It would be a wild understatement to say that online shooters are not my genre, so at first glance, It Takes at War didn’t seem to be a game for me. However, it soon became apparent that there’s considerably more to this game than meets the eye. Indeed, it’s not so much a game operating within a genre as a game about a genre; more specifically, about the online friendships that are forged and played out in the intense worlds of these video game offshoots of the military-industrial complex.
The game is meticulously presented as an online FPS. ‘Graphics! Guns! Glory!’, the game’s Steam page proclaims. On the title screen you click on ‘find game’ and then have to ‘wait for players’. As the game kicks in, you find yourself in the midst of a rather poor-quality online team-based shooter. It has intentionally jerky movement, blocky graphics, terrible controls and feels like a bare, barren world. (It’s worth pointing out that the battle arena is a vaguely Middle-Eastern-looking town, a satirical swipe at the implied politics of many a military-based FPS).
However, it turns out that this is only the game-within-the-game. The ‘real’ game – essentially a story about a group of friends interacting in and through the awful FPS game they are playing together – happens in the latter game’s voice and text chat. In short, although It Takes a War is, at first glance, presented as a straightforward online FPS game on its Steam page (‘The Future of Combat’; ‘Stunning Graphics’; ‘Co-ordinate and Conquer’, the subheadings declare), the descriptor tags (‘Walking Simulator’; ‘Story Rich’; ‘Drama’) hint at what’s really going on.
You play as a ‘rando’ on a team of (brilliantly voice-acted) Scottish friends, a participant in the awful online shooter, but really more of an observer of the interactions of the group of friends you’ve been paired with. To you, they are the randos. But you soon get to know them as you listen in – you are a (literally) muted auditor – to their chat. The characterisation is excellent. Each of the friends is tightly depicted through their, at first, playful verbal repartee. Power dynamics are carefully established, and it’s initially rather fun to voyeuristically listen in to their banter.
As a newbie to the online shooter genre, I felt incredibly uncomfortable holding an assault rifle (of course, you have a choice of military-grade weapons), and I was quickly struck by the juxtaposition of the small talk of the friends – chatting, joking, making (real-world) plans to socialise – and the brutality of the gameplay. Exploding bodies, bucketloads of blood splattering the screen, cries of pain, corpses littering the ground – all of this acts as a kind of sideshow, furniture in the background, to the socialising of the friends. Militarised violence is totally normalised; it is not even remarked upon. This is desensitisation on a whole other level.
It Takes a War makes this point succinctly, without preaching. Indeed, the implied critique of such games comes through strongest in the conversational discourse of the friends. However, this is not only a satire on militarised video game violence; at least, not directly. The intensity and callous cruelness of the gameplay soon find their way into the conversation of the friends, and the truism that what humans say online they wouldn’t say in person is disturbingly portrayed as grudges and toxic patterns of behaviour start to come to the fore, and the weakest member of the group is picked out and (metaphorically) shot down by the others in the increasingly harsh voice chat.
As the game-within-the-game’s body count piles up, the social skirmishing of the friends similarly intensifies. Using an online shooter as a backdrop to tell this story and explore these themes works quite brilliantly. The intense combat of the game is fantastically reflected and enacted in the relationships of those playing it as the inherent cruelty of the game filters out, and their conversation becomes harsher, a battleground in which only the strongest will survive. In short, the online mode of communication profoundly affects – indeed, facilitates – their increasingly ruthless interactions.
Without giving too much away, the game uses surrealism and cleverly blurs the line between the inner world of the online game and the wider fictional world of the friend group’s real lives to reach its artistic goals and help create its meanings. As in our own world, things that happen in the online world of a group of friends have a way of seeping out into the real world. They might not be as separate, certainly not in an emotional sense, as we’d like to think. Things that happen online don’t necessarily stay there. It Takes a War certainly has something interesting to say about the difficulty of maintaining meaningful human communication, especially online communication, and the dehumanisation that can so easily occur during online interactions, even among friends.
It is a painful short story (it took me just over an hour to complete) about how difficult it is to really know another person (as one character says, ‘No-one knows anyone’), especially when so many of our interactions are conducted online. The game asks, what binds us to old friends? And how do we end and move on from potentially toxic friendships? It is also terribly good on the deep human fear of being left out of the group, a fear that dwells deep in the human psyche and one that drives our need for validation, both in the real world and in our online lives.
The clearly ambitious solo developer, Thomas Mackinnon, seems to enjoy playing around at the boundaries of what games can do as an art form. There are seemingly game-breaking moments – intentional crashes and the aforementioned blurring of the inner and outer fictional worlds of the game – in It Takes a War that put me in mind of his previous game, THE CORRIDOR, which is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the game developer (as an entity) and the player and of artists’ fear of sending their creations out into the world. It Takes a War is a similarly thoughtful game about video games, which took me into a world I’d never experienced before. I came out understanding more about the subtle, everyday influence online social interactions can have on human relationships.
