RETHINKING SECURITY

Kelsey Atherton has an interesting blog on covert action and how commercial games have simulated it (or not). Kelsey’s point is interesting because it goes to the heart of simulation issues. A game has rules, some of which are more restrictive than others depending on the level of analysis. At the tactical level, the rules of covert action and espionage games are fixed. To a certain extent, this makes sense because an operative is an instrument of the state. On the other hand, the fact that these rules do not evolve or change over time, especially in response to inputs the player creates, makes these games somewhat static. I’d also question, to some extent, whether many espionage games are really about espionage at all. The Call of Duty series, though recently focusing on special operations forces, has always been about blazing away with two gun barrels.

Kelsey argues, with justification that strategy games often have a more complex approach:

When covert action shows up in strategy games, on the other hand, controlling agents is all about picking objectives and using the people available to best execute that.  For example, in the Total War series, agents are either spies or assassins, whose presence only becomes known to opponents if they have failed their mission, or if they have been observed by enemy spies. If they fail a mission against a high-enough value target, they are likely to be executed, but all the calculations behind that are beyond player control. Agents are useful for much the same way we imagine them now: information on enemy developments & deployments to better plan ones own military moves, targeted killings on individuals otherwise beyond the reach or purview of conventional forces.  That said, there are limitations on how useful this is as a form of modeling. Agents here operate within strictly coded boundaries, and so they cannot, say, spread false information amongst the enemy leadership (so no Dudley Bradstreet’s here), or engage in any other behavior that breaks the established rules.

The rigidity Kelsey describes at the lower level is reflected at the higher echelon as well. Of course, how an digital or human opponent responds to these developments in a strategy game is much less choreographed than tactical games (perhaps considered to be more as interactive action thrillers). But rules (perhaps of an overly genteel kind) constrain action.

Why have I continuously brought up the problem of rules? Covert action and espionage, is by definition, an set of policies that takes place outside the established rules of the international community. Moreover, they can serve (particularly in the case of deception operations and covert operations) as spoiling mechanisms.

Given an online multiplayer setting, this aspect comes out in EVE Online:

Lotka Volterra had unveiled one of the first Titans against us to catastrophic consequences, and at the time these profoundly silly ships were nearly impossible to kill through legitimate in-game means; they were essentially invulnerable, with the only Titans destroyed through catching the ship while the pilot was disconnected from the game. It was determined that ‘The Enslaver’ and his Avatar-class Titan had to go. I was approached by one of the leaders of Red Alliance to help make this happen, but almost immediately we were down the rabbit hole. Much to my surprise, the RA director didn’t want in-game information from me; he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to trace down The Enslaver’s home address. At a coordinated time, armed with this information, a RA member would apparently cut the power to The Enslaver’s house in the real world, and in EVE a RA capital fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan. Yikes.

As Kelsey notes, once you get past the ridiculous player names and science fiction jargon, you have a case of a private intelligence organization being contracted out to enable a direct action attack. In other words, art imitates life.