Walzer, Guild Wars 2, and "The Other"

My dude and his two fiery dude(tte?)s

 One thing that I like to do, occasionally but hopefully not too frequently at the expense of schoolwork, is play Guild Wars 2 (GW2). It’s all good fun, but recently, I’ve begun to see shadows of things we’ve talked about in this class while playing the game. 

There are three game-modes in GW2, two of which have nothing to do with this. The one that does is called World versus World versus World (WvW). To give a brief explanation of what WvW is, it’s group combat on a large scale for 2 weeks. 3 teams of players, each of which can have over 100 players in any given area, fight over territory and supply for points and profit. 

Several days ago, while I was in WvW, someone in map chat made a comment about something they had just done. They had come across an enemy in the open world, apart from any allies. The enemy had been either mining ore or chopping down a tree, and the person making the comment had attacked and killed them while they weren’t paying attention. The person who did this said they felt bad because the person had been just innocently gathering materials, they hadn’t been looking for a fight. 

Although he probably said it mostly in jest, I thought to myself, huh, that’s kind of like that one thing that one guy said in that one thing we read by him in that one class I’m in, where that guy is Michael Walzer and that thing we read was “Just and Unjust Wars”. Walzer records several anecdotes from soldiers, one of which is by Robert Graves in the First World War:

While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, about seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. “Here, take this. You’re a better shot than I am.” He got him; but I had not stayed to watch. (Walzer 140)

            Walzer says that this anecdote and the others like it that he also tells demonstrate an important moral recognition. The soldier recognizes that the naked man is, at that moment, not a soldier, but just a man, a man like any other. A man like the soldier believes himself to be. That this recognition is significant enough for so many soldiers to notice and write about implies that in general, soldiers do not view opposing soldiers as men, and this is reflected by one Emilio Lussu, who, while looking into enemy trenches during the night, wrote that “Those strongly defended trenches, which we had attacked so many times without success had ended by seeming to us inanimate, like desolate buildings uninhabited by men, the refuge only of mysterious and terrible beings of whom we knew nothing” (141). 

            The themes and ideas Walzer finds in people’s experiences on the battlefield can also be applied to my silly little GW2 anecdote. Although the person it happened to made a different decision in the end, there was still a recognition that the character they were killing was a player, not an NPC (non-player character). And this recognition can lead to another. Just like in the case of soldiers in a war, although you know that any given enemy is a person just like you, you likely don’t spend much if any time actively thinking about that. In any “us” versus “them” situation, I think people have a tendency to belittle the humanity of those belonging to “them”. This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic is a humorous treatment of that idea. The first half might be said to have the soldiers recognizing the humanity of the other, and the second has them once again occupying opposing sides in a conflict and reverting to their previous state of mutual animosity. Additionally, this article from ESPN treats the issue less humorously but more critically.  Sometimes, in the case of a justified war, viewing some “other” as almost inhuman might be necessary for the soldier to do what is necessary and just. Other times this would have negative results, and sometimes, in the case of games, it doesn’t have any direct negative outcome. Still, at least recognizing that you are perceiving humans as something less than they are, is probably a step towards the enlightenment that Plato talks about in his Allegory of the Cave. Even if you don’t agree with Plato on things, it’s still probably a good thing.

            Not long after I heard about the guy who killed the innocent miner/lumberjack but felt bad about it, I found myself in virtually the same situation. My team had just captured a tower from one of the opposing teams, and as I came out of the tower, I spotted a lone player from what I assume was the team whose tower we had just taken. He was chopping down a tree, and was apparently oblivious to what had just happened. I saw him, and I remembered what the other guy had said about killing the defenseless enemy and feeling bad about it. Long story short, I killed him and did not feel bad, because I’m sure he would have done the same to me, and because if I hadn’t gone after him there still would have been the twenty guys that killed him with me that would have jumped him, and because it is just a game after all. Still, the experience reminded me of Walzer, and the recognition that the members of the other are not faceless, soulless objects can be applied to a wide range of more important things. It also demonstrated that important philosophical principles can be seen in games, even ones which are not at all about them and to which they are not necessarily important.

(I apologize for any strange formatting issues, this thing is glitching for me pretty bad right now and I've had to do this in HTML to get around it, but I don't actually know HTML so it's hard. I think I've fixed all the visible problems though.)