Defcon (*1/2)
a review of
defcon
a videogame by introversion
published by valve, introversion, encore
for windows
text by matthew sakey
score: 
1/2 (out of four)
I was explaining Defcon to a friend, my arm-waving exposition rising in timbre as I spoke of the elegance, the simplicity, the awful beauty of this game of nuclear brinksmanship, a game where the whole point – where hours of play – really devolve into who’s the best loser.He didn’t get it.”I don’t get it,” said he.
“What’s not to get?”
“What about infantry? How do you place infantry?”
“You don’t. There is no infantry. It’s an abstraction; it brings grand scale murder into focus. It’s psychological.”
“Why can’t you see his silos? Where are your satellites? What about armor? NATO alliances?”
“There are no satellites. No armor. No NATO.”
He threw up his hands. “How is this a realistic war sim?”
“It’s not meant to be realistic, Kris.”
The look on his face told me that Kris understood the meaning of all those words. But to put them in that order and use them to describe a war game… well, it’d be like if someone said “And forgetting marsupial accessibility by variance” to you or me. The words make sense but not together. A strategy game that’s not realistic? Preposterous. Defcon is not meant for people who crave realism, but then, neither is chess.
Here’s how it works: up to six opponents each control a scoop of the world. At game start it’s Defense Condition Five – American military lingo for peace. It counts down relentlessly through Defcons until it reaches One – toe to toe nucl’r combat with the Rooskies, as it were. As the clock begins to tick, each side gets six missile silos to place in his territory, seven radars, four airbases and a whole flotilla of subs, destroyers and carriers.
Then you wait.
Everyone has nuclear weapons and the desire to use them, but ingenious balancing makes that a tricky challenge. Your ability to see into enemy nations – and thereby choose targets – is limited by your radar range and your willingness to sacrifice fighters on flybys. Moreover, the silos that launch your ICBMs are also your air defense systems (that voice you hear howling “silos aren’t anti-missile systems!” is my buddy Kris). They can only do one task at a time, so nuking your opponents means leaving your own territory partially undefended. It takes time to switch over and once you launch, the world can see your formerly-invisible silos.
So you wait.
At Defcon Three, surface navies pound at each other on the high seas while nations maneuver MRBM subs into position off enemy shorelines. Recon flights dodge SAM shells as they gingerly probe dark territory, looking for the vulnerable radar dishes that give precious advance warning of incoming warheads.
And you wait.
At Defcon Two, bombers start to fuel and players assess initial targets from spy intel. The delicious big cities are the principal victims, but clever opponents always defend them well. Your aircraft draw enemy attention with flyovers and feints designed to distract rather than damage. A sub surfaces off your coast to sniff the air, but it’s caught by shoreside radar and eats torpedo.
And you wait.
Throughout all this time the chat channels are raging. Alliances materialize and dissolve, secret promises are made and broken, everyone else waiting for just the right time to screw their friends and foes alike. Defcon One comes and goes, but no one launches. That’s bad strategy… it’s a waiting game. So you wait. But sooner or later, the inevitable howl of a klaxon, the warning: LAUNCH DETECTED.
Someone just blinked.
After that there’s little waiting. From the first siren it’s a race. The formerly quiet screen, displaying only the soft vector lines of a world map, is suddenly illuminated by dozens of arcing trajectories. Most warheads are shot down; full commitment is, again, bad strategy – better to leave some or most of your silos on air defense, wait for the other guy blow his wad. But sooner or later some warheads make it through, and casualty reports appear.
NEW YORK HIT 12.4 MILLION DEAD / PARIS HIT 8.3 MILLION DEAD / SAO PAOLO HIT 3.1 MILLION DEAD / TOKYO HIT 5.9 MILLION DEAD and on and on.
You see, in Defcon, everybody dies. It’s the subtitle. There are no winners, only those who lose the least.
That’s the secret, horrible beauty of Defcon. You’re safe in your bunker playing wargames, the deaths of millions blandly laid forth on your screen. No screams, no fires, just a soft flare and low rumble and that morbid text wipe counting the millions. Everybody dies.
It’s visually stunning. Introversion is self-funded and doesn’t have much money; they know they can’t compete with publisher budgets so they don’t try. The simple, luminous map, the softly glowing lines, it’s a study in minimalism. The audio is even better, like Clive Barker made into music. Nothing loud, no epic symphonies. The soundtrack is weeping mothers, distant coughing, lonely, forlorn tunes – Day After sounds. Score is kept. Your kills and survivors tallied against those of your enemies. It’s macabre and exhilarating.
Then there’s the strategy element. Each territory has geographic advantages and disadvantages; everyone starts with the same amount of equipment (“Africa gets nukes? Since when?” wails Kris) and the same amount of time to place it. Game speed is under player control. There’s even an Office Mode for work, where the game takes hours, so you can leave for a meeting or a nap without having to worry that London will be gone when you come back. For those who want things over faster, just speed up time and watch the world count down to annihilation. Mastering the speed game is an important part of Defcon strategy, since those who play regularly online know exactly what they’re doing. Which is what leads us to the game’s inevitable downfall.
