Introduction
11-11 Memories Retold, developed by Digixart and
Aardman Animations, is a narrative video game published in 2018 that offers two refreshing approaches in the video gaming industry. First, it is aclaimed as an anti-war game and second it's gamification uses trophies based on cultural heritage, in concrete resources from Europeana.
In first place, let me make clear that the intention of this article is not a game critique. If I write about this game it is because I love it and I've spent many hours playing it and developing learning scenarios based on it.
The aim of this article is to evaluate if, and in which way, this game promotes peace, and how it can be used by learners to enhance their skills and abilities in peacebuilding and helps them to find ethical orientation. The question of the obvious value for cultural heritage, and its thrilling approach to it shall be discussed in separate article.
Just from the start it was announced as a game that aimed towards promoting peace, without further defining what peace actually means.
But, we can read inbetween the lines, that in the case of the video game peace is marked by ending the war and avoiding any killing. The main mechanics to achieve this goal are a narrative that is strongly and mostly supported by an emotional flow, seven possible endings of which one and only one is titled peace ending, and a peace trophy.
With this approach, the game designer certainly opened the war genre to a new gaming community and satisfied many worried parents who still believe in the general opinion of a rather poorly documented press stating that shooting games convert their kids into neurotic serial killers. This could be a topic on its own and shall not further be discussed here. But if one deals with a community that shares this opinion, the framing of II-II Memories Re-told is certainly a good starting point to introduce sceptics into the gameworld as an educational tool.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet in her article Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film? observes: 1
Thus, films that denounce a specific war may
not necessarily depict all war as necessarily wrong. Conversely, films that depict war in
general as costly and horrific may nevertheless suggest that a specific war is necessary and
worth the cost. In fact, this brings us back to Saving Private þan, which depicts combat as
brutal but World War II itself as sacred and its generation's sacrifice as deeply honorable. In
fact, one would be hard-pressed to find any film that suggests world war II was not an
important war to have fought and won.
It seems simple to define a film that promotes war as films that "represent wars as effective rites of passage and as valid means of becoming a man" 1.
[P]ro-war films. ... represent wars as effective rites of passage and as valid means of becoming a man .
Reading Aardaman Animation's referencing of their own critiques, where they mention in first place the impact on the audience as "affecting, memorably beautiful interactive story", suggests that through arts their game is "sanitzing" the war, rather than confronting the player with the reality of war 1 2.
Anti-war genre
The anti-war genre has become more and more popular since the Vietnam war. Usually, it avoids violent sceneries, or only to contrast it with the beauty of an apparently normal life, or it victimizes the heroes or his proteges.
War is depicted as something that nobody actually wants, that has nothing to do with daily, normal life and is limited to the field of operations, sometimes also to the suffering of civilians within the war zone or under some form of specific oppression.
This idea starts from a wrong paradigm at first.
Nobody actually wants war
The assumption that nobody actually wants war, is true as long as we keep the word actually in the frase. Nobody wants her or his own kids to be killed, no one wants to flee and hide, and most people are to lazy for a fight, even for a healthy one at their own work place. Actually, that's true.
But, what if war can make us immensly rich; I mean, not only the few polititians, high rank military, and business people in the war industry, I mean, making us rich as a nation, providing us with otherwise impossible geopolitical or economic advantages? What, if a war is the cheapest way to get out of dispair, opression and poverty?
It seems, that in lack of concluding answers, the current discourse simply erases centuries of theories of jus ante bellum, jus in bello, and jus ad bellum.
Nevertheless, the question of good and bad is not beyond the game 11-11 Memories Retold. It becomes quite clear who the good guys are; the young apparently innocent soldiers, Kurt and Harry. And here, the question of jus ad bellum comes into play. They have audience approved reasons to engage in war.
Harry wants to become recognition in order to impress a young girl, get married and found a family. It seems almost like an excuse, that his role is shooting propaganda pictures and not actually shooting at people, at least in general.
