DBCG 2: Nuking Brussels

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