Hell Let Loose: Vietnam has a familiar voice hiding in its loadout menu. Click on any gun or grenade and you can listen to an audio description voiced by none other than Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. Ferguson has become something of a cult figure at the intersection of firearms history and video games, thanks to his detailed breakdowns of video game weapons on YouTube, but he also now plays a part in the development of video games, thanks to the Royal Armouries’ consultation service. He’s worked with studios such as Team17, Facepunch, and Rebellion to ensure their weapons are as accurate as possible and avoid commonly-made mistakes, such as getting shotguns completely wrong.
“The most persistent [mistake] that you still occasionally see is shotguns being completely less than lethal, or non-lethal, even, at a set distance,” Ferguson tells me, although he does note that “I think a lot of developers have wised up on this.”
It’s certainly true that the years of shotguns effectively being little more than loud knives is drawing to a close, across not only mil-sims but blockbusters, too. Both Insurgency: Sandstorm and Red Dead Redemption 2 are notable for their more realistic depictions of shotguns.
“The more and more detail we see incorporated in games, the more they’re able to make it resemble reality a bit more,” Ferguson tells me.
There are few people better-equipped to answer a developer’s questions about firearms than Ferguson, who not only reacts to in-game guns for the EXP YouTube channel but is also a gamer himself. His understanding of the needs of gameplay over raw historical accuracy made him an ideal fit for consulting on Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, although developer Expression Games’ realistic depiction of shotguns with authentic (even slightly generous) range is less to do with his consultancy than the studio doing its homework across the era’s entire arsenal.
“I didn’t need to tell them that the K50M submachine gun existed and was specific to the North Vietnamese,” explains Ferguson. “They already knew that. So they’d done their due diligence there.”
Beyond the shotgun issue, Ferguson often finds himself picking up on minutiae. “There are lots of little tiny details, like realistic patterns of cartridge case ejection for example,” he tells me, “which really don’t matter to how the game is played, but if you notice them, adds to it.”
Increased visual fidelity is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to detail.“
Through his appearances on Firearms Expert Reacts videos, Ferguson has built a reputation for picking apart the details many players won’t even notice. And so in the matter of case ejection patterns, he recognises there’s a bigger picture.
“There is a difference between criticising or observing, reacting, and actually playing,” he says. “There are a number of games where either I’ve played them previously and then I’m being asked to comment on them, or I haven’t played them yet but I do later, and I realise, ‘oh that thing I commented on, I didn’t notice at all’, because my attention is where it should be: on the gameplay, the story, the enemies, whatever.”
Increased visual fidelity is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to these kind of problems. During the the days of Doom and Quake, no one expected ejecting shells to be animated to reflect reality. Today, when so many items in games are rendered to reflect real-world physics, we expect to see something more realistic.
“That’s the kind of level of detail we’re at,” says Ferguson. “I can really nitpick things, and it gets increasingly hard to actually nitpick that stuff [because the detail has become so good]. Occasionally, I find out that’s because of something I’ve said, which is kind of rewarding, but I also feel bad because it’s making people do extra work.”
Sometimes, the quest for realism can require games to become less realistic to feel just right. Ferguson explains that pistol slides are a good example of this – in video games, it’s better if they move much slower than they do in reality.
“If you can see them moving, that showcases the animator’s skill. Things aren’t clipping through each other and it looks cool,” he explains. “In reality, if you shoot a gun, even if you stare right at that moving part, you can’t really see it move. It’s kind of faster than your eye can realistically perceive.
“But [a player’s] expectation is, ‘well I know that bit of a gun moves’, and [if] they don’t see something move, or it moves really fast and they can’t really tell, they might think, ‘oh, that’s not very satisfying’.”
The Real Meta
Ferguson himself also wasn’t immune to a misplaced sense of realism during his youth, years before he became an expert at the Royal Armouries.
“I’ll never forget firing up GoldenEye 64 for the first time,” he says. “Something about the way the AK was represented in that, the sound of it, the muzzle flash, the way you could sort of wave it about, that felt so much like, ‘oh, that’s like a real rifle.’
“Of course, it’s not at all,” he adds. “Especially when you look in third person, it looks like they’re just one-handing the thing. But in ‘97, that was super impressive.”
