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When Does It Become OK To Make Games About a War?
The cancellation of Six Days in Fallujah seems to have stirred up almost as much debate as its original announcement. Given the popularity of World War II games, it seems clear that the main concern about a game focusing on modern war events relates to how recently they happened. Kotaku takes a look at some of the obstacles such a game would need to overcome to achieve broad acceptance.
"When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun — war is not fun — but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"
It's pretty much OK to do anything you want to do unless you plan on pissing off the vocal minority.
I'm fairly certain the majority of us really don't give a damn what the next guy is going to do.
It's that small percent who have an extremely horrid tact and shout much louder then necessary.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I think time is only a minor factor in this case. The level of "OK-ness" of making a war game is also highly correlated with the popularity of the war IMO. In World War II we seemed to have a clear enemy who was clearly in the wrong. It was cause for celebration to defeat them at the time and thus it's OK to relive this defeat in the form of a game. The Iraq war is extremely unpopular, and it's unclear whether we really "won" anything as a result of it.
... where every single person who participated in it is dead.
I think Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a perfect example of a modern war game that hasn't gotten too much flack.
Common sense is not so common.
Skip Iraq or Afghanistan for a few years and go with a Korean or Vietnam era theme. WWII has been beat to a pulp.
when you win it.
http://aa3.americasarmy.com/ - AA3 is the most authentic military game ever. We don't just say "every detail counts" because it sounds good. We mean it and Army Experts checked every aspect of the game to ensure it's as authentic as possible -- from weapons to sounds to player movement.
maybe it has to do with competing in the same game market as the us army? I've played america's army since 2004 it is both fun and entertaining. this game would be able to take off if they simply called it 'desert battle sim' instead of trying to pull actual battles from RL. I must say it is a neet idea but dumb, considering its exactly what AA3 is doing.
The problem wasn't the controversy, it was that Konami buckled. Anytime a company gives signs of backing off, you'll have a bunch of groups charge in like pack animals to set their agenda. Jack Thompson has been trying it for years. He would have loved that type of weakness in companies. So Konami pretty much blew it.
You can't tell me beating up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto is better than a modern day war simulation. For every person saying "but that's someone's son" in regards to the war game, you could say "but it portraying someone's daughter in GTA"...
If recency were such a controversial thing, you couldn't have documentaries of events newer than 20 year old, let alone what is happening in the world today. The subject matter isn't all that different from any other game of its type, and I'm sure the soldiers in the "soldier groups" protesting the game have played their fair share FPS/GTA/Survival_Horror, so there probably is a fair bit of hypocrisy going about trying to make this or that topic sancrosanct and taboo.
One the 7th day of Fallujah, they could have released the game.... as long as they had changed the title, the media blackout would have made the game "fictional"
I didn't read the article, but I will assume it's some bleeding-heart bullshit about how insensitive it is to make games about current military endeavors where people are losing their lives and whatever else. I say, as long as the game is well-produced, politically unbiased (it's hard to be 100% this case because there has to be a winner), and, above all else, fun, I couldn't care less which war the game was about. Frankly, I wish there were MORE games about the Iraq war. It gives me something that I can play that relates to current events. It shows that the devs that made it have some balls and aren't afraid of hurting the feelings of a very small select group of people. It also gives me an alternative to the ten WWII games that come out every year which are becoming extremely stale.
How would a GERMAN point of view in a war game be like. You might say that several all ready did offer you the option to play from the german side, but not on the box cover. Look at the art for games with two sides like the venerable Close Combat series. It is pretty clear who you are supposed to be playing. That you can also optionally play as the germans is just a small side note.
But what is a game like Call of Duty etc had a german theme and worse, did not pretend that the german soldiers did not know what they were fighting for. Notice that most potrayals of symphatetic germans conveniently accepts "ich habe es nicht gewust" for fact. But it was the soldiers who rounded up the undesirables and put them on transport. Who took civilians hostage and executed them.
How would a ww2 game that showed that be received?
Not so good I think.
for that matter, how about a vietnam game in which the americans get to torch houses and kill unarmed women and children? Hell, even make a vietnam war game where the americans are LOOSING. Or a dutch war game about the "police" actions in Indonesia, just to show this is not an anti-america thing.
War games are acceptable as long as they show a clean version of a war with a goodie and a baddie and you are the goodie and the goodie is nothing but good and does nothing a baddie would ever do.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...once the Chex Quest total conversion comes out.
