Simulating Violence
Simulating Violence
By Jonathan Chan
During my time in the Singapore Armed Forces, I served as an infantry sergeant in the army’s OPFOR unit. “OPFOR” is an abbreviation of “opposition force”, a reference to our role in playing enemy forces during military exercises. To achieve a sense of real violence, all players were equipped with tactical engagement system sensors. In effect, blanks were fired, and a laser was generated by each shot. If a soldier had been hit by a simulated round, their sensors would register the hit and resound while their individual “game boy” devices would indicate their health status. Some descriptions were strikingly graphic: “your right arm has been blown off,” “penetrating wound through the left eye.” They determined whether one could continue fighting or had to feign injury.
This gamification of conflict often meant that we remained jocular, seeing our exercises more as sport rather than as facsimiles of wartime violence. The sensors transformed the battlefield into a stage; we played our roles as enemy soldiers for senior officers to judge. The simulation was vital from a strategic perspective, a necessary test to see whether combat units were equipped to fight in a hypothetical war. Some soldiers served as umpires during our exercises. Their task was to ensure blanks were not fired within five meters of another person for fear of damage to the ear drums or injury from flying debris. Close up, a stealthy tap on an opponent’s shoulder was enough to simulate a bayonet stab. This further served to distance us from the reality of conflict.
Constrained by the imperatives of operational safety, our simulated violence was as close to real violence as could feasibly be encountered in training—the artifice of mortal injury without the actual threat of wounding.
***
I remember the shudder that passed through me the day I first drew a rifle. The SAR 21, the standard-issue weapon with which we learned to defend Singapore, which we held close as we recited our oath of loyalty to the Singapore Armed Forces. The old adages of military defence came to mind: of the employment of violence to protect loved ones, of the coercive arm that gives steel to the persuasion of diplomacy, of the normalisation of a militarized national culture. The tension between the necessity of learning violence and my unwillingness to perpetrate it was one I could never fully resolve within myself, especially as we learned to strip, clean, protect, and shoot our rifles in the weeks of basic training that followed.
Later, as I was assigned to be an infantry specialist, training demanded that we expand our repertoire of weapons, from grenade launchers to light machine guns. After I was posted to the OPFOR, the ability to play a convincingly vicious enemy became essential. Going outfield several times a month, my troops and I quickly adapted to the structural disadvantages we faced, fending off units that outnumbered us. We operated more flexibly, less beholden to the rigidity of the army’s tactical doctrines. We learned to weave through trees, hide in dense shrubbery, and disorient enemy sections fatigued by tropical humidity.
It was here that suppressing that original shudder became paramount—how could I be expected to lead my troops during firefights if I was unwilling to take the first shot? “Train to Fight, Fight to Kill” was our ethos, our wargames the furthest realization of its substance. Our opponents’ medics were dutiful in wrapping gauze over wherever game boys told them their “casualties” were wounded. The gauze did not do much to advance any comprehension of real pain.
This internal tussle—the gulf between an abhorrence of violence and the intimacy of my knowledge with its practiced forms—continued to manifest outside of camp and after I’d completed my service. That shudder returned, whether in the sudden eruptions of violence in films I watched, such as when Joaquin Phoenix brought a revolver to his temple in Joker (2019), in the instinctive dip my body would take when it heard the cackle of firecrackers, or in the shock of familiarity I felt when I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, peering at weapons in glass cases and images of jungle warfare on the walls.
***
After leaving the army and arriving in the altogether different milieu of university, I found that the performance of violence I had partaken in month after month had a mirror in tragic theater: drama’s ability to skirt the boundary between the visual and the imaginary, real and unreal, by bringing viewers into proximity with violence. My inchoate apprehensions toward violence found expression in the ethical paradigms staged in the genre of tragedy; in tragic theater, the audience bears witness to the motions of violence onstage, as to the blanks fired on the simulated battlefield. The audience is brought to the performance of violence by textual mediation, just as the descriptions displayed on our game boys sought to enhance our sense of corporeal vulnerability.