Kurt wants to find his son, lost at the frontier. Thus he enlists as soldier. As a comment in the margin, he could have become a paramedic, or become one of the first war reporters as fifteen years later Gareth Jones would do, but that is no option in the game.
Further, there are the sweet innocent daughters of the two men and Kurt's wife. All so sweet, passive and apparently unengaged, just sitting out the situation. The whole game leaves completly out, the enormous importance women had in their role supporting leaders, working in the war industry, breeding soldiers, maintaing daily live running in midst of the chaos and in many more aspects.
The bad guy is foremost Gareth. He seems a veteran in love with his job, fighting and killing as a vocation. Perhaps, he is just committed in doing his duty and giving his best. But, this reflection is not considered. As a man with bad temper, apparently overacting he ends up killing Kurt's son being a defensless prisioneer in a war camp, when trowing some water at Gareth in an act of protest. Barrett is also a very flat character, without any background development. We do not understand why he has such bad temper or why he does at all what he does. He is simply bad.
The fact that Harry plays the role of a war photographer is one of the most interesting aspects of the whole game. While being well aware of the intentions that central government departmens had during the war time, they use exacly the same strategies by setting war in the right light.
One way, to define a film clearly as pro-war according Soltysik Monnet, is by contrasting the correlating enlistment statistics. This seems a very powerful tool for past wars, where most of the action took place on a battle field. But is this still valid for a society in which cyberwars, economic wars, and strategic inmigration politics have become much more powerful tools than any traditional weapons? Possibly, these elements played always a role and one leads to the other. A statistic related to the game would be interesting.
Peace is not the final rest
Taking pictures; a critical review or a non-violent activity?
But does this necessarily mean that an anti-war game must portray the crudity and losses war brings with it? Soltysik Monnet explains how in the example of the film Sands of Iwo Jima, this strategy was in contrary used to motivate young man to enlist, by making the sacrifice high, but valuable and importante (p. 406).
One of the key problems in this game is that the only anti-war message is to "put the gun down". But their is no attonement, there is no real insight about one's own contribution to the whole mess, no confrontation with one's own guilt. For this reason, the film must finally also end without hope of redemption. Apparantly, everybody goes home and continuous as before. There is no character development, except perhaps Barrett, who had shot Kurt's son for a small symbolic gesture of aggression, and decides to let Kurt alive, when he actually gets ready to kill Barrett.
The costs of peace
As a short comment inbetween, the whole game never discusses the costs of the peace. What does it mean for all the veterans, unemployed after the war? What about all the traumas? We do not need to become very crude, there is in fact a scenery where some more disharmic sounds try to evoke a kind of unease, which seems to me one of the best parts in the game. War trauma do not only come from suffering and observing "terrible" things. It is ofte already a simple physical reaction to the lack of sleep, hunger, constant pressure, huge efforts without real achievement, axhaustion, noise and air pollution in all its forms. We have not even touched direct physical harm, such as bomb splinters and gas that can destroy one's nerves or rational mind for the rest of one's life.
The other cost is the post-war "peacefull" live. World War II is often considered a direct result of unsolved conflicts in World War I. Or the German Wirtschaftswunder, it was not only a result of the WWII, it was also the cause of creating a completly wrong paradigm about malehood, success, economic values and achivement in life. A paradigm whose effects have to be paid today. But some of the readers might have a different opinion here. It is not my aim to create any crispation naming this example. This is how I feel it, you might substitute it for some other example. The point is, war comes at a price, but peace is not for free neither. The state of peace is an active state, a state in which people resolve, settle and standout all the unavoidable conflicts within a countries frontiers and also beyond them. Peace requires effort and requires commitment, and there is something like a false peace, where conflicts are just fought at another level. Wars did actually not end with WWI or WWII. I mean, they did not end for Canadians and Germans (as in the game) neither. We tend to say that since WWII Germany lives in peace, but the truth is, there are a lot of fighting troops financed and raised by the Germans all over the world right now. If they are there, it means there is some war, and it means that it is a war that means something to Germany, even if it is not faught on German grounds. (If I name Germany, than only because they are one example in the game, the reader might exchange it with any other nation.