The question starts with when, but it really isn't asking when. It's asking the 'What' 'How' and 'Why.'
When is a different question. and the answer is tomorrow. That is when.
How about you first start out by not developing a game based on an on-going war. For example, had the technology existed, I would not be developing a WW2 game in the middle of f-ing WW2!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
That just sounds to me like the biggest pile of circumventing, euphemistic bullcrap I've read in a long time. If you want to make your game, go ahead and do it and don't pretend that the people who play it aren't having 'fun'. If you get to deal with the consequences then man-up and face the music. Don't try to explain away with fancy words that what's just controversial and that what's just human nature. Bah.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
How about when kids born during are old enough to play? Seems like a safe bet ;)
So, then, what ARE some fun war games?
I disagree. I can confirm kids playing COD, Halo, etc.. I usually end up getting my ass kicked online by some cackling 12 yr old.
It will always been too soon to make a game about any real war to some group. There is a sort of logarithmic scale to the number of people offended by a particular war being depicted in video games.
Also, the accuracy of the war is important. More specifically, less accurate representations of wars that favor your market's culture's "good guys" will be more acceptable than highly accurate depictions. Even if your side won, you want to keep the image that they completely won, with as little difficulty as possible.
Real life "bad" events will always be a touchy subject to depict in any media. Pictures of the planes hitting the WTC buildings are generally only used when necessary. Songs about unfortunate events are highly criticized if they aren't ultra sympathetic. Games about war are either dumbed-down as much as possible, or they're about fictitious scenarios. You'll always have someone complaining about reminders of things they want to forget or move passed, it's just a question of how many you're willing to put up with to release your work.
Let the market decide. If people buy it, it's the right time. If they don't, chances are, your game just sucked anyway.
Personally I have always been disgusted by any wargame based on historical events, and I don't play them. However, free speech is one of the many things these real men and women died to defend (to take the WWII example so oft cited), and so no 'war' or war should be off-limits, IMHO.
It's never OK to trivialise War in such a way. The real question is when can you get away with it: At what point is opposition small enough to not matter or (better yet) to help drive sales with the illicit thrill of controversy? As others have pointed out it depends a lot on popularity and the politics. If the group are really still being demonized then often the video game can even precede the conflict. Games about "terrorists" etc are examples of this. Realistic games are always going to hit a nerve though, because realism isn't what is usually popular about war.
Stupidity is its own reward.
"Mission Accomplished"
I'm an american and surprisingly I agree with you.
One quote from the article really stood out. It kind of bothers me.
" The former Army colonel was quite clear on his opinion of that matter.
"If you're working with the enemy, that's called treason. The jihadist killing our people today would love to get a larger audience to perpetrate their hate."
This is precisely the same argument that is being kicked back and forth over the torture photos. Basically, the colonel is saying it's treason to even ask the insurgents why they are trying to kill us. He's also saying it's treason to ask them why they stayed and fought in Fallujah against the world's most powerful military.
That, despite the fact that these people are willing to kill themselves to fight us, we can't even publish what they're thinking that leads them to this.
From a military perspective, propaganda is important to winning wars. It's evidently the correct strategy to tell lies and half truths about your enemy in order to incite your side into fighting. But we have plenty of American troops willing to fight - the problem is that it doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything.
An immune system doesn't care if the invaders have good intentions or not - they fight off anyone who doesn't belong. We're a foreign body to these people, and they feel they have to fight us off.
A game (or even a simulation, in this case) is always fictional and biased.
Even a piece based on "fact" or historical information is still, at best, a commentary on a single perspective of the event (usually that of the developing body expected to appeal to their target audience -- not to discount satire, antagonism, or other secondary aspects).
The only issue here is the marketing and, more specifically, the target audience of the game.
Properly marketed -- suggesting an 'M' rating at a minimum, and an author's full disclaimer as an indication of bias -- any 'game' is valid.
Is it possible to make a realistic war game?
I vote "no" due to the fact that you really can't get hurt and probably won't develop PTD after watching your buddy's face explode in a shower of blood and bone, leaving you to wash his brains out of your mouth.
Not to mention that most wargames don't involve the player having to realistically deal with other people on their own side comitting war atrocities - never mind comitting them themselves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
that's what freedom is. anyone who is opposed is a freedom hating commie.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'd also argue that accuracy is also a key element. "Old School" wargamers took pride in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each side, presenting the simulation with at least a semblance of impartiality.
