HELL LET LOOSE

MI-CHAEL:  I dunno. It’s like how I play this game. It’s a kind of World War II simulation. The creators have attempted to faithfully reproduce the uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and accurately recreate many of the actual locations. There are farmhouses and barns and little villages, forests and rivers, desert valleys and snowy hillsides. And, of course, all this becomes strategic barriers, defensive locations or staging places for your attack. What’s interesting about it is the combination of chance and skill. It’s more like a game of chess than others of this genre; because it’s largely about coordinating the team, acquiring and distributing resources, manipulating the environment by building and removing obstacles, and responding effectively when the opposing team inevitably does something unexpected. You can’t just run around with a gun and shoot the enemy. Like, if you intend to capture a strategic point, you have to somehow safely get supplies and troops there first. But that means covering a long distance, in a terrain the enemy knows well. And you can either do so in loud and highly visible vehicles or slowly and arduously on foot, hopping fences and scurrying down cliffs, trying not to fall to your death — and all while avoiding enemy strafing and bombing runs, artillery and tank fire, and sniper rounds. And if you do reach your destination, well, that’s exactly where the bulk of the enemy force is, anticipating your arrival and line of attack. But because you take a side, and there can be dozens of people per side with any level of experience in the game, it’s like playing chess with pieces of varying quality and value each game. Like, in this game your knight doesn’t know he can move backward or two of your pawns just refuse to attack. Or maybe you have no queen at all and lose sight of the whole left side of the board from the start. But why am I telling you this?

DO-DONA:  No idea. Something about war.

MI-CHAEL:  War. Oh, right, recon flares. In this game, standing still is a great way to get yourself killed. At best you’re not getting done anything that needs doing for but a few moments before eating a bullet or a high explosive howitzer shell. And when you’re out there getting it done and being shot at, there’s a good chance that, unless the person doing the firing has never played before, you’re going to die pretty quick. And there’s an even better chance of that if you don’t immediately return fire. But doing so also means you give up your own location to everyone in the vicinity who isn’t firing at you, both due to muzzle flash and, of course, the sound from your shot. That said, the only thing more dangerous than making a bunch of noise by shooting at someone is running. Movement is easily spotted even at quite a distance and your opponent is always looking for you. So running pretty quickly draws fire from anyone paying attention. But the enemy is often in pretty close quarters with you, like immediately outside the building you’re in or waiting for you behind a hedge row, and can easily hear your footsteps on the pavement or coming up through the mud and grass, especially if you're running. And if you’re going to try and lay low in a useful location, where you can build defences or nodes to acquire resources, or to take sneaky shots at the enemy or spy on them and relay their locations, what often happens is that an enemy reconnaissance unit comes upon you. Worse than that is when they fire a flare over your location. You or your whole unit or entire team may have found yourself a cosy little spot, that’s maybe easily defended or where your fire is somewhat concealed, but when a flare goes up you’re all exposed. Everyone on the opposing team can temporarily see your exact location highlighted if they just open their map. Of course all the troops in the area are an immediate concern in that scenario; but more worrying is the artillery team back at their headquarters and the enemy's command, who has access to several types of air support, and all of whom also just suddenly learned of your exact whereabouts. So there’s not really any hiding.

DO-DONA:  Sounds miserable.

MI-CHAEL:  It’s delightful. Even after hundreds of hours of play I still duck in my chair when there’s an enemy strafing run. You hear the plane in the distance and then realize it's headed in your direction. Your hair stands on end and you reflexively duck the incoming rounds as you’re dived upon by this fighter plane. And you can’t not flinch when a sniper round nearly misses you.

DO-DONA:  That’s one way to spend your time.

MI-CHAEL:  Indeed. The first videos from this game were memes mocking how quickly and easily it is to get yourself killed. The videos would be a guy spawning in and immediately getting blown up by artillery fire along with his entire unit, spawning in again and instantly dying the same way; then the player thinks they have a plan and spawns in at an entirely different location across the map, only to get shot through the helmet by a sniper *ping* before even being able to take a step. Many people, it seems, take many hours just to figure out how to stay alive long enough to do something, anything, other than get killed.

DO-DONA:  You could be reading a book.

