William Penn Life, 2016 (51. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2016-05-01 / 5. szám

Tibor's Take with Tibor Check, Jr.

A világháború

World War I was not a game along the Eastern Front

VIDEO GAMES normally don't inspire much contemplation: they are mostly mindless entertainment that provides an easy escape from the mundane rhythms of the everyday. But, one game I have been playing has been radically different and has inspired this month's Take.

The game is called Verdun. It is a first-person shooter game set on World War I's Western Front. As a player, you control an American, British, French or German soldier as you navigate no man's land, storm trenches, capture objectives and kill the enemy. Verdun is a brutally realistic imagining of the real-life battle it is named after, which claimed more than 300,000 dead and twice that number wounded. One shot from any gun will kill your character, and death strikes swiftly and indiscriminately: if the enemy's machine guns and bayonets don't get you, the gas, artillery barrages or barbed wire might. The flow of the game is tedious. Your fellow soldiers take and defend trenches against waves of enemies, but it's not really clear what impact those efforts have on the war. By the time the battle ends, hundreds of men have been murdered on the fields of France and Belgium, and both armies retire to their respective side of no man's land.

Many war-based video games often veer into the absurd; characters can withstand multiple grievous wounds, can jump and run like Olympic athletes and can tap into heroic shooting and fighting abilities. Those same games are often jingoistic and ham-handed, using blood and violence as props in a glorious and cinematic gaming experience.

Verdun isn't like that. Even though it is realistic and brutal, it never seems insensitive. For example, when your character is killed, the point-of-view shifts from first person to third person, almost as if the camera is showing the perspective of your character's disembodied soul leaving earth as the body twitches and convulses in its death throes. At first, this feature was annoying, as it added several seconds between "spawns" — that is, when your character regenerates and can rejoin the game. But as I played, this delay allowed me to reflect on what was happening in this simulation of one of the worst conflicts in human history. When my character was killed, I began to think about the very real men who struggled through those terrible battles, about the soldiers who were struck down.

One area where Verdun falls short is in its scope. Naturally, a game named Verdun would focus on the Western Front, especially its namesake battle in Northern France. But, this shortcoming is not unique to this game, rather, most of the World War I-related media available inordinately focuses on the Western Front. I think this is a shame, especially now, at the centennial anniversary of the conflict that defined so much of our modern world.

6 0 May 2016 0 William Penn Life

Beyond the horrific battlefields and trenches of Ypres, Verdun, Vosges, Amiens, the Marne, and the Somme, we should also take time to remember other, less familiar places like Przemysl, the Masurian Lakes, Isonzo, and Gorlice-Tamów. These places involved not the British or French, but Austrians, Hungarians, Italians and Russians. All told, the Eastern Front cost roughly 15 million casualties from the belligerent nations. But, what do we know of the immense suffering that took place in the East? Much of it, I think, is concealed behind a geographic, historical and linguistic veil.

Geography occludes what happened on the Eastern Front because of the immense distances involved and the lack of proximity to American audiences. The Western Front is located between the tourist hotspots of Paris and the Low Countries. The entire distance of the Western Front, as the crow flies, is little more than 300 miles. On the Eastern Front, 300 miles is just a small bit of land in a theater of war that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Not only is the Western Front closer to us in America, it is also concentrated to a distinct geographic locale: one can drive from one battle site to another in an afternoon. Not so in the East.

Historical perspective also conceals from us what happened on the Eastern Front. Strictly speaking, Austria- Hungary was on the losing side, and, more importantly, it was positioned in a theatre of war far removed from where American troops actually fought. As a result, most