Literary critic Rowan Williams asserts that tragedy provides a space for audiences to “bear witness” to violence, and that the staging of violence is necessary “if we are serious about the role of tragic drama in simultaneously disturbing and re-establishing a human identity, personal and social.”[1] Edmund Burke, another critic, emphasizes that this self-reflexivity can only be enabled “when we do not suffer any very acute pain, nor are exposed to any imminent danger of our lives.”[2] The assurance of an epistemic distancing through the artifice of theatre ensures the possibility of sympathy. Theater director Bryan Doerries remarks that tragedies, “when viewed by a large audience that had shared those experiences, fostered compassion, understanding and a deeply felt interconnection.”[3] Yet, an awareness of individual safety does little to allay the body’s visceral responses—as the body onstage is slashed or pierced, the body in the audience flinches instinctively. The simulation manipulates a perceptual distinction between what is real and what is not by locating the site of violence in the imagination.
These concerns were elided, glossed over in the army by the sharp camaraderie that a hard-fought battle would inspire. The rudiments of our vocation—fighting on foot, killing enemies, seizing territory, holding ground—were never brought into question. The analogy between OPFOR exercises and tragic theatre is imprecise, but it began to help me understand what exactly I found so unsettling in those moments of gnawing introspection: try as I might, I could never overcome the visceral sensation that came with imagining being at the centre of brutality. That the illusion was broken at the end of each exercise—my troopers eager to return to our company line, our opponents chattering excitedly about ordering McDonald’s or boarding the bus home—could not dispel the semblances of bloodshed that we continued to create.
***
The first bridge between my experience of simulated violence while in the army and the rehabilitative potential of tragedy came when I read an article about Theater of War productions. A Brooklyn-based theatre company, Theater of War describes itself as “an innovative public health project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays, including Sophocles’ Ajax, as a catalyst for town hall discussions about the challenges faced by service men and women, veterans, their families, caregivers and communities”.[4] It was the first time that I encountered such an explicit link being drawn between two experiences of violence, albeit with combat veterans from the US military in mind. Given that Ancient Greek tragedy emerged from a festival celebrating the god Dionysus, it stands that the crudity of staged violence would serve to offend the sensibilities of religious ritual. Yet, this gave way to an emphasis on “bearing witness” to the effects of violence, rather than of violence as spectacle in and of itself. Consequently, as Bryan Doerries, the company’s director and co-founder, describes:
ancient Greek drama appears to have been an elaborate ritual aimed at helping combat veterans return to civilian life after deployments during a century that saw 80 years of war. Plays like Sophocles’ Ajax read like a textbook description of wounded warriors, struggling under the weight of psychological and physical injuries to maintain their dignity, identity and honor.[5]
While it would be disingenuous to claim that the remnants of my experience in the army in any way approximate trauma or psychological injury, such an appraisal of tragedy brought the heft of its transformative potential into view. The plays ceased to be defined by the kind of frivolity that is so often used to describe theatrical productions; the theoretical dimensions of such literary analysis provided a new way for me to think about these plays and to contend with the revulsion I felt while in the army. Sophocles’ Ajax (5th century BC) was one such example.
In Ajax the site of horrific violence is left to the imagination through traumatised messengers. Ajax, a mythological hero, feels slighted as the kings Agamemnon and Menelaus anoint Odysseus as Greece’s most formidable warrior after the death of his predecessor, Achilles. Furious, Ajax plots to commit regicide, only to be misdirected by the goddess Athena. In a blind rage, he slaughters cattle and herdsmen instead. When this deception is lifted, shame envelops him, planting the idea of suicide in his mind.
There is a rhythm that builds toward an expectation of Ajax’s violent undoing. To the reader, the anticipation of Ajax’s suicide is demarcated by stage directions. Ajax establishes the circumstances for his own violence as he “carefully fixes the sword in place, tamps down the ground, and feels the edge of the blade.” Ajax’s final soliloquy concludes dreadfully as he “falls on the sword and collapses behind the bushes.” The positioning of Ajax’s suicide is crucial for it is obscured from the view of the audience, attesting, perhaps, to the logistical difficulty of staging his death. Neither audience nor witnesses view the gory details of Ajax’s death, and only his corpse being dragged into view. This is brought into sharper definition through messenger Tecmessa’s description of Ajax’s corpse: “His fallen body enfolds and hides the sword.”[6] The audience witnesses the preparations and ramifications of violence but must fill the lacuna of violence itself in their minds.
