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Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion?
Thanks to the New York Times for its article (free reg. req.) discussing the plethora of recent videogames based on the Vietnam War. The piece notes: "Before the year is out, the game industry will have released five major titles involving a conflict that it has largely ignored for nearly two decades", and muses: "World War II games have in principle been simple to design. But because Vietnam changed the rules of engagement, the virtual battles had to be chaotic and the goals less clear." The article ends with a quote from one of the creators of Shellshock: Nam '67, arguing: "With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."
All I know is I loves me some Battlefield Vietnam. I can just hear my soldier screaming as he falls to the ground from a sniper wound, "Why Nixon WHY?"
Note to self: Check Post Anonymously, not "No Karma Bonus" when First Posting. Now I just look like an idiot.
It was hard to create a convincing jungle prior to today's ultrapowerful computers and graphic cards. Look at the levels in Goldeneye for the n64 and rainbow six (1), they aren't environments that are too impressive.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
I think this is probably just the game industry trying to find new material after WWII has been beaten to death over the past few years. After the Vietnam Era, what'll be the next video game wars? Gulf Storm? Somalia? Afghanistan?
What about the old forgotten wars? The War of 1812? Korea? WWI, for crying out loud?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Damn, if ONLY the Americans had known about the quad powerup behind the stairs to the left of the embassy, the Tet offensive could have ended up completely different. War is hell.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Believe you me, there will never be a shortage of wars to make games about. I can't wait until developers stop worrying about what fads are "in" and actually do some of their own research about a war instead of just playing their competitor's games. I'm to the point now where another WWII game comes out and I just say, "blah, WWII again?" Vietnam is the same way. The only vietnam game I've even played was vietcong and I'm keeping it that way.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather play a well thought out interpretation of an obscure conflict than bomb my way through yet another bunch of krauts. A truly good developer could make a great game out of any story you throw at them instead of just giving us more shiny surfaces.
In short, there's a finite amount of ass that can be kicked by any given concept, and each new chapter only dilutes the entire book, so to speak.
SEAL Team was a pretty groundbreaking game set in Vietnam, all the way back in 1993!
It was a realistic depiction of Vietnam too, because it was frickin' hard and I always died.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Why blank ammo?
True, if a game is really well made a developer can leave the verdict of the actions in a game to be justifiable or not. But the problem is, as long as human beings form these ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS, there will always be the insertion of bias into the game.
Take Battlefield : Vietnam. Why don't American players find strung up dead allies in the middle of the jungles as warning? If I was a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam and I saw that I'd think the Vietnamese were savages. Vice versa, why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S.? You don't see this because its not what the developers WANT you to see.
The developers want you to see a war with no goals, no black, no white, just a lot of greys. If I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years, you'd think the U.S. was justified (And yes, there would be lots of gore). On the other hand, if I made a Vietnam game with 50% of the game having the player be nothing more than a rice farmer sneak past American soldiers killing and taking away innocent villagers, you'd think its only right that the Vietnamese were justified.
The whole idea of looking at a war through someone else's vision is misleading at least, and propaganda at most. Wheres the gore? Where the years in POW camps? Where are the villages being napalmed?
WWII events are captured well in WWII games (other than obviously the Holocaust and the Pacific theatre but thats changing). Air raids? Got that. Seemingly out of nowhere artillery attacks? Got that. Charging machine-guns nests while your buddies go down? Got that. Tank battles? Got that. This is why people have generally let WWII games off with such ease. They knew what happened, they knew how it happened, and developers knew enough to put those events into the games. They didn't skimp on the details whenever possible and the public respected them for that, even if they avoided topics such as the Holocaust, and the Russian and Pacific theatres until recently.
(Score:1, Insightful)
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Movies and books have no problem taking the subject that seriously, and it changes / confirms a lot of peoples beliefs in war.
Games are poised to have an even larger effect in that way. Because of their interractive nature they let you actually *experience* what it was like (provided the developers do the experience justice).
