Gaming and Reality

It’s been a real gripe of mine as a Soldier and a gamer, on the state of gaming and the attitude it engenders today. It’s seemingly like everybody is an “expert” at something, because, well, they have the information at hand. But I see a lot of gamers nowadays not listening to the experts who actually worked with the material, gun, jet, whatever is modeled, and that they “know what is going on”, even though they don’t really fly the jet that is modeled, especially in DCS World, or any other flight simulator. I’ve seen some players lose their minds over stuff not accurately modeled in the game, and they just assume that all of a sudden, it has to be ultra-realistic due to the classified nature of some systems, and the recent gripe I heard about players is a “lack of realism” of Electronic Warfare, or ECM effects and values. A real-world Growler WSO/EWO said that EW “depends” on a lot of factors, which no game to date has actually reproduced.

So down the road, I ignore or try to ignore comments like this, and enjoy my own gaming session. Yes, I’ll gripe on how effective something is in the game, of course, but it’s tempered by the fact that hey, nobody has access to classified material, and they come up with their own way of modeling ECM and other things that matter in the scope of the game. It’s a game, not a reflection of real life, and should be treated as such. Sure, some games accurately model stuff that was done, and the envelope is probably pushed almost daily in modeling a system and how it interacts with the player. So, the expectation that what works on A should work on B, and maybe on C, is sometimes just annoying.

For first-person shooters, a lot of stuff is gamified so that it’s at least remotely believable. Arma 3 does a good job of bullet modeling, so I use an Excel sheet to model them. Another player and I were caught talking about Arma 3 as we were talking about the real stuff. I mean, the flight model leaves little to be desired for helicopters, and especially jets, but the Arma series is inherently an infantry simulator, not so much about the real thing. It doesn’t capture the pain of gear, wearing so many pounds of it, and being expected to fight reliably with it. My physical fitness wasn’t that great in Afghanistan, and when you’re climbing mountains, it’s a factor, along with the tons of gear that you need to be effective on the battlefield. While games do in some way model the effects of weight, which is also gamified, they show that no simulator can always replace the real deal. I managed to get through Afghanistan on the limited dismounted operations, but Iraq wasn’t so bad, it was mainly flat land, so I didn’t suffer as much as I did in Afghanistan.

Anyway, the point is that not all simulators can effectively show the way with real combat, and again, the belief that since you fly DCS World, that you’re an Expert at aerial combat, and that what is mainly made for entertainment (by a post by BIGNEWY), and not to represent real life. There are some things that can be done to make it as realistic as possible, but some time in a game doesn’t confer that much experience. It helps, don’t get me wrong, as all my life I’ve been into aviation, so when I’m doing talk-ons in Afghanistan, my second combat deployment, it helped me visualize, but it didn't give me the experience to micromanage the aircraft. I wasn’t being paid to fly the particular platform, and I see Facebook comments and other commentary on how things should be done, or why the pilot didn’t do this. You’re not there; you’re not in the situation, so okay, fine, comment, but will it make sense to you? A friend of mine acted like he was superior to a pilot who had flown 10,000 hours for real, and he beat that person in a simulator. Sure, okay, but I’m sure that pilot would have beat the socks off of my friend in real life, and you don’t get a respawn, so the desire to make sure you’re doing it right is paramount.

And during my time in Iraq, games never conferred an advantage over the Iraqi insurgents with whom I traded bullets. I, in fact, never man-to-man shot a human being. Interesting huh? I’ve shot at ambushes, though, so all the killing I do is in a game, not so much in real life. But I know how visceral combat can be, and that is an advantage any servicemember who served in combat feels. And to a point, we as combat veterans fly or shoot games because, honestly, that’s how close to the real thing we can really get now, unless you’re going to Iran. Perhaps Trump needs a diplomatic simulator so he can figure out how to do a basic task. But that’s not my lane, and I couldn’t resist the commentary. So, at the end of this diatribe of complaining, it shows that while yes, simulators do prepare you for the real thing, a gamer these days should realize that it doesn’t get you the Gold in surviving. There are a lot of factors that some simulators just can’t replicate, and you, as a human being, should know the difference between that and not believe that a game is indicative of real-life combat. There are too many differences between the two to know that.