When my brother Lewis and I were little we used to play ‘army’ a lot. It turned out that other kids called it ‘war’. We had a grandad with a shed full of wood-working tools and it wasn’t unusual for him to kit us out with wooden guns, swords and shields to act out our pretend fighting (I even got him to make a wooden brick once — yeah I know, I have no idea either). At some point we also got a load of military hats, enough to dole out to our friends, and on them we wrote in permanent marker ‘Sharpe’s Rifles’. Well that’s what I wrote anyway, nobody believed me when I told them ‘rifle’ was spelt with a single ‘f’.
War (or ‘army’) was one of the ways we used to enjoy ourselves, to us it was just a game — and this was before we had realised our favourite electronic past-time was our favourite electronic past-time. It was also before we knew what real war actually was. All I knew of real war were the images of burning oil fields in the Gulf and a mustacheoed man by the name of Saddam emitting from the TV at my grandparents. I didn’t understand it and truth be told my little brain didn’t want to either. To me and my brother, war was a disconnected but innocent role-play where we got to fictitiously shoot each other for fun.
When I was at uni I remember my flatmate saying that he wasn’t a fan of war games because he felt that they trivialised some of humanity’s darkest and saddest moments. I never forgot this sentiment but at the same time never gave it the thought that it really deserved. It was only recently when I was looking to purchase Arma II: Combined Ops that Armand from Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming said a similar thing, and this time it got me thinking.
Should war ever be fun? Much like mine and Lewis’ play fighting many years ago, with war games there’s a disconnect; a gap between the action and the very real things that make the prospect of war so terrifying to any sane individual. Gaming is a mechanical medium, so understandably war games tend to focus primarily on the physical, mechanical, action-oriented side of conflict, with only a fleeting secondary glance at the emotional. They’re about the weapons, the shooting, the killing, the blowing shit up, the taking cover, staying alive and being victorious. It’s not necessarily the action that’s at fault — after all many of these things could easily take place in any other action game — it’s the dish that it’s served on. For example, Company of Heroes or Call of Duty could, for all intents and purposes, be set in far flung sci-fi worlds without losing the essence of what they are really about (think along the lines of Dawn of War or Halo, in fact, just look at Battlefield 2142: essentially the same as any other Battlefield game but in a different time period and setting).
So what purpose do real-world theatres of war settings serve if not to draw criticism for their host games making light of them? Is it to offer some form of insight into these periods of time by cleverly tapping into history? Or perhaps to act as a lens to magnify a specific message? Or is it just a cynical and effortless way of shifting more units and/or bringing the game closer to home in a bid to give it more emotional clout without necessarily having to work to elicit it?
From my limited experience, a real-world theatre of war setting is often nothing more than window dressing for another po-faced, if cinematic and highly polished, shooter with little or nothing to really say. And I think that’s where the problem lies: war games that have nothing to say other than DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA; glamourous guns and glory porn for role-playing children, forumite sig dick-swingers and firearm freaks. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a cathartic slice of DAKKA pie as much as the next person, but in most war games it has a tendency to feel carelessly estranged from its source inspiration, like it’s missing the point. War is atrocious and tragic but war games rarely communicate this and if they do it often comes across as trite and glib. (Ahh, I’ve been wanting to use that word ever since I discovered it amidst the feedback for my final essay at university.)
Anyway, the long and short of this is that I just want to talk about Sensible Software’s Cannon Fodder, a misunderstood and unlikely anti-war war game that was, bizarrely, as fun as it was eloquent and touching. I’d go as far to say that it is one of, if not, the most important war game this medium has ever had, and it’s nearly 18 years old. It was way ahead of its time. A black comedy war game with a message ingrained in nearly all of its assets; it was in the title, the imagery, the music and in the very mechanics of the game itself. Cannon Fodder wasn’t set in any real-world theatre of war and had no great aspirations of recreating one either. It cherry picked the elements that would serve its message; the mortality of the soldiers, their identities, honouring them in life and death, eager replacements, collateral damage, mercy killing. What made Cannon Fodder such a controversial title however, was its approach. On the surface it seemed a brash and irreverent shooter that glorified war and violence but beneath that was a clever and composed game that too few truly engaged with. Here was its biggest problem:
The red poppy, a symbol of remembrance for the millions that fought and lost their lives during World War I and part of the logo for the Royal British Legion (a charity that provides support to members or former-members of the British Armed Forces), was planned to feature on the box art as part of the game’s logo. Needless to say this didn’t go down well with the Royal British Legion, the media or anybody else with a knee to jerk, and after mounting pressure the box art was redesigned before release without the poppy. The original logo remains in the game (as seen above) but is preceded by a disclaimer saying ‘This game is not in any way endorsed by the Royal British Legion’. Then there was the game’s tag line and theme tune (sung and composed by Jon Hare with the help of Richard Joseph):
‘War has never been so much fun.’