Games are a great tool for communication of ideas and feelings, so it's not a messed up concept at all and I think this developer is trying to use the medium as more than just entertainment.
Quagmire wars are, like, all the rage these days. Simply everybody has gotta have one! Popular game for popular times.
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Who do you think builds my circuit boards?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Good point.
I find that playing Battlefield 1942 is a much better experience than Battlefield Vietnam simply by the context. Battlefield Vietnam doesn't really add that much to Battlefield 1942 with gameplay/graphics. What makes 1942 better is simply that WWII portrays a feel good war versus Vietnam which just conjures up images of horror. WWII was probably just as bloody and horrific but the image I have been presented though the media for my entire life has been of an honorable war. Playing 1942 just gives me a much better feeling of wanting to win. I gave up on Vietnam after a while. Maybe I just want to escape to something that is more black and white when I want to have fun.
the problem with historical war games is that they represent a sanitized version of what really happened, probably the winner's version of history, too.
Which war the game is set in has very little relevance to the enjoyment of the gaming experience. Haven't you played and enjoyed FPS games like Quake or Half-Life that aren't based on historical campaigns? The engine and gameplay mechanics are all that matter.
;-)
About the only use a historical setting has is to help teenagers justify the purchase to their parents (But Mom, it's educational...). Older historical eras (pre WW1) aren't very enjoyable in an FPS, mostly because it's such a pain to watch your musket reload between shots
As to the plethora of Vietnam themed games, I find the game industry moves as a herd, and next year it probably will be Desert Storm. After that, who knows? A realtime simulation of Iraq right now?
Touche!
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Great post, so I'll attach piggy back my post to your's.
The very nature of a game creates a protangist and and antagonist. Some good old deconstruction is in order here. The player, however morally neutral the game makers have crafted it, is still the "good guy," even if he's the bad guy, as in GTA. The player is still trying to reach an objective. Conversely, the "bad" guy is whomever is attempting to stop the player. What's more is that the game is always designed so that the player can theoritically win, or do better. In a game like BF:V this becomes more complicated in multiplayer, but the idea is the same. The more skill you exhibit, the more often you receive a reward. Therefore, even in attempts to neutral-ize the game, they are still placing bias, even if that bias is inherent in the nature of playing.
I suppose you could call these games the ultimate manifestion of post/anti-modernism. The moral attachment to these symbols, say of the Nazi party and the Holocaust, or of American soliders killing Vietnamese civilians, is drained completely because the when the player is a German in Battlefield 1942, it doesn't matter anymore that the team they are virtually fighting for committed vast atrocities. What matters is that they take hold the flag for 10 seconds longer and receive a point. I'm not sure what the cultural long lasting effects of these games will be, but I'm sure there'll be some.
What we need from game developers, I believe, is a moral awareness, a realization that when dealing with violence, particularly within the context of a war, that they ought to acknowledge that these symbols mean something more than merely scoring a point. Merely because the public is less sensitive about an issue doesn't necessarily mean that the human harm committed disappears, or even loses its importance. I remember the backlash to games that included Osama Bin Laden immediately following 9-11. Fundamentally, though the only difference between those games (exempting quality, of course) and Battlefield Vietnam is a timespan of 30 years.
We'd be outraged if Dice's next game was, say, one side trying to esacpe the WTC and another side trying to hit it with airplanes. And yet, in 30 years that may very well be a game. Why aren't we addressing this more in gaming? Why can films address this, for example, the Vietnam War so astutely immediately following it, but our games can't do the same with the WTC?
My feeling is that the gaming landscape is ripe for someone to truly integrate the moral reality of war into a video game. I suppose that the creators of Call to Duty somehow think they're doing that, and I suppose I could concede that they are making baby steps in that direction. Still, it's within the basic framework of a protangonist seeking a reward and hindered by an antagonist. Like you said, violence and war are far more complicated than this. What would impress me is if the Call to Duty game developers had borrowed more than just style from Band to Brothers and instead included a level where you are forced to shoot at point blank range a 13 year old German soldier who doesn't fit in the uniform. The challenging question becomes: how do you imply an emotional connection, and communicate that this collection of pixels represents a human being with brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers that you ended the life of?
