Prisoners of War in video games. A discussion.

In 1859, a Swiss man called Henry Dunant visited the battlefield of Solferino. The details of the battle are a bit beside the point, but to quickly summarize it was a battle between a French-Sardinian alliance against the Austrian Empire, which eventually led to the independence of Italy. It was a massive battle, with modern estimates putting the amount of troops at about 300.000 in total. What was also massive was the casualties. Dunant witnessed the absolute carnage of the battlefield after the smoke had settled:

“Oh, the agony and suffering during those days… Wounds infected by the heat and dust, by shortage of water and lack of proper care, and grow more and more painful. Foul exhalations contaminated the air… The convoys brought a fresh contingent of wounded men into Castiglione every quarter of an hour, and the shortage of assistants, orderlies and helpers was cruelly felt”

A Memory of Solferino by Henry Dunant, page 60-61.

The more brutal visceral details which fill Dunant’s recollection of the battle are beyond the scope of what I feel comfortable sharing without sufficient readers warnings. Needless to say, Dunant witnessed hell on earth for days as the wounded of the Battle of Solferino died in their thousands due to lack of proper medical care, or even basic sanitation. The memory of Solferino reforged Dunant, who turned his despair at being unable to help, into tangible action, by pushing for the establishment of the Red Cross organization.As a product of this, the Geneva Conventions were also formulated, which were the first formal rules of war. This would be followed by amendments in 1899, 1907, 1929 and finally following World War 2 in 1949.?

(credit wikimedia.org)

The conventions, if summarized quite briskly, are a series of rules that dictate how a signatory country treats civilians, wounded soldiers and prisoners of war (POWs). They are a larger framework that attempts to bring humanity into a decidedly inhumane aspect of life. The effectiveness of the conventions has ebbed and flowed, but regardless the International Committee of the Red Cross has been instrumental in further limiting the horrors of conflicts across the globe.?

But how about conflicts across the virtual globe? In an article back in the summer of 2012, The International Review of the Red Cross, a magazine of the ICRC, discuss the issue of the rules of war in video games. Titled “Beyond the Call of Duty: Why shouldn’t video game players face the same dilemmas as real soldiers?”, it caused quite a stir at the time of its release to the public. There was significant debate in the gaming community regarding the feasibility of adding the rules of war into video games. After all, how would you add in taking prisoners to a Call of Duty game or Counter Strike? They are after all merely shooters for fun, and adding on a system of taking prisoners would completely ruin this fun. I am definitely not here to argue for or against the idea, I think it has merit in some situations but is hard to actually put in video games. Instead, I want to take a look at games that have successfully implemented systems where one has to interact with POWs. I will specifically be looking at Rimworld, Crusader Kings and Act of War.?

Example #1, Rimworld.?

(A scene from the video game Rimworld. Here, 6 colonists celebrate a religious occasion inside their mountain base)

To begin with, let’s take a look at a game which the game’s community often dubs “War Crime Simulator”. Rimworld was fully released in 2018 and is made by Ludeon Studios. In Rimworld, you (typically) play as a colony of survivors who have just crash-landed on a harsh and deadly planet. Surrounded by raiders, tribals, pirates and other factions, the player must successfully stake a claim in this unforgiving world, and successfully manage to build a brand new ship from which they can escape the rimworld.

In between those objectives, there are several interactions which have given it a level of infamy among players. As your colony grows progressively stronger and larger, it also faces increased attacks from hostile raiders and angry mechanical beings. The raiders, who are human just like you, can be knocked unconscious during combat, or receive such serious bodily injuries that they are incapable of continuing the fight. It is at this point that the player is presented with a dilemma. Say your colony has 5 colonists, and you are just barely scraping by food-wise. Can you afford to take in 2 prisoners from the last attack wave? What will you feed them with? Should you just leave the wounded raiders to die on the battlefield?

Rimworld presents a plethora of options in this scenario. You could take in the wounded and make them your prisoners, and then over time successfully persuade them to join your colony. You could literally harvest their organs and have them die on your operating table. You could work them as slaves in your colony, doing menial work. Or you could patch them up, feed them well, and send them home when they are well enough to leave your colony.?(For a complete list of interactions, please see guide attached at the end of this article)

(A typical prison scene from the game Rimworld. The brown area denotes where the prisons live, sleep and heal. Outside the room, a trap hall-way filled with bear traps are there to catch any prisoners who may try to escape. Credit to steam user DanishScorpio.)