First impressions would tar this as crude marketing sludge, not unlike War Inc. Battlezone’s ‘War is big business and business is good’ (feel free to facepalm), but on the contrary; ‘War has never been so much fun’ was a satire on the glorification of war itself. The song went on to say:
‘Go to your brother
Kill him with your gun
Leave him lying in his uniform
Dying in the sun’
Even the box’s rear cover, a place typically adorned with screenshots and bullet points listing the game’s features, was featureless and simply said:
‘Don’t wait ‘til you see the whites of their eyes…
Don’t kid yourself it will be over by Christmas…
Don’t try to shut out the screams…
And don’t forget to wash your hands afterwards…’
Like the image of the poppy sandwiched between the words ‘Cannon’ and ‘Fodder’, it wasn’t exactly subtle but it was wry, unflinching, sharp and progressive, at least for a game. It was a potent and controversial mix, which probably explains why the media, in the wake of the poppy debacle, and like a chimp absent-mindedly scratching its balls, demonised the game without attempting to understand it or engage with it in any way. No surprises there then.
Cannon Fodder started with a seemingly innocuous green mound called ‘Boot Hill’ skirted by cutesy recruits lining up ready to enlist. This was the main ‘hub’ screen which punctuated missions and allowed you to load and save your progress. The recruits were your lives, both in traditional gaming terms but also as lives to command on the battlefield. Ironically, in Cannon Fodder the soldiers were treated as anything but cannon fodder; each recruit had a name and would be promoted for each successful mission they carried out, or alternatively commemorated on their death. The first few recruits were actually named after the developers themselves: Julian ‘Jools’ Jameson, Jon ‘Jops’ Hare, Stuart ‘Stoo’ Campbell and the late Richard ‘RJ’ Joseph. They were always the first ones to enlist and almost always the first ones to die.
At the top of the screen were home and away game scores showing how many soldiers you’d lost ‘away’ and how many you’d killed or scored ‘home’. This intentional terminology only served to reinforce the game’s satire. As you lost soldiers the hill would slowly fill up with gravestones and as missions came and went, more recruits would arrive. The juxtaposition between the home and away scores, the clusters of poppies lining the road, the gravestones gradually covering the entire hill, and the endless queue of recruits obliviously lining up in front of it, trailing off into the distance, eagerly waiting to replace the fallen, all with Richard Joseph’s melancholic ‘Recruits’ playing over the top, was perhaps the game’s crowning achievement. The Boot Hill screen was a summation and stark reminder of your actions, and as more and more soldiers were killed (both allies and enemies) it became a poignant image depicting the senselessness and tragedy of war, and even now remains every bit as affecting.
Playing similarly to Commando, and with a strangely appropriate resemblance to Lemmings, Cannon Fodder was a solid top-down, almost arcade, squad-based shooter. Each mission was divided into sections or ‘phases’, each with their own quirky title often referencing popular culture. Briefings were usually along the lines of ‘kill all enemy’, ‘destroy enemy buildings’, ‘rescue all hostages’, ‘kidnap enemy leader’ etc. Only when a mission was complete could progress be saved, so mid-mission deaths were likely to be permanent unless you wanted to load a previous save. The problem with reloading was that missions were often made up of several lengthy and dangerous phases so it wasn’t always a convenient option to start the whole lot again.
