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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."
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?
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yeah Richard Nixon sucks! Oh wait, he ended the vietnam war. It was the French, JFK and LBJ that fucked it up.
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.
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?