War games are a specifically post-9/11 phenomenon. That’s not to say that war hasn’t been depicted in popular media—and videogames especially—prior to that. Starcraft predates the War on Terror by almost half a decade, and that’s a game that casts players in the role of the now-ubiquitous space marines. Even closer to home, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six—a game featuring real-live soldiers doing real-live War Stuff—was released the same year as Valve’s Half-Life. But there’s a difference between a game that features soldiers doing War Stuff devoid of context and a game that, at least on the surface, attempts to recreate or retell the experience of an actual conflict. There’s a reason early modern shooters like DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D are pinned firmly against the backdrop of sci-fi and fantasy. War is a nasty business, and while simulated violence can be fun (it can, don’t try and pretend otherwise), there’s a big difference between enjoying blowing up virtual demons and exacting death and torture against real (or ostensibly real) people. After 9/11, however, the videogame industry seemed like it was making up for lost time. The dust had scarcely settled in Manhattan before the likes of Call of Duty, Medal of Honor (which had admittedly been around since 1999 thanks to Steven Spielberg and the fumes of the Saving Private Ryan phenomenon), Full Spectrum Warrior, Battlefield 1942 (which would eventually warp and morph itself into the Battlefield series we know today), and the myriad games about and featuring real-life soldiers doing actual fighting actual wars started clogging shelves. And we couldn’t get enough of it. On some levels, it makes sense. Overnight, the world had changed—it seems only fitting that the game industry, and the tastes of those it serves, should change as well. For the first time in nearly half a century, Actual Americans were, whether we liked it or not, suiting up and shipping out to the far reaches of the world to put themselves at risk of bodily harm in the name of freedom. If art imitates life, then it makes sense that we’d see an influx of games, especially in a medium known for its love of casual violence, that centre on soldiers fighting the good fight. The morally ambiguous nature of the so-called War on Terror may have made it difficult to immortalize the conflict of the day, but World War II provided writers and developers with a war that was, morally speaking, cut-and-dried enough to make a great videogame. It was 1993 all over again, except just replace “demons” with “Nazis.” But as the war raged on, our weariness with it grew. Saddam was deposed, then arrested, then executed, and yet still young women and men were being sent halfway around the world to engage in morally dubious activities nobody back home really understood. We’re now 15 years removed from that cataclysmic event and still seeing reports of Western soldiers being killed in action, usually senselessly, in service to a war that with each passing day becomes increasingly abstract and nebulous. Games about storming the beaches of Normandy and repelling the Nazi invaders are well and good, but that type of simplistic “Good vs. Evil” narrative falls apart in the face of things like decentralized terrorist cells and military occupations of civilian areas. And so again, art evolves to imitate life. Just as our notion of what war is has shifted dramatically in the decade and a half since war became an important cultural touchstone again, our games (and other media) have had to change too. If the century’s first decade was all about stoking the fires of patriotism (read: nationalism), then the second decade demands to know why things haven’t worked out the way they said they would when they unfurled that “Mission Accomplished” banner. For every Medal of Honor, it seemed there was a Spec Ops: The Line to challenge the legitimacy of the jingoism we were peddling. The real question, then, is what purpose war games serve today? It’s a question that many games seem unable to answer, and a question that especially seems to perplex the developers of Battlefield 1. The game is set during World War I and spans many of that conflict’s theatres, from the mud-soaked trenches of western Europe to the shores of what would become the disaster at Gallipoli all the way to the deserts of Arabia. This is a marked departure for the series, which is most famous for its True To Life We Swear To God You Guys depictions of Modern Warfare (ahem), and whose most recent entry, Battlefield Hardline, may be one of the most thematically misguided and odiously executed videogames I’ve ever had the displeasure of having to play. World War I is tricky, since unlike its immediate successor, there is no Absolute Evil to rail against. In an age where war is already morally ambiguous, it’s seen as increasingly irresponsible to present a version of any conflict that demonizes the opposite side. To its credit, Battlefield 1 acknowledges this. In the war story (the game’s equivalent of chapters) set on the beaches of Gallipoli, the developers close out the encounter by lauding the heroism of the Turkish soldiers who repelled a far superior Allied force, stating that the Ottoman army’s bravery paved the way for the founding of the Turkish Republic. This is perhaps the game’s greatest example of being unable to find its narrative footing, at least from a historical perspective: These nameless, faceless soldiers, whom the player has just spent hours killing and evading, turn out to be the real “heroes” of that particular segment. Whether this is a clever inversion of how we view war games or the developers struggling to fit their military shooter within an acceptable historical framework is up for interpretation. But if you remove the propaganda angle, how else can you frame the 10 or so hours you’re asking players to spend murdering whom they are supposed to perceive as fellow humans? One argument is to use the game as an historical lens through which you can accurately recount the experience of war. Videogames, as an interactive n, are particularly well