25Playing with Toy Soldiers: Authenticity and Metagaming in World War I Video Games
Andrew Wackerfuss
Even as the one hundred-year anniversary of World War I arrives, options for refighting the conflict on video screens have remained remarkably limited. Game companies have likely avoided the war in part because of its legendary reputation for invalidating the very concept of individual heroism that their audience demands. In a war of industrialized attrition, combatants quickly learned that their individual actions rarely influenced the outcome of battle, which instead resolved for impersonal, material, and industrial reasons. This strong historical memory of the war, while not universal by any means, has inhibited World War I’s cultural value in the context of an American culture dedicated to depicting warfare as a heroic contest that offers a chance to display virtues and defeat evil.1 World War I therefore makes a poor video game by the standards of AAA first-person combat simulators, which gamers evaluate based on requirements of challenge, accuracy of simulation, and seeming authenticity of experience. Because of this internal logic, World War I games have faced the challenge of building an “authentic” war experience by confining their simulations to the air, where heroic and seemingly realistic combat could still be positively portrayed, or by ignoring authenticity itself in favor of surrealism and fantasy (see Wackerfuss 2013).
In recent years, however, a new genre has emerged that has opened up space to offer both interesting gaming and authenticity of memory. The genre of tower defense perfectly matches World War I: the conflict’s static nature matches the genre’s structure, while the player’s perspective encourages focus on the war’s psychological legacy of vast, impersonal destruction. One of these games, Signal Studio’s Toy Soldiers (2010), became among the most popular titles on the Xbox Live arcade (XBLA) marketplace due to its innovative combination of first- and third-person gameplay, evocative period details, and a surprisingly astute metacommentary on the nature of wargaming itself. This chapter will discuss how Toy Soldiers combined these features to achieve commercial success, garner critical acclaim, and convey the historical memory of World War I to a new generation far removed from that war’s important legacy.
Origins and Features of Tower Defense
Tower defense partisans often locate the origins of their genre in user-made modifications of several real-time strategy games popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In truth, an earlier game, Atari’s 1990 title Rampart, first developed many of the genre’s elements. But it was only with the rise of mods for Age of Empires (1997), Starcraft (1998), and particularly Warcraft 3 (2002) that tower defense games became widely known. In the mid- and late 2000s, tower defense games found popular platforms in web browser and touchscreen games, which eventually solidified the genre into the following form.
Tower defense games present players with a map on which they will place static defensive turrets in order to eliminate waves of enemies progressing from an entry point to an exit point. Towers generally will provide a variety of capabilities or features, and will vary in their effectiveness against different enemy types. Any enemy successfully breaching the end gate will damage the player’s overall life total, eventually ending the game once too many get through. Killing enemies will earn the player currency to add and upgrade towers, and defeating all waves will advance the player to the next map. Enemy pathing can take one of two forms. In a basic model, enemies emerge from one point and progress along a set path or maze, advancing along a predictable route. Sometimes, multiple start and end points are used. Alternately, many games present a more open map that does not route enemies through a preset maze. Players must then use wise tower placement in order to block direct approaches and channel enemies through fortified lines. The latter form has become more standard in modern tower defense games, as it offers more interesting gameplay and allows players freedom to adapt the map to their preferred strategies.
Having coalesced around this basic formula, the tower defense genre grew in popularity as its own mode of gaming. It has produced many successful browser and mobile games, and eventually broke through into the AAA market as well, taking advantage of the XBLA marketplace’s ability to deliver titles directly to gamers’ consoles. Though the basic gameplay remained the same, prominent AAA tower defense titles have displayed a variety of interpretations and moods, including the cartoony Plants vs Zombies (2009), the absurdist and self-referential South Park Tower Defense Let’s Go Play! (2009), and the lush sci-fi scenario Defense Grid (2008). All these saw great success. Toy Soldiers, however, broke all records not only for tower defense games but also for downloadable games in the overall XBLA marketplace. According to one independent estimator of XBLA sales, Toy Soldiers sold over 200,000 copies in its first month of March 2010, a figure that represented almost one-third of XBLA’s total earnings and contributed to a higher volume of sales overall (see Lemne 2010). It continued to succeed through expansions, sequels, high earnings, and critical acclaim. These accolades established Toy Soldiers as the leading example of both tower defense and World War I gaming, demonstrating the natural synergy between tower defense and World War I. Much of this success came from the game’s ability to match structure and tone, with both elements working together to build a less problematically “authentic” simulation of a certain type of war memory.
Structures of Conflict: Tower Defense, Gameplay, and World War I
As the earlier summary of genre conventions indicates, tower defense games seem structurally well poised to depict World War I, a conflict notorious for its static and defensive nature. Toy Soldiers mobilized this synergy to achieve what had previously proven difficult for makers of World War I games: to create a real-time battle simulation that simultaneously upholds the military truisms of the war while also preserving interesting gameplay. It must be said that the seeming truism of a static World War I has often shifted under scrutiny, with modern scholars recognizing that many campaigns, especially in the east, featured far more mobility. However, the cultural memory of the trenches’ unique horrors continues to overpower historians’ attempts at revisions, making Toy Soldiers a document of the war’s psychological reality even as it declines to reflect its more nuanced empirical experience.
