I was recently dragged into Rainbow Six: Siege by my girlfriend, and it's been a refreshing addition to my game library. The gunplay ranges are much too short to seem arcade-ish, and the gameplay is tactical when you're skilled enough to move onto an objective-based playstyle. The thing that surprised me the most, however, had nothing to do with the mechanics themselves, but the overarching story and design of the game. Now I must profess early on that I am by no means a Rainbow 6 veteran; I clumsily played with Rainbow 6: Vegas on the PlayStation Portable in my youth, with no real understanding of anything that was going on at all. I've come to conclude that even though I loved games from a young age, I've been really bad at them until I hit the age where I became self-aware.Â
Still, Rainbow 6 is a cool idea, though its existence would have dubious real-world implications. Conceptualized as a multi-national, NATO-directed counter-terrorist unit (CTU) founded in 1999, curiously before the proliferation of the War on Terror, before President Dubya invoked Article 5 of NATO against "terrorism" and before terrorism became a widespread trauma of the West. It genuinely came as a surprise to me when my girlfriend spoke so passionately about counter-terrorism, and told me that Rainbow Six: Siege had actually taught her more about how it felt to want to protect one's country and homeland. That preface to me buying the game really primed me to critically analyze how it was that this game could influence my girlfriend, usually a sweet, apolitical, violence-averse human being, to empathize with counter-terrorism, and profess the belief that she on some level understood the idealistic reasons that could underpin the decision to join an active combat or law enforcement unit.Â
When you first boot up Rainbow Six: Siege, you're encouraged to play single-player missions called Situations to familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and learning how to use the special abilities of your Operators. These Situations provide you with the context around the surprisingly multinational group of CTUs sharing their best practices and training together. In the story, Team Rainbow was deactivated in 2013, only to be reactivated in 2016 in order to counter a terrorist organization called the White Masks. The art design of the White Masks is very interesting - every part of their body is covered up and their only distinguishing feature is the white mask that they wear. You can't tell their race, gender, nationality, anything.
The artistic decision to portray terrorists in this way is conscious, and is a double-edged sword. It is a sad fact that for most of the West, the instinctive conception of a terrorist is a turban-wearing, AK-47 wielding, Arab Muslim fighter. The decision to completely remove any identifiable features from the terrorist, then has two effects: firstly, it is a deliberate disavowal of that knee-jerk concept of the identity of terrorists. The truth is that before and after the declaration of the War on Terror, terrorists have come in all shapes and forms. The West has, since the end of World War II, been periodically plagued by far-right, white supremacist terrorism, on top of the popular conception of Islamic terrorism. It is a problem that has been ramping up, as we can see from the number of active shootings by radicalized white supremacists in the past few years. The decision, then, to completely deprive the terrorist of any identifying factors, does help to fight against the bias that we have when we think of "terrorists".Â
The other effect to consider is how the lack of any human identifiers dehumanizes the White Masks. Tubular Assault, the 4th situation, is set around a White Mask hijacking of a plane while it's still on the tarmac. In the briefing, it is verbally admitted by the Director that the White Masks have an objective, and that the nature of a plane hijacking allows them to boost recruitment and awareness of their cause. However, there is absolutely no mention whatsoever of what exactly this cause is. When you combine the dehumanization of terrorists with the refusal to identify a specific political cause for which they are engaging in random acts of public violence, it's instinctively scary; they want to destroy us, and we don't know why.Â
In March 2019, an Australian man named Brenton Tarrant loaded up his guns and attacked two mosques. He killed 51, and injured 49. These statistics do no justice to the amount of psychological and emotional damage that was inflicted on the survivors, the families of the affected, and their wider communities. In the aftermath of the shooting, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardem refused to allow Tarrant to be identified, intending to put the spotlight on the victims rather than the shooter. Tarrant had already gained a lot of media attention by live-streaming his shootings (the clips of which are still being circulated), and by publishing his manifesto, The Great Replacement. She coordinated with French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron to hold a summit that encouraged tech companies to step up their efforts in combating violent extremism and radicalization.Â
All this, however, is how the New Zealand administration dealt with the shooting, and how other administrations will be planning to deal with shootings. The media, the public, and the pundits play a very different game. Depending on their own ideological motivations and that of the terrorists, they will either highlight or downplay the terrorist's motivations or identity. The conscious calculation of news agencies in covering this specific attack was described in detail by the New York Times. What doesn't change from attack to attack, however, is the sensationalization of the violent act itself. Tarrant gave news media a big hand by live-streaming his shooting for all to see, but even if he didn't, people have a tendency to obsess over the gruesome, morbid details of attacks. The number of dead and injured, the weapons used, the angle of attack. I have seen many newspapers that show a visualization of the interior of the location being attacked, and show using arrows the path of the attacker. When the terrorist gets away after the attack, full media attention is devoted to coverage of the hunt. People will jockey back and forth on how significant the terrorist's identity and political motivations are, but few would pull the brakes on the nitty gritty analyses of the traumatic incident itself.Â
Which brings me back to the way Rainbow Six: Siege handles terrorists. Being a tactical action shooter, it's incredibly difficult for the game and its creators to not sensationalize the violence of the terrorists. When the cut-scenes roll of the terrorists concocting and wiring up chemical weapons and explosive devices, it feeds our collective morbid curiosity in the amount of harm, the amount of cruelty, that people can do to one another for political reasons. It feeds our instinctive feeling of disgust and desire to have the terrorists shut down as immediately and as violently as possible. Shoot them in the head, before they gas all of us.Â
Article 5 shows the after-effects of a White Mask chemical attack on the game version of an Ivy League university, Bartlett University. The name of the mission itself is a curiosity - Article 5 is an allusion to the clause in the North Atlantic Treaty that underpins NATO, which commits member states to the declaration that an attack on one is an attack on all. The only time it has been invoked in history is, as mentioned before, in the aftermath of 9/11. The name then makes sense; the Twin Towers were a symbol of America, and so are the major Ivy League universities. An attack on any Ivy League university on the scale of what we see in Article 5 would be a traumatic event for the collective consciousness of the United States as well.Â
Whether intentional or not, the attack on Bartlett University carries its own visual parallels to 9/11. The gas that is released by the white masks presents itself in the form of a yellow, powdery substance that obscures vision. This visualization of what a toxic gas attack looks like is unsettling in its similarity to the famous photo of Marcy Borders, the 9/11 "Dust Lady".
