I’m a big fan of cooperative computer games, but I’m not inclined to join guilds (aside from the Fuel Rats, but that was kind of an odd situation). So what do you do when your friends start playing Call of Duty?
Smoking kills; every bad habit is on the catwalk here
As a technology demo, it’s really amazing. I was hoping I could play and look it as an exercise in lighting, motion capture and set design. This is a seriously beautiful game; one of the things that kept coming to mind was “this engine is good enough that you could write movies in it.” That’s what I believe the eventual arc of Hollywood is going to be, and the timing on that is exacerbated by watching The Irishman for an hour this weekend. When you’re at the point where you can turn Robert DeNiro’s potato-lump face into a younger-looking bunch of potato-lump, at what point do you need DeNiro? I am genuinely afraid that Hollywood is going to take advantage of this technology to simultaneously screw actors/actresses out of work, and to whitewash all the characters. Hollywood has long had a problem with putting white people in non-white roles and using bad makeup to pull it off; the end-game for that is coming. Imagine a movie in which some actor plays multiple parts for cost-saving because the studio told them “this is your big break!” and slipped by a contract saying “We can also use a digital model of you to complete the rest of the series. Buh-bye!”
Once you get into the game, it feels to me like I am in Quentin Tarantino world, in the worst possible sense. Do you remember how in, Inglorious Basterds, the nazis were the snappy dressers? There were ridiculous blood-spattered fights, and the overall message of the movie seems to be “everyone is shit.” There are no good guys or bad guys – everyone is horrible and murderous and a liar or a traitor. It feels like that. I’m not saying that I expect a video game to teach kids morality, but rather that the people who produced this game managed to utterly miss a golden opportunity to ask questions about that. When I started playing I thought that maybe I’d yell “war crime” every time a war crime is committed in campaign mode, but that got tiring really fast. The war crimes come fast and furious and everyone does them. The only war crime, so far, that hasn’t happened is use of nuclear weapons on a city full of civilians, but I’m only part-way into the campaign mode.
The “bad guys” in Call of Duty are either generic Russians or generic Arabs. You can tell the Russians are Russian because they have fucking ridiculous accents that does make you want to gun them down just for being cheesy. The Arabs are arabs because they wear kaffiyeh and yell “allahu akbar!” while you shoot them. It was then that I realized 1st person shooter gaming has not progressed much since 1992’s Castle Wolfenstein where the nazis yelled various inanities in a california software engineer’s idea of a cheesy German accent. The bad guys are bad because they do bad things: they torture people – this game has a lot of torture scenes in it; everybody gets tortured. Again, it’s Quentin Tarantino-esque: it’s as if they want to respond to the “one of the tropes you have is a woman being tied to a chair and waterboarded” by “well that’s not sexist, because in our game everybody gets tied to chairs and waterboarded!” When you hit rock bottom there isn’t anywhere to go, so there can’t be any criticism that one party or another is abused. By the way, that is the plot of Inglorious Basterds so I may have saved you having to see that movie.
Hitler is bad because he has machine guns for hands
It’s “hipster whataboutism” gone 3D first person: everyone gets gassed, tortured, and commits loads of war crimes – you can’t complain that the Russians are portrayed as war criminals because everyone is. I guess that is the message of the “Modern Warfare” part of this game. You can be a ‘good guy’ shooting your way into a hospital to capture and eventually kill the leader of some bad guys. Other than the cheesy accent, there is no moral superiority anywhere. After the first half hour I realized that the only moral epistemology in the game is that people with british accents are OK. Everyone else sucks. “What about the torture?” “It’s OK, everyone does it” the hipster points out smugly.
The obvious problem that the game wants to dance past is that, if we’re killing these bad guys because they do bad things like torture people and shoot everything that moves, why don’t we turn our guns on our companions with the british accents? They’re just as horrible; in fact they’re better at being horrible; which makes them a greater danger to humanity. In that sense I think the game does capture something about prevailing trends in modern warfare: the more powerful you are the better you are – simply because you leave fewer survivors to complain and have a more robust infrastructure to apologize and forgive yourself for your crimes after they have been committed.
Let me give you an example: in one early gun-battle, “terrorists” attack London. The graphics are amazing; I’ve spent a lot of time in London and immediately said, “oh, look, it’s Picadilly Circus!”