Over time each of your soldiers became a valued individual as they steadily progressed through the ranks and when you were several phases deep with an unscathed squad of veterans who’d survived against the odds, you were careful to keep them that way. Cannon Fodder was also unforgiving in that it only took a single bullet, explosion or stray piece of debris to kill a man, so death was never far away. This was especially true when destroying buildings because they had a tendency of throwing doors and rooftops your way after exploding. On occasion soldiers would also get injured and lie there bleeding, continuously screaming out in agony until you mercy killed them yourself or left them to die. There were also moments where you’d stumble across innocent and harmless locals and, while they often served no tangible purpose within the mission itself, I can’t help but feel as though they were put there as bait for the trigger happy and as symbols of collateral damage.
When all is said and done however, Cannon Fodder was a game, and a tremendously fun one to boot. I suspect many players were so busy enjoying themselves that they missed the game’s message amidst the fog of war. It wasn’t a message with a game lazily tacked on or a game with a message shoehorned in, each of its components elegantly supported one another in a way rarely seen in games.
How Cannon Fodder compares to its peers in other more developed media is up for debate — I say this on the back of recently watching the excellent Band of Brothers for the first time — but as a game, it’s the most meaningful, respectful and consequently mature war game I’ve ever played. Cannon Fodder was bold, unique and an important step for the medium, it’s just a shame so few seemed to notice.
From the instruction manual:
‘And on a more serious note: don’t try playing this at home, kids, because war is not a game – war, as Cannon Fodder demonstrates in its own quirky little way, is a senseless waste of human resources and lives. We hope that you never have to find out the hard way.’
If you intend on playing Cannon Fodder I highly recommend checking out the Amiga version using the fantastic WinUAE because the DOS version uses woefully inadequate MIDI to reproduce the sterling soundtrack.
Email the author of this post at greggb@tap-repeatedly.com
Interesting rumination on the war game, Gregg. I’ve often considered (at least lately) the function of war games, at least those set in real-world theaters, and especially those set in modern times. I suppose I don’t wonder too much about the ethics of using World War II or something, because it’s been fodder for all forms of entertainment for so long that it doesn’t seem that strange to me; but there’s a part of me that feels vaguely uncomfortable at the very thought of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare simply because it is so close to reality, right now.
I don’t know. I feel like recent CoD games attempt perhaps not to say something, but to provoke reflection from the player: arguably, I think, the thing games are better at doing. Expecting games to have a message feels a bit too literary for them, and can fall to the player influence argument; maybe we should instead wonder how war games can (and fail to) make us reflect on the reality of these conflicts that, for many of us, are distant realities, barely more real to us personally than a futuristic battleground.
My god, Gregg. Cannon Fodder.
I played this game as a youngster, around the time it came out in ’93 or ’94 … you’ve brought back so many memories I had forgotten about. Jops! Jools! Oh, the memories…
Of course then I had no idea what it was about, other than shoot, shoot, shoot. I loved that game.
Upon reflection, it was quite the black comedy, wasn’t it?
“I feel like recent CoD games attempt perhaps not to say something, but to provoke reflection from the player: arguably, I think, the thing games are better at doing.”
I agree and I think that’s what makes Boot Hill so effective. It’s a screen that the game goes back to again and again, and whether you like it or not you’re going to see all those gravestones and all those recruits and eventually you’ll reflect on that; you’ll see what the developers want you to see. They give you the dots and you connect them. There’s enough there to have the capacity to know exactly what it is they’re trying to get across but it’s subtle enough to offer the satisfaction or sadness of finally seeing it.
I think the problem with relying on show-not-tell is that players may walk away with the wrong impression or non at all. I prefer knowing that an author implicitly intended something rather than wondering whether they really meant anything at all. It’s a fine balance. Provoking players and relying on them to wean out meaning when there might not be any seems like an easy way of blagging depth — this is coming from somebody who has seen plenty of it through art college and uni! 😉 That’s what I like about Cannon Fodder: there’s little ambiguity but it’s not too literal.
For how good it was, I think Braid is a big culprit for this. The game is clearly about something but I’ll be damned if I (or anybody else for that matter!) can work out what it all really means.
(What’s the player influence argument? That the player can affect the message?)
@xtal: Yeah I’m with you. I didn’t understand what it was all about back then either but in recent years it’s sort of ‘clicked’. I’ve been playing it over the last few days and it’s aged very well.
I think Cannon Fodder was available on the Megadrive but I never quite felt motivated enough to bought it.
This is playing into something I’ve been thinking about recently.
