Due to the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Spearin explained, more players of military shooters than ever before actually have combat experience, and know what it's like 'beyond just how to shoot a weapon, but how. War games tend to leave out elements that are more difficult to convey through gameplay, such as the camaraderie that's so essential to surviving in combat.

They're working on a standalone sequel to the mod that's simply called Insurgency, and although both the circumstances and the stakes are different from when they were developing the original mod years ago, the process is nearly identical: It's all about the community.įor Spearin, 27, video game realism isn't necessarily about lifelike physics or a perfectly recreated environment, although those pieces matter. Today, Spearin is serving as the community manager for New World Interactive, a dozen-man studio that consists primarily of developers who made the original Insurgency and Red Orchestra. The developers released Insurgency in 2007, and it went on to win the Mod of the Year award from mod repository Mod DB. Some of the developers behind Red Orchestra: Combined Arms - the popular total conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 20 - later joined him to form an international team working on his mod, which was renamed Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. Spearin eventually began work on a Half-Life 2 full conversion mod that he called Operation: Counter-Insurgency.

literally sitting in a trench thinking that 'hey, games get this wrong, so what can I do to make this right?'' said Spearin in a recent phone interview with Polygon. He was never deployed in combat, but even during his time in basic training in 2002, he realized that video games featuring war did a poor job of capturing the entire scope of the combat experience. Andrew Spearin spent five years in the Canadian Army Reserve as an infantry soldier and bagpiper.

Squad vs insurgency