GoldenEye’s version of the AK-47 may not have been realistic, but the assault rifle it is based on occupies a unique position in popular culture. It has become a symbol as much as a weapon, used and recognised across the entire planet. If anything has achieved the status of “meta” in the real world, as weapons do in games, it’s the AK-47.
“That distinctive profile, especially with the steeply curved magazine of the 7.62×39 original version, is an absolute icon,” Ferguson says. “A literal icon. I don’t use ‘iconic’ in the lazy way, I use it in a literal way, because it appears on the flag of Mozambique for this very reason. It’s a tool of liberation for some, a tool of terrorism and violence for others.”
Of course, move across the globe to Europe and North America and there’s another assault rifle that could claim the same thing. “I think certainly the Western world would say AR-15,” he says. “A short-barreled AR-15 with a telescopic stock and a flat top. That’s kind of the go-to for all sorts of people.”
While “meta” has a deeper meaning, it’s often perceived as “the popular weapon everyone uses”, and what’s popular in one medium can directly influence what’s used in another. Ferguson’s deep knowledge of firearms, video games, and pop-culture means he’s able to spot how one medium’s fascination with a certain weapon creates a sort of “feedback loop”. One particularly notable example is the use of “the specific chopped, converted HK94 that was used in several ‘80s action movies, including, most famously, Die Hard” in the GTA games.
Sometimes we get comments saying, ‘Oh God, not more video game content.’ But I’m sorry, there are lots of us out there playing.“
But while movies have long had a widespread influence on video games, Ferguson notes that the tide is somewhat turning: “Games have been in the shadow of movies, but I think they’ve moved beyond it.” The first example that he reaches for doesn’t have anything to do with guns at all, but Ferguson notes that Spider-Man: Brand New Day uses “fight scenes and finishing moves taken from the Insomniac games. Obviously, that was the inspiration. I think we’ll see that with guns as well.”
But while we’re still at the dawn of video games impacting the armouries of movies, Ferguson notes that video games already have a profound impact on the consumer habits of gun owners.
“Obviously, they buy stuff that’s in the movies, but there’s that much more personal connection to what they feel they’ve used, because they’ve grown up playing games,” he explains. “So there’s a feedback loop from non-interactive media to video games to the real world, and it goes round and round. And, of course, quite a few people join up to armed services as well, having watched those movies, played those games. “
With video games directly influencing the way the public interact with guns, be that purchases or becoming involved in the military, I wanted to know whether Ferguson believed that the depiction of firearms in games has helped or hindered the public understanding of these weapons. For many gamers, who live in countries with stringent gun laws, firearms are rarely seen and even more rarely handled. Video games are often our only window into the use of guns, and they can sometimes give us the wrong idea about their real-world usage. However, Ferguson believes that the opposite is true, at least to some extent, noting that games can provide a fairly strong base understanding of the roles of various guns in warfare.
“I think [games can offer weapon knowledge] in terms of how they look and their technical accuracy and maybe a little bit of an idea of what they’re for. In other words, what’s a rifle for versus a pistol versus a shotgun”.
He notes that, in particular, we are now seeing more depictions of 18th and 19th century firearms, as well as those from World War I. “I think moving out of living memory has made that more of a thing,” he adds. “[There are] more and better depictions of guns, from my point of view as someone who studies this stuff, than ever, and one of the best ways to get a grounding of what’s out there, what’s it for, who used it and what for.”
He is, however, quick to point out the limitations of the medium. “Media can’t give you a full sense of what it’s like to shoot a gun, much less to take one into combat or defend a home with it or whatever. They’re two separate things.”
And yet, while simulation and reality are two separate things, the two will forever be entwined… and they have been entwined for far longer than the existence of video games. Ferguson notes how his interest in firearms in modern popular culture had “raised eyebrows” from his predecessors, despite the fact that they themselves had established their interest in firearms through cowboy movies. But while some in the firearms community may grumble, Ferguson is well aware that the link between guns and video games isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, it will only become more important to study and consult on.
“I still meet people who don’t play games at all,” says Ferguson. “Sometimes, on [the Royal Armouries YouTube] channel, we get comments saying, ‘oh, God, not more video game content.’ But I’m sorry, there are lots of us out there playing and consuming media, and that’s not going away.”
