One afternoon about two weeks after my son came home from
the hospital, I was sitting on the couch with him after a meal. He was sleeping
against my chest, just a tiny bird’s weight of a preemie, and I popped open my
laptop to entertain myself while he napped. When a kid is that small, you can’t just fall
asleep with him on your chest. If you shift the wrong way and cover his face,
he could easily suffocate or fall and
break a limb. Therefore, I played video games to stay awake and avoid such
certain disaster.
I was in the middle of a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization V.
I was playing a single-player scenario as Attila the Hun against a medium-sized
board with five or six random opponents. I had already conquered all but one of
the opponents and there were a handful of unaffiliated city-states still on the
board. I had just finished conquering England and set my sights on the last
remaining nation when one of these city-states that I thought was an ally
suddenly acted up. The change cut off one of my main trade routes and caused
delays in moving my armies for the campaign against the last nation on the
board. I was peeved. I looked around the board for a minute then clicked my
mouse a few times. And then I nuked Brussels.
In Civilization V it takes a very specific act to drop an
atomic bomb on a city. You have to develop a lot of technologies and build
specialized buildings. Once you acquire all of the required technological bits,
you have to go out and mine sources of uranium. Then you have to build a
single-use bomb in one of your cities. Building a bomb puts other projects on
hold. You can’t build hospitals or train armies when you’re building the
bomb—it takes a lot of time. When the nuke is finally ready, you have to pick
it out of a list of units and then direct the big, red, target arrow toward
your enemy. The only thing that’s missing is a pop-up window asking, “Are you
sure?”
The effects of a nuclear strike in the game are quite
devastating. A city is decimated when it is hit. The land around ground zero is
a wasted, irradiated mess for miles and miles that takes years (in the game) to
clean up. The last thing I noticed is that the civilian population of the city
is cut down—usually by half. When you conquer a city in the game, the
population is always reduced by half or so, and you have the option to raze the
city to the ground. In each of those scenarios, you can imagine that some
civilians are killed, but at least there’s the hope that some flee for the
hills or other cities or something. With a nuke, they don’t get to escape. The
population just vanishes. Poof!
I didn’t just nuke Brussels. I nuked it six or seven times.
As a child of the 80’s, I felt the need to build up a massive nuclear arsenal.
I didn’t really consider the consequences, I didn’t think I’d use it, and then
I did. As each bomb hit, I watched the population diminish and I felt something
grim flip over in my stomach like a dying goldfish. Something was wrong.
I put the game aside for a few minutes and thought about
what I had done. I spent hours of my week building up a tiny, virtual society,
trading with allies, conquering enemies, and exploring the virtual world. I
developed cities, researched technologies, built farms, roads, castles, and
great wonders. And in a few clicks, I vaporized one of those rival tiny,
virtual societies just because they pissed me off.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by Brussels’s sudden
turnabout. After all, I had led a pretty aggressive, expansionist regime for
the last 1800-odd virtual years in the game. My Attila avatar had smashed
walls, overrun former allies, and slaughtered innumerable enemy troops. It’s no
wonder that an isolated city-state would be nervous when I overthrew one of the
last sovereign powers in the world and set my sights on the final one. So why
did I nuke them?
When I pushed the button, I wasn’t particularly angry. I
didn’t think that Brussels deserved the response. I didn’t actually feel much
about it at all. I looked at my list of options for dealing with Brussels,
considered that bombing them was likely to be quick, and suddenly it was DEFCON
5. When I was done with it, it was that—my lack of moral reasoning—that
bothered me.
Games are, to a great extent, our test for our interactions
with reality. When we are young, we play games to learn math, how to calculate
risk, how to strategize, and how to socialize. We play sports for fitness,
discipline, coordination, and camaraderie. When we’re older, we play “trust
games” for team building at work. The lessons we take from games are almost
always applicable to real life. I’ve spent many, many years of my life playing
Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games to enrich and enliven my
own creativity, interact with friends in a meaningful way, and solve
complicated problems with a complicated and ever-changing rules system. I am
better for it.
One of the important features of gaming is the idea of fair
play. Take turns, don’t cheat, be honest when challenged, take winning and
losing with grace. Role-playing games even go further, usually adding a
morality element. In D&D, it’s called your alignment. It is a measure of
how good or bad you are, and it can affect how successful your character’s
actions are in the game. Good guys defeat the dragon and rescue the princess.
Bad guys get chased down by the city guard.
As Attila the Hun in Civilization V, after nuking Brussels,
I felt like I was the bad guy. I felt like I had cheated, gone against some
point of the game, and therefore lost it somehow. I think it’s because of the
lesson that I was playing out. The lesson was that it is acceptable to brush
aside a nuisance in the most convenient way possible, despite the consequences.
My actions did not take into account the cleanup, the reconstruction, the
deaths of my eventual virtual constituents. My actions were not indicative of
the lessons I had learned and resolved to follow over the years. My actions
were not those that I want to teach my son when he’s old enough to understand.
I finished the game by quickly overtaking the last sovereign
nation primarily with naval and air forces, then moved the ground troops in to
occupy and convert the last cities. When I achieved the military victory, I
closed the game and spent some time hanging out with the baby and thinking
about what I did. The next morning, I started a new game and dedicated myself
to a nice, cleansing cultural victory with very little military activity at
all.
The thing is, no matter how much you nuke a city, there is
always some small amount of the population left. Once you nuke the place, you
have to choose to move in, occupy the city, and either build it back up or raze
it to the ground, or let it go and rebuild itself. That means that you will
always have survivors to contend with. Some measure of the population of
Brussels will never forget.
BRUSSELS 2013 – NEVER FORGET