However, 9/11 was carried out with a clear political motive. Al-Qaeda, viewing the continued American military presence in Saudi Arabia and also the support of Israel as an affront against Islam and the Middle East. Osama bin Laden finally publicly acknowledge his and Al-Qaeda's responsibility for the attacks in 2004, three years after 9/11, stating:
"we are free ... and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security, we undermine yours."
The clear political motive is similar to the one underpinning the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War; shock the public of the United States into the belief that the cost of continued intervention and involvement in the Middle East far outweighs their national interest, and thereby remove the public support for US involvement in the region.Â
We are offered no political motive with the White Masks. They simply conduct a bio-terrorist attack on Bartlett University, a stereotype of an Ivy League university. The cutscene is shot as tragically as can be, and bodies litter the grass field, but in the end it rings hollow because we don't know why the White Masks do this. It's just senseless, and therefore loses its effect.Â
The first time I began being aware of mass shootings in the United States, I was confused. It was a mind-breaking experience. What did the Columbine shooters go through? What could possibly have driven someone to commit such horrifying acts against a fellow human being? How does one process these atrocities in the aftermath? While understanding the psychology of the terrorist or mass shooter hardly helps heal the wounds, I would say that it was a critical process in being able to see the world continue turning. Whenever a mass shooting occurs in the US, no matter how tired your news anchor professes to be about this, and no matter what political jockeying is or is not allowed to happen over the event, there will without a doubt be a media deep-dive into the shooter's life. They will interview his friends, his neighbors, his family, his elementary school teachers, and even his dog if they can get it to speak. We need to know why bad things happen; otherwise it's just a heavy piece of cultural trauma left in the air, with no rhyme or reason, and we are left with nothing but nihilistic despair.Â
When mass tragedies occur, especially for the first time, I think that knowing what happened in a sense allows us as individuals, and perhaps society writ large as well, to find some semblance of resolution. You can really see how ingrained the trauma from constant violence is in the American psyche today; from the macabre obsession with serial killer psychology, to the instinctive cultural knowledge of and ever-present fear of active shooters in public spaces, to the siege mentality that many Americans have developed both in their public lives and in their political opinions.
It is this very siege mentality that underpins how terrorists are portrayed in Rainbow Six: Siege. Terrorists are faceless, inhuman monsters that you need to kill before they kill you. You don't know why they want to kill you, and you don't care to find out if they even have any political motivations. All you need to do is to put them down. It makes sense, because they're mostly just your run-of-the-mill AI enemy to train against before you go into multiplayer, which is the real highlight of the game. It's just that the call to pre-emptively defend global security wherever it is threatened at the end of Article 5 means nothing in the face of the hollow despair its story tells. What are you defending, and from whom? Or are we to have this knee-jerk defensiveness towards anyone we deem vaguely threatening?
On the anniversary of 9/11, Trump legal associate and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani uploaded a snippet of a video that, coincidentally, plays exactly into the aesthetic and narrative of Rainbow Six: Siege.
Since the ascendance of President Trump, the right wing has been leaning heavier into its portrayals of Antifa and other left-wing movements as terrorist organizations. The common refrains throughout right-wing media are depictions of Antifa as completely black-clad rioters with no real political motive other than self-interested looting and a vague desire to destroy America. The aesthetic of this video, and its provenance as an advertisement for a veteran-aimed clothing line called Grunt Style, is the encapsulation of how we as a public view actors of political violence. Rabid dogs, snapping at the chains, barking and threatening to overrun us. Senseless, and with no motive other than an irrational desire to destroy us. This we will defend.
Police violence is rampant in the United States, and it is demonstrably a systemic issue. Police are trained to view the wider public, as well as protesters and rioters, within a few lenses, and two of those are what Siege portrays: there is no political motive behind these faceless violent actors beyond a nebulous desire to destroy our country, and therefore they are so threatening and so omnipresent that we have to act on twitch response and always be on high alert when dealing with them.
The War on Terror has undoubtedly etched itself deep into our collective cultural psyche. We fear those around us more than ever, and we are encouraged to always be vigilant and prepared for political violence, without ever being told the motives for political violence, no matter how justifiable or not the motive is. We paint ourselves culturally as the victims of terrorism and political violence, although oftentimes we as a society and a system inflict the first blow on them, and are merely seeing their desperation and retributive rage. Whether you believe political violence, or violence of any kind, is justified, media like this - and games like Rainbow Six: Siege - dehumanize those we victimize, strip them of their cause (which may have driven any number of us to political violence ourselves had we been in their shoes), and turn them into faceless targets who we need to destroy before they destroy us.
We need to see these people for who they are. We need to see their causes. We need to be given the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether the grievances for which they agitate are really justifiable or not. We need to condemn those who deserved to be condemned, and sympathize with those who deserve our sympathy. If war is, as Clausewitz famously states in On War, merely an extension of politics, then we must observe explicitly political violence all the more critically, and not fall into the trap of believing ourselves to be constantly under threat from inherently malicious, bad actors. We must, in other words, break the Siege mentality.