Now I loved the original Call of Duty and the entire game bled the message that war was a nasty, shitty thing even though you had “fun” throughout the experience. The thing is, this is a very old message. It didn’t say anything new except the meta-statement that “other games have lied to you”. Gmaes do meta-statements very well, but that doesn’t tell us anything about our own lives. It just tells us more and more about games, which is a very incestuous and narrow channel of discourse.
Legions of writers have been writing on the theme of Call of Duty – war is not actually cool, m’kay – since the year dot. Did that message transmit easily because it was already familiar?
What happens if a game attempts to send an unfamiliar message? Going back to Rohrer’s Passage, the basic mechanic bludgeons the statement “stay single => more opportunity” but that’s a horribly crude moral. It’s the kind of simplistic message that give games a bad name, painting your world in black and white every day. But there’s more that can be extracted from Passage than that, but how many can reach another thematic level? Is it Passage’s fault or the player?
The new mantra is “the player is the artist, not the developer”. If that’s true, perhaps games may only be able to tell us something about ourselves.
Right, Gregg, that interactivity wrecks authorial intent, etc., and thus the player won’t necessarily experience the precise thing the creator intended. Arguably down to camera angles, if you’re thinking cinematically.
I personally think it’s a bit much to go that far with it, but especially in games where the player has a lot of branching choice the nature of the content can change somewhat.
@HM: I remember thinking similar things after playing Rod Humble’s The Marriage. It tries to communicate relatively complex things through interaction alone using the absolute minimum it can get away with. Some people said ‘Well that’s not what my marriage is like!! Rod’s a dick!!’ but I think it was about how he saw his marriage.
As a stand alone piece the game is difficult to decipher because it’s so damn abstract (‘The Marriage’ being the only associative and instantly recognisable thing about it — if it had been called ‘Untitled’ we’d have been screwed) but once you understand what each element represents (thanks to the readme that accompanies it) there’s a clear intention there. I thought it was a really interesting exercise in, I don’t know, I suppose you’d call it ‘expressive reductionist’ design.
This is a great, great piece, Gregg. All through it I found myself thinking of another war game franchise – Advance Wars for the DS and GBA. It is almost completely opposite in message; in fact, it makes war childish, cartoonish, comic, an anime crowd activity. One (or more) reviewers said that Advance Wars accomplished the amazing task of making warfare a child-appropriate activity.
You’re right, most games sanitize war. Call of Duty and what have you, not bothering with the screams or the fear or the cold or the injuries, just the running and gunning, the DAKKA pie as you put it. Advance Wars didn’t sanitize the experience so much as put warfare in a cereal box, and it was an excellent game, but the message was quite different from this one’s.
So Gregg, based on this rumination, do you see yourself thinking differently about buying or playing certain games? Does an experience like Cannon Fodder make it easier to appreciate the loss of human life in a simulated environment? I’ve killed many people in many wars (all simulated, no combat drops for me), but rarely do I think about them once the obstacle’s removed. I’ll try to thanks to this fine piece of work.
Great work Gregg.
I’m very guilty of the mindless nature of most war games, it has to be said. I think if there is a problem of any sort there then I am very much part of that problem. Maybe not the Call of Duty problem (I hit serious franchise fatigue last year with Black Ops. That’s the only game in the series I’ve not finished) but maybe the general stupid-ass-dude-bro-generic-brown-corridor-shooter problem.
In all honesty though, I believe Call of Duty is a game that does what it does very well and makes no pretences to be anything else. I suspect a ridiculously small percentage of Call of Duty players at best will actually care about the thought of gunning down potentially hundreds of people, and as a result the game makes no effort to teach these people any different. The story is most often ridiculous, throwing bland shouty characters around real world locations dodging lots of big explosions. But it is very easy to play and offers a very visceral, loud, obnoxious and brash chance to charge around shooting your mates. Clearly, that’s absolutely fine for record breaking numbers of people.
Personally, I’d question whether the public would be ready for a more personal and emotionally involving war game even if one was in the pipeline. Medal of Honour generated it’s own shitstorm just for using the Taliban name in their multiplayer segment (instead of “Middle East Defence Force” or whatever they went with), although I’m a little cynical of their motives for attempting to do so anyway. Konami dropped Six Days in Fallujah barely a week after the game was announced due to the sheer volume of pressure about it’s more realistic take on the Iraq war. Would people, or at least the general great unwashed public, accept a game that offered a more realistic yet upsetting view of war even if there were any now?
