Andrew O’Hagan is the author of three novels, the most recent is Be Near Me. A book of essays, The Atlantic Ocean, has just come out in paperback.
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Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008
pages 9-10 | 3505 words
Living It
Andrew O’Hagan
- BuyCrossfire by Andy McNab
Bantam, 414 pp, £17.99, October 2007, ISBN 978 1 84413 535 6
- BuyStrike Back by Chris Ryan
Century, 314 pp, £17.99, October 2007, ISBN 978 1 84413 535 6
If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of Hotspur or Penthouse are now more likely to be employed in a fight against universal evil in one of its modern guises. Last year saw the greatest ever increase in sales of computer games, to the point where the world’s biggest titles – Halo 3, for example – reliably bring in more cash than most blockbuster movies. In small bedrooms throughout the Western world, boys in woolly hats and Nike trainers are currently tackling the most intractable problems of the day, and it seems their arsenals are unlimited and their thumbs tireless.
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[*] This may constitute one of the best arguments for conscription. Unlike McNab and Co, who wanted to fight, a previous generation of writers on war were simply called up. And this may explain the very different attitude to combat: for all the brilliance of the Sword of Honour trilogy, one never loses sight of the fact that Waugh was a man apart. Conscription brings people into the theatre of war who don’t strictly belong there, which is perhaps good news for war writing if bad news for esprit de corps.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 3 · 7 February 2008
From George Poles
Andrew O’Hagan begins his attack on video games with a series of skirmishes with what he suggests are some of the most popular games of recent months: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Eternal Forces (LRB, 24 January). The first two titles will be instantly recognisable to almost anyone who plays video games. The last, which he describes as ‘a game set in New York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony’, will not. A check on metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores from across the best-known gaming magazines and websites, reveals that Eternal Forces has received an average mark of 38 out of 100. This hardly bears out O’Hagan’s claim that the game ‘has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war’. As for Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, it would be hard for a fair-minded critic to deny that both have at least some artistic merit: Assassin’s Creed in particular provides fascinating evocations of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus at the time of the Crusades and its treatment of the Knights Templar and hidden artefacts is superior to The Da Vinci Code’s at least – though that might not be saying much.
George Poles
London N16
