This is Defcon.
If it reminds you of a certain movie starring Matthew Broderick, you’re not wrong!
No wait, that is wrong.
DEFCON is like WarGames… the uhh…
Game.
And it’s the scariest game ever made.
DEFCON plays like a simplified RTS.
Each player has control of a continent, which they fill with nuclear silos,
launch-detection radar,
airbases and naval fleets.
Every player or bot starts with the same amount of units
there’s no resource gathering.
There’s nothing to distract you from the game’s horrifying implications.
Over the course of a game, a defcon timer slowly counts down from defcon 5 to defcon 1.
Defcon stands for Defense Readiness Condition, and it’s how the actual US Airforce keeps track
of how ready and raring to go the US military ought to be.
Defcon 5 is like, totally chill, and defcon 1 is you’re finger is hovering over
the big red button.
In the game, each defcon phase allows players access to more and more of their arsenal.
There isn’t any fighting in defcons 5 and 4; players just place their units.
This cold war escalates in defcon 3 when conventional air and sea warfare begins.
Defcon 2 is mechanically the same as defcon 3, but it feels different.
Because you know what’s coming next.
Defcon 1: the end of the world.
Players are free to launch all of their nuclear missiles, from their bombers, their submarines,
and from the silos dotting their territory.
And everyone does, eventually.
This isn't like WarGames, where the best move is not to play.
That movie relies on the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction: the idea that two logical countries
won’t initiate an all-out-nuclear attack because they know they’d both lose.
In DEFCON, everyone loses,
but someone loses the least.
It’s terrifying,
and science agrees!
Scientists have studied the hell out of DEFCON: examining its AI bots, looking into its ethics.
Most intriguingly, Concordia University conducted a study on how the game affects people's
views of nuclear war.
Researchers asked the participants a bunch of questions about nuclear weapons,
how likely they thought nuclear war was, and how likely they’d be to survive one.
Then half read articles about nuclear weapons, and the other half played DEFCON.
And when the scientists asked them the questions again, the DEFCON group was way more pessimistic.
DEFCON had literally changed their views about nuclear war.
So how does such a simple-looking game have such a powerful effect?
First of all, this is what it sounds like:
* depressing atmospheric music, with someone quietly coughing or crying*
It’s dreadful!
It slowly ratchets up the tension as the doomsday clock counts down to midnight.
And if you thought… “hey, was that a cough I heard? or maybe someone crying?"
It’s probably totally unrelated to the nuclear Armageddon that you are creating…
totally unrelated.
And that’s the other thing about this game.
When you’re playing it, it really drives home the idea that you’re the one doing it.
You’re not an observer in this nuclear war, you’re an active participant in a game that
measure its score in millions of civilians.
*In game text reads: "LOS ANGELES HIT, 7.6M DEAD"
Sure, you have todestroy the enemy's Navy before they destroy yours,
and your silos might be able to destroy some of their missiles before they land.
But ultimately, you have to turn your weapons on the main targets:
cities.
And if you’re like me, a thought starts to tickle the back of your mind:
How far is this from how it would actually play out?
Pop culture is awash with these images of a military control room.
A real war room probably wouldn’t have the same slick, neon design, or creepy sound effects…
but during the Cold War at least,
this is what NORAD looked like.
And here’s what it looked like in 2005.
And we do know the people pushing the buttons would be far removed from any of the actual carnage.
Defcon recreates this detached, abstract, bunker mentality through its design.
After all, the score isn’t actually civilians... just numbers on the board.
The unavoidable truth of these weapons is that any exchange between nuclear armed countries
would almost certainly mean the end of the world as we know it.
Civilian...
Military...
Everybody dies.
Hey, that’s the game’s tag line!
*Existential sigh*
As part of the Concordia study, one of the participants explained to the scientists
how DEFCON felt different from a Battlefield or Call of Duty
“...this one takes the stance that you’re somebody from a position of power
and you’re moving pieces around on a board.
You’re controlling people, but you’re not included in it.
So it’s more different.
I guess it’s like, it’s worse.
Because you’re controlling other people’s lives but you, from wherever you are,
you're not at risk.
Or you’re relatively not at risk, whereas in the other games, you might kill somebody,
but you also risk being shot.
There’s no moment in the game where the screen turns black because
your little tower has been destroyed.”
There was also something odd in this study’s data.
People in the DEFCON group were way more likely to assume that if there were a nuclear war,
they would die in it...
but they were also less likely to believe a nuclear war would actually occur.
The study’s writers weren’t sure what to make of this, but they had a theory:
engaging with the apocalyptic conclusions of nuclear war led them to believe
no one would ever let it happen.
It was now something so existentially terrifying, they believed it must be impossible.
While researching this script I had the bright idea to watch HBO’s Chernobyl,
a rigorously accurate depiction of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.
It shows the visceral human costs of radiation.
And like DEFCON, it shows that the people making decisions
are often the ones most removed from the consequences.
Chernobyl is pretty horrifying.
But DEFCON is horrifying because it’s abstract, in a way that rings true to life.
Defcon doesn’t give a voice or even a face to the millions of civilians dead.
It puts you in the chair, with a finger on the button
and posits a world where mutually assured destruction isn’t a factor;
nuclear war is inevitable, because…
It’s a game.
Somebody has to win.
What’s more terrifying than that?
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