Good people do not do this.
You can tell that guy’s a baddie because he’s wearing a stupid hollywood suicide vest. That’s one thing that the good guys don’t do in this game. The subtext is one that has been a justification over and over for carnage: “these natives don’t value their lives like we people with british accents do.” Well, they don’t drop white phosphorus on hospitals, either, but that’s because they don’t have big expensive airforces with AC-130s standing by to drop white phosphorus. In this game, nobody values life at all. Nobody has any principles at all, unless it’s to keep a stiff upper lip and be tough – even that principle falls apart, for me: I don’t see any military glory in being able to sneak into a building in the dark, wearing night vision goggles and carrying a silenced machine-gun, to shoot everyone whose eyes you can’t immediately see. Oh, yeah, that’s another giveaway in this game – when someone’s head is going to be blown apart in a puff of blood, they make sure they are wearing a head-scarf or goggles first so, you know, it’s not as shocking or something.
They just don’t value life like people with German accents do
The body counts in this game are ridiculous and lop-sided. In the history of warfare there are documented incidents of fanatical attacks into the face of extreme casualties, but the casualty-rates in Call of Duty are reminiscent of the worst days at The Somme. You get on a roof with your night-vision gear and a machine-gun and several hundred head-scarf wearing zombies attack your position while you gun them down in puffs of blood. Most troops would immediately go to ground and cease the assault, switching over to suppressive return fire or sniping, but these guys just jump over the top of the trench and come at you and die, die, die. Even Russian supposed-special forces do that, which is funny; I guess the subtext is: “Russians are pretty stupid pop-up-and-die dolls, too!” if they had british accents they would never do such a thing. But the game takes everything that we know about combat morale and throws it out the window – in modern warfare a big gunfight is one where 15-20 casualties are had, and they’re mostly Médecins Sans Frontières if the US military is involved. I remember talking to my friend Steve Zimmerman, who was a scout/sniper with an LRRP team in Vietnam and he told me that when they were scouting in the free-fire zones they might move 50-100 feet in an hour they moved that slowly and carefully. If you read accounts of combat outside of set-piece battles or slaughter-fests like Borodino, one characteristic is that if a side takes about 10% casualties, they tend to melt away. Especially if that’s immediate. Sure, there are incidents like Thermopylae where everyone stands and dies, but most of the time whichever side takes a great big whack of damage decides it’s time to run away and learn how to snipe.
The character models are that good. The lighting is that good. Sgt Price has a british accent.
I’m fairly sure that the people who made this game had some vague idea of showing how cool the special operators are, with their immaculately-trimmed beards and fancy gear. But to me they’re just a bunch of psychopathic thugs with better gear, who have the courage to sneak around in the dark and shoot people who can’t see them. I’m fairly sure that the people who made this game were thinking they’d make it a realistic action game – in which case, when you get hit by a high-velocity bullet, you should not be allowed to play for 6-9 months regardless of what kind of accent you have. In Call of Duty when you make a tactical error and get some of the shit blown out of you, you duck behind something and catch your breath until the bloodstains fade and you can go back out and shoot some more helpless victims.
Military glory, indeed. What the players haven’t realized (is this a spoiler for a big reveal?) is that they are the unstoppable zombie horde that gets shot, goes to ground, yet staggers to its feet and comes on, again.
I’ve heard people hypothesize that games like Call of Duty exist to inure people to actual combat and killing, by reinforcing totalitarian and racist stereotypes. To some degree, I’ll say “that’s all true” except it’s inuring people to be cannon-fodder. Everyone in the game is cannon-fodder, torture-meat, and amoral. I don’t think gamers are that thoughtless, frankly. But they are pretty thoughtless not to laugh this gorgeous piece of shit off their hard drives.
Oh, yeah – the game’s attitude toward the CIA is interesting. It appears we are moving from the time when the CIA’s publicists were able to get every game to promote the “CIA is cool and competent” meme everywhere. I was a bit disturbed by the way the CIA in this game is kind of, shall we say, “deep-statey”? They’re definitely portrayed as some of the war criminal’est war criminals – unhesitatingly approving sending special forces to St Petersburg (last time I checked that was in a sovereign nation?) and starting a massive gun-battle in the city streets that caused around – I lost count – 100 dead, or thereabouts. Remember, when the Al-Qatala (I guess Activision didn’t want to get sued for trademark infringement by Al Qaeda) starts a gunfight in Picadilly Circus we know they are bad guys because good guys don’t do that – they start gunfights in St Petersburg.