Anyone?
Or how about I just communicate that deconstruction is masturbation. Its a game. Its supposed to be fun. Keep your hippy crap out of my games.
If the gaming landscape is so ripe, why not do it? Oh, that's right, because everyone would hate your preachy little game.
The question isn't how to imply an emotional connection. Noone does that because that's called awful game design.
OMFG YOU GOTTA GO BUY THE NEW IRAQ WAR GAME!!!11 IT TOTALLY BUMMED ME OUT ON THE REALITIES OF WAR AND I CRIED ALONE IN MY ROOM FOR LIKE 3 HOURS!!!11 OMFGOMFGOMFGOMFGOFMGOFMG
To create an emotional connection, the game would have to make the player identify with the opponent somehow, which usually involves character development. This is usually reserved for major roles of allies or opponents, like the super villian. For Battlefield Vietnam, you could have families of civilians running around. Trying to huddle together and survive the battle. Or maybe have families huddled in rooms in the bombed out buildings. There would have to be some penalty for killing civilians. My main concern is it would be bad to de-sensitize people to the horrors of war. Somthing like "Oh, more Palistinian civilians killed in rocket attacks by Israeli forces... I played that mission, it's pretty much impossible not to hit the civilians while trying to kill the terrorist leader with the attack helicopter." In games like Battlefield Vietnam there isn't time to form the necessary emotional relation ships any way. 1) There is no lull time where the players develop relationships with eachother. 2) Even if there was time to form emotional bonds, when somone dies, they respawn 10 seconds later, so death and loss have no meaning. So in the end this game would have to include lots of lull time for players to bond, and to demonstrate that your opponents are themslves forming these bonds. Relation ships with civilians who have there own opinions, and fears would have to be exemplefied. Each player would have only one life, that way it actually mattered if someone died. Basically it sounds more like a RPG than a war game. An RPG where you don't gain levels, you only develop relation ships, and try to survive your tour. Games like Battlefield Vietnam should try and avoid the moral implications and stick to the aspects that make it a game, and as such enjoyable. It's not about the morals, it's about playing within a set of limited rules, and developing skills and strategies to try and do better. But I guess Battlefield Vietnam invites the morals into the game by basing it off of an event that has had a huge impact on this society.
Or how about I just communicate that deconstruction is masturbation. Its a game. Its supposed to be fun.
I'll give you the deconstruction = masturbation. But your kneejerk reaction to my post merely proves that it's not just about fun. If it were just "a game", we'd still all be sitting around playing only Tetris, Pac-Man, or Pop Cap games. Or, Dice would have created a context-less game in which representations of people as square boxes went around capturing small yellow squares and "shooting" little white balls of nameless energy at each other. And, you wouldn't have given a damn about hippy crap in your games, because if it really is about the fun, then why bother with the war theme at all? If it's just fun, and just a game, why the hell do you care if you're a Nazi or a white blob? Why aren't we all sitting around playing an updated version of Nerf Arena Blast?
Because there's something inherently more fun about being a Nazi in Battlefield 1942 than there is about being just a kid with a Nerf gun, at least to most people. That's not to say necessarily that Battlefield succeds merely because you can be a Nazi, but it's certainly part of its success. It's partially why people are apparently buying stacks of these WWII games and not the generic scifi shooters that companies like Jowood and Dreamcatcher keep pumping out. Sure, part of it is that most of Jowood's games are horrible games anyway. But some of it has to be the context of war, otherwise it wouldn't matter at all whether it was a "historical" context of WWII or some fictional war with fictional countries. Dice and EA obviously felt that the benefit of contextualizing their game within the potential controversy of the Vietnam war was worth more risk than making up some fictional context.
