We're at DEFCON 5

Played a computer game last night… ooohhh, wow, big news right? Yeah! Big news. Don’t switch of yet though because there’s more.

I was playing a game called DEFCON. As the name may suggest the game is about nuclear weapons. You’re presented with an atlas of the world, with physical land/sea borders represented as blue neon lines and population density represented as a warm orange glow against a stark black background. It’s a clinical and unfeeling representation of the world, eschewing the greens and blues of our lush planet for a stylised, bereft and clinical representation using numbers and scant detail to represent the populous of towns and cities.

A timer counts down and I’m pitted against another human player across a network. I’m given resources, all of which are weapons of destruction, missile silos, submarines, air defence units. And although I can see where my opponent populous is I cannot see where his resources lay. I can only assume that he has similar defences as me and the ability to launch an offensive in the same way. I feel a rush of power, I realise that I can lay waste to his nation and suspect that he plans to do the same to me. The clock counts down further and a message appears on screen, I’m now at DEFCON level 3 and I set my defences up with more urgency.

A war ensues, I make a myriad of mistakes, I use a nuke to take out a ship for instance. A showy and over confident demonstration of power which backfires when my later nukes are destroyed mid-flight before hitting their targets and my planes discover subs in my sea.



The population of New York, Michigan, Texas and Ohio are decimated and I hear their screams and their moans and then silence. Their voices are muted and the silence is worse than the anguished cries.

On the other side of the virtual pond my opponents live in peace, untouched by my impotent rage. And suddenly I’m sorry. I don’t feel the same rush of power anymore and wondered if it ever really exsisted, wasn’t it always going to end this way? With anguish and screams and loss, the numbers dwindling and the orange glow fading. What once seemed like a clinical representation of the world was a dark reminder of its fragility and our ability to destroy ourselves.

I thanked my opponent for playing and left the game. Later that night I thought about Korea and my proximity to it and I thought about Nagasaki and my proximity to that place too, it’s people and the very real affects of nuclear warfare in green and blue, charcoal black and singed crack concrete grey.

So, I played a computer game last night… and it made me think.