Uncle Sim wants you!

That the fifth edition of the annual Video Games & High Culture Conference, held last autumn in Bari, in the heel of Italy's boot, was dedicated to the relationship between computer games and war was not very surprising. The war in Ukraine is on everyone's lips. For Europeans, this war is not a distant memory. Not only because it is taking place in Europe, but also because the European Union and individual member states, because of sanctions against Russia and the supply of increasingly heavy weaponry to Ukraine - from helmets to Leopard 2 tanks and perhaps soon F16 fighter jets - are being drawn deeper and deeper into the war. Putin, moreover, has increasingly openly framed the brutal invasion of Ukraine as a war against NATO, which would aim to destroy Russia. And since the use of tactical nuclear weapons is then justified according to Russia's nuclear weapons doctrine, the threat of nuclear war in Europe is also all over again.

In the game industry - the world's biggest player in the entertainment field - war has never gone away. War games, ranging from simple first-person shooters to complex simulators and multiplayer online
strategy games, are among the most popular genres of computer games. Its origins lie in nineteenth-century Prussia, where war simulations with pawns on a map were used to train military officers in tactical, operational and strategic thinking. Thus, historical battles and wars were reconstructed and attempts were made to predict the course of possible future conflicts.

With the development of the electronic computer, the first war simulations were programmed for mainframe computers in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The development of gaming computers in the 1970s and the personal computer in the 1980s then led to large-scale commercialisation and democratisation of war games. And with the growing computer power and availability of the internet in the 1990s, multiplayer online war games, which can be participated in via PC, game computer and smartphone, became the true killer applications.

A good example is the US Army-developed computer game America's Army, which was launched in 2002, shortly after 9/11, and was available for free download on the US Army website until May 2020. In this multiplayer tactical shooter, the player joins the U.S. Army and, to begin with, receives 'basic combat training' in the single-player mode, which focuses mainly on handling weapons used in the US Army. But the player also receives field instructions and parachute training and learns various other relevant skills, such as driving a Humvee ground vehicle and performing operational medical treatment. Once he has passed these, he and a group of fellow players must complete various military missions, competing against other groups of players.

The computer game, of which increasingly slick sequels appeared in 2003, 2008 and 2015, has been downloaded more than 20 million times in its 20-year existence and users have successfully completed some 180 million missions. Several spin-offs also saw the light of day, including a Virtual Army Experience Simulator (2007), deployed during public events, a Technology Education Program (2007), a webinar (2008), an Army Experience Center in Philadelphia (2010) and an America's Army Digital Comics Series (2013), all designed to educate youth about military missions in the virtual and real world. That support for the game was stopped recently is not so much due to a lack of success, but an adaptation of tactics to developments in the gaming world. In recent years, the U.S. Army, Navy, National Guard and Air Force have established e-sports teams, made up of active-duty military personnel, who give digital demonstrations of their skills at massively attended game events.

If we want to make sense of the relationship between computer gaming and warfare, Homo ludens: Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur, the book by the renowned Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, can help us on our way. It is an important source of inspiration for the computer game conferences in Bari, as evidenced by the title of the book Homo Cyber Ludens, co-edited by medievalist, game designer and founder of the conferences Fabio Belsanti and published in 2022, which contains a record of the first four conferences.

Incidentally, this is not the first time Huizinga's book has been rediscovered. In the 1960s, it was done by situationists, Provos and other artistic and political avant-gardes, who used the term 'ludic' borrowed from the book
to express the playful fundamental attitude of the time. Among other things, Huizinga's book was a major inspiration for the New Babylon project (1956-1974) by artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, an impressive series of designs for a futuristic home of the homo ludens, a play palace without fixed walls and institutions.

With the emergence of academic game studies (also known as ludology) in the 1990s, Homo ludens came back into the spotlight. There is virtually no introduction to this discipline in which Huizinga's book is not discussed as a precursor. It also brought New Babylon back into the spotlight, because this future gaming world, in which the constantly changing colour of the sky, according to visionary Nieuwenhuys is generated by computers, now retroactively resembled virtual worlds like Alphaworld (1994) and Second Life (2003), in which the 'inhabitants' could also experiment to their heart's content experiment with environments, roles, lifestyles and identities. But the fact that Nieuwenhuys' depictions of New Babylon became increasingly bloody and ominous over the years shows that even this 'utopian' world of homo ludens is not free of war violence.