MI-CHAEL:  Oh it’s far better than any book. Books are perfectly lonesome and passive and uninvolved. Anti-social.

DO-DONA:  Are they?

MI-CHAEL:  Actually, the game is really just an endless barrage of life lessons if I think about it. 

DO-DONA:  Like what?

MI-CHAEL:  I dunno, like, it’s good to know your role and do it well. And that performing your role well means you can do so much more than that as well. Or it’s very helpful for everyone if you’re good at both taking and giving orders; but what’s better than that, the next level, if you will, is no one ever needing to give or receive orders, which should be everyone’s aim.

DO-DONA:  That counts.

MI-CHAEL:  What else? That communication is key; but that “good communication” is not correlated, in any way, with the amount or volume of communication. In fact, it’s often the opposite: it’s about being extremely quick and concise and doing so as infrequently as possible. Ideally, too, good communication doesn’t even require words. Most of what needs communicating is best done visually on the map or silently in text. If everyone’s talking, you’re probably missing important verbal messages from superiors and, even more essential, the countless acoustic cues from the environment, all of which are vital. Like hearing footsteps or a troop transport vehicle in the distance. You often can’t see something that you need to know about. Or distinguishing between types of enemy fire. There’s a big difference between a five person unit trying to dash across an open street with a bolt-action rifle at street level at one end or one with a machine gun with deployed bipods on a rooftop. Or aircraft: is it an enemy supply drop, reconnaissance plane, or a bombing run? You can distinguish those long before you can see them. And if you wait to see where a bombing run looks to be directed you probably don’t have the jump you need to get out of the line of fire if it's coming your way. And if you’re doing too much talking you’re probably even missing some of the essential visuals cues, as well. There’s definitely a large cohort of all-talk-all-the-time folks. And they definitely believe they’re being effective and communicating well. But it’s all just noise.

DO-DONA:  That’s something, I guess.

MI-CHAEL:  Actually, my favourite lesson is that it’s better to act early and fast, and be flexible, than waiting for the ideal moment or even “good” timing later on. Like, a bad plan poorly executed, that lands fast and early and that can be adjusted on the fly or made up for later, is superior to trying to pool your resources the whole game, which may never happen, or attempting the precise coordination of this herd of feral cats under a particular set of circumstances and at a particular time and place.

DO-DONA:  Makes sense.

MI-CHAEL:  But along with that, here’s a good one, options: It’s never a good idea to give your own team the option to do something unless you want them to immediately execute. Like, if you plan ahead and get supplies down to build a garrison, anticipating taking the current point of attack and needing to start a new assault against the next location, and you go and build that garrison before you want folks attacking from there, well, you’re screwed. These monkeys simply will not be able to refrain, regardless of communication, and will abandon the previous location before it’s won and start trying to overwhelm the next, almost inevitably losing all the hard-won gains you’ve made and returning the whole project back to square one, undoing maybe an hour of labour and probably the game. I imagine this is the kind of learning you get being a police officer or city planner.

DO-DONA:  Probably.

MI-CHAEL:  Oh, similarly, every role in the game has particular abilities and tools and access to role-specific information. And there’s a pretty strict hierarchy, not unlike the military. But you quickly learn that it’s always far superior to do something yourself if you’re able than to ask for assistance or direct others. Even with an essential job, you can’t expect it to get done. That is, unless you’re with folks you play with regularly. Because this isn’t the military and some amount of folks will not pay attention or take orders, others will show up without a mic or with refuse to communicate, and others won't speak the language. That's just what it is. So, on a team of fifty people, where everyone is able to drop supplies and maybe ten are able to build a garrison, and both supplies and garrisions are required and will cost you the game if not utilized effectively, it’s always better to do all of that yourself if you can: to stop what you’re doing, redeploy to the headquarters, burn through supplies to bring in a supply truck for yourself, hop into that truck and cross the entire map back to where you started, and maybe do so twice, drop off the needed supplies, and then build the garrison yourself rather than order a squad to do so or just expect anyone else to do what is obvious — even if they have the needed crew members to do it themselves and are in the right location, or even if you can airdrop them the supplies while telling them what to do with said supplies, and despite all that being perfectly common and essential. The building of that essential garrison will so frequently never get done, even when doing so is what everyone wants and folks are asking for and it’s for the immediate goals of this attacking unit and, ultimately, the larger team. They could do it for themselves in 15 seconds, but it will never happen unless you drop what you’re doing and take the five minutes to make the run yourself. They even acquire points to level-up and improve their kit for doing this sort of thing and still they neglect it or refuse. This is basically an emergent property of this and many games. So reliable, it’s almost a rule.