situated to put players “in the shoes” of the characters they are portraying. And yet here the game falls down, as well. As the “first of the modern wars,” World War I looked very different from we associate with warfare today. The frenetic chaos of a D-Day didn’t exist in 1914, for example (Verdun, one of the most infamous battles of the war, was a 10-month slog involving a lot of sitting in the trenches. Almost as many soldiers died from drowning in mud as from actual fighting). The uncomfortable truth is that a war like World War I simply isn't fun to reenact. Machine guns had just been invented a couple of decades prior and were virtually untested on the battlefield, which makes scenes in Battlefield 1 where the player is running around toting full-automatic weapons a hilarious anachronism at best. The entire second chapter of the game centres around Britain's Royal Flying Corps, told through the eyes of one American pilot who makes a name for himself by stealing a prototype fighter plane. The ensuing dogfights are of a scale far too massive to actually be a true-to-life representation of the role air power played in WWI (to say nothing of the fact that the chapter's climactic battle occurs in an air raid over London that didn't occur until WWII). The game itself plays with this tension by implying the whole of the chapter is an embellished tall tale woven by Blackburn, the protagonist for this section, but this just further leans into that point: It's preferable to have a game that is fun or entertaining than to retell history as accurately as possible. Battlefield 1 approaches the history of the war with a loose hand, taking actual events and injecting them with a healthy dose of videogameisms. Players blast their way through German fortifications with a massive lumbering Mark V tank, singlehandedly destroying enemy fortifications and armoured vehicles. As a member of the Italian Arditi, the player character dons a full suit of armour that looks positively medieval. One of the game's more tenacious recurring enemies is a “flame trooper,” a hulking, facially obscured soldier wearing a backpack-mounted fuel tank and carrying a flamethrower, looking like a nightmare out of a science fiction shooter (in case you were wondering, this is what a WWI-era flamethrower actually looked like). Nobody would argue that the burden of accurately representing history falls to videogames, of course. As a piece of Entertainment Media™, Battlefield 1's primary allegiance is to entertainment above all esle; it's more important, from this viewpoint, to have a game that sheds verisimilitude in favour of being fun to play. Who would actually want to play a game where the player spends 90 percent of her time sitting in a trench, only to go “over the top” and get immediately gunned down? In essence, Battlefield 1 has taken the spirit of that conflict and carried it forward to better match our idea of what gameified war is supposed to look like. If the game is unable or unwilling to show what the war actually was, then perhaps its goal is to try and demonstrate what it felt like. To call war an emotional experience is an understatement, and that vein has been mined thoroughly throughout the history of American media (fun fact: The first episode of HBO's Band of Brothers aired on September 9, 2001). War-centric media that isn't jingoistic and bombastic is usually mawkish and overly sentimental, and Battlefield 1 is guilty of that, particularly in the first chapter. The player takes on the role of a young British tank driver. Despite the fact that the majority of this section of the game involves literally steamrolling over hapless German infantrymen in a near-invincible iron hulk, the writers constantly push the underdog story: Yours is a motley crew of down-and-out misfits who are always just one step ahead of total annihilation. The chapter is replete with overly sentimental moments of ham-handed (and needless) self-sacrifice, of constant Alamo-style last-stand encounters in which three or four British servicemen are overwhelmed by seemingly endless waves of evil, faceless German soldiers. The chapter is bisected by one of the only parts of the game that made me laugh out loud: A minutes-long interlude in which the player takes control of a carrier pigeon released by the tank crew to carry a message back to HQ. A soft piano mournfully tinkers as players are treated to an overhead view of the carnage, soaring aimlessly over the mud-soaked, crater-pitted fields of western Europe. It's ridiculous. True, war is an event that can bring out the most extraordinary aspects of humanity, but Battlefield 1 crams its short-and-sweet chapters with so many overwrought stories of self-sacrifice it almost comes off as a running joke. The fact that players are constantly jumping back and forth between the Hallmark card-style cinematics and the frantic, often frustrating shooting segments characteristic of the series makes the dissonance even more pronounced. And so art imitates life, but it also helps us understand our relationship with the world around us. As a society and a culture, our relationship with war is much different than it was even 15 years ago. This is made painfully evident by the awkward missteps Battlefield 1 constantly takes trying to figure out how to make a game about war for an audience that is thoroughly sick of it. Not confident enough in the jingoistic narrative that was rampant in the early years of this century to come across as genuine, not faithful enough to its source material to be an “accurate” representation of the events it depicts, the game is left to ruminate limply on the emotional highs and lows of war, all culminating in the watery, unseasoned message that “war is bad.” In this way, Battlefield 1 commits the first cardinal sin of war: It has no objective.

***

Patrick Lindsey is a Boston-based game critic who likes to focus on narrative and thematic design. In addition to cohosting the Bullet Points podcast, he also co-edited SHOOTER, an ebook anthology of critical essays on shooting games. Follow him on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo.