Looking back on my time as a six-year old in 2001 and watching my Dad play Tiberian Dawn, my imagination and intrigue was captured by the cool installation process (like how it was set up to reflect an "actual" command console), the Full Motion Video cutscenes, the pre and post mission graphics and the manner in which GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod set themselves as distinct and distinguishable factions different from one another on so many levels.
When Gaming and Current Affairs Collide
All this talk of terrorism, how the new world order of peace and stability was being challenged by some messianic cult group and how the international community needed to bond together to counter such a threat boggled my prepubescent mind. Granted I did not really understand most of what was being stated on my computer screen but Tiberian Dawn did become my introduction to such complex and "adult" terms.
Fast forward into today and I am surprised at how much Command and Conquer had been a crash course in Geopolitics and Current Affairs, going so far as to be an oracle for the current situation that we find ourselves in.
Again in 2001 as I was watching CNN's coverage of the September 11 attacks, I had this gut feeling that something really bad was about to kickstart. Two years after that I found out that a new Command and Conquer game had been published, one that was titled Generals and which soon had an expansion called Zero Hour. What was more interesting was that I could choose a third faction to play this time and that the third faction in question were these folks called the Global Liberation Army.
What intrigued me further was that the GLA was a significant departure from C&C's standard faction stereotypes of steamroller (GDI and Soviets) and specialised (Nod and Allies). Furthermore, as I discovered, the GLA were actually going to be a terrorist group that plays on ethnic stereotypes and which *gasp* I would be able to play!
But I did not understand how much of a bold statement Generals and Zero Hour were, to let you play as such a faction in such a political climate, especially considering the fact Iraq War was kicking into full gear. Only now do I understand how much the latter two games reflected the political vibes and tensions of the early noughts and translated it into something for mass consumption as a form of entertainment.
Do not even get me started on how EALA had one of the earlier USA missions as literally being a Second Liberation of Baghdad. This is literally telegraphing real world events and modifying them to a minute extent to fit the context of a game. Consider also with all the threats of loose nuclear weapons being on the black market being used as "dirty bombs" in the post-cold war landscape.
Now think back on one of the starting China missions which has the GLA detonate a nuke in the middle of Beijing. Not forgetting the other operation in which the aim was to destroy the Three Gorges Dam. These are actual national security risks being played out digitally and of which partially lead to the game's banning in China. Again C&C shows how it hauntingly reflected present day political tensions.
Consider the uproar a few years back when Medal of Honor Warfighters was planning to let players play as the Taliban. I was surprised we did not get some sort of similar reaction back when Generals came out (other than EA modifying it for their main consumer base Germany, but that's a different topic to be covered another day).
Predicting Future Warfare
I soon understood that the C&C franchise had its origins on having predicted the future trends of warfare. From its foundation, C&C has always attempted to be a franchise that reflected certain periods of human history, both past and present. The entire Red Alert series was based on the Cold War and always had the recurring theme of alternate history running through it. Going back a bit, Westwood's Brett Sperry, who was Executive Director of Tiberian Dawn, had the foresight to understand the changing nature of warfare and that future wars would not be the inter-state conflicts or the Communist insurgencies of old.
No, they would be fought by large coalitions, regional and global supra-entities, against similarly widespread and influential non-state actors who claim that their cause is a just and sacred one and who's chain of command has evolved to such a level of decentralisation it would make even the Mujahedeen proud. We look to GDI and Nod as a conception of such foresight;
The Brotherhood of Nod was a literal and visual conception and realisation of such an idea and threat. A quasi-religious, messianic terror cult hell bent on opposing the tyranny of the Western world and aiming to liberate the developing world which was chained to slavery, and lead by an all knowing and all powerful individual.
Now where have we heard that? Of course you just have to check and flip through any news channel to know that that is our present day political, social and security landscape as molded by groups such as ISIS and Al-Shabab onto the global community.
Then what about GDI? Well my take on it was that it would be the idealist's response to counter such growing aggression. In Tiberian Dawn GDI had not become the supra-global power it would eventually evolve to be, a status it shared with Nod by the Second and Third Tiberian War.
The original GDI was still under the thumb of the United Nations and bound by all its conventions, even to the extent they were entirely funded by them. GDI could not take unilateral actions as and how they please and were severely limited by the Security Council's decisions. You would think that Westwood created GDI as almost an anti-thesis to the United States and its unilateral actions for the better half of the 2000s. Again this is a para-reflection of our modern reality. Westwood got inspired by what they were witnessing happening in the world in terms of political and military broadstrokes and channeled them as ideas into their game development.
History and Gaming
While there will always be critics that claim and state that such games are immoral, insensitive and tasteless due to a wide myriad of factors, I take the opinion that they can alternatively be viewed as historical records, a testament to the great degree of influence that the world's political climate at any point of time can have on inspiring the development of certain video games to the extent they become almost a mirror image of our reality.
I would blog more but this would eventually evolve into some form of pseudo-current affairs-gaming thesis which is undesired. What can be certain and concluded from the above however, is that certain C&C games, Tiberian Dawn and Generals in particular, were acute predictions and reflections of the world's political climate, both past and present and reflected how much Westwood and EALA were inspired by what was transpiring around them to the extent they heavily featured such elements within their work.
FallenXE
Disclaimer: The opinions of this blog are solely that of the author himself and not of Gamereplays.Org. Any concerns regarding this topic should be brought to the attention of either the author or to that of Gamereplays.Org.