One more thing: the game has a ludicrous mini-game at one point where you have to cut the wires on a body bomb. This trope crops up again and again and again in shitty terrorism movies, since Die Hard II and I wish it would stop. Electrically detonated bombs are a simple electronics problem: there is a controller and a battery and a firing circuit. The controller also has a battery (if the controller is an iPhone the battery is internal). The controller would almost always be closing a relay that carries the main power to the blasting cap and sets it off. So, typically, you’re going to have a couple batteries and a blasting cap. The blasting cap is the thing stuck into the explosive and it’s not energized when the bomb is not in the process of going off. If you start snipping all the blasting cap wires, the bomb will not go off unless it is currently in the process of going off when you approach it with your snippers. Therefore: start snipping shit as fast as you can before whoever it is who has their finger on the button pushes it. Any semi-rational terrorist will set the bomb off as you are approaching it, and are still 6-10 feet away. The nice thing about that scenario is that you’ll never know what happened because high explosive shockwaves propagate faster than the nerve signals in your brain – you’re a fine mist of gooey stuff before your brain even has a chance to register anything. That should be comforting! So the algorithm is: if you get within snipping range of a bomb, just start snipping the blasting cap wires and/or anything that looks like it’s connected to a battery. Bombs are actually pretty simple and delicate circuits. Most of the real bomb designs I’ve ever seen would fail completely if you snip any old wire at all. Game designers and movie-makers: please stop with this stupid trope. Or do your goddamn research.
hint: you have 20 seconds to cut the entire iPhone off with one snip “I can tell by the notch that this is an iPhone X; the bomb is probably really being controlled through facetime.”
Oh yeah, blasting caps are hard to come by and are kind of precious. Other than well-funded hollywood bomb-makers nobody’d waste 6 of them to make 6 redundant firing circuits on a body bomb. And why make redundant firing circuits? You want your bomb to be simple and reliable, not complicated with wires running all over the place screaming “snip me!”
I was thinking how I’d build a really nasty hollywood bomb; it’d be wirelessly controlled via 802.11 connected to a local hotspot and it’d be running an arduino controller with a PHP script (and a 4 character password, natch) so you could detonate it via its built-in web page. The controller, battery, and cap would all be formed inside a block of C-4 plastic explosive and the outside would be festooned with hollywood-style wires and countdown clocks and a laptop running Ubunto with a Ruby on Rails app driving a Russian-commented obscured piece of code. The heros would be calling on cell phones, “can you un-obfuscate a piece of RoR code for me?!” and I’d be sitting in a cybercafe in Amsterdam laughing my ass off, drinking shitty Starbucks hot coffee (to make me grumpy, really grumpy) ready to click the “OK, explode” button.
And WTF are the stupid padlocks for!?!? First off, some anonymous angel sent me a pair of DeWalt battery-powered angle grinders last year; with the diamond cut-off wheels I usually have mounted on them they’d go through those padlocks like cheese. But what I’d do first is use the angle grinder to shred all the wires, turn the guy around, and shred all the wires back in the back, too. Then I’d put the angle grinder down and use snippers on every wire coming out of a block of explosive. Then I’d chop the locks. Don’t send your cheesy Al Hollywooda bombs up against a blacksmith or you’re going to just look really stupid.
By the way: Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards podcast – tell your listeners to get a nice DeWalt battery-powered angle grinder with diamond cut-off wheels instead of bolt cutters. For one thing, the angle grinder is better for interrogating capitalists; it’s got better reach than the bolt-cutters – those things could probably do fine on toes and fingers but the angle grinder will work on fences, locks, and arteries.
I play Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.
It’s interesting in its moral nihilism as well, but the excuse there is that no one is being killed. The conceit of the game is that you are a person in the Star Wars universe who enters a gambling establishment where the “game” is a game of forcing holograms to fight each other. This is similar in theory to the faux-chess game that R2-D2 and Chewbacca play in the original Star Wars movie (now styled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), however there is no chess board to constrain your legal attack targets. Everyone on your side of characters can attack everyone on the other side unless and until some character invokes an ability that limits such choices.
