How right I was, he later told me the website was www.everybody-dies.com.
So I tried playing the game, and I actually enjoyed the style of this game. Basically you look at a 80's inspired war map and your units basically appear as symbols. This polished look on your LCDs really bring you into the feeling of being a military commander but brings you away from something which I will touch on later.
You take control of defense and offense for your region, such as North America and the USSR. And the aim of the game is to kill as much of your opponent's civilian population as possible. Of course, it will never be possible to shoot down all the nukes that are aimed at your cities so the key is to balance offense and defense priorities.
However, this game slowly brought me to an understanding, that there is no such thing as an 'absolute win' when it comes to wars. Much like the movie 'war games' which inspired much of the game, there will always be losses on both sides and justification should not even be thought of; the numbers are too big - ''A strange game, the only move is not to play.''
There is no way to win a thermo-nuclear war. When you think about it, how sure are you that you can attack a country and have them not be able to fight back? Are you really that capable of disarming ALL of their retaliation capabilities instantly? What if they fight back and kill millions of your people? It's like playing a game of russian roulette, with 5 bullets instead of 1.
It is always easy to try to justify the deaths of soldiers, that they have fought with honour, that they at least contributed to the attack. But what happens when you find that innocent civilians are blown up because they are there? This brings me to what the game DEFCON brings you away from - the ability to see the consequences of nuking a city. Images of people simply disintegrating from the blast, bodies cooked from the boiling rivers and lives in misery and illness from the fallout.
And then there are those that are thrown into the battlefield despite their unwillingness to. Given a uniform and a rifle, these people are told to 'make the nation proud'? I would make my nation proud by steering it out of trouble's way!
When we look into past conflicts, we often see that the longer they take, the more negative the views on the attackers get. Just ask yourself why there are still people throwing stones at the US army, when what they did was 'liberate' the people. Well, lets just hope these stones don't turn into grenades if they continue staying there.
With far more serious issues at hand such as dwindling resources, pollution and failing economy, I think it would be a better choice to stop the fighting and start on the preparation because our future is a dark one.
War, War Never Changes. - Quote from the Fallout series.
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