Toy Soldiers presents players with a series of battlefields that include several standard features of the tower defense genre. The level begins with an overhead flyby of the terrain, which shows players both the general layout of the battlefield and the key features that will determine their strategy (i.e., point of enemy wave entry, locations where players can place their defensive towers, and exit gate that must be defended). Players begin with a set amount of money that they will use immediately to create their initial defense. Then, at the sound of a horn, the first enemy wave begins. Tower options mirror the most important defensive weapons of the era, including:
Machine guns. Machine gun nests offer the most common and cost-effective means of eliminating enemy infantry. Many players will rely primarily on these towers to defeat waves of enemies, the same role these units played in the actual war. Some players may even find that they rely on these units with near exclusivity. They are cheap to build, quick and efficient to upgrade and repair, and, just as in the real war, offer an astonishingly effective method of area control and infantry annihilation. If destroyed, they are also easily replaced.
Artillery. Another important type of tower reproduces the other key weapon of the historical war: long-range artillery that fired indirectly at massed enemy formations. In Toy Soldiers, players may only place artillery in specialized, larger slots dedicated for long-range fire, a limitation that reproduces concepts of layered defense that dominated that era’s strategy. Players may therefore place these guns only near their end of the map, or at times along the sides, where the guns will remain generally safe from harm but still capable of dominating the main battlespace.
Antiaircraft guns. In many levels, players will also encounter waves of enemy biplanes, which pose particular threats to backline artillery that otherwise could avoid attack. Players may therefore place antiaircraft guns in the long-range tower slots in order to defend against this threat, which cannot be countered by any other ground unit. In practice, however, players often choose not to use these towers, for reasons again mirroring historical logic: aircraft were a psychologically significant but militarily marginal side of the conflict. Players therefore often choose to focus on towers more effective against the main threat from the ground.
Gas turrets. The use of gas turrets as units similar to the machine gun nests represents one of Toy Soldiers’ only significant structural departures from period military weaponry. Both machine gun and gas towers are relatively inexpensive frontline defensive structures, with the machine guns filling the role of rapid long-range fire while the gas towers dispense a small zone of local area effect damage. The sickly green color of the cloud marks it as chlorine gas, the first effective gas weapon of the war. The color also signals to experienced video game players the weapon’s adherence to gaming’s general tropes of poison damage, as a form of indirect and passive damage usually indicated by the color green. This depiction of gas towers, however, marks the developers’ most major revision to general accuracy in historical weaponry. In the real world, World War I armies developed chemical weapons as offensive tools to break fortified lines. They used artillery shells or gas-dispensing canisters to clear low-lying and tightly packed enemy trenches, causing defenders to die or flee so that their own armies could occupy the evacuated space. For obvious reasons, using gas defensively would risk disaster by flooding one’s own lines with poison. Gas was therefore something that special attacking units carried to the enemy, rather than a weapon that kept the enemy from approaching (Heller 1984). In this way, Toy Soldiers deviates from its otherwise accurate representation of the war’s general structure, a departure necessitated by the desire to include such an iconic weapon in a game whose genre is essentially defensive. In order to meet player expectations that a World War I game would include gas, the nature of that gas had to change to meet the structural conventions of tower defense.
Barbed wire. One final type of defensive fortification transcends the preset limitations on where players may place their structures. Unlike towers that actively kill the enemy, players may place barbed wire on any open spot of ground, where it will slow enemies so that they may be mowed down by the other towers. It thus offers a cheap and effective means of zone control. It can, however, be easily destroyed by enemy armored units, as well as artillery and mortar fire from both sides. In this respect, players much constantly refurbish and extend their barbed wire nets, lest they eventually dissipate altogether. This project consumes player resources in two ways: the money to build the wire, and the time and attention it demands from players who must also juggle several other priorities at any given time. Barbed wire therefore creates interesting gameplay by increasing challenge, as well as by allowing players to discover and develop ways to shape the battlefield according to their personal strategies. In other words, the dynamic closely mirrors the historically accurate experience of fortification during the war. The massive trench system that developed by the end of 1915 was not a natural state of being; it was instead a constructed battlescape that required constant attention, investment, and personal risk by troops seeking to build their own defenses while undermining the enemy’s. The developers’ implementation of barbed wire therefore perfectly balances historical authenticity and interesting gameplay, prompting players to acknowledge the active, constructed nature of the World War I trench systems while also offering opportunities for stimulating challenge.
Figure 25.1 Repulsing a wave of enemies in Toy Soldiers, the interior wall of the toybox visible in the background.