If Defcon were a pony, it would know one trick. While in the short run it’s definitely awesome, it lacks any kind of true longevity. There are, it transpires, a limited number of optimal tactics. Each territory has prime setups that external forces cannot necessarily confound through strategem. In short, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The victor of a game of Defcon can usually be forecast from the instant that one person blinks, because once the launches start the game is, in many ways, over.
Defcon isn’t selling for fifty bucks or anything, but at $19 downloaded and $29 boxed it’s not cheap either. And the amount of actual play you’re going to get out of it is debatable. Sure, there are many gamers, myself included, who will spend lots of hours just killing millions for the perverse rush. Like a nuclear war, Defcon is a fun diversion, but it’s a sprint, not a marathon. (“Probably because it’s not realistic,” opines Kris, wrongly). No, it has nothing to do with the lack of realism. That’s actually part of the beauty. You can’t “simulate” real nuclear war and you probably wouldn’t want to. Introversion’s approach is necessary and welcome, it gives the game a cruel, detached flavor that is palpably effective. Everybody dies, baby. Everybody dies.
I’ve played a lot of Defcon, and I do enjoy it. But I also know how to play and win now. I don’t win all the time, but the fact is its avenues for victory are sharply limited. It’s not bad. It’s beautiful and challenging and quite unique. Depending on perspective, and the amount of pleasure derived from bombing the crap out of the rest of the world, many players could (and do) enjoy the game very much. But at the end of the day it’s not all it could be, at least not for the price. The patina of simplicity, of minimalism, actually winds up going too far.
“We like to push buttons” is the proud motto of this website, and the fact is we’re not too discriminating in which ones we wind up pushing. Our feeling is this: if there’s a button, push it. And if it causes the deaths of millions in the fiery maw of nuclear furnaces, that fact – though unfortunate – really isn’t sufficient impetus to turn us off our button-pushing crusade. After all, everybody dies. But this button, once pushed a few times, doesn’t really call out to be pushed again.
April 14th, 2007 at 059
That’s a great summary of a good game.
I keep thinking that the different modes of play will draw me back in. Maybe doubling the size of the planet or using a point-buy system to determine players’ starting resources adds enough variety for me to play another round or two. I keep getting disappointed.
April 14th, 2007 at 719
Good review.
I don’t think this game will hold any medium-to-long term appeal for me. I’ll save the $20 and will just go and wait for “War Games” to show up on HBO again. It’s due.
April 14th, 2007 at 745
Sakey,
man, after giving you so much shit over you’re last review, I thought I’d mention;
Your writing in this review has a good flow. I haven’t played this yet, but you’ve done a good job giving a feel for what this game is about, and you’ve given an open view as to why this game may or may not appeal to people.
April 14th, 2007 at 857
Either Lurky is the Glen Close to Sakey’s Michael Douglas or we finally have the answer to the age old question “Who watches the Watchmen?”
April 17th, 2007 at 631
It’s not a bad review, but remember that some people (like me) don’t enjoy a game as morbid as this – realism aside, genocide is not attractive to everybody.
April 17th, 2007 at 950
I think it’s pretty disingenuous to try and say that the game invites players to enjoy genocide.
April 17th, 2007 at 1420
Then what would you ‘try and say’? That it is about brinkmanship? Honestly, I haven’t played the game, so I wouldn’t know for sure, but according to the review and the many rants of a friend of mine, it’s not about going close to the brink to win any kind of political gains.
It would seem it’s a game about the pleasure of wiping people out.
Probably it has more layers than that, but still.
April 17th, 2007 at 1736
It’s not about the pleasure of wiping people out. You are supposed to feel conflicted and disturbed about that — that your goal in the game is to do this thing, and at the same time it’s so terrible. The audiovisuals are designed to reenforce this conflictedness.
On the subject of replay… I agree that this game doesn’t have tremendous replay value. But, is that necessarily important? Can there be such a thing as a Great Game (or maybe merely a good game) that you only play a handful of times? If it gives you a strong experience that you haven’t had with other games, why not? (We don’t insist that a great movie is one you want to watch 100 times…)
April 17th, 2007 at 1808
I agree on both counts. Part of the point of Defcon is the horror of the deaths, and a point I hoped to make was that the game’s chilly aloofness actually contributes to that. Had they shown lots of terrifying stock footage of nuclear blasts and injuries and such, the effect would have been diminished. The game doesn’t glorify genocide, nor does it attempt to be a statement against it. It is a strategy title, just like any wargame – murder on any scale is awful, it doesn’t need to be millions for it to “count” – and its design is focused on the strategy issue. But the way the genocide is presented does make you feel something.
As to the replayability, I certainly think that it’s wrong to over-penalize a game simply because it lacks replay value. Games are made to be played, not replayed. My issue with Defcon is less that it’s not infinitely replayable and more that there is a sharply limited number of ways to play. I just feel that the focus on minimalism, on simplicity, goes a bit too far in this case.
