Every victory in DEFCON, though, is a hollow one you still lose millions and millions of people, and you still kill millions and millions of people. DEFCON is a game of who can kill the most innocent people. The points I’m playing to rack up are human lives. But DEFCON makes me feel guilty for winning. Through twenty years of playing video games, and twenty four years of living in a society that values personal achievement, I have been taught to want to win. Forget every other argument you’ve ever heard for games as art, DEFCON is proof that they already are. It’s like watching a movie like Hotel Rwanda or Reign Over Me it doesn’t make you happy, and it’s definitely not fun, but it’s enjoyable, and a good experience. This game makes me feel what I would loosely call “bad”, but it does so in a good way. And winning is hard (though again, that’s the point). The strategy involved is very deep, though the interface and units are incredibly simple. ![]() ![]() You wouldn’t guess it from reading that last paragraph, but I actually love this game. I killed 75 million of his people, and he only killed 50 million of mine. “Winning” a game of DEFCON means killing more of the enemy’s civilians than he kills of yours. That’s the point of this game in global thermonuclear war, no one wins. The subtitle, “Everybody Dies”, is no misnomer, but I think “Nobody Wins” would have been better. If the missile impacts a city, casualty information rises up from the flash. Their trajectory is marked by a dotted line with a missile icon on the end of it, and their impact is represented by a white flash. ICBMs take 10-15 minutes to reach their destination when the game is played in real time. The game can be played in real time if the player chooses, or run at a higher speed. Missile silos can either be used to launch ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles), or as defense systems against incoming missiles and planes. The game starts off at DEFCON (Defense Condition) 5 and gradually ticks down, with different actions permitted at different levels, until you reach DEFCON 1 and the use of nuclear weapons is authorized. There is calm, but eerie music playing in the background, and it doesn’t change through the game, no matter how tense the “action” gets. The game is played entirely from a stylized map of the world (pictured at the top of this post), with icons representing missile silos, radar installations, air force basis, fleets and cities. You are in command of your nation’s nuclear arsenal, and your mission is to decimate the civilian population of your enemy while protecting your own. Right now, I’m thinking it’s somewhere between “unsettled” and “pensive”, though the feeling is deeper than either of those would imply.ĭeveloped by Introversion (Darwinia, Uplink), DEFCON is a game that, according to its site, casts the player in the role of a military commander hidden deep underground in a fortified bunker. I still haven’t found quite the right word, but such is the nature of language we use words to approximate our thoughts in order to convey them, but when a thought is unfamiliar enough we don’t have the words to describe it. My next thought was “despair”, but again, not quite right. ![]() My first thought was “depressed”, although that’s not quite right DEFCON doesn’t make me sad. I’ve been having trouble putting a word to the feeling I get as I play DEFCON. In fact, it’s a quite enjoyable game it’s just not a fun game. This is purely the author’s musings about his feelings while playing DEFCON, and is in that sense entirely subjective.ĭEFCON is not a fun game, to me anyway, which is not to say it’s not a good game, or even an enjoyable game.
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