The Billion-Dollar Game Designer Who Became a Future-War Theorist

[undeterred]

Former ‘Call of Duty’ creative director Dave Anthony wants to change the way America thinks about conflict

Video games are huge business. For years now, digital games have earned more than the music and film industries combined. And of all of the billion-dollar properties in the industry, Call of Duty is one of the biggest. For eight years, Dave Anthony steered the franchise. He wrote and directed five of the series’ 11 titles, helping to transform a World War II shooter into a cultural touchstone and annual entertainment event for millions of people.

After producing some of the most successful video games of all time, Anthony left the industry. A year later, the Atlantic Council—a Washington, D.C. think tank—hired Anthony to help predict the future of warfare. Now the man who imagined video-game wars helps an influential think tanks talk about real war. At least, the ways real war might evolve.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is set in the 1980s and also 40 years later. The dual narrative follows the rise of a Latin American terrorist organization during the Cold War. In 2025, after years of harboring a grudge against the West, the terror group lures the U.S. into a conflict with China by hacking American drones and launching a cyber sneak attack on the Chinese stock exchange. It’s easy to see why Grundman and the Atlantic Council were interested in Anthony. “[The game] involved a long of things the Council had been looking at,” Anthony says. “A lot of their fears. [Grundman] wanted to know how I came up with the story. How was it that it was so close to what they think might actually happen.”

For Anthony, national security threats are all about proactive solutions. Too often, he says, governments are reactionary. “If you can think of these types of threats with a mindset of, ‘This has already happened,’ rather than, ‘This is just some idea that this might happen in the future,’ it really forces you to think about it in a different way.”

Interesting read: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-billion-dollar-game-designer-who-became-a-future-war-theorist-64331508ea5d

Video:

[bemildred]

1. Yes, marketing is very important. nt

[PeoViejo]

2. +1000

...but they always seem to get blindsided by something that wasn't in the game scenario. I've seen it happen in the real world, where, so called experts fail to recognize that potential bad actors can have a creative mindset of their own and don't depend on what's available in Media to come up with an effective plan of attack.

[bemildred]

3. Everybody thinks they are the good guys.

Even when they think they are the bad guys, they think somehow they were supposed to be the bad guys and it's not really their fault.

Just because you are a religious whacko does not mean you can't do the math.

Computers are inferior substitutes for human beings in many applications, and that is not likely to change. What computers are is fast, not smart.

Anything that requires electricity to operated can be problematical in a combat environment.

And yeah, people who think they can predict the future are always wrong, Reality does not care what we think.