All these structural elements combine to represent the experience of World War I in a way that evokes many of the most important elements of the war’s historical memory. As players watch from above, waves of enemies crash against their own massed formations, channeled through barbed wire into predetermined “paths of glory” that end in slaughter. Players thus replicate the war experience primarily as generals, filling the same role as the distant figures of godlike detachment depicted in the 1957 Stanley Kubrick film called, yes, Paths of Glory. Just as those generals sat in elegant Parisian salons, moving figures on maps and sending men to the slaughter, so too do players sit in comfortable living rooms and command thousands of virtual soldiers to their deaths. World War I, quite authentically, becomes a contest of detached material attrition, divorced from the individual cost. Tower defense games like Toy Soldiers therefore offer the perfect vehicle to convey the war experience, not in spite of their avoidance of first-person heroism, but because of it.
Mood, Imagination, and Play: What Is Being Simulated?
This chapter has thus far avoided discussing the visual, auditory, and other aesthetic depictions of war in Toy Soldiers, which in themselves present a novel and innovative approach to wargaming. When starting up the game, what was hinted in the title becomes immediately clear: the game does not actually take place in the trenches, but rather in a child’s toybox. Title and loading screens show the players period-inspired advertisements for the toy sets they are about to play with, putting gamers in the mindset not of a soldier in the trenches, but a child in the bedroom, collecting and imagining warfare while not directly taking part. Musically, the soundtrack does not feature the type of heroic, orchestral score generally expected for first-person heroic epics but instead mobilizes period-authentic music that might be played on a living room phonograph in the 1920s. Once in the game, it becomes clear that the units themselves are toys rather than people. They do not bleed when blown up, but rather fly high into the air as if flung by a child’s hand. (Game stats even gleefully track the record heights attained by blasted units.) The map itself, upon further examination, turns out to be a diorama built for play. One can see over the edges into the bedroom, where bookshelves and other artifacts of a child’s room show that a larger world of reality exists outside the realm of play.
The meta-setting also appears in the ability to take control of single units for a period of time, an element that not only adds interesting possibilities for gameplay, but also furthers the game’s commentary on the nature of play itself. Players may assume control of units in order to move them around the battlefield, a feeling similar to how a child would grip and move toys around the bedroom. In practice, most players will choose to control the biplane or the tank, the two technological wonder weapons that captured participants’ imaginations as possible escapes from the brutal nature of trench warfare. While it can be fulfilling to take control of a machine gun nest and mow down endless waves of enemies, in practice these units function perfectly well unattended. Players therefore feel encouraged to find methods of more meaningful participation through the air and armored units, making them more attractive options for a first-person experience—just as in reality.
Figure 25.2 Aerial view of toy sets, with one repurposed as a train tunnel.
In prizing play over replication, Toy Soldiers succeeds in simulating a cultural type of World War I experience because it chooses to avoid representing the war itself. Instead, it re-creates the experience of playing at war, a popular activity for boys too young to join the fighting themselves. These boys, the prime consumers of the toy soldier industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dealt in war as an idealized construct that shielded them from its worst physical and psychological effects. Historically, that dynamic had a sinister side: scholars of fascism note that while the Nazis often portrayed themselves as representatives of the front experience, one of their most important demographics were in fact youths who had just missed participation, and who therefore retained idealized notions of heroic warfare that their fathers or older brothers had discarded when faced with reality. Critics of the militarization of present-day American culture have expressed concerns that a similar dynamic has begun in the United States, in that video wargaming and warlike films dominate the culture but only 1 percent of the population serves in the actual military. That disconnect looms large behind every video wargame—even if most refuse to admit it. When the industry and its audience prize a first-person experience of supposed authenticity, they usually measure it according to how games create the most naturalistic environments, the most realistic-looking blood spatters, or the most accurate simulations of ballistic physics. Dozens of World War II titles have sought audiences through these technical feats, yet few acknowledge those elements they fail to even attempt. Video games inherently lack the ability to replicate fully battlefield conditions of deafening noise, nauseating smells, slow rot of disease, and direct existential terror. Games thus fail to convey a truly authentic war experience even as they claim to seek that as their goal. Their false authenticity, critics fear, contributes to the militarization of any culture that believes it knows war, but in fact knows only the game.
Ironically, this danger minimizes in games depicting World War I, which history remembers as so horrible as to defy any realistic attempt at simulation. Critics of militarized cultures may well see less to fear from Toy Soldiers, which wears its artificiality on its muddy green sleeves. Games like these show American culture as self-aware, ironic, and indeed postmodern in its embrace of the constructed and artificial over the superficially real. Toy Soldiers thus allows a culture to have its hardtack and eat it too, playing at war while acknowledging the gulf between play and reality in a way that honors the historical memory of a terrible war.
About the Author
Andrew Wackerfuss is a historian with the US Air Force, stationed with the Air National Guard History Office at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. He holds an MA in German and European Studies and a PhD in history from Georgetown University, where he continues to teach night classes in European history. He is the author of Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement (2015) and of what he hopes to be an essential philosophical guide to a postapocalyptic world, Thus Spoke Zombiethustra: A Book for the Living Undead.
