Post-War Iraq And Videogames

DarkBlackFox writes "MSNBC has an article on how gamers relate to the rebuilding of Iraq, and how current world politics influence strategy and action games." A slightly odd article, but it begs the question - considering there are already games based on the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, how soon will it be before the Operation:Iraqi Freedom shooter or RTS, and how delicately should recent wars be handled in games?

Comments

Quick: most popular BF:1942 mod?

[gmhowell]

If anyone were paying attention, they'd know that modders are already making games based on the war.

Re:Quick: most popular BF:1942 mod?

[Reptile]

Desert Combat rocks, for a number of reasons.

First and simplest (on the surface), it's based on a conflict that's very en vogue right now. While DC is currently based on the first Gulf War, the basic conflict of Coalition (U.S. et al) vs. Opposition (Iraq) is something everyone's been thinking about.

Second, it takes some of the funnest parts from BF1942 and makes them even better. Tanks are faster and they shoot better. Missile launchers are awesomely powerful versions of artillery. The classes and their abilities are all shuffled together, making a number of new class concepts that work really well. And aircraft, arguably the most popular part of BF1942 (see all those plane campers for proof), are even awesomer--jets are fast and maneuverable, the Harrier can take off vertically, and there are HELICOPTERS! The DC team totally extended this 1942-themed game and added a whole new type of unit! That's pretty impressive for a game with no mod SDK available.

The last reason is really just the quality level of the mod. Even though the current version is an alpha version, numbered 0.3, it already feels like enough. I can only imagine the level of quality that their 1.0 release will have.

Any surprise that more people are currently playing DC than the original BF1942? Any surprise that the DC team has been approached by EA to get their mod on store shelves someday?

Not a game, but...

[Per Wigren]

...a really funny flash-animation: The Real Hussein :)

How delicately? Not at all.

[Babbster]

I think that given the capacity for realism in terms of graphics and sound in today's games, they shouldn't handle war games delicately at all. I think it sends the wrong message when you tone down violence and bloodshed in a purportedly realistic game. Much like movies such as Saving Private Ryan can bring home the brutality of war, games can potentially do the same given the chance.

What would be wrong, for example, with a game wherein you're part of an infantry regiment/division in Takrit and your goal is to take the city with as few civilian casualties as possible? You could be penalized for causing civilian death and even end the game court-martialed because you didn't exercise good judgement in a firefight. Such a game would include all the carnage of a real war and, handled properly, encourage the player to think about the lives lost in the process of winning or losing the game. No doubt it would be rated "M" for Mature but it might be a game that actually deserves the rating for good reasons as opposed to bad.

We all know that war games (strategic, tactical, FPS, etc.) will be made. It would be good to see a high-profile war game, though, that tried to really address the negative side of war instead of simply glorifying violence and conquest without consequences.

Semantics and simulation

[RobotWisdom]

It's great to see these issues addressed at all in the popular press-- in the world of artificial intelligence, puzzles like 'how-to-model-diplomacy' are usually classed as 'semantics'... and then swept under the rug!

For at least 100 years, wargamers have understood that to make their models accurate they have to include diplomacy and other subtle sociological factors. [great long history of wargaming]

More recently, when Chris Crawford did his breakthru nuclear-armageddon sim Balance of Power in 1985, he read all the basic texts on international diplomacy and found them almost completely useless-- his model ended up being entirely about 'saving face', which was something the texts hardly ever spelled out. (If you let your enemy get away with anything, you lose face, so to avoid that you have to rattle your nuclear 'sabre'.)

But what's most alarming is that as long as AI's been around (almost 50 years) and as popular as computer games and simulations have gotten, I'm not sure there's any university program yet that surveys how to do this kind of semantics, for games and other simulations. (I've been scouring the Web about this for my timeline.)