This sense of mental intimacy creates the possibility of a rehabilitation from trauma—as an American military officer commented after watching a production of the play, “I just know... I just know my buddy would be here today if he had seen that you can have these feelings, these struggles and you can still be the strongest of warriors.”[7] Violence is forcibly enmeshed within the imaginative realm as language becomes its mediating force, one made fully comprehensible through the corporeality of description. And yet, the distance accorded by theatre grants necessary space for reflection. Here, one can understand the aftermath of violence with a greater clarity when it is shielded from ethical comeuppance.
***
The possibility of processing an experience of violence through tragedy, as foregrounded in Ajax, finds a variation in the plays of William Shakespeare, written centuries afterward in the 1600s. The experience of coming to his plays after having served in the army evinced new ways of thinking about his presentations of bloodshed: reading Macbeth and Hamlet in school, particularly the “playing” involved in swordfights and hand-to-hand combat, made corporeal injury feel as if they were at arm’s length. Returning to Shakespeare after experiencing months of simulated warfare granted such presentations of violence a greater affective weight. This was especially so for his play Titus Andronicus (1593), which is often regarded as one of his most morbid plays, more in line with the bloody appetite of the playwright Christopher Marlowe than other playwrights’ depictions of courtly or monarchical intrigue. With Titus, the vicarious experience of cruelty is made altogether more stark and more unnerving by the staging of its aftermath.
Titus Andronicus follows the cyclical and vengeful violence between Roman general Titus and Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. In the midst of their disputes, both characters’ children are subject to collateral suffering. The figure of Titus’s ravaged daughter Lavinia leads to the envisioning of the sexual and physical violence wrought upon her offstage. Lavinia is revealed: ravished, hands and tongue cut off to prevent her from accusing Demetrius and Chiron, sons of Tamora, of perpetrating this violence. As Marcus, Titus’s brother, laments:
Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As have thy love? Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue.
[…]
Shall I speak for thee? shall I say 'tis so?
O, that I knew thy heart; and knew the beast,
That I might rail at him, to ease my mind!
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,[8]
Unlike the messengers of Greek tragedy, Marcus is forced to bear witness to Lavinia’s condition onstage, synchronously with the audience. Marcus guides the audience’s eye by means of a descriptive dismemberment, focusing first on her “lopp’d and hew’d” arms, compared to “branches” and “ornaments.” The shift in attention to the tongue, the literal silence of Lavinia, is accompanied by the graphic image of “a crimson river of warm blood/ Like to a bubbling fountain stirr’d with wind.” A stage direction encoded in the text, the sight of the blood dribbling from Lavinia’s lips serves as a visual reminder of the cruelty of her tongue being cut off. In this instance, pain becomes farcically underwhelming when represented in language.
Lavinia’s silencing demands the interlocution of Marcus, who almost functions like a Greek Chorus through his perverse blazon. Just as the Chorus manipulates the gaze and sympathy of the audience, Marcus becomes a conduit by which pity is expressed for Lavinia and her tragic situation, “Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp’d.” The act of violence continues to remain one step removed from the stage, from visibility, left for the audience to reconstruct from the interactions of Demetrius, Chiron, and the dishevelled Lavinia. The text provides the framing, the mind evinces its detail.
***
Both Ajax and Titus make for squeamish viewing, especially with the materialising of mortally injured characters onstage. Gary Owen’s Killology (2017), however, offers no such explicit imagery. Where messengers and spectators work to strengthen the imaginative link between offstage violence and onstage suffering in the aforementioned plays, Killology is content to remain entirely in the realm of verbal description.