In play, it is very much like Magic: The Gathering. One collects various holographic characters and each character has its own special abilities. These holos combat each other and derez when defeated. But since these are akin to Magic cards (or chess or checkers or go pieces) the defeated holos do not suffer – not when injured and not when defeated. It’s a very interesting moral two-step, and I can see how it neatly outmaneuvers various criticisms, but I still find it somewhat lacking.
In the end, though, I’m not claiming that SWGOH has anything like the moral import of a game like Call of Duty which appears to depict actual people who, from a point of view internal to the game, suffer and die in a way that no holo suffers or dies from the point of view internal to SWGOH. Rather, I find the moral justifications of games and other fictional entertainments to be of interest. Sometimes of important interest, but even when they aren’t important per se, my academic ethicist perks up her head to sniff around.
The Arab killing is set in some fictional -stan country. It’s like Sacha Baron Cohen helped script the game.
@Crip Dyke – I can’t see how any game that takes war seriously cannot avoid the fact that war is a horrible, evil thing. So the question, I suppose, is “why does this game flip over backwards to portray war as noble?”
I don’t buy the “desensitization” argument, but I do wonder why the EvPsych folks seem to want to ignore a pretty obvious lab for exploring nature vs nurture.
Call Of Duty was very popular with troops deployed in Iraq. But it was popular eveywhere.
There is one training/moral aspect of these games that I believe is particularly interesting. I should do a post but I need to figure out what I think first!
Humans have had movies without actors for decades—they were called cartoons. It’s just that nowadays animated movies are getting more realistic.
Personally, I don’t particularly fear about actors losing their jobs. Sure, a few of them are talented actors and seem like they might be nice people. But others are simply nasty people who earn too much money and at some point turn out to be rapists. Besides, Hollywood actors are millionaires. Thus I’m least likely to feel sorry about them. I’d worry more about actors who work for small studios, theaters, etc., but Hollywood actors, nah, they are already rich.
Speaking of skill and talent, a person cannot be an actor unless they have a beautiful (preferably white) body. Sure, I know exceptions exist, but those are rare. But anybody can sit behind a computer screen and create art for a movie. Just like there can be talented actors, there can be also talented artists/animators. The latter job doesn’t depend upon physical appearance and is at least theoretically more accessible to people who aren’t white and beautiful.
Of course, my overall attitude is influenced by the fact that personally I have always been more interested in cartoons than in live action movies. I’m interested in art, so I can appreciate good art/character design/animation. Acting, on the other hand, is something I have never cared about.
That’s not how terrorist attacks work over here. A British terrorist attack generally involves one guy with a knife (and, incidentally, a British accent), and is stopped by a pair of other guys working together using a narwhal tusk and a fire extinguisher.
The Assassin’s Creed series sounds really cool to me — I love the idea of going back in time and exploring different cultures. The problem is, I don’t want to be an assassin! Assassins are bad guys, to me, and I want to play a hero — preferably a hero who is good at other things besides murdering people.
If anyone knows of any good games with great graphics that involve other things besides killing, I’d love to hear.
brucegee1962@#6:
You can play the Dishonored games without killing anyone, if you want. It is harder and more fun that way. Graphics are great as is the design of the assets.
I played through by nonlethally knocking out all the guards, collecting them, and stacking them in dumpsters or stacking them in chandeliers. There was something remarkably satisfying in that!
You’re still playing an assassin but kind of like Ghandi-gone-wrong-the-chandelier-stacking-assassin. I always got a huge giggle out of imagining the guards waking up and finding everyone in the lighting when the first one woke up and tried to stand up and fell 30′ to the floor. Well, that’s not my fault. And the guards are pretty repellent thugs.
With games heading towards photorealism while movies turn into glossy CGI hells, that seems pretty obvious.
Not long ago there were big, breathless headlines about James Dean being cast in a movie. My own initial reaction was “who?”, followed eventually by “why?”, with raised eyebrows for emphasis. In the short term it’s likely a publicity stunt and nothing more. If I recall, the people responsible for this decision claimed they simply could not find someone better for the role in question than the someone very long dead.*
Long term, it’s going to be easier and cheaper, because once all the problems with casting real people as pure CGI from exiting footage are figured out, the process can be automated – which is what games have been working on for a long time.
And casting dead people is already a thing, see Star Wars with Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing(?).