The game itself does not offer any moral judgment on what you decide to do, instead it is reflected in how your individual colonists react to your choices as a player. If a colonist is rather cold-hearted, he may not care if you take in the wounded only to harvest their organs, but if the colonist is more sympathetic he may get a serious mood impairment for having committed or taking part in the act of such a grievous crime. Indeed, the very societal tenets of your colony heavily impact how you can treat wounded prisoners of war, with some societies being heavily against maltreatment, while others encourage it with summary executions and grand spectacles of blood and guts. The game doesn’t provide any innate benefits to any action, they are all allowed and applicable in the dangerous and chaotic Rimworld. It is therefore entirely up to the player how they wish to treat the rules of war, which I think is perhaps one of the most interesting ways of approaching the problem of implementing rules of war in a video game.?

Leaving the agency of what to do in the hands of the player is an interesting way of inviting the player to think about the consequences of their actions. Instead of being forced or hand-held towards an intended solution or moral, each player must view his actions on their own merits. There are no courts, no consequences for being evil (other than the faction which you aggrieved being more hostile to you in the future, of course). Conversely, being a “good” colony and following the rules of war doesn’t carry any innate moral advantages either. Indeed, the only true advantage is that you gain better relations with the factions of which your prisoners come from and return to once they are well enough to leave your colony.?

It is important to remember that players are of course playing a game. Many will purposefully choose more depraved paths, simply for the experience of it. Colonies of cannibals or slavery are more common on the Rimworlds, and rather common among players as well. Players shouldn’t be judged or feel judged for making decisions in a video game with no actual impact, but it is interesting to reflect on why and how players will often choose to engage in actual war crimes over following the rules of war. A closer inspection of why humans often choose cruelty over kindness is well beyond the scope of some random blog article about video games, and I will leave that discussion to the philosophers, but needless to say, Rimworld is a great example of the best possible implementation of the rules of war, making it not an inherent game decision, but rather a constant moral question. One which players will see the consequences of dynamically, instead of having the game dictate what can and cannot happen.

Example #2 Crusader Kings?

(A screenshot of the game Crusader Kings 3, with the player character Kaiser Heinrich IV in the upper left corner. Credit to Paradox Interactive)

Taking place in the European medieval ages, the Crusader Kings franchise has been a highly successful game series by veteran developers and publisher Paradox Interactive. In both Crusader Kings 2 and 3, you can play as anything from a count up to an Emperor, with matching powers and responsibilities. One particular responsibility of any ruler during the medieval age is what to do to stay in power. Courtiers plan for your demise, rivals plan for your overthrow and family members slowly poison your food and turn you against your allies. Inevitably as you rule, you will be placed in a position of having prisoners at your disposal. Be it enemy lords that you captured on the battlefield, or a noble which you have successfully captured, foiling his plan to overthrow your kingdom. How you treat these prisoners is entirely up to the player, like in Rimworld, but just like in Rimworld your decisions have quite serious repercussions depending on your culture, your personality and who you have captured.?

While there is a certain amount of breadth in how Crusader Kings 2 and 3 handles prisoners, for the purposes of this article I will be focusing entirely on the interactions possible with enemy lords or soldiers captured during a war. Within this category there are numerous options. A king can outright execute anyone he captures during a war without anyone in his own kingdom taking offense, although this will cause the kingdom/family of the killed person to grow in hatred towards your character. If a lord or noble is captured during a war, and the war ends, executing them increases your tyranny score, a way that the game measures how other characters within your realm view your rule in terms of its unjustness.?

Even if the ruler in question just holds the prisoner in their prison over time, the character in question can die from a long list of illnesses that they are more prone to getting while stuck in a presumably terrible situation in some dank fetid prison under a leaky and drafty castle. While lords in your own kingdom can be sentenced to house arrest, a much more humane method of imprisonment, those who you capture on the battlefield are all put in your own dungeons. Prisoners of enemy kingdoms are also fair game, in your subjects eyes, to any sort of torture or disfigurement. Byzantine rulers, for an example, can specifically castrate or blind their prisoners of war without any tyranny points imposed, and indeed without any of their own lords being offended by the action. Pagan lords, or more specifically Norse Pagan lords, also have access to straight up burning their prisoners alive in great religious festivals, which can boost and augment your prestige, piety and relations with your fellow pagan lords. In that way, Both CK2 and 3 certainly offer the player very positive responses to mistreating prisoners of war, as there is very rarely any truly net-positive reasons to keep a captured enemy lord alive. Indeed, the only way a prisoner often leaves someone's court alive is through a ransom, which is one of the more convenient ways of getting a revenue stream going during a war. Nobility around the world will gladly pay for their loved ones return (usually) and kings can command great ransoms that can fund costly projects.?

(A sadistic character prepares to torture a prisoner. Sadistic characters can relieve stress by committing such unspeakable acts. Credit to PCInvasion.)