Peace and pacificism
No real dilemmas
As described in my book
Principles of Liberty, in order to promote peace, a narrative needs an actual dilemma as defined by Dramatica. This is not the case here, not at all.
On top of that, the game is not trying to overcome one of the greatest misconceptions provoked by war movies, the catharsis. War movies often seem a sort of Greek drama, and are often described in much worse terms than they merit. The question is, if catharsis is a way towards peace, and under which conditions. The Greek drama were mostly written to enact the emancipation from the Gods and fate (e.g. Oresteia), and in later periods, freedom from man made arbitrariness (e.g. Antigone).
No tensions
Compared to other games, such as
What remains of Edith Finch, the game, as much as it is labeled as emotional, makes little use of these emotions.
Many gamers like war games because they release tensions, and the capacity of video games in achieving this effect is largely proven. Why did the developers of 11-11 Memories Retold not make use of this capacity in order to recreate the experience of anxiety, fear, fright, boredom, so much associated to war experiences. It seems so simple to make the right decisions (about shooting or not) sitting relaxed in an armchair, walking within poppyheads and taking the time necessary to walk towards the right decision. And decisions seem so obvious.
In order to achieve the "peace ending" the player must take the following choices for each of the characters.
Harry has to choose to save his new achieved friend Kurt, the German opposer, and to forget about becoming a hero and returning with his girlfriend. Certainly a hard decision. What I like about this option is that it connects to the target player audience, secondary school students. For most of them it will be imaginable to be forced taking a decision against staying with a girlfried, for example going abroad to an exchange programme. So, this part helps to understand the difficulty of taking "the right decision". Probably, this game had engaged me in a different way playing it being 30 years younger. Now, I simply think, either Kurt does not fully understand peace as the only scenario in which he will be able to have a normal life or he has not a very objective perspective on the importance of the very specific women he is in love with. For a player who is not badly in love and has a quite abstract concept of peace, the choice is simple. (For love sick as well, but it will the opposite choice). But interestingly, this is not relevant. We do not feel the exhaustion the soldiers in the trenches felt. They just wanted "it to be over". They were not actively looking for peace, only hope that this hell would end, which is a very differnt thing. We can get a feeling for this watching the film
A Very Long Engagement.
Kurt has to forgive Gareth who killed his son.
Told in such simple words, the options sound plausible. But reviewing tons of documentary material on real life war experiences, the context seems to be missing. In both cases, the decision to go to war was meaningful. The young men were not forced to go, but decided to go. A privilege many real soldiers never had in any war. Another problem is the false believe that soldiers kill their enemies because the hate them, speak do not forgive. Hatred is often promoted by propaganda in order to strenghten the soldiers will to go forward and follow orders, but this is often the least important reason, if at all.
The 2020 short movie
Without Words by Ivan Shakhnazarov illustrates this type of dilemma quite well.
Towards the end of the game, the player should believe, that within all the turbulences and chaos of the ending war, giving up such an importante goal would be a reasonable option leading towards peace. Remember, Kurt engaged in the war allegedly to find his son. He learns about his son being killed only a few minutes before he encounters Garreth. For my taste, the ease with wich he is able to revenge his son is quite unrealistic, as well as the degree of impulsiveness that an immedate action for revenge would need seem not really fit for the quite and thoughtful character of Kurt. Still, to bring this dilemma up is a great opportunity for discussions in the classroom. Yet, it seems not very adequate for veteran games who only know to well the fight, working hours and hours to get an achievement, risking everything amking the right choices in team building and strategy, as for example in League of Legends. The need to forgive can be experiende there a much more realistic way and not in this staged and argumentative form. Revenge is something viceral and there is nothing instinctive in II-II Memories Retold.