Anyone who had read Huizinga's Homo ludens properly would not be surprised by this. Despite its title, it is by no means a cheerful book. Not only is the chapter 'Game and get' entirely devoted to the theme of war, the book also runs into a bleak diagnosis of the downfall of Western culture. In particular, according to Huizinga, total war, as manifested during World War I (1914-1918), threatens to plunge culture into 'barbarism and chaos'.

The basic intuition underpinning Homo ludens is the radical idea, inspired by Friedrich Schiller's analysis of the human urge to play, that all human culture stems from play. Contrary to popular belief - an idea that is also reflected in the mistranslation of the book's subtitle in the English edition: A Study of the Play Element in Culture - Huizinga's analysis does not focus primarily on the role of play in culture, but considers that all cultural phenomena, including war, should be understood as play.

In the penultimate chapter, 'Civilisations and epochs sub specie ludi', he summarises his study as follows: 'It was not difficult, in the rise of all the great forms of community life, to demonstrate a playing factor as extremely active and extremely fruitful. Playful competition, as an impulse of society older than all culture itself, filled life from time immemorial, and like a yeast brought the forms of archaic culture to maturity. The cult grew up in sacred play. Poetry was born in play, and continued to live off forms of play. Music and dance were mere play. Wisdom and knowledge found their articulation in sacred contests. Law had to unwind from social play. The regulation of armed struggle, the conventions of noble life were based in game forms. The conclusion had to be: culture, in its original phases, is played. It does not sprout from play as a living fruit detached from the mother body, it unfolds in play and as play.'

In his book, Huizinga points out the fundamental distinction between play and seriousness. According to him, play is an expression of human freedom par excellence because it has its purpose in itself and takes place 'outside and above the sphere of the sober life of necessity and seriousness', the struggle for existence characterised by labour and technical means. The game takes place according to specific rules, within a 'magic circle', delimiting it in space and time from the serious world. This applies not only to the sporting contest and theatrical performance, but also to religious ritual, justice, scientific research and military battle. These examples make it clear that play is by no means frivolous. Not only does play provide enjoyment, but it also establishes a sense of community and is indispensable for the well-being of the community. Therefore, Huizinga argues, in spite of its non-serious as if nature, we play the game with 'holy seriousness'.

In doing so, Huizinga seems to put into perspective the sharp distinction between play and seriousness. Play is vital. The chapter on war and play makes it clear that this distinction is not absolute for another reason too. In the practice of war, play and seriousness often enter into a hybrid connection. Huizinga assumes that in the 'earliest phases of culture (...) robbery, stealth, man-hunting and extermination' were commonplace, 'either from hunger, from fear, from religious representations, or from bloodlust'. Cultural civilisation first emerged when mutual struggles became bound by rules of the game. Initially, these applied only to one's own group, whose members were recognised as equals, but not to 'barbarians', 'devils', 'pagans', 'heretics' and other strangers who were denied basic rights and often even humanity.

Huizinga, who made an international name for himself with his magisterial Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), discusses at length in Homo ludens the medieval contest between two individuals or small groups, which often replaced the battle of all against all. Such contests were based on chivalric courtesy, honour and virtue, and tied to a specific time and place and strict rules of the game. Although even such noble contests were not infrequently fought to the bitter end, they avoided mass bloodshed.

According to Huizinga, this concept of 'playful struggle' carried over into modern times, when the ideal of chivalry was declared applicable to ever larger groups and culminated in the establishment of peoples' and eventually universal human rights. Although Huizinga acknowledges that in the practice of war, these rights are often violated because the political goal involved conquest, subjugation and control of other peoples, to the extent they are respected, they help curb the violence and suffering of war.

In the final chapter of Homo ludens, Huizinga argues that playfulness seems to be increasingly disappearing in twentieth-century culture. This inevitably leads, Huizinga had already concluded in 1936 - with reference to the bellicose language that became louder and louder after the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany - in his book In the shadows of tomorrow, 'to the right of the strongest and recognition of anarchy'. And in the World War II-written and posthumously published Geschonden wereld: Een beschouwing over de kansen op herstel van onze beschaving (1945), Huizinga identifies consequent militarism and 'frenzied hyper-nationalism' as the main causes of game and cultural decay.

In Homo ludens, Huizinga cites the mixing of seriousness and play as the underlying cause, breaking the magic circle of culture. 'The most essential characteristic of all real play, be it cult, spectacle, contest, feast, is, that at some point it is over. The spectators go home, the players take off their masks, the show is over. And here exhibits the shortcoming of our time: its play is in many cases never out, and therefore not a real play. A far-reaching contamination of play and seriousness has taken place.'

According to Huizinga, this dangerous mixing of play and seriousness takes place in all areas of culture. 'From one side the phenomenon occurs as a not entirely serious conception of work, duty, fate and life, from the other as an attribution of high seriousness to occupations, which in pure judgement should be called trivial, childish, and as a treatment of truly weighty matters with the instincts and gestures of play.'

He cites as examples the commercialisation of sport, in which the game increasingly falls into the grip of economic interests, and gambling on the stock market, where 'the sober life of necessity and seriousness' degenerates into what is nowadays referred to as casino capitalism. This involves 'foul play', pretending to play the game fairly according to the rules, and not infrequently 'game-breaking', completely breaking the rules of the game, which amounts to the destruction of culture and community. Huizinga sees such phenomena as manifestations of puerilism, childishness, permanent adolescence, caused or facilitated by 'the technology of modern mental intercourse'. Huizinga thinks here of the influence of then-new media such as radio and film, which lend themselves willingly to propaganda and war incitement.

It would be unjust to dismiss Huizinga's criticism of modern, technical media as the lament of a conservative-pessimist cultural critic in the spirit of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918-1922). Not only because Huizinga repeatedly calls himself an optimist and makes constructive proposals to restore European culture in his latest book - the aforementioned Geschonden wereld - but also because his analysis on the pollution of the distinction between seriousness and play is highly topical in the light of the close entanglement of today's gaming industry and warfare.

In 1960, US President Dwight Eisenhower, former commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, warned on leaving the White House of the undermining of democracy by what he referred to as the "military-industrial complex", the alliance of arms industry, military and influential politicians. 36 years later, the U.S. National Research Council pointed out that this military-industrial complex has become increasingly intertwined with the entertainment industry. Whereas film and television initially played the leading role in it, in recent decades that leading role has increasingly been taken over by computer games. In their 2002 article Theatres of War, Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood introduced the term 'military-amusement complex' for this constellation, referring, among other things, to the computer game America's Army, launched the same year.

A well-chosen example. The US military used America's Army primarily as a successful propaganda weapon. It tamboured the noble values of the US military: loyalty, devotion to duty, respect, honour, integrity and personal courage. A 2008 mit study learned that 30 per cent of all US 16- to 24-year-olds had gained a more positive image of the military through the game. The fact that in the game the player can only take the role of an American soldier and never that of the enemy, who is in a desert landscape and has an Arab appearance, has drawn criticism that the game promotes militant nationalism. It is not without irony that because each player plays from the perspective of an American soldier, the enemy is also made up of American soldiers, effectively making the game a civil war simulator.

At the same time, America's Army, which is partly based on war simulations designed and used by the military, is an effective training tool, playfully teaching the player the military skills that prepare for a career in the US army. Serious gaming all the way. And finally, the game also proved to be an effective recruitment tool. The website allowed players to apply for no less than two hundred exciting positions in an 'unstoppable team' that teaches lifetime skills. Exactly how long such a lifetime lasts, the website did not mention. Whereas the army previously spent many millions annually on recruitment, the seven-million-dollar America's Army was not only much cheaper, but also much more efficient.