DO-DONA:  Curious.

MI-CHAEL:  It is. And it isn’t, too. That’s humans.

DO-DONA:  I suppose.

MI-CHAEL:  It really doesn’t matter the skill level or amount of hours someone has put into the game. And it isn’t about the person on the other end, certainly not in the way you might expect.

DO-DONA:  How so?

MI-CHAEL:  You never know if the British military historian (who’s trying to tell you about the rifle you selected or why he didn’t select that rifle…) or the American kid on her xbox, avoiding her homework after school, is going to be the diligent one you can rely on or the one that will lose you the game. You just never know what you’re going to get.

DO-DONA:  Sure.

MI-CHAEL:  Oh, here’s another life lesson. When you bust your ass for an hour, anticipating everyone’s needs, get everyone everything they ask for and when, do half the team’s jobs for them, but your team still loses (because no one was doing their job, their one job) the most useless among them will be very vocal about how you suck and cost them the game and shouldn’t lead next round.

DO-DONA:  That’s actually pretty funny.

MI-CHAEL:  It is. There are also people who insist on that in a weird way. Like, there are lots of folks who, despite having all the information you have and even more experience in the game, will insist on being told what to do and enthusiastically complain about your incompetence when you aren’t telling them exactly what to do, when, and how every minute of the game. They’ll ask you, “Should [my squad] defend?” They know that if we don’t defend we lose the game. And they know that if the entire team is directly asked to do so most won’t do it. And they know that we’re both aware theirs is the only squad still on the point. It’s something like asking your dinner host if you should get up from the table to go to the washroom, and actually waiting for for an earnest response, as though if you poop your pants it will be the host’s fault and you can take great delight in telling your coworkers tomorrow how the company was terrible, the house stunk, and there was shit all over their dining chairs. It’s totally sociopathic. But it’s also interesting to watch and be on the receiving end of. Life lessons.

DO-DONA:  Life lessons.

MI-CHAEL:  Oh, and you often find yourself in what seems like a perfectly impossible scenario. And often that’s when your command or squad leader will flake out and quit the game. So you step up and try and figure out what to do. And when things work out, which does happen occasionally, it’s often some magical combination of brute force, raw skill, cleverness, and dumb luck. But for all that to come together you still have to have logged enough hours to know what’s going on and what’s possible, developed the ability to effectively execute, be able to anticipate and maybe surprise the opponent, and also have chance on your side, too.

DO-DONA:  So, what does all that have to do with recon flares? Or war? Or what we were talking about? I was talking about October 7th and you started talking about video games.

MI-CHAEL:  World War II, Nationalsozialismus, and suddenly being exposed.

DO-DONA:  Yeah.

MI-CHAEL:  Yeah. Well, we’re pretending we aren’t in the middle of the next war. And that we learned no lessons from that last one.

DO-DONA:  Okay.

MI-CHAEL:  And some of us are somehow still pretending there isn’t something in our midst far worse than the National Socialists of mid-century Germany.

DO-DONA:  Okay.

MI-CHAEL:  And we’re pretending everyone wasn’t shown to be exactly where they are.

DO-DONA:  Okay. But what do you mean, exactly?

MI-CHAEL:  I dunno, you tell me. I mean, you’re seeing all this stuff. It's in the news every day. Isn’t it?

DO-DONA:  Sure. I mean, I was saying to someone the other day that it’s kinda silly to pretend that the West isn’t at war with BRICS. That it isn’t even a quiet, cold war. 

MI-CHAEL:  Right. In which case you could maybe actually pretend it wasn’t happening. 

DO-DONA:  Yeah. But can you do that when Kharkiv and Haifa are taking almost daily rocket and missile attacks?

