘irregular terrorist militias’ that need to be defeated by force at all costs.
Which is problematic for a series of reasons, but in Counter-Strike there is something very “wrong” about the way that this conflict is portrayed. In real life counter-terrorism strategy has some basic guidelines, for example to avoid casualties the special forces need to have a massive military advantage over the irregular forces in order to avoid casualties. Which is something that’s not compelling for a generic video game, so ever since the days of Rainbow Six people have been playing in anti-terrorist scenarios that are designed to go horribly wrong.
However there is a key difference between Rainbow Six and Counter-Strike, in R6 you usually play as special forces that are funded and supplied by the US government, and before each operation you select which soldiers and equipment you are going to use in order to carry the mission. But this is not the case in Counter-Strike, at the begging of each round the CT forces buy their own weapons, which makes me wonder: What kind of counter-terrorist group buys their own weapons and also don’t have government oversight?
It really makes you think…
There is an obvious an answer to that, which is that paramilitary and mercenary militias fill that role, these types of groups often have to acquire their own weapons, have less government oversight (or none) and are also known for often committing as many atrocities as the terrorist groups they fight. In some cases paramilitary groups commit way, way more atrocities than the so-called terrorist groups, like it’s the case of paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Contras in Nicaragua (which were trained by the CIA).
If we look at other examples in the real world this distinction between terrorists and counter-terrorists becomes even more muddled, with the most famous example being the conflict in Israel and Palestine in which ‘irregular groups’ like Hamas have been known for targeting civilians in their terror attacks, but this is also the case for the Israel Defense Forces, which are known for committing many more atrocities against civilians, even though the IDF is a ‘perfectly legitimate state army’.
Obviously it would be extremely insensitive to make a game about the conflict in Palestine and Israel (although it has been done) since it’s such a complex and difficult conflict in which countless innocent people have died… but this argument applies to all war games, any game that deals with war, violence and death is necessarily problematic, war has never been an innocent subject.
However that hasn’t stopped people from making stories about war, and is not gonna stop developers from making games about war either, much less stop players from enjoying these virtual killing fields. Violent games indulge in the immorality of war, and yet they are mostly harmless if people are self-aware about war. Propaganda is also much less effective when people are conscious about the real consequences of war.
It’s also possible to ask the question of why people who live in mostly peaceful societies enjoy games about violence and war so much? I live in Costa Rica, which is a country with no army that hasn’t had a war in more than 50 years, and yet I fully enjoy all sorts of games, movies and books about war, especially the Iliad which is a bloody great book. But that’s a very complicated question that should be addressed on its own, and maybe Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance would be a better game to explore that topic.
Either way the alternative proposed by Extra Credits is much more troubling and problematic, making games about Counter-Terrorism Training normalizes the very same groups that lead the War on Terror, a war that has done very little to stop the spread of terrorism worldwide while also enabling human right abuses by “anti-terrorist” states like the United States, Russia, China, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and many more.
So my answer to this is that there is no good answer, violent games are inherently problematic, yet most people love them, and terrorism itself is also ill-defined, as Noam Chomsky explained back in 2001:
Everyone “condemns terrorism,” in this sense of the term. The Nazis harshly condemned terrorism, and carried out counter-terrorism against the terrorist partisans — in Greece, for example. The US basically agreed. It organized and conducted similar “counter-terrorism” in Greece and elsewhere in the postwar years. Furthermore, us counterinsurgency programs drew quite explicitly from the Nazi model, which was treated with respect: Wehrmacht officers were consulted and their manuals were used in designing postwar counterinsurgency programs worldwide, typically called “counter-terrorism.”
What we can learn from Counter-Strike is that there is no meaningful difference between Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists, mechanically they are extremely similar, which is a way more honest depiction of how this conflict plays out in the real world (although it changes a lot depending on context). And war games like CS also create a sort of “neutral” space in which people don’t have to think about the horrible consequences of real war.
My real concern though is that by making such careless comparisons between the Nazis and terrorist groups the Extra Credits crowd was unwittingly supporting the War on Terror that has only led to more unnecessary war and suffering. Although I don’t think that was their intention.
Hey, what’s up with all this whataboutism?
The simple answer is that whataboutism only works when the other side is worse. The Soviet leadership was so eager to point out the many crimes of the US government because it distracted people from the human right abuses that they committed in their own area of influence.
Although it’s not like they had to try hard to make the United States look bad.
The same is true for the US government, they talk so much about the atrocities committed by their enemies in order to distract form the fact that they commit similar atrocities, often on a much larger scale. The reality is that World War II was the exception to the rule, ever since the foundation of the United States the state has been engaged in brutal wars against people who cannot defend themselves, first against Native American nations, while these days the mayhem continues against extremely poor countries like Yemen.
Somehow people keep playing games with US soldiers, even though the US military has committed all sorts of horrendous atrocities, including the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus munitions in Iraq and Syria.
I think this is something that has not gone ignored by many video game developers, many people point to obvious examples likes Spec Ops: The Line and Metal Gear Solid, but my favorite example is from a little known company called Valve: In the original Half Life it’s impossible to tell if there is good or bad guys, at first it seems the aliens are bad but as soon as you meet the US military it becomes obvious they aren’t nice dudes either, especially during the G-Man speech at the end in which it’s shown that US military tanks were inside Xen, which leads to many questions: Were the humans trying to take control of Xen? Are they working for a greater alien power? Was defeating the Nihilanth even a good idea in the first place?
This reflects modern conflicts better than most games. For example many people see the Kurdish militias in the Syrian war as the “good guys”, but at the same time the SDF is working with the US military, which many of the same people see as the “bad guys”. Meanwhile the Islamic State was obviously bad, but they were mostly supported by US allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The reality is that war is a fucking bloody mess, and we should strive to have less of it in the real world. In the other hand I think video game developers, players and commentators should strive to have more nuanced discussions on these topics, which often requires essays longer than five minutes.
