More than any other franchise, the Total War games bring out the butcher in me. I would love to say that surrounding and annihilating an army of peasants to the last man is a purely strategic decision in Shogun 2, but mostly I eradicate and eliminate enemy forces just to see if I can – to make those casualty scores at the end of a battle tilt overwhelmingly in my favor.

It’s not just Total War. Though pursuit is not always the wise choice in a wargame, I do it a lot in Operational Art of War and War in the East. I’ll happily let a beaten army escape in Europa Universalis (since at least I always know where a small army is), but in some games I will chase and chase and destroy until the bodies pile up.

As much as I like to talk about how I prefer to act ethically in strategy games, rarely playing the aggressor and avoiding playing certain factions, there is no doubt that strategy games can bring out the vengeful, angry, and murderous side of me. In Victoria 2, I will kill the proletariat as it revolts instead of introducing better wages or political reforms. In EU, I will convert foreign populations; in the first one, I would instigate religious revolts to eradicate entire populations and then settle with colonists. In Rome: Total War, I regularly massacred cities and assassinated enemy leaders. In Civilization 2, I would plant nukes and I will let them fly in other Civs if I “have to”. Nerve stapling in Alpha Centauri? Don’t pretend you never did it.

In short, like many gamers, I play strategy games “like a psychopath.”

In his very interesting essay, Jonathan McCalmont argues that the design of strategy games encourages aggressive behavior that would probably be defined as war crimes. Because, in most cases, the player IS the state, progress is defined entirely in terms of the power and success of the state as a state. Since we never really have to deal with the consequences of behaving like a tyrant, and, in fact, tyrannical behavior can be undertaken no matter what the real form of government you imagine you have, gamers become morally detached. In a way, this is the whole “It’s only a game!” argument – it’s not real people, so we are freed to do things we would never countenance in real life.

McCalmont goes on to tie some of this to the evolution of International Relations Theory after World War 2, especially the work of Kenneth Waltz, though the nuclear conflict research of Hermann Kahn and the game theory work of Thomas Schelling should get some mention here. Nations become unitary actors with interests and nothing more, so anything that helps the nation achieve success is legitimate. The direct connection between Waltz and Meier is pretty thin, but McCalmont argues that reifying the state as Waltz does is no different from what strategy game call on us to do. It’s not a cause and effect thing, but two similar things that, he argues caused diplomats of the 60s and 70s and contemporary strategy gamers to behave as if little things like civilian casualties and human rights didn’t really matter.

It’s an interesting argument, but I think it misses a few things about strategy games and their design. First and foremost, of course, games are generally not cooperative experiences. They are, most of the time, zero sum so the success of one means the failure of another. While the real world is full of cooperative institutions and factors that bring humanity together instead of tearing us apart, games generally have winners and winning means that there must be sides and teams. You could argue that this strategy game is based on flawed understandings of international politics or history, but the assumption of conflict underlies every modern game genre, except for certain types of simulations. Even games that allow you to be awesome and nice, like The Sims, are almost always more enjoyable when there is tension between the actors.

Games turn war into sexy math. When I chase down ashigaru bowmen, it’s not simply so they don’t live another day. It’s because I get rewards and a heroic victory thing and my troops gain experience and buffs for killing lots and lots of people, no matter how helpless they are. It’s not simply that many games detach us from the humanity of conflict – it’s also that many of them pat us on the back for being inhumane. Our scores and progress depend on it. Even games with peaceful winning conditions, like the Civ series, find a way to force you to care about your army. If you are weak, you will preyed upon, so you have to deter attack. The corruption penalty in many version meant that razing or starving a city were not just allowed, but encouraged.

McCalmont’s argument that the problem with strategy games is that they are too abstract misses the fact that many of their mechanics reward the gruesome behavior, not just because it is fun but because it is sensible. Wars are the way forward in many strategy games – the only way to get more resources or more power or to advance whatever passes for a plot. I can probably count the number of totally pacific grand strategy game sessions of my life on my two hands with a couple of fingers left over; I may have won only two of those.

But, I think, there is also something seedier and it is rooted in our long cultural love affair with war.

You don’t have to be Miles Gloriosus to appreciate the dark and savage beauty of war. Though I wish war on no one, and would love to see it eliminated from the planet forever, our ancestral inheritance of seeing war as a necessary evil continues. We must always support the troops, because they are doing noble things even if the war itself is a bad idea for the country. Acts of great heroism on the battlefield are feted by our national leaders. Movies that show the glories of war generally do better than those that show the horrors.

The Total War games are probably the best at making battle itself a thing of beauty, with the Combat Mission franchise a close second. Just as a formula or equation can be beautiful to a mathematician, seeing a battle plan perfectly executed and then every enemy soldier perfectly executed is a thing of great beauty to a gamer, and even some generals. Cannae, Austerlitz, Tsushima…moments when everything seemed to go to plan and the result was an enemy force overwhelmingly defeated. I chase routing units because I can. I nuke enemy cities because the invasion calls for it. I launch sneak attacks because to hell with laws of war. I have a plan, and part of the plan means no survivors.

Well maybe one. Someone should tell the enemy king what to expect.