In terms of how CK2 and 3 present the prisoner of war dilemma, and the rules of war, I think it very accurately simulates some of the moral quandaries about prisoners, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. Whereas in Rimworld there is a difference between a “just” and an “unjust” execution when it comes to prisoners of war, in CK2 and 3, foreign lords are always free game when it comes to imposing any sort of grizzly fate upon them, with the only drawback being that their families back home will despise you further, which is not much of a hindrance at all, seeing as most other nobles already hate you for being a different nationality, religion or personality type.?

While the medieval era of course predates any formal rules of war, or indeed any formal rules on POWs, it is still an interesting look into how games treat the topic. In CK2-3 it is certainly a matter of debate whether or not the player is actively encouraged to be more cruel towards their prisoners than otherwise. There is often very little to be gained from freely releasing someone, as they will most often just continue to work against you, and if a ransom cannot be had for a character, be they a minor, adult or old sage, then you are often better off letting them rot in their cells, literally.

Example #3: The Act of War series.?

While my last two examples are rather well known in the gaming community, the last one is from a rather older series that has long since been discontinued. In the Act of War series there is a distinct focus on wounded soldiers and POWs. The game takes place in the modern world, and pits three factions against each other: The secretive Task Force Talon, the United States of America and the Consortium, a sort of catch-all bad-guy faction described as being “A syndicate and a violent non-state actor”(1).

All three factions are able to take prisoners from among wounded enemy combatants, and all three factions get special rewards for taking prisoners. Their benefits are largely split into two. First, prisoners in a prison camp generate static income over time, making it quite profitable for players to take prisoners. Second, wounded soldiers are interrogated, and can reveal the location of enemy units on the map. However, the POW in question is then disposed of, and cannot be used for generating income, implying that the interrogation tactics are of an inhumane variety. The manual describes the action as “By interrogating a POW in a prison building, a part of the map will be revealed to you, but the POW will be lost”, which sounds rather ominous.?

(From Act of War: Direct Actions manual, page 22)

Act of War: Direct Action and its expansion packs are rather unique in that they deal with the consequences of wounds on the battlefield. The USA faction and the Consortium both have dedicated medical evacuation vehicles that pick up wounded troops and return them to your base, which is an incredibly unique mechanic among other similar games.?

In comparison to the previously discussed games, the scope of your interactions with POW’s are rather limited. While in both Rimworld and Crusader Kings you could personally interact with every prisoner down to a very gritty and fine-detail level, in Act of War prisoners become a rather anonymous resource in the grand scheme of things. The disregard which is shown POW’s in the game, having them disappear after an interrogation, most likely is a reflection of the time in which the game was made around the beginning of the global war on terror. Government blacksites, Guantanamo Bay and the infamous “renditions” wherein the US sent prisoners to other countries where torture was legal in order to bypass it being illegal back on home soil(2).??

It is rather weird to talk about a game that both seems to give unusual focus to battlefield casualties, friendly or otherwise, but at the same time models their abuse. One has to wonder how exactly these prisoners are generating passive income at the detention centers, perhaps doing menial work, but in the end their work actually contributes to the war effort directly, as the player is able to turn that income into more units on the battlefield. Even worse, the loss of a POW following an interrogation seems to suggest a rather blatant disregard for the rights of POWs under any number of conventions on the subject. Rather uniquely, in comparison to Rimworld and Crusader Kings, the player has no way to act “lawfully” or “morally good” in Act of War. There is no way in which a player can freely release a prisoner, or treat them in line with their own moral convictions. Prisoners are either generating income, or they are being “interrogated” and lost, with no in between. In some ways, this is a more distressing way of viewing POW’s than in the previous examples, as one cannot even attempt to treat POWs well.?

To conclude, I would add that all three examples are video games. A players actions in a video game does not reflect their morality out of the game. Shooting another person in Counter Strike does not make you more likely to shoot someone in real life. In the exact same way, acting like a tyrannical ruler in Crusader Kings or a deranged cannibalistic tribal colony in Rimworld does not make you a bad person in real life. They are entertainment products, and are specifically crafted to offer such experiences for the novelty of it. I would never, and will never, judge someone's personality on how they treat prisoners in Rimworld, or what they do with captured enemy lords in Crusader Kings. Instead, this article is merely a reflection on how games have and will discuss the idea of POWs. It is interesting to reflect on how the series that offer you the most depraved actions typically are also the ones that offer you the most morally wholesome options as well. In that way, they offer the player a way of interacting with POWs and discovering the consequences of these actions.

As game designer Sid Meier said: "A game is a series of meaningful choices", and how players interact with captured enemies is a meaningful choice. Hopefully, as the gaming industry surges forward, we see more interesting discussions and takes on the questions of the Rules of War and of POWs.

Prisoners 101, a Rimworld guide by Steam user DanishScorpio: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=936041483

(1) https://actofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Consortium

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/12/september11.usa