This is a heroic victory!

Some time ago I revisited a video game entitled Rome: Total War. Rome is, like its predecessors, a hybrid strategy game that combines high-level turn-based strategic planning with low-level real-time tactical battles. In terms of its gameplay, it's one of the most complicated and enjoyable video games ever made; one of the best the strategy genre as ever produced, at least. (In terms of everything else -- well, it really has nothing else. No plot, no interesting artistic direction, etc.)

Much praise has been lavished on Rome (and the Total War series in general) for its implementation of mechanics not usually seen in strategy games, such as morale. In Rome, all of your troops have a morale level; the higher their morale, the better they fight. Morale is affected by various things -- the most devastating being war elephants, which can scare troops merely with their presence, but charges and surprise attacks and such can also be quite damaging. When morale gets low enough (the troops are described by the game as "broken"), they "rout" -- the player loses control of the broken unit, and its members flee the battle in the quickest way possible.

As a side effect of this, armies may lose battles but still retain a number of troops from units that routed and then regrouped after the battle. To prevent this from happening (and thus having to fight the same forces again), Rome encourages players to run after routing units and cut them down before they can escape the battle. However, routing units, due to their frenzied terror, move faster than non-routing equivalent units; this means that in order to catch, for example, routing foot soldiers, a player must use something normally faster than foot soldiers -- cavalry, obviously.

Thus the end of almost every battle involves horsemen chasing down from behind frightened men fleeing on foot and either stabbing them in the back or trampling them to death. Thanks to Rome's impressive use of level-of-detail systems (don't ask), players can zoom in to watch the carnage up close and personal. And when this slaughter is complete, the narrator proudly announces, "This is a heroic victory for Roman arms!"

Based on the general bloodlust of the gaming population and the Total War developers' focus on gameplay at the expense of everything else, I find it unlikely that I was supposed to feel sick and disgusted at the end of every battle. Yet I was -- and I'm grateful for the experience. You can watch a war movie and see the horrors of war, but it's another thing entirely to be the one responsible for it, even in a historically inaccurate simulation of two-thousand-year-old battles. For me it was an eye-opening moment, demonstrating how easy it is to take an abstract, objective view, seeing the world as an elaborate game, a system to be analyzed for the quickest, simplest, and cheapest solution.

It's the same way corporate managers start to see only profit margins and cost-benefit summaries, or (to choose a more relevant example) students evaluate the fastest way to get into somebody's pants. We forget that we're not dealing solely with numbers and equations -- we're dealing with the fundamental unquantifiable variable that is a person. It's another form of dehumanization -- as I defined earlier, the only true crime in my eyes. As much as we'd like to, we cannot assign a value to a person, stick them into a function, and compute the result. As much as we try, objectivity has no place in humanity.