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Chaos rules. It is simply madness. The countless billions of dollars invested in defense are proving woefully inadequate. Enemy fighters penetrate deep into our airspace even as ground to air missile batteries erupted with fire. The huge carriers with their escorts are fighting brutally against an enemy that seemingly has no remorse. With no other choice silos both on land and below the sea open and launch nuclear payloads. DEFCON is a strategy game that is unlike anything currently on the market. While many games have elements of nuclear war few actually seek to emulate it. In DEFCON, that is exactly what the player does – leads a country or region through thermonuclear war. The unique combination of subject, graphics and symbols, makes DEFCON a highly controversial game that seems to trivialize humanity by underplaying the consequences, showing contempt for life, and ultimately stylizing warfare into anything but a serious matter.
To begin to understand DEFCON you must understand the history behind it and how it ultimately translates into the game. During the Cold War two major powers reign supreme, the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries and their allies built up huge military stockpiles of all sorts, including massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. The United States devised a numerical system based from five (5) to one (1) to quickly explain the military readiness of all its forces. Referred to as ‘Defense Condition’ this was abbreviated to ‘Defcon’, thus becoming the title of the game. At defense condition five or Defcon 5, all forces are at normal operations. Progressively decreasing from five is a higher state of readiness when at one, nuclear weapons are deployed. In game this is represented by being able to do more with your units as the defcon level decreases. At five the player is only able to deploy units and bases, four your radar activates to detect enemy unit movements, three units engage each other, until you hit one and nuclear weapons are launched and all your strategies begin to either succeed brilliantly or crumble in ruins before your eyes. The objective being simple in that you hopefully avoid getting nuked.
When you play the game the first look is the game map. To those who have seen the movie Wargames it will look eerily familiar. It should, because DEFCON was based largely upon that movie. It is from the world stage map that you will command the various elements – planes, subs, carriers, and missiles. This isn’t Command and Conquer so you will not be seeing individual tanks, or soldiers. Units are represented by symbols on the map, a satellite receiver dish for radar, airport for air bases, crudely shown as lines; cities as solid circles, or squares depending on the population. While the interface is easy to use, navigate and ideal for displaying information needed to play effectively, it is never lets you forget you are playing a video game. This is in part due by the very concept, nonetheless it implies something much more crucial and profound; that is, war, is and has been, reduced to a video game.
Standing alone this a minor point. It is the element and subject matter that makes this concept so fundamental. War by its nature must involve an abhorrently large number of people, civilians and soldiers alike, and all sides must be represented. In DEFCON they are but not in any appreciable form. In the Command & Conquer series units were rendered and visibly died (or exploded) DEFCON removes even this vague depiction. A typical carrier task force involves one – three aircraft carriers, ten – twenty auxiliary ships that cumulatively represent five-ten years construction time, and crewed by ten-twenty thousand individuals. DEFCON shows all this destruction merely by an icon disappearing on a very large and unremarkable digital board. No explosion, no blood, no debris, no emotion.
Being a simulation rather then a historical representation there is no story line. This makes the former point especially remarkable. With no main characters, and no flashy visual eye candy the player is dropped into a world devoid of not only emotion, but loyalties. Arguably the most demoralizing element in all of this are several subtle sound effects. When playing occasionally you will hear coughing, maybe a sneeze, and when the bombs start falling, people crying. All of this is to generate the impression of being in the control hub – specifically North American Air Defense Command (better known as NORAD) during a thermonuclear war. It is this combination of digital design, lack of player – character – computer/AI interaction that drives the most important aspects of DEFCON and it is those facets that so successfully dehumanize the player into committing on-screen atrocities.
The best evidence to this fact is the scoring system. It is this same system that truly shows the worthlessness of human life by encouraging destruction and inevitably killing. While a player can play exclusively against the computer AI DEFCON is designed to be a multiplayer game with up to six people at any one time. The default scoring is where two points are awarded for killing every one million enemies, (this is considered a “megadeath”, accomplished by nuking cities) you lose one point for every million you lose. The second is Genocide where one point is awarded per megadeath. Lastly is Survivor where all players are given one-hundred points to begin with and lose one point per megadeath inflicted upon them. In any of the scenarios the objective is the same; kill your enemies and indiscriminate between civilians and soldiers. Bolstering this fact is the fearful reality that it is impossible to successfully defend all your cities from attack. At each launch of a nuclear weapon a launch detection warning is sent and a missile appears, a dashed line marking its trajectory. Assuming it survives to its target (and that target is a city) a white dot flashes on the screen at the impact site. Instantly three things occur; first, the population of the city decreases, second, the city population icon changes, third, your score is impacted. This process is repeated time and time again until eventually the bombs and missiles stop.
Beyond DEFCON is the entire concept of integrating and modeling war through game theory. This entire notion began with the military soon after World War 2. Using complex sets of equations, statistics and available data computers were able to devise scenarios for virtually any battleground, in any circumstance, on the globe. The end result of this ability is to predict the outcome of a battle on paper before hand. In past conflicts warfare has been somewhat attributed to an art form; one strategy countering another, a delicate dance that is repeated until one makes a mistake or feigns from exhaustion in manpower or resources. The decisions of front line troops under influence by orders from headquarters decided the victor; that is no longer the case, powerful computers capable of limited intelligence are upsetting the intragel balance between peace and combat. What once are abstract equations are now automatically being analyzed and acted upon. Military theory and statistics has moved from simply being math and projections to controlling the most powerful and lethal constructions humanity has ever devised; like in DEFCON, these know neither ethics, nor morals, their only consideration is in numbers and projections.
The world today is marked not by champions of peace but by increasing violence around the globe. As mastery of technology increases so does the chance of escaping the very horrors that made past wars so monumental. When missiles and bombs are automatically guided and controlled by television cameras, robots swim, fly, fight and die at the touch of a button or tilt of a joystick; the very act of killing becomes mute. DEFCON is a game that builds and furthers this notion in the most haunting and horrific scenario that war can possibly bring. It is by removing the emotions and producing an expressionless form of art that allows us all to discover our humanity, perhaps preventing the very thing we are creating for joyful entertainment on-screen.