In this case, however, the game is biased, jingoistic and unrealistic. And, as you observe, it supports a cause that has been largely rejected.
The first part will have alienated the old school wargamers, the latter part will have alienated a lot of gamers who are not far right-wing.
I guess, ultimately, that's the true test of the OKness of a game - if you alienate the audience, it's not ok.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now as I mentioned before, people are illusioned into believing that something is extremely important. The reality is that most of the controversy is simply caused by stupidity. Sadly, I'm wrong when I say it's caused by stupidity; it's usually caused by willful ignorance in the form of religion. Though I do admit that there are some caused by bigotry, idiocy, and normal ignorance as well.
Think about it - What are the big controversies today in America? I'll list some for you:
Those are all caused by religious institutions; the pope hates them all. and there's such opposition to these issues because, guess what? They hurt their feelings. And they remain controversial because of bigotry. But there are some very minor controversies out there that aren't caused by Christianity; gun control and the war on drugs, for instance. These issues are caused by sheer ignorance.
How does this relate to the topic in hand? It's hard to say. Games based on real, current wars aren't controversial because of people's bigotry, idiocy, stupidity, or willing or unknowing ignorance.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this type of game isn't controversial at all. What it is, however, is stigmatic. People have different views on the war, and because not everyone agrees with it, and even though it's a subject that people can have differing opinions on it without getting upset, it instantly becomes taboo.
So the real problem is that people and organizations have become so incredibly afraid of being politically incorrect, they're not even willing to go along with anything that people won't agree on. Which means that the shelves of the game stores will continue to be filled with endless sequels, because someone might be offended with anything new, and in an overly-sensitive global society, that's enough to get your game banned.
To sum up what I was trying to say, current-war games aren't controversial, but are simply too new of an idea.
I hope my message got across well; I'm actually doped out on sleeping pills right now. I'm not even sure that I wrote about the point I was trying to make.... I'm a very confused man at the moment.
P.S. I think I meant to say earlier that controversies are caused by intolerance. Ex: Fable was controversial for being able to play a gay character.
Remember that one of the game publisher decided to cash in on the term "Shock and Awe" and realize that there was a public back lash at the attempt to cash in on the Iraq war. I think people need to realize one thing. This is not a freedom of speech issue, they're a private company and if they tick off the people that generates their profits, they'll probably do what it takes to protect that revenue source.
Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts
Eh? Could you run that one past me one more time? It would make sense if you said something like "Fun and education aren't mutually exclusive", but as it is stands it is a tautology.
When it comes to war, what is acceptable and in good taste depends on whether it allows people to come to terms with what has happened. WWII ended a while back, AFAIK, and people in Europe are still trying to come to terms with it - which is why in UK there is hardly one night when there is not at least one programme rehashing the events, or a comedy series or whatever. In UK we haven't even quite come to terms with WWI yet, and perhaps one shouldn't really expect to get to the state where it is just the subject of idle fun.
In my opinion, coming to terms with events of this magnitude means facing up to all aspects of what has happened, and for Falluja we aren't even close to that yet; this is not just a question of showing a bit of tact and respect for the tens of thousands innocents that were allegedly slaughered by Americans troops, but also a question of our integrity and moral standing. On a personal level I find it revolting and deeply disturbing that a bunch of soldiers - possibly henchmen in a horrifying crime - are now trying to milk the story for what it is worth. Talk about military honour.
And before anyone begins to spout nonsense about "the global anti-Americanism", let me point out that since you elected Obama, things have changed a lot in the world; not because we think he is going to do what we want him to do, but because we believe that he genuinely represents the American people, and we trust and respect the American people.
Although the wargames he used were not computer-based, he relied extensively on wargames and battle simulations to plan strategy and tactics. The main reason he lost in Africa, according to what I've read, was that the people he had feeding data into the simulations were nationalists who preferred jingo to honesty. Garbage in, garbage out. If not for that, he might well have stalemated his opponents or won.
This example is cited in a number of books on the history of wargaming that I've read on why it is essential that wargames be completely impartial and unbiased.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Its totally subjective. Influenced by cultural issues, maybe, but you can pretty much define what is fun for you. You could ask if is moral, ethic, damage sensibilities, etc... but fun, that goes with each one.
Actually, it wasn't that simple.
1. For a start you have to understand that what the bulshit Hollywood propaganda presents as a one "German army", was actually several branches, some of which weren't army at all. The SS for example was a paramilitary organization, _not_ a branch of the German army, and none too loved by the real army (the Wehrmacht.)
