People Make Games: The Games Behind Your Government's Next War
While recovering from COVID I've been watching the very excellent People Make Games video on war games and Quinns does a fantastic job of navigating through the really difficult values at stake and deconstructing the power relations at play in the interviews at DSTL. The focus of the wargamers on the games as “tools like hammers” obviously ignores the values inherent in the designs of the games; the problems with the abstraction of designers and players of the games from reality on the ground; the differences between the “right” and “wrong” kinds of wars... and how the active recruitment of game designers and developers by the wargaming sector might mean that you wake up “the bad guy”, especially given the current state of the games industry.
It was a Cook's tour of classic responses to difficult ethical questions: “if I don't do it, someone else will”, “we're on the good side so we need to do this”, “we're just providing analysis, we aren't directly killing people”, “it's used for things other than military purposes”, etc.
“How would you sleep at night?” is a question anyone looking to get into this industry really should be thinking about. Maybe the only way to win is to not play. But how can we avoid it, if we're working in games, game engines, game design, that might become repurposed for military purposes? And can we just ignore the fact that some of these approaches can be used for other strategic decision-making, such as healthcare, extreme weather events? Could we also make traditionally military wargames more human-centred rather than prop up the military industrial complex? (probably not, given the “three witches” Quinns identifies toward the end)
Happy to discuss these tricky questions with anyone questioning whether to get into these spaces or already in these spaces and wanting to demilitarise the sector to push it toward more of the human-centred approaches (and not just as a smokescreen for the military applications – I am not interested in being an ethics-washing attempt by companies in these spaces!).
Here's the video on YouTube – very worth a watch. Thanks PMG for starting this discussion, they generally have an excellent critical view into the games industry, and this was no exception.
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