Conversely, the game industry provided the army with user-friendly human-machine interfaces. For instance, the popular Nintendo WiiMote controller (the Joypad) was soon used to control military robots (Packbots) and drones used in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Carmel, a military combat vehicle introduced by the Israeli army in 2020, which has no windows but does have a panoramic display, all operations, from steering to operating the combat systems, are carried out using a Microsoft Xbox game controller. And the Ukrainian soldiers attending the five-day course at the 'drone training centre' near Kyiv to operate the increasingly important military drones on the battlefield are selected partly on the basis of their Sony PlayStation skills. This continuity not only increases the training value of wargames (young learnt is old done), but also does away with the distinction between computer game war simulator and the control panel of the warcraft, and hence that between game and reality. That is, until the moment the player is wiped out on the battlefield by enemy fire and no replay proves possible.

The blending of game and seriousness is also pregnant in the spectacular nature of contemporary war, which takes place not only on the battlefield but also in the media. As the situationist Guy Debord already stated in La société du spectacle (1967), reality is increasingly disappearing behind the tsunami of images poured over us by the mass media. Although the popular assertion that the US lost the war in Vietnam not so much on the battlefield as on television needs nuance (initially, the US media reported overwhelmingly positively on the conduct of the war), it is undeniable that during the course of the war, the images of the 'search and destroy' missions and bodybags of dead soldiers were a major contributor to the Nixon administration's decision in 1968 to withdraw US troops.

That experience helped the US military keep a firm grip on image direction during the Gulf Wars in 1990-91 and 2003, treating the public to images of 'precision bombing' reminiscent of computer games and obscuring the gruesome reality behind the digital images. It inspired French sociologist Jean Baudrillard to write a trio of cynical articles, before, during and after the Gulf War, proclaiming respectively that the war would not happen, did not take place and had not taken place.

The current war in Ukraine is also spectacular in the sense that it is being covered by journalists, bloggers and vloggers as if it were a close contest, with - on the Western media front - jubilant comments as underdog Ukraine manages to corner the Russian bear against all odds. Meanwhile, trolls spread misinformation and hackers not only try to break into crucial physical infrastructures such as nuclear and other power plants and the internet, the nervous system of the information society.

The latter makes it clear that with the erosion of the distinction between seriousness and play signalled by Huizinga, the distinction between war and non-war is also blurring. This is eminently expressed in the hybrid nature of contemporary warfare. Not only do irregular troops - private militias such as the Wagner Group, insurgents, partisans, guerrillas et cetera - increasingly take part on the battlefield alongside conventional armies, but at the same time, in addition to the already signalled media dimension, the battle is also taking on an economic and information-technological character, which also blurs the distinction between 'real' and proxi-war completely.

That this opaque situation also provides ample opportunity for various forms of foul play and breaking the rules of the game, the war in Ukraine provides numerous examples. Putin is undoubtedly a master at this, when he sells the referendums in the conquered territories as honest plebiscites and bombs power plants, hospitals and residential blocks on a continuous basis. In doing so, he wilfully places himself outside the international community and rule of law. But his opponents are also flexible with the rules of the game, for instance when the EU reacts indignantly when Gazprom turns off the gas tap in defiance of supply contracts, or when NATO claims it is not at war with Russia, but that only individual countries are helping Ukraine defend itself.

Meanwhile, behind this game, which is as shadowy as it is grim, many tens of thousands are falling dead on both sides of the front line, and there are fears that even the rules of the game of mutual assured destruction (mad) will be abandoned and giant mushrooms will start to form over European cities. We could use some of Johan Huizinga's optimism. Let's hope the Ctrl-Z key is found in time.

This essay is an adaptation of Jos de Mul's lecture delivered at the fifth Video Games & High Culture Conference in Bari on 17 October 2022 (videogamesandhighculture.com). On Huizinga and digital culture, De Mul and others published the book Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures, published as an openaccess publication by Amsterdam University Press in 2015. On Constant Nieuwenhuys' processing of Huizinga's Homo ludens in New Babylon and its influence on digital culture, De Mul published the article Database Architecture: Anthropological Reflections on the Art of the Possible in 2009. The aforementioned publications can be downloaded at demul.nl