In the play, Killology is a video game that takes torture and suffering as its primary goals. The play’s characters are Paul, the game’s designer, Davey, a teenage boy who suffers from a copycat attack inspired by the game, and Alan, the boy’s father. I first came across it in the form of a student production in 2018, its three overlapping monologues articulating how the proliferation of video games has heightened the slippage between the visual and the imaginary, with computer-generated imagery able to simulate violence with terrifying specificity. Even without the staging of violence’s somatic consequences, I still found it rousing the same revulsion to violence that had accompanied me in the army.
In the play, Paul, the designer of Killology, displaces his father’s identity onto a virtual body through game design:
I bluetooth the family snap off my phone, lasso my dad’s face, map it onto the head of the big bad boss right at the end of the game.
And I spent my birthday night on my own, virtually beating the shit out of my dad.
Killing him horribly, then bringing him back to life to kill him even more horribly next time.[9]
To Paul, simulated violence is the necessary stand-in for a transgressive violence that can never be committed. The audience is shown no videos or screencaps of the game but must imagine its perversity through description, intensifying the sense of aesthetic distance from corporeal violence. The very notion of ‘bearing witness’ to violence or its aftereffects is ruptured, with the description of games functioning as extensions of the imagination. Paul attests to this by describing the game’s crowdsourced torture:
People ask, how do you keep coming up with these sick, hilarious ways of bumping off bad guys. And of course it’s us. It’s the community. We released editors and modding tools with Killology 2 and these days, most new content originates from the players themselves. It was actually a player who came up with what most people think of the signature of Killology – the golden shower mini-game.
[…]
Say your victim is getting fed feet first into a mincing machine. To start the mini-game you hold your controller at dick level. On screen appears a stream of piss, yours, which you then direct into your victim’s face. Obviously the victim is writhing from the unbelievable agony, but they’ll writhe even more to dodge your piss, and the game is to keep your piss hitting their face as they die, and for max points their mouth and eyes.[10]
The audience is forced to squirm through descriptions of sadistic violence. However, the “unreal” violence of the play draws attention to the ramifications of a global culture democratized and sustained by the Internet, with violent imaginations linked through high-speed telecommunications. Not only does the playwright Owen attempt to close the gap between bearing witness to real and unreal violence, but he also draws the audience into considering the implications of perpetrating unreal violence. Paul asserts that his game shares an ethical impetus similar to that of tragic theater by describing the game as “a deeply moral experience.” [11] Owen dismantles the complacency of passivity, with Paul remarking:
In Killology, as you torture your victim, they will beg, plead, and bleed and you watch the reality of their suffering.
You have to. If you look away the sensor picks it up and deducts points.[12]
Owen problematizes the ethics of viewing by forcing the audience to imagine themselves as perpetrator and spectator, enforced by the game’s mechanics. It is Alan, whose son Davey is tortured by teenagers attempting to replicate the violence of the game’s highest level, who provides a countervailing perspective. Vigorously, he dismantles Paul’s valorization of the game’s cathartic merits. Their monologues are interpolated—while Paul insists, “If you genuinely don’t know the difference between a game and reality, then you are batshit fucking insane,” Alan asserts that, like military training:
It’s about responses your nerves learn
That completely by-pass the brain.
And that’s what these games do.
They train our kids to kill.[13]
Owen is unapologetic about manipulating the impulse to squirm, flinch, shudder. To seek justice for his son Davey, Alan intends to inflict the same pain on Paul, whom he holds responsible for the “horror [he] put into the world.”[14] Again, the play makes demands of the audience’s imaginations to fill its empirical gaps. The video of Davey’s torture plays out aurally:
From the video, a tap of metal on metal, and the pleading voice becomes a scream, the other boys cheering, whooping, swearing in disbelief and horror as the blows continue.
ALAN watches say twenty or thirty seconds of the footage of his son being tortured, not aware of Paul now.
He goes to the laptop, stops the video.
Takes some time to collect himself.[15]
The distance from real violence is shortened. The audience has borne witness to suffering by way of a recording, complemented by the violence that Alan describes as the teenagers substitute “Bread knife for the saw./ Lighter instead of a blow torch.”[16] Owen proceeds from video-game violence to recorded violence to the precipice of onstage violence as Alan prepares to enact his revenge. He “picks up the hammer and chisel” and “puts the blade of the chisel to PAUL’s abdomen” taking “A couple of practice swings, like a golfer.”[17] Yet, this is where the violence stops.
