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ABSTRACT
Militaries around the world have benefited from computerized games. Many recruits have been attracted to the military through military-style video games. After recruitment, games and simulations provide an important means of soldier training, including before actual deployments. However, electronic games are lacking for UN peace operations. The multidimensionality of peacekeeping has yet to be simulated in serious games to complement the many games that too often depict a binary battlefield of blue-team versus red-team (or, often in public games, good versus evil). Not only could soldiers benefit from nuanced and ambitious peace-related games, so too could civilian peacekeepers, and the public at large. Peacekeeping gaming should not be merely at the tactical level; the operational and strategic levels can be gamed as well. The decision-making in future peacekeeping simulations could help instruct conflict-resolution and critical thinking skills. The paper posits that such digital games could be an important tool for current and future peacekeepers, both military and civilian. Commercial games could also help educate the public on UN peacekeeping. The paper suggests that the United Nations partner with some member states and perhaps the video game industry to provide in-depth training simulations that mirror the challenges and complexities of modern peace operations.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Drs. Danielle Stodilka, Charlotte Sennersten and Paul Darvasi, as well as Ryan Cross, Marcus MacDonald, and Hesameddin (Sam) Abbaspour Tazehkan for valuable feedback on drafts of this paper. Any errors or flaws in the paper remain the responsibility of the authors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributors
A. Walter Dorn is Professor of Defence Studies at Royal Military College, and the Canadian Forces College, Toronto. He teaches military officers from about 20 countries, including on peace and stability operations. He has served at the United Nations as an Innovation Technology Expert. His books include Keeping Watch: Monitoring, Technology & Innovation in UN Peace Operations (UN University Press, 2011) and Air Power in UN Operations: Wings for Peace (Ashgate, 2014).
Stewart Webb is editor of Defence Report. He obtained his MScEcon in Security Studies from Aberystwyth University and his BA from Acadia University. He has provided his analysis frequently within the Canadian media and has written many reports and has edited two books on terrorism and insurgency.
Sylvain Pâquet works as a data scientist at the Canada Border Services Agency. His research focusses on game theory and complexity theory for the study of politics.
Notes
1 Dorn and Webb, “Gaming Peace: A Call for Peacekeeper Roles.”
2 Brynen, “Teaching about Peace Operations.” Brynen also maintains the website “PAXsims” devoted to “peace, conflict, humanitarian, and development simulations and serious games for education, training, and policy analysis.” See: Brynen, “PAXsims.”
3 Films on peacekeeping are, unfortunately, quite rare and low profile, in stark contrast to the ubiquity and popularity of war movies. There are only a few movies that feature the actions of peacekeepers in the field: Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) about the heroic efforts of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire's in Rwanda (not to be confused with the documentary of the same name that covers General Dallaire's actual return to Rwanda in 2004); Peacekeepers (1997) about Canadian peacekeepers in Croatia; The Siege of Jadotville (2016) about an Irish unit repelling an attack in the Congo in 1961. Other movies focus more on the failures and weaknesses of peacekeepers: Hotel Rwanda (2004) where the UN is shown to be of little use in repelling attacks on the hotel and civilians in the country; No Man's Land (2001) about Serb, Bosniak and UN soldiers of ill-will; Black Hawk Down (2001) about US forces, loosely connected to the UN operation in Somalia, in combat with a Somali warlord (though, in reality, saved at the end by UN peacekeepers); The Whistleblower (2010) about a US police officer, working as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999, who discovers a sex trafficking ring with NATO/UN officials turning a blind eye.
4 Movies on war are much more plentiful on war-fighting than peacekeeping. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) counted almost 200,000 titles focused on war out of almost 4 million titles (author search, May 2017). Digging deeper, 13 of the IMDb's top 100 movies are war movies (13%), 29 out of the top 250 (12%) and 81 out of the top 1,000 (8%). While 81 out of the 1,000 highest rated movies on IMDb focus on war, only two have UN peacekeeping as a background theme (#252. Hotel Rwanda and #431. No Man's Land).
5 Bitflake Studios, PeaceKeeper.
6 Spil Games, Peacekeeper - Trench Defense. Also A10.com, The Peacekeeper.
7 Bohemia Interactive, Arma 3.
8 Maxis, SimCity 3000.
9 Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto IV.
10 Massive Entertainment, Tom Clancy's The Division.
11 Grasshopper Manufacture and Capcom Production Studio 4, Killer7.
12 In the science-fiction inspired turn-based strategy video game, Alpha Centauri, the Unity exploration mission was started by the “eUN,” and they are one of the factions that emerges shortly before Planetfall in the form of the “Peacekeepers.” In Overwatch, the “UN” forms the eponymous international team of heroes to combat a robot uprising. The Global Defense Initiative in the Command & Conquer series is a branch of the United Nations. The Chimera, one of the three playable factions in the real-time strategy game Act of Aggression, is a covert multinational task force formed by the “UN.” A large part of the Deus Ex series revolves around the “United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition,” phonetically pronounced UNATCO for short. In Surveillance Kanshisha, the “UN” establishes a counter-terrorist unit called Shadow Sword in order to safeguard the Earth-Mars space travel route and the people using it from a mysterious terrorist group called Neo-Kleit.
13 11 bit studios, This War of Mine.
14 11 bit studios, What Would You Do with 500k Dollars?; GamingLyfe, “11 Bit Studios.”
15 Impact Games, PeaceMaker.
16 Cuhadar and Kampf, “Learning about Conflict .”
17 See, for example: Public International Law & Policy Group, “Lawyering Peace Lab.”
18 Jones, “Dalhousie-Designed Video Game .”
19 Holohan, “Transformative Training in Soft Skills for Peacekeepers.” See also: Edwards, “‘Visual Novel’ Game to Be Used to Train International Peacekeepers.” Gaming for Peace was awarded a two million Euro grant from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 program. There are 14 additional partners in this project, including the Finnish and Polish militaries and the Irish video game company Haunted Planet.