MI-CHAEL:  Possibly. But not when 25 nations are formally involved.

DO-DONA:  Yes, and another dozen or two are allowing active recruitment of their citizens.

MI-CHAEL:  With weapon systems and munitions and intel from Iran and China, the US and UK.

DO-DONA:  That doesn’t feel too discrete.

MI-CHAEL:  Doesn’t feel like an obscure, regional conflict.

DO-DONA: It’s way less subtle than Syria, which now looks like a warm-up.

MI-CHAEL: Sure.

DO-DONA:  But how does that relate to the Second World War, exactly? Or National Socialism?

MI-CHAEL:  In the midst of the atrocities, Himmler offered to his compatriots something along the lines of: “We’re writing a chapter of our history that we will never be able to speak about.” 

DO-DONA:  It had to be hidden from the world.

MI-CHAEL:  They concealed their crimes.

DO-DONA:  Even from their own people.

MI-CHAEL:  Yeah.

DO-DONA:  Right. And when the Russians closed in on Treblinka, the whole thing was scuttled and any signs of it removed or covered over. And later, like crime scene investigators, the Allies had to piece together what had taken place there.

MI-CHAEL:  Exactly. The world got the horrors of the German extermination camps, their cremation pits and factory-like furnaces precisely because Germany’s mass burials from the beginning of the war were discovered. Those shocked the world. But those monsters were desperate to hide what they were doing. And that's what led them to employ other techniques — to better erase the corpses of their countless victims.

DO-DONA: I didn't know that, actually.

MI-CHAEL: And, so, what was so disturbing about last October? It was not the scale and viciousness of the barbarity. The world knows all too well about what humans are capable of. Instead, it was the glee and pride, admiration and celebration of it all.

DO-DONA:  Broadcasting their crimes to the world.

MI-CHAEL:  Broadcasting their crimes— Filming themselves phoning home to tell their parents they’ve achieved their greatest potential and are now covered in Jewish blood that they themselves wrung from their victims with their own hands.

DO-DONA:  Right.

MI-CHAEL:  I mean, a father took his two young sons into their bomb shelter when the chaos broke out— Did you watch this video?

DO-DONA:  I don’t think so. No.

MI-CHAEL:  I'm sure millions of people have seen it. You would know if you did. A father took his kids into a bomb shelter— The shelter, like almost all such shelters, couldn't be locked or barred and it wasn't sealed from the outside world. 

DO-DONA:  Right. None of them are safe rooms or fallout shelters, as we think of those, just there as protection from rocket fire.

MI-CHAEL:  Yeah, and not even direct rocket fire but more the shrapnel of a nearby explosion. Cinder blocks and maybe a metal door.

DO-DONA:  Right. Better than a bus shelter but certainly not anticipating assault by teams of men with rifles and rocket propelled grenades.

MI-CHAEL:  Exactly. Well, in this instance a grenade was lobbed into the shelter. The father realized in time and threw himself on the explosive. The children survived the grenade. Though one lost his hearing and the other his vision. There’s footage of them. Disoriented and distraught, one of the boys tells the other their father is dead. The other somehow disagrees. It’s devastating. Then the guy who did this to them is seen helping himself to the contents of the family’s refrigerator. The littlest boy, maybe eight or ten, who just watched his father blow up at this guy’s hand, confronts the man, telling him “That’s my mother’s food.” The terrorist responds, on camera: “And where’s your mother? I want her, too.” 

DO-DONA:  Hmm.

MI-CHAEL:  And the flare went up.

DO-DONA:  The world discovered there are far worse forms of anti-Semitism than 20th century German anti-Semitism.

MI-CHAEL:  Yes. But more than that. Just as there was no sense of guilt among the perpetrators, too, there was an absence of any shame or even shyness among their cheerleaders and fundraisers and volunteer corps in Australia, Europe, and North America. And there, on your little map, your neighbours and coworkers and classmates and teachers and friends and family members were seen for where they are: trying to outdo Tarantino, filming themselves wearing the uniform and waving the flags and chanting the chants of the people sharing video of themselves — casually polishing off the soda of kids’ whose father they just killed — asking where their mother is.