Already while playing the game, this part seems the hardest to believe. The decision, if taken in that form, feels like surrender and not like making peace, it remains impulsive. And the impulse that is celebrated throughout the whole game is some sort of anesthesia, keeping tensions at a minimum. In no moment the game becomes "intense". The girlfriend - the only anchor that kept so many soldiers at live - forgotten at a sudden, the dead son simply put apart for an apparent higher goal - to forgive. And what does forgiving actually mean in the context of this game? If you are surrounded by opposing soldiers, what can you win by killing the murderer of your son, knowing that you will be shot to death inmediatly after, and having a wife and a daughter waiting for you at home? Where in this part is a genuin intention of forgiving expressed? There is a hughe difference between forgiving and surrender, and the game seems to have mingled both. A part from that, soldiers know best that their business is killing. They know that one has to take controverse decisions and that the nerves can make one behave like a heartless idiot. They know about the pleasure of being evil and even being rewarded for it. Just read
Eugen Sorg and his research about the Pleasure of Evil.
“Behind evil there is no pathology, no despair, no revenge for injustice suffered. There is nothing behind him but the decision to do evil. »
Soldiers know about it, hide it and try to live with it for the rest of their lives. This is one of the dilemmas of war that can hardly be represented in a game, but should at least be discussed.
One of the films who comes probably closest to it is
The Four Feathers directed by Shekhar Kapur.
In general, the game propagates a sensation of peace as the absence of killing and noise, in the most purest Weberian way.
Love and war genre
The combination of love and war is almost as explosive as sex and violence, and makes almost any pacifist approach impossible. Here, love serves as reference point for both men. Love is limited to family bonds and kinship. The reasons that lead both men towards a friendship, another form of love, remaine somehow unexplained. Is it instinct, mutual support? All over, the game lacks any form of transcendence. The characters blaim the fate or suffer hardship, but they reach in no moment an existential crisis. The drawbacks of war seem more like an unpleasurable work, but in no way the characters feel - or make feel the audience - that their whole world is breaking down. This is enforced by the harmonous picture of the German town, apparently save from bombings, food rations and other problems. Just look how careless the bread is lying on the table!
On the Canadian side the picture is not better. Nothing gives a hint to ruthlessness of Canadian soldiers during what would be the bloodiest conflict in the Canadian history. Nothing explains where these deep anti-German feelings came from or what the Canadians actually feard so much that they engaged in the war. Is it to complicated for young learners? Too complicated for the game environment? I am not sure what the reasons are. But all over it seems that the game tries to explain war in the same way the flower and the bee explained sex to children in the past. It is not completly off the facts, but....
Failed diversity
The player gets a sense of the game producers good intention to bring some diversity into the storytelling. Not regarding women, which are extremly stereotype and follow the typical patterns of the view back from an imagined paradigm of chronological progress, which has nothing to do with reality. I largely address this point in my
learning scenario.
It is nice how an Indian soldier is included. But I am not sure what Indian soldiers role is, perhaps a support, a Guardian in terms of Dramatica? He feels much of a stereotype for me, being a dispensable secondary character. It is great to see that at least the presence of foreigners, especially foreigners of colours is mentioned, but it is not really represeting the importance they had.
The role of the Indian Army with the Triple Entente, which would become even more prominent in WWII, the Egyptians, and other Africans in the Black Army, the Ottomans supporting the Germans - all fighting on European grounds, and the role of the Chinese and Japanese in this conflict. Even more important is the question of Jewish Europeans and Gipsies. Certainly, this cannot be reflected within the context of this game, simply for its complexity. But to mention somehow the importance of the envolvement and the reasons would give more depths to the whole issue. The game supports the idea that the war was simply there, by fate. Perhaps, this is intentionned to avoid distraction or unnecessary debates about the true reasons, to avoid the need to explain what evil actually was fought. I accept this. But I wished, the game writers had found a solution in order to abstain from the classical dichotomy of the good and the bad, the enemy and the friend. Wars, and especially WWI, are exactly wars because these questions are at stake. It is a state of chaos and it is this chaos that makes logical decision taking so difficult.