What I'm addressing is not the "fun," but the symbology behind the fun. There's a reason why we have more fun being a Nazi or an American soldier in Vietnam than we do a little orange dot, and we ought to be asking ourselves why that is.
ultiamte - I need to stop writing slashdot posts as procrastination when I should be cramming a 30 page paper due in two hours.
I would agree that Pong or Tetris or Mario is masturbation in the same way a cheezy romance novel or action movie is masturbation. But just as movies and books _can_ be enjoyable AND thought-provoking or emtional or social commentaries, I think videogames can too. No one is going to force you to play a game that is set as a social commentary on Vietnam or the Holocaust or September 11th, just as no one is going to force you to read a book commenting on those topics or watch a movie about them.
"The Diary of Anne Frank" has its place in the world, just as "Hop on Pop" and pornography do. What I think the parent/grandparent posters are suggesting is that game designers experiment with emotional content in videogames. It may not work. But - in my opinion - videogames have room for even MORE emotional intensity than books or film because the player is controlling the action. I don't think anyone was saying ALL videogames have emotional or social commentaries, just that videogames, as a medium of artistic expresion, might work very well to communicate said commentaries in some situations. No one is going to take away Unreal 2004 and Halo and Super Smash Bros. But there may be room for emotional charged games as well, just as there is room on bookstores or Blockbuster for more than one genre of book or film.
-Trillian
I want to compliment you on your post. I too think videogames have the opportunity to be expresive in a way that is emotional and/or a social commentary and I look forward to the experimentations in that direction. I think videogames have the potential for, in specific areas, being more effective as emotional or commentative mediums because the player - by virtue of controlling the protagonist - is inherently more conected to the plot.
I don't know how it would be possible without being cheezy or seeming insesitive, but I think videogames have amazing posibilities. On the other hand, the replayable nature of videogames - with spawning and extra lives - makes the emotional impact difficult to convey. In an action setting, where death IS a posibility (say, the Holocaust or Vietnam) if the main character dies and they're not supposed to, what do you do? In a book or film it is obviously not possible for the audience to accidentaly stumble into a room of Nazis and get killed. But in a videogame this can and will happen. How do you build an emotional attachment to a character who can be respawned and loaded at will? I don't know the answer.
I think a posibility, and a way of taking a step in the direction of more action-genre type games, is an adventure-style game (possibily even a text-based game) where the game itself can take control of the players action through cutscenes or narrative so that action seens can be conveyed but the main character can't accidentaly die.
I'm currently in college, and double majoring in Performance Studies (a hippy offshoot of a Theatre Major) and Computer Science. One of the things I'm excited about is the posibilities for communication and human expression through computers - not AIM or computer graphics or the like (although they're intruiging venues) but in the ability to convey performance-type expresive content in a computer environment. I don't know if it's possible, but your post (and the grandparent) have given me some cool ideas (which I rambled about in this post) about communicating an emotional or commentative story in a videogame setting.
Thanks a ton for your insights!
-Trillian
Actually, I played a half-life mod that was placed in revolution era colonies/US (can't recall the name). It was really really fun. You had to really time your shots (which were still for more accurate than a real musket), and of course close quarters combat with a sword or bayonet was quite hilarious as we leaped at each other. The fact that the weapons were "diminished" required you to rely on your strength in numbers as well as coordinating movements. it was a great change of pace.
Wow I was trying to get modded and failed. Anyway...
All of that breaks down when you look outside of the scope of games set in reality. Doom III is obviously not set in any real world conflict. The setting is merely another way to enhance the gameplay. If you want to create a creepy horror thing you set it in a Mars base. If you want to encourage the player to drive tanks around an island surrounded by destroyers and aircraft carriers you set it on Wake Island. If you want to force the player to slog through a rice patty watching every step you set it in Vietnam. The setting is only a tool for gameplay.
