Killbox: A Case Study in Virtual Warfare and Digital Subjectivity
In early 2016 a new game about modern warfare was released to the world. Unlike Call of Duty or Counter Strike: Global Offensive, behemoths of the first-person-shooter video game market, Killbox, named after the US military’s term for the virtual targeting space used in missile strikes, is a game with different goals. Developed by artist Joseph DeLappe and the Biome Collective, an indie game outfit out of Dundee in the United Kingdom, Killbox is more installation than blockbuster video game. A game about drone warfare, Killbox is designed to be played by two individuals in the same room, one person controlling a small colorful orb moving around a low-poly render of a Pakistani village in south Waziristan, the other playing a drone pilot, circling above. Killbox, though simplified in some aspects, is based on a real drone strike in 2004, the first outside of an active warzone. The game is short and can be played in its entirety over about ten minutes, but in spite of its apparent simplicity, Killbox strategically uses different devices and details to cut to the heart of the ethical issues around UAV strikes.
Delappe and his co-creators chose this particular strike as the basis for their work intentionally: by attaching a nonfictional aspect to the game, they lend the experience weight as players attached more tangible consequences to their actions in the game. Tying the game to an actual event forces players to grapple with the real-world impacts of the event they are virtually reenacting. Players can’t help but project the actuality of this rendered event onto the seemingly innocuous, soft shapes of the game.
More importantly, Delappe and his co-creators single out this exact strike in Killbox, not just for the civilian casualties, including two children, but precisely because it is “the first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle missile strike in an unofficial warzone” (DeLappe). At face value, Killbox is about one unfortunate drone strike, but the game and its creators strive to generalize its specifics to a much larger, untold narrative of a shadow war that the United States has waged for over a decade in the FATA region of Pakistan (Tahir). Specifically, Killbox prompts players to consider how the physical removal of the pilot from the aircraft has enabled extralegal killing outside of designated warzones in contemporary warfare. During the Cold War, when U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in 1960, he was flying a reconnaissance mission without any weapons on board (“U-2 Overflights…”). With the advent of UAVs, a pilot hundreds of thousands of miles away can not only fly into a sovereign nation, but take life, all without risking themselves. This is a drastic paradigm shift, brought about by digital technology that has made way for the US military exploit legal gray areas and take combat actions with UAVs that were considered far too perilous in the past with a human pilot on board (Conditt). Killbox creates a space where players can struggle with the morality of the United States killing wherever and whenever they see fit, now that the pilot has been relocated half a world away, out the line of fire.
This internet-facilitated separation of the soldier from the battlefield is why Killbox is also why constructed around a LAN connection between the two players, toying with the distance that exists in modern UAV warfare. Killbox’s creators are specific about the exact installation of the game, with a detailed schematic, showing dimensions and technical details, available for download on their website, each player sitting at a monitor facing the other. While Killbox can be played online on the gaming platform Steam, the juxtaposition of a virtual connection that is predicated on a physical one is where Killbox’s power and impact lies. The necessity for a hardwired interaction ensures an uncomfortable collapse of the separation of action and consequence that factors so heavily into the moral dilemma of drone warfare. The digital removal and virtual dehumanization that, much like the profusion of hate speech in comment sections across the internet, also allows for remote killing by the US military, is rapidly disarmed in Killbox as each player is forced to confront the person on the other end of their seemingly immaterial digital actions. The sudden resulting collision of opposing sides in the same physical and digital spaces pulls into stark contrast the contemporary departure from the corporeal warrior, in preference of the satellite soldier of the 21st century. By design, the digital “vision” that is integral to Killbox relies on a physical connection between each player’s computers, countering the long-range communication technology that allows UAVs in Pakistan to be flown from Las Vegas, and providing an eerie neutralization of the divorce of operation and actualization that digital culture has normalized.
