I was reading an interesting article at Wired, and I thought I would share some of it with you. First, allow me to admit to you, the reader, that I am a video game player. I know, it is a shock, but I love to, as my technologically challenged male parental unit would say, “play the online interweb games”. Ok, he might not actually say that, but I imagine he would. Anyway, in the article, the author discuss how playing Halo 3 got him (ever so simplistically) into the head space of a terrorist/suicide bomber.
I haven’t study the topic with any degree of depth, but I have always been blown away (no pun intended) by the concept that people can be convinced to blow themselves up just to blow someone else up. I always asked myself, what did they accomplish? Was this the best use of resources available?
The article really made me think about some of the economic and strategic implications of asymmetric warfare and concepts of capital (political capital / monetary capital / etc). From the article.
It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.
It’s not just that I’m willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It’s that I’m exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.
Because after all, the really elite Halo players don’t want to die. If they die too often, they won’t win the round, and if they don’t win the round, they won’t advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it’s all about bragging rights.
I guess it all ties back to game theory, and how the different belligerents in a conflict assign differing values to strategic objectives. When fighting a war against terror, understanding the relative values of your opponents objectives become paramount. It makes me wonder if we are using the correct approach in our current “war on terror”.
Because the “war” is asymmetric, the resource allocation and motivations behind a conflict are different for each side. We are rich in certain resources (equipment, people, training, money, land etc) and the enemy is poor in them. But this asymmetry means that the risks associated with the conflict are also asymmetric. The loss of a US Solider or US Citizen or Non-Combatant carries a tremendous amount of downside risk (as it should, the loss of any life should carry that risk) in the form of all sorts of lost Capital (political, monetary, etc). The loss of one bomber however, is the exact opposite. Their downside risk is so much lower (though certainly non-zero), and all this goes to the psychology of the players involved.
I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.
Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don’t have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.
Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes — haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away — just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.
I don’t know what any of it really means. As the author of the article states, you can’t reduce such a complex political process to as simple a metaphor as a video game. But it can make you think about it in terms you just might be able to understand…. at least a little.