20 Mason and Patterson, “War Gaming Peace Operations.”
21 United States Institute of Peace, “Simulations.”
22 Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty.
23 DreamWorks Interactive and Electronic Arts, Medal of Honor.
24 Red Storm Entertainment, Ubisoft Paris, and Ubisoft Milan, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series is a shooter game series that focuses on the completion of tactical missions through teamwork. The player is in control of a number of troops simultaneously but directly controls the behaviour of only one avatar (person) at a time. The player may order other troops to specific locations and to take specific actions. The player must coordinate troops in order to effectively and efficiently complete a mission while minimizing casualties among their ranks. This gameplay concept would translate well into a peacekeeping game, as peacekeeping follows the same principle minus the violence involved in neutralizing an enemy.
25 Intelligent Systems, Advance Wars. This series is a tactical turn-based game series where the player is in control of troops from a “god perspective,” a top-down perspective where you control the behavior of multiple avatars or elements on a map. The player may or may not be represented by an avatar but always controls the movement of all avatars like pieces on a chess board. The player must therefore take into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the troops in order to optimize the chances of defeating an enemy by placing resources in the most strategic manner. Such game is a closer simulation to the experience of a strategist that does not fight on the frontline, but rather gives orders from the safety of an office.
26 Ensemble Studios, Age of Empires. This series is a real-time strategy game series that enables the player to manage resources in real-time, with a top-down “god perspective.” In a similar fashion to tactical turn-based games, the player should find optimal strategies in order to minimize losses and maximize gains, and send troops when and where victory is more likely than defeat. The key difference here is that the player may feel a higher level of stress, as the action is happening in real time and they need to keep informed of all that is going on to make informed decisions.
27 Konami, Metal Gear. The main character of most Metal Gear Solid games, Solid Snake, is a veteran spy in a sci-fi dystopia who has been trying to stop a conspiracy for a decade, and is now riding with mercenaries to the frontline of a battle. The story-driven goal of this game series is to deal with an immediate threat before moving on to the next one. Avoiding direct confrontation is the preferred option since violence could mean the death of the player's avatar. The play must gain an understanding of the problem at-hand and sabotage any plans of conspiracy and destruction. One entry in the series, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has Solid Snake working under the umbrella of the United Nations in a world where private military companies have become more powerful than national forces, and where machines are used to fight human rebels and mercenaries, and where technology is used to enhance the capacities of soldiers beyond.
28 Hasbro and Winning Moves Games, Risk.
29 Jumbo Games, Stratego.
30 Calhamer et al., Diplomacy.
31 See: “Paradox Interactive.”
32 Calhamer et al., Diplomacy. was originally a tactical turn-based negotiation board game in which each player represents one of seven nations. For every turn, there are two phases: negotiation and movement. In the negotiation phase, each player conveys information to the others. Negotiations between two players may be private or public, and there is no obligation to respect engagements, nor is there a mechanism to enforce them. In other words, this is a game where trust and rational calculations play an important role, as in real politics. In the movement phase, each player moves units (troops or fleets), and chooses a set of rules that determine whether they would make peace or war.
33 Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive, Total War.
34 Försvarsmakten, “Welcome to Viking 18.” For a detailed blog covering this exercise see: Försvarsmakten, “Viking 18 Blog.”
35 Bohemia Interactive Simulations, VBS3 or VBS4. The popular (public) version is the Arma series.
36 The Canadian Forces command and staff exercises sometimes include a modification of the US Army's Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) and sometimes use the “Zoran Sea” theme that is common in NATO exercises. For the UK model/exercise, see: Body and Marston, “The Peace Support Operations Model: Origins, Development, Philosophy and Use.”
37 Military platforms and software are usually not shared nor made available for public use, though some aspects may be made available to the United Nations. Commercial platforms that have already been used to develop conflict-related games and simulations include: “Fablusi” or “ICONS.” Furthermore, there are thousands of programs with features that can serve as inspiration. A number of game development platforms are available as well, such as: “Unity,” “Unreal,” or “Crytek.”
38 United Nations training exercises are usually done within a fictitious country called “Carana.” For POC, the exercise is scenario-based. See for example, United Nations Peacekeeping Resource Hub, “UN CPOC for Military Units.”
39 These scenarios are drawn from the “UN Tactical Level Protection of Civilians Training Modules,” which introduce scenarios drawn from UN missions in Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Darfur and Côte d'Ivoire. See, for example: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Integrated Training Service, “Tactical Level Mission-Specific Training Modules on Protection of Civilians.”
40 Monterrat, Lavoué, and George, “Adaptation of Gaming Features for Motivating Learners.”
41 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Request for Information: Innovative Concepts for Multi-Resolution Interactive Wargames.”
42 Crookall, “Peace, Violence, and Simulation/Gaming.”
43 Darvasi, “Empathy, Perspective and Complicity,” 12.
44 Farber and Schrier, “The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as ‘Empathy Machines.’”
45 Farber and Schrier, 7–8.
46 United States Army, “America's Army”
47 United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Integrated Training Service, “Training.”
48 United Nations Secretary-General, “United Nations Secretary-General's Strategy on New Technologies.”
49 Robitzski, “The U.S. Army Is Using Virtual Reality Combat to Train Soldiers.”
50 Information provided to one of the authors by Christian Rouffaer, Head of Virtual Reality Unit at the ICRC.
51 Chappelle et al., “An Analysis of Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms.”