Thanks to everyone for their comments!
April 17th, 2007 at 1907
Menigmand:
I think it’s dangerous to equate enjoyment derived from a simulation to enjoyment derived from the activity being simulated. Simulations provide an environment where we can explore and experiment with actions and consequences, and come out unscathed — having only changed a game state, and not the world.
Playing games that explore the dark sides of human nature doesn’t make you a sociopath.
April 18th, 2007 at 850
It’s funny, because while I played the game a lot less than you did, I’d probably go ahead and give it another star, even though I agree with you on every count. I barely got into it – in fact, I only played the free demo on Steam – and I could tell fairly quickly that the game, at least against other players, would be fast-paced and RTSy, and limited in its options.
But the experience of the game, its “chilly aloofness” as you put it, really hit me. It’s the first game since Missile Command to give you that feeling of deep Cold War paranoia and distant, earth-wiping horror. Even though I knew I’d never play it, I almost bought it just on principle (in the end, my collegiate read empty bank account won out). At the very least, I’ll be keeping my eye on Introversion. I SHOULD have bought Darwinia, but again, realtimey strategy games just aren’t my forte.
Why don’t they make a minimalist, digitalized arcade action game? Man I would drop money on that so fast it’d put a hole in the floorboards.
April 18th, 2007 at 1319
Sakey, I’m really glad that ABDN has a writer like you contributing. Your, uh, “old games journalism” *shudder* style is a deviation from the more introspective near-ramblings and hazy metaphors of this site’s star attractions.
For a site that Tim has set up as aspiring to a degree of professionalism, your reviews [which, while punched up with some biting style, have the most balanced overview of a game's surface workings I think] contribute that tone and spirit in great big servings.
The factor of pricing of a game I find sticks out in your stuff so far, and that’s obviously of concern to the consumer, though consumer concerns are ones I’m not finding addressed anywhere else here. I don’t mean to bring this up as a complaint, but more to reiterate my point that I think you bring some useful balance to the force here.
April 18th, 2007 at 1826
Thank you, Digi, that’s really flattering.
To be perfectly honest it’s kind of strange happenstance that I started here with reviews of indie games where price was a factor; COTS titles are much more my mainstay in professional reviews, and I have been known to ramble introspectively and employ the odd hazy metaphor.
That said, Tim is kind of scary when it comes to word limits (my natural enemy, the word limit) so I’ll endeavor to keep it balanced and professional. Thanks!
April 18th, 2007 at 2109
That’s um… kind of hilarious considering Tim has written the longest reviews of games I’ve ever read. [granted, most of those weren't really about the games, kinda] I mean, compared to his other stuff, not even his lengthier stuff, 800-1200 words is like a IGN/Wired blurb in comparison.
April 19th, 2007 at 828
Lots of good points being made here, thanks for taking the time to comment on my first post.
About the comparison with MissileCommand I still feel there is a difference – in MC the player’s aim was to protect his/her “cities” in the bottom of the screen. In Defcon, it seems the only aim is to cause as many deaths to the enemy as possible. Defcon seems more related to that old Amiga game (was it called Nuclear War?) with a more cartoony approach and a clear message at the end (your faction’s leader cheering “I won! I WON!” – on the backdrop of a desolate nuclear wasteland)
I’m not saying the Defcon game was designed to bring pleasure from that, but just like the deliberate hostage/scientist killings of Counterstrike, I think
a lot of people don’t really ‘get’ the more subtle layers of the game, and instead use them for some kind of murder-wanking for lack of a better term.
Please note that I’m NOT saying this encourages violence in the real world. It’s still just a bit disturbing to me. I’m not religious, and I played lots of violent games back in my day. But it was violence as a means to a good end.
April 19th, 2007 at 1148
In Defcon, yes: the only aim is to make sure more of their people die than your people. This constitutes “victory.” Sure there are defensive measures one can take – the placement of your antimissile batteries is very important – but ultimately the tack of the game makes you consider these defenses as reducing your deaths rather than actively protecting life.
It’s far more chilling, in that sense, than Missile Command. And I think that’s exactly the point.
I absolutely agree that some or even most players probably skim the surface of this experience and end up getting a cheap apocalyptic thrill, but that’s hardly an indictment of the game itself.
April 19th, 2007 at 1607
>>>That’s um… kind of hilarious considering Tim has written the longest reviews of games I’ve ever read.
I write as “Steerpike” at http://www.fourfatchicks.com. In terms of pure length and haziness of metaphors, my work there will almost certainly exceed anything Tim has done. They actually published a 27-page retrospective about the Thief games that I wrote, amazingly without complaint. Tim’s word length rules are good for my discipline.
Menigmand: I certainly understand that – as you put it – genocide is not attractive to everybody. Defcon doesn’t really try to make it attractive. However, there is a cruel morbidity in humans that this game does appeal to. It’s the same reason we look at car accidents. The game isn’t an indictment of any kind, but it does a fine job of abstracting the concept of mass murder. Victors are pleased and mortified at the same time.