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Let’s Play War | Julia Krzeszowska
from Issue 9 Games
Julia Krzeszowska
Let’s Play War
It is a children’s game with simple rules. Everybody can have a try. As many players as you want. However, the more people play, the harder it becomes to find a winner, and the distinction of who wins and who doesn’t gets muddier. The idea is that the stronger one keeps on beating the weaker till nothing is left of them and then, if the players are not bored already, one of them shuffles the cards, and they play again. Winning isn’t a matter of skill but of circumstance or luck – if someone didn’t tamper with the card deck earlier, that is.
Here, I’m just talking about the card game called “War”. Yet, those statements, to various degrees, could be applied to real military conflicts that were, are, and will someday be happening out there in the real world, with real people’s lives at stake. And, indeed, it may be cruel or insensitive to compare war to a game one plays for pleasure or to kill time. I’m not a war specialist. I’m a linguist, at best. When I engage with war discourse, what interests me most is the language at work –particularly, one very powerful rhetorical device: the metaphor.
The idea of metaphor, as understood in linguistics, could be explained as taking a phrase in the “language of reality” and translating it to the “journey language”, the “plants language”, or the “game language”, to name just a few. The last sentence uses a metaphor, too. Translating from one language to another and the mental act of constructing a metaphor are, in fact, two distinct, unrelated things. Even so, we can find some analogies between them: the former’s function is to convey a message expressed in one language into another; the latter’s is to render a concept expressed in one domain (a field of meaning) into another. Because we notice this similarity, we can “borrow” the familiar vocabulary associated with translating and use it to describe something new – here, the function of a rhetorical device. And so, we create a metaphor. It’s a great tool that helps us mentally visualise and talk about abstract, difficult or complex experiences. In this case, war.
It’s necessary to pinpoint one key quality of metaphors – they allow us to focus on only one aspect of a given thing at a time, inevitably obscuring others. For example, the experience of “love” can be described in many ways, depending on what kind of love we have in mind. We can speak of love as a journey (“Our relationship is going in the right direction.”) to highlight the progress and cooperation. We can also discard the whimsicality and randomness of falling in love, as expressed in the metaphor “love is magic” (“He was enchanted by her beauty.”). It is also possible to focus on the violence and determination, as conveyed by the metaphor “love is war” (“She is willing to fight for their relationship.”).
Metaphors are so deeply embedded in our personal and shared vocabulary that we often don’t notice we’re using – or even overusing – them. One interesting example of that would be a quote from the current US Deputy Defense Secretary’s speech on the Iraq War: “Iraq has had 12 years now to disarm, as it agreed to do after the Gulf War. But, so far, it has treated disarmament like a game of hide and seek, or, as Secretary of State Powell has termed it, ‘rope-a-dope in the desert’”.
But this is not a game, the Deputy adds immediately. He doesn’t want us to associate war with playing games. Games are unserious and frivolous, wars – just the opposite. Yet, it is hard to ignore the fact that we regularly borrow phrases heard on the playgrounds and in video games to describe military conflicts. In every war we identify “the winner”, “the loser”, and their goal (simply put): to beat the other one.
For all that, some may start to wonder whether it is the metaphor that shapes reality or the other way around. Just think of virtual reality. When asked what it is, most people start to talk about VR goggles and games. And they aren’t wrong. Owing to VR technology, war games, or “wargaming”, have become a part of modern military training in many countries, with the US leading the way. Before being deployed on missions, soldiers practise by playing simulations of combat scenarios on games like a military-issued Call Of Duty.
However, the rising popularity of wargaming technologies isn’t the only factor responsible for the difficulty in drawing a line between “war” and “gaming”. If you’re into strategic games, you probably have heard about game theory. Originally invented as a method of analysing mathematical models of games that don’t involve reflexes or aiming skills, nowadays the theory is used in the planning stage of many military activities. Its purpose is to predict strategic interactions among players – or, when applied to war-waging, the sides of the conflict, who are called rational agents. Notably though, “rational” doesn’t mean “reasonable” but “purposeful”. Therefore, “[p]layers in a game can have just about any goal including those that a game theorist might consider fanciful, misguided, or immoral”, writes Frank Zagare, Professor of Political Science at the University of Buffalo, in his article on the use of the game theory in interpreting wars.
The theory gives us a meaningful insight into the inner workings of the war machine. As a byproduct, it also articulates some simple truths about what modern war is: a calculated, goal-driven confrontation. Whether those objectives are “fanciful, misguided, or immoral” doesn’t matter here. It’s not the one who’s good or right that wins, but the one who’s more persistent (or lucky).
Yet, it should go without saying that equating war with a game is only a simplification. War isn’t “a game” or “like a game”. At some level of specification, nothing is like anything else. And so, at the end of the day, war is war, and that’s it. Language can only take us this far. But, despite their limits, we shouldn’t completely dismiss the potential the words have to shape and to change our reality. After all, skilful use of words is just as effective, if not more so, than the use of force – as one 19thcentury British playwright, Edward BulwerLytton, summed it up almost 200 years ago: “The pen is mightier than the sword”.