@Steerpike: You know, I’ve finished Dual Strike and Dark Conflict (otherwise known as Days of Ruin outside the EU and Oz) and while the latter tries to be grittier it still slips into the cereal box. They were great games but the fluff between the missions really wasn’t necessary and mildly entertaining at best.
With regards to my playing/buying habits, I don’t play many real-world war games. The last two off the top of my head were Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The former I only ever played through the single player campaign while the latter was purely for multiplayer with friends.
I’ve always been a big fan of the Battlefield games, from 1942 and the Desert Combat mod right through to 1943 and Bad Company 2. It’s not necessarily been the settings or the conflicts themselves that have drawn me to them but more the objective, class and team-based dynamics. Quake Wars was excellent for all these things but unfortunately its community dried up leaving all the tough hombres behind who I could never compete with.
Since getting my new PC I’ve been quite keen to give Arma II a go. The main thing that draws me to the Arma games (and the original Operation Flashpoint) is their emphasis on trying to authentically simulate the mechanics of war– not necessarily the horror of it. After playing the demo of Arma II it’s clear that Bohemia don’t give a rat’s ass about making concessions to deliver a more traditionally ‘fun’ experience like most war games. They want it to be severe and realistic and I can get behind that — it’s an entirely different beast to say, Call of Duty or Battlefield. Having said this, as a simulator the controls are ridiculous for it.
With regards to appreciating the loss of human life in a simulated environment, I don’t know. I’m a cold sonofabitch so it takes quite a lot to make me care about a bunch of pixels pretending to be a person. I’m not connected to my soldiers in Cannon Fodder in the same way as I was with say, Norman Jayden (who died horribly in my playthrough of Heavy Rain) but I can totally appreciate what those little guys represent, if that makes sense?
Blimey, longcomments.com
@Mat: I agree and just to be clear, I’m not trying to condemn action games — there’s a place for everything — I just think that games set in very real-world conflicts should attempt to do something more than the simple action we’re accustomed to. Modern Warfare had a couple of moments that were unlike anything I’d seen before, the post-nuke blast, the hostage/execution scene, the surreal aerial bombing run, but otherwise the game was just a really solid and cinematic shoot ’em up.
I don’t profess to have any answers here but I’d like to think that in time we can say ‘war game’ without people instantly defaulting to ‘war shooter’. I know Cannon Fodder falls exactly into this category but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.
I’d be interested to see what Konami would have done, or at least what they intended to do with Six Days in Fallujah.
Before the series had a bad name, do any of you remember the PC game that was actually titled “Call of Duty”?
Excellent game; although it unwillingly changed the landscape of war games into what you see now, it was also a big, bold, emotional, non-shouty (mostly) game that had weight. Most people remember Stalingrad: one magazine, off you go.
I’m betting CoD: The Beginning is about the price of a manky peanut now. I’ll do a bit of at digging at the local pre-owneds, see what I can find.
I loved the original Call of Duty. Other than my obligatory football management sims, that was my sole interaction with PC gaming. It really was a fantastic game. I’d also say Call of Duty 2 was pretty good too. I played that on my launch Xbox 360 and it was pretty impressive.
To be fair to Call of Duty it has a pretty rich heritage even beyond the bazillion selling behemoth it is now. Call of Duty 4 is in my opinion one of the most important console games of this generation. It introduced me (and presumably plenty of other console players) to properly brilliant online gaming for the first time, and I spent hours upon hours playing COD4 multiplayer across the beta and the full game. For better or for worse, Modern Warfare introduced alot of the standards that console FPS games feature by default these days.
Gregg, Activision released Call of Duty on PSN and Xbox Live around the launch of Modern Warfare 2, but for a pretty ridiculous £11.99 or something like that. It didn’t hold up well on consoles at all, the controls felt horrible and it was a pretty ludicrous price point. I’m sure you could find a boxed copy for the PC super cheap, mind.
Call of Duty 4 definitely still is one of the better online experiences, I agree, Mat. Call of Duty 2 was also as strong as the first game, if a tad less dramatic and a tad more action-packed. Call of Duty 3 is utter garbage, worst single player and online I’ve ever played.