Can you accurately say that you have more fun as a Nazi or American soldier vs. a person working on a Mars base being overrun with demons vs. a random scientist who gets caught up in some messed up stuff (Half-life)? I can't say I do, but I can say each is different fun. The setting is merely a tool for enhancing gameplay, and possibly another feature for marketing to list. Games are for escaping, not being beaten over the head with the designers view of reality.
I have seen these games. They are all crappy flash things that lead you to a conclusion (typically based on a false dilemma) that the designer wants you "learn". You can't let the player both do what they want and force commentary on them. They are mutually exclusive. Though I would agree that games should be considered art, they are really the first interactive art form. If you start forcing a world view on the player you lose the interactivity. I might as well just go to a movie.
Nah, I wouldn't say it is mutually exclusive. For example, you could put a 13 year old kid on the opposing side shooting your allies and you can decide whether to leave him be, or take him out yourself. Or maybe you go to this country and you see horrible atrocities being commited, ones you may be able to circumvent, but not without extreme difficulty and going way out of the way, and perhaps for little or no reward (maybe even an ass chewing by your staff sergeant for straying from your duties). It's possible to have moral situations in games without sacrificing freedom of choice.
Creator of the popular web game Proximity
I agree that there haven't been any successful moral or social commentary games (that I know of) I'm just saying I don't think it's impossible. Maybe the only commentary would be that the situation WAS morally ambiguous (with the Holocaust as an example: is it more moral to save the life of a child who will be sent to the camps, or to ignore the child knowing if you DO try to help, YOUR family will all get killed. 1 death vs 3 or 4: which is "better"?)
Books are enjoyable even without freedom - other than chosing what book to read, you don't get offered choices on what the character will do. But because videogames DO offer such choices, I think it's possible (and I admit I could be wrong) to have a game that has both the moral/emotional/social power of a book, and at least some of the freedom of choice offered in traditional videogames.
-Trillian
And all of that would be more fun and superior to game such as Call of Duty, how?
I know where you are trying to go, but I'm not coming along. Sure you can give the player morality choices, but they won't mean anything without consequences. If you enforce consequences based on the player's choice, especially when both sets of consequences are negative, you have already taken the player's choice away. Then its called a movie.
I'd like to play GWBush in Vietnam. I guess I'd be campaigning for a Republican and periodically picking up a paycheck.
Despite the early headlines the media eventually got around to reporting the whole story not just the anti-Bush party line. While serving in Vietnam could be hazardous, assuming you are not a Senator's son and have gardian angels - see Gore, serving as a pilot in the Air National Guard is not risk free. Bush flew a single seat jet fighter, one that had a demanding reputation. When the plane was being phased out and retired the Guard determined that with less than a year on his enlistment it was not worth retraining Bush in another aircraft. This sort of thing happens all the time. Being a pilot is an inherently risky job even under the best peace time conditions. The media eventually reported that Bush's Texas Air National Guard squadron patrolled some part of our southern coastline and escorted nuclear armed SAC B-52s. This may seem trivial to us today but it was deadly serious in the 1960s at the height of the cold war. The US and Soviets constantly probed each others borders, no one knew if that Soviet bomber on radar was doing recon or if it was armed. Guard pilots did some of the intercepts. Nearly 40 years later and with our 20/20 hindsight we think things were much simpler and safer than they really were.
Also, for the record, Air National Guard pilots did fly combat missions in Korea, Vietnam, and continue to do so today.
Actually the Tet offensive went quite well for the US. The Viet Cong was comitted to pitched battles in urban terrain and was largely destroyed. NVA operations didn't go much better. The civilians failed to rise up and support the struggle for Communism. The only US failure was domestic public perception. The US public bought the North Vietnamese spin, there is no light at the end of the tunnel, rather than the US Army spin, it's like World War II's Battle of the Bulge - one last failed desperate push before the collapse. Who's spin was true, no one knows. All we really know is that in the field the US won, but politically the North Vietnamese won.
The following was snipped from the Firaxis website:
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.