Killbox further complicates the perceived discomfort of reuniting conflicting digital and physical realities, by forcing each player to experience the game from both perspectives: on the ground and in the air. Through this role reversal, Killbox shrinks the empathic divide that accompanies the geographic distance problematizing drone killings. In DeLappe’s own accounts of watching people interact with Killbox in an exhibition setting, it often takes one run-through for each person to realize that they are playing the same game (Bhattacharya). By making each screen graphically distinct in layout, color, and style, to the casual observer the two screens of Killbox can at first appear as separate games, the realization of connection coming only when the black explosion of the first Hellfire missile marrs the screen of both players. This moment of understanding, when the digital suddenly bleeds into the physical, manifests each player’s intangible online actions embodied in the other player, displaying the connection between the virtual and the physical that exists, but is disjointed in drone warfare.
Along with Killbox’s expressions of dehumanization through UAV combat in physical space, the graphics of the game are stylized to perform a similar function. The forms are basic and abstract, small orbs representing children and large oblong volumes adults, all brightly colored. Groups of child-orbs move in playful circles with each other in a field while the adults stand by the low buildings. They lack any distinctly human features, but through context they take on character, formally stressing the reduction of innocent people to statistics, percentages, and blobby heat signatures, while simultaneously allowing the player to project human movements and gestures onto them. After five minutes of ‘frolicking’ through the idyllic landscape, jumping high in the air and collecting amorphous spheres of light that make a bright, happy sound when the player’s avatar hits them, it is impossible to resist the visceral reaction of shock when the screen turns a sickly shade of purple against a background of ethereal audio feedback. Brightly colored bits lie strewn amid computer-generated debris in a cloud of thick black smoke. Both players oscillate between the symbolic dehumanization of the blob characters, and an innate feeling of humanity in the formless avatars. Players understand that the characters in Killbox are meant to drive home the dehumanization that takes place in automated, remote warfare, but they cannot separate an uncanny sense/connotation of human essence in the avatars that provokes an equally powerful feeling of remorse.
This said, Killbox tries to temper its potentially heavy-handed political commentary by pointing to a lack of agency on both sides, mitigating the tendency to place blame, and further encouraging empathy in both directions. It might seem obvious that the player on the ground has little control over the events that unfold, but the UAV player does not really have any more control. Because Killbox is based on real events, in every instance the target is always surrounded by three other innocent people in close proximity, and if the drone player chooses not to launch the missiles, the autopilot takes control and launches them automatically. A couple months after Killbox’s release in August 2016, Tom DeMajo, a member of the Biome Collective, had this to say about Killbox’s game mechanics:
“The child has lots of freedom, but no power. The drone pilot has lots of power but no freedom.” (Campbell)
What this ultimately means is that neither player has any effective agency. Without power and freedom together, the difference is the same in the end: helplessness. The UAV pilot may have the power to take life, but within a militaristic operational structure, no freedom to wield that power with their own moral judgement. They are helpless. Conversely, while the child on the ground can roam as they choose, they too are helpless, lacking any power to stop the impending doom. This eventually points each player, not at each other, but at the methods, rationalization, and automation of modern war that allows for such industrial, emotionless killing. Killbox does not offer players a target for their moral anger, but rather exposes a system in which all actors are equally and problematically unable to affect change. Killbox does not try to provoke or direct outrage, but urges players to critically examine the reality of warfare today, produced, not by individual drone pilots, but by our unrealistic collective desire for “clean”, distant, riskless, virtualized war.