Diversity cannot be achieved by including a foreigner into the narrative, without also disrupting the 20th century propaganda on gender roles, ethnicity, nationality and redefining manlihood.
The enemies of peace
Good feelings, good vibrations
The graphical design and sound for the game are selected with much care in order to create an environment and underline sceneries towards an emotional experience. This experience tells more through the feelings each game situation arises than trough the text. The result is a full sucess and highly acclaimed as "affecting, memorably beautiful interactive story".
Emotion seem to play an important role in the mechanism of both pro and anti-war films. They are the main drivers in the decision making process to engage or abstain from a bellicose activity.
But which are the emotions that make people "feel right" (Soltysik Monnet 2016, p. 407
1)? The more intense and better controllable use of emotions put those narrative films certainly above documentary films, at least in their persuasive power and impact on the audience. This should be discussed with care. In my personal experience, it is beautiful and has some touching elements, but it misses to represent any aspect of war.
Good consciousness
In order to keep a clean consciousness it is helpful to keep clear who the bad guys, the enemies are.
In the past the, nazis, and since the Cold War the communist were simple and convicing targets. At least in the case of the nazis it still seems almost unconceivable to doubt about their quality as bad guys, who ever individually comprised the group of nazis. There might be gray zones such as some civilians, people similar to the game character Kurt, or some German generals, but coming to the party leaders and Hitler, the answer becomes clear. They were monsters and anybody thinking differently is suspect of being a monster as well. The good thing about this is, that anybody able to distanciate from those bad guys becomes a good one. The game supports this impression that we can escape war with an entire self-image, that there are innocent people who engage in war. Certainly a difficult question, but I had welcomed at least to mention the question. If we play an anti-war game and promote feelings of self righteousness with it, I believe we miss the goal. A war cannot be won, or as Albert Schweitzer addressed this issue in more general term:
"The good consciousness is from the devil"
Overacted positivism
The problem with the audience
Anti-war films and games are much less universal than other movies. The emotions and problems in war are universal, but the experiences are not, exactly for their quality of being existential and us such constitutive, both for the individuals as for their community.
One important phenomena in audience perception is the connection or disconnection of depicted experiences from one's own experiences, as described in the article Why does my pacifist boyfriend love war movies so much?
Conclusion
War has a cost, so has peace. The question about war and peace is threefold:
- if it is admissible to enter a war (jus ad bellum),
- how to conduct war (jus in bello), and
- wich impact peacetime activities have on bringing war about (jus ante bellum) especially in connection with the idea of a "global rule of law" 3.
A key issue to put the desired message forward is clarifying before writing the narrative what shall be understood by an anti-war position. This envolves a clear theory about a concrete bellicose event, defining why it started, how it was developed from an ethical point of view, how this particular success relates to a position about war in general, and how the costs of war are compared to the costs of peace.
In resume, I liked the idea of the game and hope more games in this line will be produced. My aim was to contribute some reflections on improving the learning effect of such potential future games.
1
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet. (2016).
Is There Such a Thing as anAntiwar Film?
In A Companion to the War Film, First Edition. Douglas A. Cunningham and Sohn C. Nelson. New York, NY:John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Retrieved from https://people.unil.ch/agnieszkasoltysikmonnet/files/2010/09/Antiwar-Film.pdf
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2
Ardaman Animations. (2018).
11-11 Memories Retold.
Retrieved from https://www.aardman.com/work/11-11-memories-retold-game/
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3
Garrett, W.B., & Bohm, A. (2015).
Introducing Jus ante Bellum as a cosmopolitan approach to humanitarian intervention.
DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354066115607370
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