ACHTUNG PANZER! Return to the steppes of monster wargaming
Bundeswehr panzers go into action north of Simferopol in Lock On.
A recent post by Sharon Weinberger on the Danger Room blog led to an interesting interview with a Brit military man in the Guardian newspaper. About computer gaming and simulation, it didn't include the usual eyewash on how games mimic reality or how they constitute a superior form of training.
"These days we're constantly being told how authentic military combat games are, the Ghost Recon and Battlefield series' focusing heavily on real-world weapons and situations. But how realistic are these games? Do they portray anything of the conflicts we're seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan?" asks the interviewer.
If it had been in a US publication, you'd prepare yourself for the marketing and salesmenship disguised as truth.
"I think that consumer military simulations are never going to be totally realistic because ultimately people don't really die or get injured, and thus the fear element is never going to be there," replies the subject. "I think that what is missing is the chaos of battle."
"Finally the combat environments are complex, and what is missing, particularly in an urban environment, are civilians mixed in with military forces."
The military man goes onto say that in his survey of games, "I think one type of warfare missing from computer games, which may be used in the future is the weapons of mass destruction or effect (WMD/E) including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and enhanced-explosive (aka CBRNE). These are proliferating at an accelerating rate ... In every sim I have tried (be it on PC or XBox 360) I have yet to see this type of warfare represented, or seen friendly forces having to take precautions against its use."
One has to go back a long way to find tactical nuclear weapons in computer gaming.
The primary serious example would be the old Three-Sixty Pacific title, Harpoon, made for DOS machines.
Pitting the naval forces of NATO against those of the Soviet Union in the north Atlantic, it allowed for release of tactical nuclear weapons. When this was done the game ended quickly.
All one found was that if you were going to use such weapons, you had to do so in a surprise attack and be sure all the enemy's assets were pounded in one massive strike. If you missed anything, the game was over the next turn.
Old military board games of the Eighties also modelled tactical nuclear and chemical weapons. Use of the first ended the interesting parts of the simulations and the latter were never realistically modelled. All involved Warsaw Pact forces going up against NATO, somewhere west of the Fulda Gap.
Where gaming intersects reality is that use of chemical weapons isn't militarily interesting. If one resorts to it, one has to be prepared to use high volumes in surprise attacks.
Chemical weapons are appropriate for exterminating nests of wasps or killer bees. The insects defend their turf, don't flee, and are struck down. There's not much analogous to use in a military environment unless one entertains using chemicals on people trapped in a building with nowhere to go. In such a case, one might just as well use high explosive.
Historically, during the Iran-Iraq conflict, Iraqi military men under Hussein considered the Iranians to be "insects," according to Dilip Hiro's "The Longest War" and used them on that apparent basis.
Hiro cites a couple of examples in which the Iraqi military used heavy artillery barrages which included "cyanide gas and nerve agents [to] put the Iranians on the run." Usage of chemical weapons provided a few localized tactical victories in a war of bloody stalemates fought ineptly, World War I-style, by both sides.
Paradoxically, the Ayatollah Khomeini appeared to be opposed to retaliatory chemical warfare. "When he was approached on the subject by top officials, he reportedly reiterated his earlier refusal based on the argument that Islam prohibits its fighters from polluting the atmosphere even in the course of a jihad," writes Hiro.
On the other hand, "According to [Ayatollah Rafsanjani], the US and Iraq had made it crystal clear that they would resort to any means to prevent an Iranian victory, and that Iraq had been given 'the green light to commit any crime,' including the large scale deployment of chemical weapons in its offensives."
Trying to simulate use of biological weapons in a game like Ubisoft's Ghost Recon would probably entail a good bit of fiction and result in something of a mess.
Still, something of a mess is an adequate description for many wargames people wish to play.
Lock On: Modern Air Combat, by way of recent example, is something of a mess.
Buy it in stores and you get a truly buggy game with no practical documentation. Getting it to run smoothly requires patching. Learning it is an extended run of trial and error.
As a wargame it is furnished with designer missions which are in no way realistic. This is an appropriate designer decision. Real world missions, or even abstractions of them, are much less entertaining than the puzzle-like shoot-em-ups required by buyers of consumer electronics.
Since Lock On is about jet combat including close air support of ground offensives, it contains a fairly substantial capability for building land battles.
One uses it mission editor to construct these and upon delving into the program it is found that as the size of forces increase, an increasingly significant hit is put on processing, the consequence of allocating more artificial intelligence functions which the program employs to administer the game.
Interestingly, Lock On includes a great deal of civilian traffic, traffic which makes the euphemism "collateral damage" common. One can turn it off as it also drains processing power.