But the original … mmm mmm good. Definitely get it on PC, Gregg, or don’t get it at all.
Excellent read Gregg. Cannon Fodder was a much smarter game than it gave even itself credit for. Here’s hoping we see more like it.
I would like to clarify the point I made to Gregg in our first discussion on war games. I play a lot of games (as anyone who knows me can attest too), but the one genre I almost never even touch are the “realistic” war games. Games that try to recreate warfare in actual theaters of combat and historic instances. A large part of this (and something I don’t openly discuss too often) is that my family and I were war refugees when we showed up in Los Angeles many many years ago.
We escaped Beirut Lebanon, my birthplace and first home because of the horrible civil war that plagued the small nation. Growing up there, my memories of the war had nothing to do with the kind of thing we see today in games like CoD or war movies.
What I saw was the effects the war had on our neighborhood. The streets were deserted as our neighbors and ourselves hid in our homes, often deep underground in bomb shelters, unknowing or unwilling to acknowledge that many of the bombs being used in that conflict would tear through 20 stories of concrete and explode only after reaching our pitiful shelters. I saw neighbors with missing limbs and dark attitudes, wild dogs running rampant on the streets as no functional government was there to keep things orderly. I saw the men sitting in their homes, unable to work because it was too dangerous to go out, or because the value of our currency had plummeted to the point of being worthless. I saw the women anguishing over where they would find fresh food to feed their children, or which of their kids would even survive the year knowing that at any time their entire building could collapse. I saw fields with tiny signs right next to our home, signs that read in an Arabic I couldn’t read “land mines.”
And I saw my own two parents, stressed, angry, hopeless, afraid, and crazy, using what little resources they had to keep us alive.
There was rarely any electricity, only an hour or two of television when we did have power, and that was dominated by grim news of just how bad things were in our struggling little country. I was raised on powdered milk because we didn’t have any of the fresh stuff in the markets (hell, we didn’t really have markets), and my mother was too stressed and distraught to produce any of her own for her two little babies. I remember learning to read by candlelight, classrooms with bare, white walls, and teenagers in charge of “teaching” us.
I sat in various bomb shelters not knowing what I’d done wrong, as I was too young to understand that bombs were dropping outside, and that what seemed like a punishment: hiding in a dark room with other families or students for long hours, being told to not speak or move, was actually us cowering in fear.
My toys were broken dolls without heads, and a handful of green army men, representative of the troops that patrolled our streets armed with massive guns tipped by frightening knives.
I didn’t understand the difference between an Arab, Christian, or Jew. Those were just names associated with the fighting factions. I didn’t know about Palestine or Israel or about the thousands of refugees who had been slaughtered in camps only a half hour drive from our homes.
When I think of war, I think of my childhood and of these half forgotten (or blocked out) memories. I think of my father covering me with his own body in our car as he frantically tried to get me home from school as bombs fell all around us. I think of my mother, quiet and sad and half crazy from living in constant fear. I think of other family members or friends of family that were there one day, but (I was told) were killed by indiscriminately lobbed bombs or gun fire the next, mere collateral damage (as Madeline Albright might call them) in a conflict without winners or losers, without good guys or bad guys.
That is war to me. Yet, that is also something I never see in video games. Perhaps the accusations that games don’t have the maturity to handle such content is correct, and I should just accept it. Or perhaps developers and publishers know that these things wouldn’t make a “fun” game, they wouldn’t prompt another round of flag waving and yellow ribbon tying the propagandist mindless war games promote with their “kill the bad guys” rhetoric.
Suffice to say, I don’t play war games.
Sorry for the long post…
That’s one thing which no war game I’ve ever played has represented– or even attempted to–, the civilian horror.
Thanks for sharing, Armand.
Thanks Armand. As unfortunate as your past experiences are, your perspective is the sort we (perhaps thankfully) never really witness. Whether games are the right medium to try and convey that perspective is up for debate. In time I’m sure they’ll be able to accurately render them, but whether or not virtualisation and interaction will add anything over traditional media is another matter entirely. Cannon Fodder shows how well a relatively simple but stark message can be communicated in a way that’s unique to gaming. Let’s hope that there’s more out there where that came from.
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