That would be the consummation of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. War, or its virtual perversion, would literally become the ultimate form of entertainment. It would carry a false import with it, too.
It’s interesting that you think of a virtual war – a representation of the exact same thing we’ve been doing since, what, humanity’s incipience – before thinking of other alternatives for peaceful global relations. Why would war have to be preserved at all, even in an electronic form? If the world can agree to settle its disputes in a game of Call of Duty, it can just as easily agree on peace. And if not a virtual war, why not a thumb war? Why not a spelling bee, to determine these things?
The problem is that war is something ultimate. The results of a war cannot be argued, I mean, whereas the results of a video game can (and almost always are) disputed because of things like cheating/ hacking, hosting capacity, etc. All is fair in love and war, but that can’t be true for video games. A virtual world is plastic; it can be remotely manipulated and given its own laws, of physics or whatever, which means that a definitive outcome would be impossible if nations were to resort to that kind of cheating.
In the name of fairness, these virtual wars would have to occur on LAN, in some neutral nation, and the participants (‘soldiers’? ‘warriors’?) would have to be flown out there, and they’d probably have to be recruited and they’d probably be able to demand large sums of money for their gaming prowess, etc., and in the end the richest country would be able to buy up a great portion of the international talent, and it would have just a really terrible cultural effect because it would simultaneously commoditize and more literally weaponize human beings.
We tend not to think of war in positive terms, but what you’re proposing would devalue war in such a way that its outcomes would be meaningless. History, for example, manifests to us more or less as a line marked by moments of conflict. It’s on these moments of conflict that history is built, and they involve great amounts of spending and technology and science and movement and death and misfortune, etc. And now I’m just imagining the entire world sitting in an office chair and staring at a screen and maybe eating popcorn and saying, Yes, this is war! And it’s kind of an insult to people who actually make war meaningful by risking their lives every day, etc.
And then, of course, technology would kind of stagnate because its progress would no longer be necessary for war or for global dominance, and people I think would mostly just be concerned with making the fake new experience of war as realistic and as entertaining as possible. And museums would feature signed mousepads instead of Boeing bombers, blown-up scoreboard screenshots behind glass instead of deactivated warheads.
Seems ‘empty’. Lots of fun to think about, though. GQ!
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