The designers, being Russian, also made what seems to me to be the audacious decision to allow the German army to return to grounds once scorched in the Crimea and the Caucasus, as part of a theoretical NATO effort to liberate, say, Georgia, from the grasp of Mother Russia.
Although I've chosen to use more snapshots of modern combat in open ground, the game allows for urban battles. Building them requires a lot of detail work.
How realistic Lock On is certainly open to debate. However, it does get one use to complexity and bad ideas, the kind which result in being quickly shot up.
The nut of it, as always, is that as one strives to achieve wargames which are realistic in even a minor way, the less they are games and the more they are work.
And it is unreasonable to think mass producers of BestBuy-stocked fare are particularly interested in making such games "realistic" although they are perfectly willing to sell and market them as products said to achieve new heights in realism.
That's show biz and the word immersive has more meaning when used in connection with the question, "How long is it going to stay on the hard drive?" rather than the statement, "So real, you'll smell the cordite!"
As explained in an earlier article, the trade-off was worked out in the monster wargames of the Eighties.
Cityfight, by Simulations Publications, was another such game, one that emulated modern urban combat. Scalable down to pathetic little actions in which terrorists drive pickup trucks and cars, its rulebook covered all contingincies and was voluminous. Its designers recommended a third player be included as referee to help interpret rules and smooth play.
Cityfight wasn't much of a repeat. But it could teach about a variety of historical urban combat environments and actions if one had the stamina and patience for it.
Monster wargames, including Cityfight, as potential training tools, in this document at the French Ministry of Defense's doctrinal website.
Related: Wargames for twenty bucks.
A panzer brews up on the steppe.
Bundeswehr panzers go into action north of Simferopol in Lock On.
A recent post by Sharon Weinberger on the Danger Room blog led to an interesting interview with a Brit military man in the Guardian newspaper. About computer gaming and simulation, it didn't include the usual eyewash on how games mimic reality or how they constitute a superior form of training.
"These days we're constantly being told how authentic military combat games are, the Ghost Recon and Battlefield series' focusing heavily on real-world weapons and situations. But how realistic are these games? Do they portray anything of the conflicts we're seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan?" asks the interviewer.
If it had been in a US publication, you'd prepare yourself for the marketing and salesmenship disguised as truth.
"I think that consumer military simulations are never going to be totally realistic because ultimately people don't really die or get injured, and thus the fear element is never going to be there," replies the subject. "I think that what is missing is the chaos of battle."
"Finally the combat environments are complex, and what is missing, particularly in an urban environment, are civilians mixed in with military forces."
The military man goes onto say that in his survey of games, "I think one type of warfare missing from computer games, which may be used in the future is the weapons of mass destruction or effect (WMD/E) including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and enhanced-explosive (aka CBRNE). These are proliferating at an accelerating rate ... In every sim I have tried (be it on PC or XBox 360) I have yet to see this type of warfare represented, or seen friendly forces having to take precautions against its use."
One has to go back a long way to find tactical nuclear weapons in computer gaming.
The primary serious example would be the old Three-Sixty Pacific title, Harpoon, made for DOS machines.
Pitting the naval forces of NATO against those of the Soviet Union in the north Atlantic, it allowed for release of tactical nuclear weapons. When this was done the game ended quickly.
All one found was that if you were going to use such weapons, you had to do so in a surprise attack and be sure all the enemy's assets were pounded in one massive strike. If you missed anything, the game was over the next turn.
Old military board games of the Eighties also modelled tactical nuclear and chemical weapons. Use of the first ended the interesting parts of the simulations and the latter were never realistically modelled. All involved Warsaw Pact forces going up against NATO, somewhere west of the Fulda Gap.
Where gaming intersects reality is that use of chemical weapons isn't militarily interesting. If one resorts to it, one has to be prepared to use high volumes in surprise attacks.
Chemical weapons are appropriate for exterminating nests of wasps or killer bees. The insects defend their turf, don't flee, and are struck down. There's not much analogous to use in a military environment unless one entertains using chemicals on people trapped in a building with nowhere to go. In such a case, one might just as well use high explosive.
Historically, during the Iran-Iraq conflict, Iraqi military men under Hussein considered the Iranians to be "insects," according to Dilip Hiro's "The Longest War" and used them on that apparent basis.
Hiro cites a couple of examples in which the Iraqi military used heavy artillery barrages which included "cyanide gas and nerve agents [to] put the Iranians on the run." Usage of chemical weapons provided a few localized tactical victories in a war of bloody stalemates fought ineptly, World War I-style, by both sides.
Paradoxically, the Ayatollah Khomeini appeared to be opposed to retaliatory chemical warfare. "When he was approached on the subject by top officials, he reportedly reiterated his earlier refusal based on the argument that Islam prohibits its fighters from polluting the atmosphere even in the course of a jihad," writes Hiro.