The excuse is probably something involving “integrity” or “consistency”, whereas the actual reasons might well be something to do with laziness or stinginess. “We could recast the part, but since since that costs a lot of money and we’re already neck-deep in CGI, we might as well use that to paper over the gaps.”**
As for the morality in games like CoD, I don’t think it’s worth thinking about. One look at the Enemy (TM) tells you as much. They used to be Nazis and demons (courtesy of ID, who did, after all, invent the genre), now you get stereotypical muslim terrorists and Russians. It’s not just CoD but all over the place. It’s about as subtle as being hit by a barnful of bricks followed by the factory that made the bricks. The most benign interpretation is bottomless laziness. “We fired all the story writes, at least those with some nuance and interesting ideas, and have been coasting on tropes ever since.” Mainly, of course, “Good vs. Evil” with tons of wishful thinking / wilful blindness infused. The only interesting question a game like this raises is, what will the next incarnation of the Enemy look like?
*Harsh criticism indeed for every actor ever since…
**What I almost wrote: “… but we don’t trust our audience to be able to accept someone new as a familiar character.” Then I remembered all the tantrums Star Wars fans have thrown over recent movies involving women or people of colour. A vocal minority, hopefully, but not one easily confronted with changes.
Because that’s what people want. People like propaganda, and that goes at least double for people at war. Like Fox Mulder, they want to believe.
Also, very few people would buy a realistic war game. Where’s the fun in carefully scouting forward at 50 – 100 feet an hour, only to find yourself suddenly dead without even seeing the enemy?
@brucegee1962
Games that come to mind are Firewatch (apparently very good but I haven’t played it), monument Valley (great puzzle game) and night in the woods (once again, apparently very good). All are very pretty games in their way
The setting, ‘story’ and themes of COD exist purely as a tool for the multiplayer. Anything that takes away from multiplayer dev isn’t worth it, but they still feel they need token justification (probably because of the vaguely real world setting). If they had any real courage they would do what Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament did, and just discard any pretense of plot/story. Also helps you to avoid some of the political problems
I’m pretty sure that the only military shooter I’ve ever liked was Spec Ops: The Line. If you’re not familiar with it, I’d say it’s as close as you can get to the “anti-Call of Duty”.
Oh, it starts similarly enough: you play as an American soldier arriving in Dubai, after some fantasy super-sandstorm buries most of the city and generic Al-Qaeda-esque terrorists seem to have moved into the place. A naive CoD-head would probably dive in expecting to spend the next twelve hours cheerfully gunning down waves of mindless zealots who just hate America for our Freedom.
But instead the game is written by folks who very much know how problematic that is, and they make sure that you do not feel good about it. Oh, you’re still slaughtering countless gun-toting AIs, and the gameplay loop of “use gun on target until target stops moving” is still satisfying enough. But you are not a Good Guy, and the game makes you know that (although in a loading screen toward the end of the game, they do make sure to inform you that “You are still a good person.”).
I have no interest in playing Call of Duty, and I view anyone who likes the games with a lot of suspicion.
The stuff you were saying about movies at the start?
They’re making a war movie with “James Dean”. The producers looked high and low and the only actor they thought could pull the character off is James Dean, so “he” is going to be in the movie – that is another actor will perform in the movie and they will overlay his performance with the image and a vocal approximation of James Dean.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/james-dean-cgi-movie-2020.html
“This opens up a whole new opportunity for many of our clients who are no longer with us.”
komarov @8:
What is surprising is that the outrage republicans haven’t complained that “the Russians” aren’t our enemy anymore, so this is insulting our “friend” Putin.
…
Well, that’s easy. Democrats and liberals, of course.