In conjunction with the game mechanics, the way that each player interfaces with Killbox reinforces the static power dynamic and poses questions about digital objectivity. As discussed, the graphics for the player on the ground look like something found in a video game for young children, quite different from the tactical, multi-window view of the UAV player. Where the child can move in all directions, jump and look around 360 degrees, the view from the drone is much more constrained, a tight cone of sight focused from far away, with the ability to pan, zoom, switch to an infrared view, and interact with the aircraft using console commands. The child’s controls feel much more natural, with fluid swipes of the mouse to rotate the view, while the UAV pilot is confined to keystrokes in a sterilized interaction that only allows for binary motion. The UAV player has distinct, predetermined options, any singular key existing in only two states: engaged or not, 1 or 0. The target: confirmed or not. The missile: launched or not. The UAV player lacks any kind of interim option, any between state. Any hesitation in deciding the fate of four humans and autopilot takes over and makes the decision for them. By contrast, the child is immersed in a world that allows them to exist in a multitude of different attitudes and positions, experiencing all of the environment’s aspects and nuances. The UAV player is trapped in a rigid, precalculated decision tree, distanced and separated from the implementation of their choices, attempting to use the inflexible structures of a digital apparatus, the drone, to make objective decisions about war, a subject that is inherently messy and disordered. Killbox exposes the digitally-omniscient vision of UAVs as a perspective that convincingly flattens, but inadequately represents, the intrinsically instinctual, imperfect and compromising decisions of war into a categorical system that utterly fails to comprehend moral discretion. Through dismembering physical sense from war and replacing it with the virtual prosthesis of a drone, the contemporary digitally augmented soldier is married to a binary construct of warfare (“Five Thousand…”). DeLappe and his co-creators limit the UAV player to the keyboard as a way of representing the loss of human gesture in war, the loss of organic movement, of those things that make decisions exclusively human. The mouse as an indefinite, imperfect instrument is free and human while the UAV player is funneled into a handful options and a few keystrokes that cannot possibly describe the complexity to taking another person’s life. The UAV player in Killbox is forced to confront the reality that killing from afar is still killing, even if it is filtered and moderated through a virtual programme.
In 2012, the Obama administration changed the definition of an enemy combatant in the FATA region, to any combat-aged male, unless posthumously proven otherwise (Tahir). Since then, the definition and estimation of civilian deaths has been widely disputed by governments, journalists and humanitarian groups. The reason for constantly changing definitions? The reason for such blurred and malleable legality? Morality does not break evenly. Categorical systems, proliferated by the rise of digital technology, disintegrate and fail in the context of war, acutely limited in their capacity to see beyond quantities and statistics. Killbox presents this as the central problem with drone warfare, suggesting that contemporary methods of remote combat require reliance on those categorical systems almost exclusively. In Killbox, once the strike has been executed, the console asks the player to estimate the number of fatalities. In the chaos, debris and smoke, it is an impossible task to count the dead, much less sort individuals into civilians and combatants. Omer Fast alludes to this protocol in Five Thousand Feet is the Best, whereby drone pilots are required to inspect the wreckage of a strike closely to count the dead. But, in Wounds of Waziristan, Pakistanis from the FATA region are interviewed and describe the fragments of human bodies that are often scattered across strike sites, making counting the death toll a difficult task at best (Tahir). With immense quantities of data surrounding Americans every day, the American people incorrectly assume that the apparent objectivity of a thermal camera flying high above the unofficial battlefield can inform entirely equitable decisions. The reality is that in the shadowy War on Terror there are few features like a front line or political state through which to orient and contextualize those actions. Americans presume that a pilot making decisions from an air-conditioned shipping container at Creech, detached from the traditional implications of battle, will provide the best possibility of certainty and objectivity. The promise of the Predator drone was to finally remove the casualties and heat-of-the-moment mistakes that have always been endemic in war, but the reality is that no digital procedure or model can actually segment the disperse reality of war into clean, discrete categories and protocols. Killbox shows drone warfare as its problematic self, not the idealized life-saver of the popular narrative: a virtual tool supposed to ‘solve’ war, but undermined by its own inability to visualize, not the hard facts, but the humanity that has been stripped off of those glowing heat signatures as they have been beamed across an intercontinental video uplink, reduced to nebulous clusters of pixels. The computational, digital lens of the drone, feigns the ability for dispassionate, objective, precise killing, but in actuality, its models lack crucial data: a moral compass. Drones, then, are just another in a long list of machines of war, limited to a digital subjectivity that aspires and pretends to be omniscient and fair, but cannot grasp the unquantifiable human element of war that makes space for morality.
Bibliography
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“Five Thousand Feet is the Best. Omer Fast Interviewed by Eyal Weizman.” Photoworks (Fall 2012), 62–67.
Tahir, Madiha. Wounds of Waziristan. Wounds of Waziristan, Journeyman Pictures, 25 Nov. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1_2ysVT9HY.
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