serial consign

[the game of war / from alexander galloway's 2007 talk at mediamatic / photo: silvertje]

Once you start peeling back the layers of discourse that cut through game culture, one of most developed discussions you'll find is on the relationship between gaming and the military (see my previous post Information and Warfare). Ed Halter dedicated an entire book to exploring the Military-Entertainment Complex with his 2006 text, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games and he continues to blog about the topic at War and Video Games.

Alexander Galloway is no stranger to "gamer theory" and gave a talk this past fall at Mediamatic where he presented a Java prototype of Guy Debord's Game of War that his Radical Software Group had been working on (see Anne Helmond and Michael Stevenson's posts for more info on this presentation).

[my moderately successful attempt to fortify my borders]

As per the endorsement of Iman Moradi, I recently started dabbling with Weewar, an online turn-based strategy game that allows you to get in touch with your inner imperialist. In the game, each player starts out with a few bases, troops and currency to levy an army. The game map is broken down into hexagonal plots of land, with a range of possible terrains each being ideal for or off-limits to specific unit types. Each player must scramble to capture bases (which boost financial assets) while protecting their territory.

The simple maps, limited unit types and lo-fi graphics are quite refreshing and in many ways the game has more in common with the original "wargame" Kriegsspiel than most contemporary military simulations (i.e. the razzle-dazzle gameplay of Command and Conquer). Best of all, gameplay moves along quite quickly due to an automated email system that informs players when it is their turn.

Weewar has been enjoying a lot of success over the last few months - it was recently nominated in six categories for the 2007 Browser Game of the Year and boasts a community of more than 25,000 players. I wholeheartedly recommend the game for research into simulated warfare and/or compulsive procrastination.

[diagram illustrating the logistics of JSTARS netcentric warfare - for more information see the 116th ACW site]

After years of reading around him, I finally have dug into a text by theorist Manuel De Landa. A friend recently gave me her copy of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and I've thoroughly enjoyed working through it over the last few weeks. In this writing project, De Landa reads military history in relation to philosopher Gilles Deleuze's notion of the "machinic phylum," a term Deleuze used to describe the paradigm of self-organization. The text repositions the military as an abstract entity and provides an alternate history of technology that deals exclusively with the will of the military machine. The following excerpt outlines De Landa's conception of the elements of military metabolism:

If we think of tactics as the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy as the art of assembling battles to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic and industrial resources that make it possible. If a war machine could said to have a body, then tactics would represent the muscle and strategy the brain, while logistics would be the machine's digestive and circulatory systems: the procurement and supply networks that distribute resources throughout an army's body. pg. 105

In essence, the military state is rendered as a self-aware apparatus with an endgame of making the most efficient use of the tools and resources it has available at its disposal to achieve its goals.

In working through military history, De Landa addressees numerous themes including: troop formation, training psychology, urban fortification, projectile weapons and guerilla warfare. The onset of the industrial revolution and Taylorization create a new paradigm which is in turn eclipsed by our current informatized age:

If Frederick the Great's phalanx was the ultimate clockwork army, and Napolean's armies represented the first motor in history, the German Blitzkrieg was the first example of the distributed network: a machine integrating various elements through the use of radio communications. As the flow of information in a system became more important than the flow of energy, the emphasis switched from machines with components in physical contact with each other to machines with components operating over geographical distances. And if a Turing machine is an instance of the Abstract motor, then several computers working simultaneously on a given problem correspond to the third in the series clockwork-motor-network: a parallel computer. pg. 158

One of the interesting things about this 1991 text is that it anticipated the extensive attention that would be devoted to the "network" paradigm. I've read through The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture and Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and found the treatment of topics like emergent intelligence and AI in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines far more satisfying than in these other texts.

[a night vision fire-fight from activision's forthcoming call of duty 4: modern warfare]

One of the reasons that I found War in the Age of Intelligent Machines so compelling is that the analysis overlaps with a lot the historical and theoretical literature dealing with video game culture that has emerged over the last several years. De Landa's book provides an excellent companion text to Ed Halter's From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and VideoGames. Halter's text is a extremely well-researched history of the connection between the military and gaming/entertainment industry. Roger Stahl of Ersatz is also a scholar in this field. Stahl recently produced a documentary and text on the military entertainment complex, both entitled Militainment. I've seen Militainment, and like the Halter text the research project provides a thorough analysis of the unsettling connection between military culture and commercial entertainment industry. Some of the themes that both of these authors address are Hollywood cinema, new-school recruitment and how ideology constructs narrative frameworks in fiction.

As if this post weren't link laden enough, a few weeks ago an excellent interview with Stephen Graham was posted at Subtopia. Graham is a geographer at Durham University in the UK and deals with the intersection of urbanism and geopolitics and the notion that the city is the battlefield of the 21st century. I guess it only follows that the next text on this evolving reading list is Graham's forthcoming Cities Under Siege.