Fleeing
As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.
I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.
They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?
Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.
They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.
Rome Total War
Rome Total War was the third release of the series of video games Total War, developed by The Creative Assembly. Although it was originally produced in 2004, the game remains to date arguably the most complete strategy video game available on the market.
Set between 270 BC and 14 AD, the game allows players to assume control of one of three powerful Roman families, in the quest for imperium over the unruly provinces of the expanding empire. As well as dealing with the injunctions and punishments of a superego-like Senate, players have to manage the cities that constitute part of their territory, as well as taking care of the military aspect of their campaigns.
Cities can be developed by constructing specific buildings – aqueducts, theaters, temples, etc – and armies can be reinforced by producing a vast array of different units.
As with most games of this type, the player’s perspective is effectively that of a God, competing for supremacy with other AIs or, if in multiplayer, with other human ‘divinities’.
Late Night Addiction
I play Rome Total War mostly at night. Late at night.
When the echo of the karaoke from the pub next door finally vanishes in the coming silence of the early hours, I turn up the volume of the faux-ancient music that plays throughout the game, and I take up my responsibilities as a God of my digital antiquity.
If a God also exists over our physical world, I wouldn’t be surprised if His relationship with us was one of addiction. Populations come and go, battles explode and wane, empires pass like shooting starts through history, while God labours late at night over His multitude of creatures. They all look so similar from far away, their pixels as smooth as skin – their skin as rough as a mosaic of pixels, whenever He casts His watchful gaze too close to us. God must be addicted to playing our world. His back must hurt for having spent too long bent over our flickering life. Yet, looking down at the screen of His universe, He must never feel alone. Loneliness has been replaced with responsibility. God takes care of us, even when He pushes us towards annihilation and slaughter.
I know this, I know it with certainty, because God and I are colleagues.
The Three Stages of Rome Total War
What is God’s responsibility towards us? What is our responsibility towards God?
Playing Rome Total War, witnessing the absolute readiness of my men to build or fight or die at my orders, I understand that these two sides of responsibility coincide perfectly. Kierkegaard must have been a veteran video gamer, since it is in his writing that the ethics of Rome Total War shine through most brightly.
According to Kierkegaard, human existence unfolds in three stages, or in three spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. While the aesthetic sphere is concerned with the immediacy of our most selfish appetites – in perennial pursuit of ‘the interesting’, – the ethical and the religious spheres tend towards a more complex relationship with Society, with God, and ultimately with ourselves. The accomplished ethical agent, according to Kierkegaard, is a person who recognizes the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and who pursues the ‘good’ in accordance with the aims and limits of his/her role within society. A religious person, on the contrary, transcends the narrow boundaries of society, and understands his/her happiness as the accomplishment of the tasks that God decided for him/her, and which s/he apprehended directly from God. What is more, within the religious sphere, the smug comfort of the ethical agent – safe in the possibility of actually achieving the tasks of an ethical life – dissolves in the acknowledgement of the impossibility to fully perform the tasks that God assigned to each one of us. The religious person hears the call of God, s/he understands His orders, and s/he knows that the accomplishment of God’s orders is the only chance that s/he has to achieve eternal happiness – and yet s/he fails to accomplish the task s/he has been given.
Whenever I select one of the cohorts of my army, my soldiers respond to my call by saying out loud the name of their unit. While St. Paul responded to the call of his God as a single individual (bearing the name of Saul, or, later, Paul), disconnected from and rebellious against his given social role of a persecutor of the Christian sects, my soldiers always reply my call by stating their complete belonging to their social roles. Whenever they obey my orders, they do so only as satisfied, social, ethical agents. It is only when they fail to obey, when their individual silence is the only response to my call, that they manage to transcend the narrow perspective of their social/military organization. It is only when they fail to obey my orders that they become religious agents, putting their faith in me, their God.
Being a Demiurge
God should help His believer to obey His orders, yet He rarely does. I see my soldiers fleeing the battlefield, and I cannot help them. As I witness their slaughter by the hand of the elephants and chariots of the Seleucids, all I can do is interrogating myself on how I could grant them that eternal happiness they lived and died for.
To be sure, I could easily avoid this problem of my God-like responsibility towards my soldiers, by claiming that in fact I am not their creator, I am not their God, but I am simply their Demiurge. As in most Gnostic philosophies, the universe of Rome Total War has been created by the distant God of The Creative Assembly. After creating them – in countless, replicable, parallel universes, each purchasable as a single installation pack – the original God abandoned His creatures to the care of a number of individual Demiurges, smaller divinities who deal with the daily joys and sorrows of His dejected creatures. I am a Demiurge, then, but by taking up the orphan children of God I have taken upon myself an even higher responsibility than that He has towards them. I didn’t create them, so I cannot ‘always already’ dissolve my responsibility into the deep-past of creation. I chose them, I adopted them, and my responsibility towards them remains perpetual in their perpetual present.
The Gnostics were wrong in idealizing the figure of God-creator as a benevolent entity, opposed to the malignity of the Demiurge: God is a tree that scatters His spores with no emotion or attachment, while the Earth is the Demiurge that nurtures them, for good or evil.
Yet, my responsibility towards my fallen soldiers remains. How can I award them the eternal happiness they forced me to promise to them through their faithful obedience – and especially through their faithful failure to obey my orders?
When Kierkegaard died, he had already given instructions about the inscription he wanted on his gravestone. Perfectly in line with his philosophy, he had selected a few verses from a hymn by Brorson.
In a little while
I will have won
The entire battle
Will at once be over.
Then I can rest
In paradise
And talk unceasingly
With my Jesus.
Where will my soldiers rest, now that their battle is over? Where will we meet, to unceasingly converse?
Paradise
I play Rome Total War at night. Late at night. Into the morning.
When the light of dawn attenuates the contrast on my computer screen, and the birds cover the pseudo-ancient music with their singing, I begrudgingly accept that the time has come for me to stop playing. Although a God in the game, I am a member of society in my world - I must wake up, go to work, be a functioning member of society. As I click ‘exit’, I can suddenly feel my eyes hurting, pangs of pain shooting from my lower back to the top of my head. My divinity crashes in the pathetic reflection of my face in the mirror, and I feel guilty. I wasted an entire night seeking the pleasures of my fantasy, conquering imaginary territories with the same careless greed of a Don Giovanni. Being God, for me, has meant being a Kierkegaardian aesthete. Maybe every God is, by necessity, an aesthete, playing with His creatures only out of transient interest. But as guilt kicks in, I am pushed back into the position of the ethical agent: wasting the entire night was ‘bad’, and I will carry my wrong choice with me throughout the day, as I will go back to fulfill my role within society.
I brush my teeth, shut the curtains and collapse on my bed. Sleep arrives in a matter of seconds. Though it feels like I’m still awake, still in front of the screen, better, beyond the screen. In my dream, I see my soldiers, obsessively returning. I see them moving without having to order them to do so. I don’t call them, but they talk to me. They tell me their names, their identical faces blur into the sound of their voices. They are talking to me, unceasingly. I listen to them, I reply in dream language. The have won, the entire battle is over. They can rest in the paradise of my dreams, finally, eternally happy.
