Arma 3

❦ Published

The precursors to humans, fighting over resources.
Still from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, showing earlier humans using tools to fight for resources.

As a descendant of hunter-gatherers, I too like to let projectiles fly and gather shiny things in video game streams of life.

The first game I wrote about, in a forgotten text file in an old AMD Athlon-powered computer, was a demo for Bohemia Interactive’s crawling and running soldier simulator, 2001’s Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis.

The precise yet clumsy movement of your avatar, that careening jeep, the distances in the landscape, challenging difficulty, and loud sound design made the demo feel different from other 3D games. You didn’t play a hero, but a simulated boots-on-the-ground grunting grunt, trying to survive.

I bought the game from a shop on Via degli Scipioni near the Vatican in Rome, and finished it, stopping the missiles from being launched in the end after many tense missions like one putting you at the edge of a forest where you had to immediately run, zigzagging between trees, bullets from many angry digital men chasing you cracking by, finally hiding in a bush in a field while an APC came searching for you at the other side of the forest. And finally, after many tries, getting away. Surviving.

These days, the simulation of modern warfare often feels too close to reality for me, and I prefer spending time in future, fantasy, and more abstract worlds, including the universe of music.

When I do play Arma it is mainly cooperatively with other players in human intelligence vs artificial intelligence, or PvE game modes.

The game is an excellent giant digital toy box space to spend time together and exercise our primal instincts without hurting others. It is also one of the only games that lets you draw freely on a map.

Line drawing of a woman on the Arma 3 Altis map.
A drawing from a recent coop session.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or a PC or Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo devotee, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of humankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a person who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial video game system; this person is concerned with the total understanding of humankind.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known, Chapter 6. Bolded word changes by Ed.

Playing Arma 3 with friends.
Screenshot from an Arma Antistasi session with friends.

Arma has extensive modding support, which means players can change the game, even making completely new gameplay modes. This is something other developers like Ubisoft should take note of.

The Battle Royale genre of video games, for instance, was born in an Arma mod by Brendan Greene, which later became PUBG, Warzone, and so on.

The best Arma mods I’ve played:

A zombie wearing a suit.
I played lots of Arma 2, especially its DayZ mod, the original PvPvE apocalyptic survival experience.

Arma 4 is coming, with Reforger a technology bridge connecting the past to the future of the series, and a good game itself.

In the meantime we’re continuing cooperative Arma Antistasi campaigns on various maps, and I’m listing the streams from my point of view of the action on the sidebox above.

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