I can’t help thinking that the [in-/a-]moral universe that this is set in reflects USAan foreign policy. Mass murder, genocide, torture, and blowing up everything in sight are no longer even instruments of foreign policy. At some point, they are USAan foreign policy; there’s no longer any coherent purpose or goal behind, and to the extent anyone even bothers with a pretext, it is so unrelated to any situation that it might as well have been picked using a “magic 8-ball”. We (USA) commit attrocities and war crimes just for the hell of it. (Like the old saying, “why does a dog lick his halls?…”)
The enormous popularity of “games” like this tells me is that this isn’t just a moral sickness of the people in power; it’s a fundamental attitude or urge in the USAan population at large. I get the impression that the only reason a large fraction of the population (maybe even the majority?) isn’t perpetrating atrocities like this is because they don’t have the opportunity, but they seem happy or even eager to commit smaller-scale atrocities, like rape, “domestic” violence, child abuse, racist and misogynistic violence and oppression when they get the chance.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that Trump and his ilk are so popular, or that groups that are all about almost (?) senseless murder and destruction are now coming out of the shadows. (They’ve always been around, though.) It’s worth remembering that there was widespread admiration for the German Nazis back in the 1930’s; admiration for Hitler and his gang was actually fashionable until World War II changed Germany’s status to enemy. (Or we can go back to the treatment of the Africans brought over to the USA as slaves, or the genocide of Native Americans, both of which are still going on today. None of this is new.)
There are those who claim that violent games make us violent, but I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s the other way around. The popularity of “games” like Call of Duty are simply showing us who we really are under our thin pretense of being civilized.
P.S.: I’m reminded of an experience I had some 20 years ago: I’d organized a birthday party for my son and his friends at the local game arcade, and I noticed a setup with what looked like rifles aimed at video projection screens showing well-endowed young women in T-shirts. It seems that the point of the game was to shoot these women and see them die, with all the blood and bullet holes that your shots made. And this was a “family oriented” game arcade, too.
@Allison
I agree. I think a major factor in Trump support is that a lot of people wish they had that level of immunity. They’re living out their fantasies, vicariously, through him.
LykeX@#15:
I think a major factor in Trump support is that a lot of people wish they had that level of immunity. They’re living out their fantasies, vicariously, through him.
So Call of Duty needs a level where you shoot people in the street in 5th Avenue, while the crowd cheers.
Allison@#14:
The enormous popularity of “games” like this tells me is that this isn’t just a moral sickness of the people in power; it’s a fundamental attitude or urge in the USAan population at large.
Back in the 50s kids used to play “Cowboys and Indians” – i.e.: Genocide!
I remember playing F-19 Stealthfighter back in the 1980s and an Iranian acquaintance was amused to discover that he could bomb his home town in the game.
I wonder what the reaction in the US would be if an Iranian computer game simulated bombing US American cities?
Whatever this game says its not just about the US. It’s a world wide success. There are people in Russia and the Middle East playing this (sadly I can’t find regional sales data)
thank you.
Whenever I see one of those dumb bombs, I have to restrain myself from yelling “just pull out the blasting caps”
And now I’m reminded of that kid in Texas(?) who built a clock in a lunchbox, and everyone claimed it looked like a bomb. Even here in supposedly liberal Oakland, I was getting in arguments with randos in bars about whether it looked like a bomb or not. For some reason, people don’t seem to get that the important part of a bomb, the part that actually makes it a “bomb” is the explosive…
lochaber@#20:
Whenever I see one of those dumb bombs, I have to restrain myself from yelling “just pull out the blasting caps”
A few years ago I got started on a posting about how to disarm bombs in movies if you ever find yourself in the situation. Unfortunately I took a brief wander into nuclear weapons and the article ballooned and I never finished it because I got involved in reading about krytrons…
reminds me of one of Charlie Stross’s “Laundry File” books (which I fuckin love…), where at one point they effectively “disarm” a nuke by… blowing it up. :)
@9 “Also, very few people would buy a realistic war game. Where’s the fun in carefully scouting forward at 50 – 100 feet an hour, only to find yourself suddenly dead without even seeing the enemy?”
Sounds like Red Orchestra in a nutshell. (I still loathe the whole marketing stick that Battlefield, CoD, Medal of Honour, the Devision are “realistic” shooters. Also “That bearded guy with shades, a cap and guns” in the promo material.)
As for the CoD Series, shooting pixel-nazis is more fun in Wolfenstein series and I can go without shooting various digital brown people, thank you very much.
AFAIK, that’s the standard approach to bomb disposal – you “disrupt” the device with a small explosion, large enough to scatter the components, but small enough not to trigger the primary charge. With a nuke it’s even easier, because they’re incredibly difficult to set off at the best of times. You just want to try not to scatter too much radiological material around, because it’s a bugger to clean up.
How… how did we get from pretty video game graphics to bomb disposal?
Probably via Marcus’s extensive digression on the topic in the OP…