Gaming in the real world

Author: Fred Hunt
Published: 16th January 2008

Previous page Comments (48)

Stress and stamina

This is the grey area that even in real life can’t be predicted or accounted for. How many times have you actually thought what it might be like to come under fire in real life?

How long do you think you would actually last before cracking up after seeing your friends being seriously wounded or killed? After all, you’ve got to remember that there is no respawning in real life.

How would your judgment and moral fibre be affected by constant exposure to violence and death? You can't just turn it off, go out and play football – you're in it for the long haul, soldier.

These are the questions a real battlefield soldier wonders before entering a theatre of war, and nobody can answer them for him. Time would be a very important factor too because after 45 minutes of running around, with your adrenaline pumping at full throttle, your natural reserves will suffer and taking a rest is all that will stop you from becoming a burden to the rest of your team.

The most exhausting thing you are likely to encounter in the gaming world is running out of Bawls or Pizza whilst attending a weekend-long LAN party. Although having attended an iSeries LAN party recently, I discovered that Domino’s Pizza delivers directly to your table. Bring along a pack of man nappies and you can stay immobilised for the whole weekend (I don’t recommend doing this, or sitting next to someone attempting it for that matter).

Sheer Chance

Have you ever been hit by a ricocheted round in a game? What about slipping on some loose ground that causes you to break your index finger in the trigger guard? Ever had a bird strike in the engine of an F-35 Lightning II?

These are all unpredictable and terminal events in a real life battlefield. You would have to be unlucky for any of the above to happen to you, but in most games the programmers make sure you are never this unlucky by not programming bad luck into the game in the first place.

Gaming in the real world Stress, Chance and Physics

A limited number of game environments are destructible, and some require specific hardware

Game Physics:

One thing that was very evident when I spent time in Bosnia, was the way soldiers used their environment to their advantage and adapted it to suit them. For example: where a building had a vantage point and no firing position, a couple of grenades or some HE created one. When the opposing side found these firing positions, a few well placed tank rounds made sure they were no longer usable.

Has it ever annoyed you that a certain part of a map in a game was a narrow rush point, where the enemy seems to have multiple safe firing positions facing it? In real life once these are identified they would be widened or the firing positions would be taken out permanently. This is the disadvantage of a game environment that is fixed and non-destructible.

As you can see, the gaming industry has had to make important changes to what some of us experience every day in real life to make the games more inviting and enjoyable than real life ever will be. There will always be hardcore reality fans that will never be happy until the game is more of a simulation than a game, and in the case of Battlefield 2 for example the Reality Mod community have changed the game to be exactly that.

I’d suggest giving it a go and then comparing it directly to BF2. You will be surprised how much harder it is to play, and once you get into it you will notice how the gameplay needs team work as solo missions end as quickly as they start. Would this version have ever become as mainstream as the original? It probably wouldn’t, simply because of the steep learning curve and the “hard to die, easy to re-spawn” desire that is prevalent in the gaming community.

Closing Thoughts

I hope I have given you an insight into how user demands have shaped what we play today, how something realistic isn’t necessarily fun and how much training and hard work is needed by those who do this for real. Creating a game that reflects a real life battlefield is impossible, as every person reacts differently to the environment around them. The fear of being hurt doesn’t exist, creating a bubble of security that just can’t be eliminated.

The question is, would you honestly really want to feel the same fears of a soldier? I think Post Traumatic Stress Disorder specialists may find their offices packed with shaken up gamers if the next Battlefield game featured a full war simulation mode. When I come to think of that though, at least there would be nobody left to spawnkill me, so maybe it wouldn’t be quite as bad as I’m making out…