Killology is preoccupied with the relationship between real and simulated violence but stops short of endorsing a particular position toward the simulacra of violence in video games. Owen frustrates the boundaries of activity and passivity when viewing violence and suffering, with agency variously displaced from perpetrator to spectator, violence freely vacillating between the real and the unreal.
***
Each of these plays roused that same feeling of revulsion I encountered in the army, the forced imagining of fleshly injury. If tragedy “disturbs and re-establishes a human identity” in its depiction of violence and pity is underwritten by the acknowledgement that “imminent hazards” are distant, artists probe and perturb the individual viewer, complicating the politics of viewing by displacing the sites of our sympathy. In the absence of an actual figure suffering onstage, both imagined suffering and imagined violence burrow deep within the imagination. The viewer is forced into a feeling of complicity, actively co-creating the site of torture.
Faced with the proximity accorded by graphic detail, violence ceases to remain in the realm of fantasy. This was the phenomenon I experienced in the army, the filtering of violence through the arbiter of the game boy on the battlefield, problematizing the way I thought about the ethics of learned violence thereafter. The inflection point at which the capacity to flinch is deadened is one that I never fully encountered. Yet, its very possibility overshadowed all my subsequent attempts to think about representations of violence.
Repeated exposures to violence may not always induce a clarification of the self or a broader collective, particularly if they cause a deadening of our revulsion to violence or fail to placate real feelings of trauma. Susan Sontag asserts that “We truly can’t imagine what [war] is like.”[18] While the same can be said of violence, the imaginative complicity demanded by its simulations may lead us to invest violence with a significance that does not take atrocity as its telos. We may think of it as embedded in other aspirational concerns—nationalism, shame, vengeance—but never as a desirable end in its own right.
Thinking back to the sustained practice of simulating violence while in the OPFOR, I bring this abhorrence toward cruelty forward with me, praying that its pretenses never cross the threshold to flesh and blood.
Endnotes
[1] Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination, (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 18.
[2] Edmund Burke, ‘’Sympathy’, ‘Of the Effects of Tragedy’ and ‘The Sublime’ (1757)’ in Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, ed. by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 120-126 (p. 122).
[3] Jeff MacGregor, ‘The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy’, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2017,
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/healing-power-greek-tragedy-180965220/>.
[4] MacGregor, ‘The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy’.
[5] MacGregor, ‘The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy’.
[6] Sophocles, Ajax, Sophocles II, trans. by John Moore (USA: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 899.
[7] MacGregor, ‘The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy’.
[8] William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Alan Hughes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; repr. 2006), II.iv.17-37.
[9] Gary Owen, Killology (United Kingdom: Oberon Books Ltd, 2017), p. 20.
[10] Owen, Killology, p. 30.
[11] Owen, Killology, p. 50.
[12] Owen, Killology, p. 50.
[13] Owen, Killology, p. 51-52.
[14] Owen, Killology, p. 72.
[15] Owen, Killology, p. 62.
[16] Owen, Killology, p. 62.
[17] Owen, Killology, p. 63.
[18] Susan Sontag, ‘Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death’, The New Yorker, 1 December 2002, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war>.
Bibliography
Burke, Edmund, ‘’Sympathy’, ‘Of the Effects of Tragedy’ and ‘The Sublime’ (1757)’ in Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, ed. by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 120-126
MacGregor, Jeff, ‘The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy’, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2017,
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/healing-power-greek-tragedy-180965220/>
Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Alan Hughes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; repr. 2006)
Sontag, Susan, ‘Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death’, The New Yorker, 1 December 2002, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war>
Sophocles, Ajax, Sophocles II, trans. by John Moore (USA: University of Chicago Press, 1957)
Owen, Gary, Killology (United Kingdom: Oberon Books Ltd, 2017)
Williams, Rowan, The Tragic Imagination, (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and recent graduate of the University of Cambridge. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and creative expression. He has recently been moved by the writing of Natalie Diaz, Jamaica Kincaid, and David Wong Hsien Ming.