On the other hand, "According to [Ayatollah Rafsanjani], the US and Iraq had made it crystal clear that they would resort to any means to prevent an Iranian victory, and that Iraq had been given 'the green light to commit any crime,' including the large scale deployment of chemical weapons in its offensives."
Trying to simulate use of biological weapons in a game like Ubisoft's Ghost Recon would probably entail a good bit of fiction and result in something of a mess.
Still, something of a mess is an adequate description for many wargames people wish to play.
Lock On: Modern Air Combat, by way of recent example, is something of a mess.
Buy it in stores and you get a truly buggy game with no practical documentation. Getting it to run smoothly requires patching. Learning it is an extended run of trial and error.
As a wargame it is furnished with designer missions which are in no way realistic. This is an appropriate designer decision. Real world missions, or even abstractions of them, are much less entertaining than the puzzle-like shoot-em-ups required by buyers of consumer electronics.
Since Lock On is about jet combat including close air support of ground offensives, it contains a fairly substantial capability for building land battles.
One uses it mission editor to construct these and upon delving into the program it is found that as the size of forces increase, an increasingly significant hit is put on processing, the consequence of allocating more artificial intelligence functions which the program employs to administer the game.
Interestingly, Lock On includes a great deal of civilian traffic, traffic which makes the euphemism "collateral damage" common. One can turn it off as it also drains processing power.
The designers, being Russian, also made what seems to me to be the audacious decision to allow the German army to return to grounds once scorched in the Crimea and the Caucasus, as part of a theoretical NATO effort to liberate, say, Georgia, from the grasp of Mother Russia.
Although I've chosen to use more snapshots of modern combat in open ground, the game allows for urban battles. Building them requires a lot of detail work.
How realistic Lock On is certainly open to debate. However, it does get one use to complexity and bad ideas, the kind which result in being quickly shot up.
The nut of it, as always, is that as one strives to achieve wargames which are realistic in even a minor way, the less they are games and the more they are work.
And it is unreasonable to think mass producers of BestBuy-stocked fare are particularly interested in making such games "realistic" although they are perfectly willing to sell and market them as products said to achieve new heights in realism.
That's show biz and the word immersive has more meaning when used in connection with the question, "How long is it going to stay on the hard drive?" rather than the statement, "So real, you'll smell the cordite!"
As explained in an earlier article, the trade-off was worked out in the monster wargames of the Eighties.
Cityfight, by Simulations Publications, was another such game, one that emulated modern urban combat. Scalable down to pathetic little actions in which terrorists drive pickup trucks and cars, its rulebook covered all contingincies and was voluminous. Its designers recommended a third player be included as referee to help interpret rules and smooth play.
Cityfight wasn't much of a repeat. But it could teach about a variety of historical urban combat environments and actions if one had the stamina and patience for it.
Monster wargames, including Cityfight, as potential training tools, in this document at the French Ministry of Defense's doctrinal website.
Related: Wargames for twenty bucks.
A panzer brews up on the steppe.
posted by George Smith at 4:23 PM
2 Comments:
Re: your observations on CB warfare simulation, yes, no real work being done out there (alas for me). I had hoped that Gary Grisby's WWII strategic simulation might include CB warfare options, but they didn't want to add that. I had an old game from SSI (I think) called NATO that included chem attack options for the Warsaw Pact.
Re: Iraq-Iran 1980s attacks, I would beg to differ on your description. Saddam actually had some decent combined arms attacks against Iran, Iran had the numbers and human wave attacks going for their side. Iraq was losing the southern front due to the pressure, and it was the combination of chemical warfare and combined arms attacks that allowed him to force Iran into a stalemate. Then the Scud "city war" caused Iran to call for a ceasefire.
Hiro's account of the war is peppered with anecdotes on the offensives which employed gas and the thinking on both sides over it. He's maddeningly short on in depth description except for one brief moment.
Re an offensive to regain some land east of Basra. "...the Iraqis overpowered the Iranians in a ferocious artillery and rocket barrage, mixing conventional shells with the ones filled with cyanide or deadly nerve gases, and expelled [the Iranians] from the bridgehead...the Iranians discovered than in the searing temperatures of 45 C. prevalent on the fronts, it was virtually impossible to wear their protective clothing and masks. As quick-acting agents, cyanide gas and nerve agents put the Iranians on the run but permitted the Iraqis to undertake mopping-up operations, unhindered in an atmosphere quickly free of the poison gases. In this offensive Iraq regained its territory up to the Kut Sawadi and Bubyan border posts 25 miles from Basra. Just as in the Fao peninsula, by bombing the Iranian rear area with slow-acting mustard gas, the Iraqis frustrated Tehran's plans of immediate counterattack."
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