Second, even Hitler understood and accepted that not everyone has the stomach for his racial purity solutions.
The rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc, was done by volunteer groups -- the euphemistically called Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos (special units) -- recruited from the SS, SD, Gestapo (all under Himmler, btw) and local volunteers, _not_ from the army.
So, yes, most German soldiers didn't know jack squat about the extermination, and never rounded up anybody.
If you want to see an example of how the real army felt when ordered to do some atrocity: when a German sub was sunk by airplanes while trying to tow to safety the survivors of a ship it torpedoed, Hitler was furious and ordered that subs machinegun all such survivors in the future. Dönitz argued that doing anything of the kind would cause a massive morale drop, and basically pretty much refused to do it. Hitler actually backed out of that idea. Subs did stop trying to rescue survivors, though.
2. But to get back to the rounding up, you also have to understand another aspect: people are easier to round up when they don't know they're going to end up dead. After all, if you'll be killed anyway, what's your incentive to surrender to the guys with guns? At least running away or fighting back you still have a small chance to survive.
And you can see in the Warsaw uprising what happened when people realized that they're dead in the long run anyway.
So the "final solution" was actually kept somewhat secret, because, you know, the less people know about it, the less the risk that one of them will write to their former friend in Minsk to say stuff like "dude, hide before these guys come haul you to the gas chambers" and that guy tells _his_ friends about it, and it goes downhill from there. You have plenty of historical examples from elsewhere of exactly this kind of thing happening. E.g., the Gunpowder Plot in England failed when some conspirator tried to warn some other catholics to not be in the parliament on that day.
The people rounded up and the population in those cities, were routinely told they're being merely deported to some other province, and encouraged to take whatever they think they'll need in a new home. (Incidentally, that ended up as loot for the nazis.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When the societies processed it enough that it's comfortable trivializing it. Probably after the generation that had to fight it has had time to rebuild their lives enough to distance themselves from it.
Quack, quack.
The difference between heroics and butchery. Fallujah was a Massacre. Hard to celebrate atrocity.
Vote up. First poster should have read his history
"Can it be fun" should be the first question asked when designing a game, through every step of the process.
And the answer for a realistic modern warfare game, is "Of course."
That nearly merits a "Duh".
When Does It Become OK To Make Games About a War?
when the righteous moralists get over it.
You might as well argue that no american soldier knows the CIA tortures prisoners. That no soviet soldier knew about deportations to siberia.
Talk to some real germans soldiers when they are willing to let their guard down. The knew, just didn't want to know and sure as hell couldn't admit to knowing after the war.
When you are reading history, learn the difference between the one that is in the books written by people who wanted germany back in the civilized world as fast as possible and the real history.
The final solution was to big to keep hidden. But hey, keep dreaming baby.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
SmallFurryCreature, you need to travel back in time and take over DigiShaman's basement and declare it for the FuhrryLand!
"Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts". Eh???? Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive? Orly??? Seems like such a normal combo nobody would comment on the fact surely? Then it becomes clear - he actually means the opposite of what that sentence says given the next sentence is as follows "'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'" What he meant was fun and entertainment don't have to go together or 'fun and entertainment aren't mutually *inclusive*' in the context of real-world military conflict which is what the dev quoted is saying.
I wonder if it's the "active re-enactment" of the war that gets people more than "the war as entertainment". Three Kings was a fairly major movie about another conflict in that area that took place, what, 7 years before it was made? That's not a terribly long time.
http://www.tenjou.net/
While it's not a first person kind of War game, and you have the ability to play on the Ally side, it's pretty clear the focus of Panzer General series is to command German force for world domination. And it was pretty popular without much bad PR at all.
I don't think games always have to be fun. 'Fun' is such a shallow concept. Games can be entertaining, educational, emotional and other things without being 'fun'. As an example may I point you to a game about the Israel-Palestine conflict that hit me hard emotionally and opened my eyes to the circumstances people have to live in every day in some places in Israel? It's called Global Conflics: Palestine and does a very good job of giving an unbiased impression of the situation there.
-- Cheers!
It all depends on how much of an emotional toll said war has taken over the public you're selling your game(/movie/book/whatever) to.
An interesting huge thing that factors into that is who we perceive the "good guys" were in the real war - if we do so at all.
I don't really have any emotional connection with, say, either side of the wars Troy had.
Being a Jew and an Australian/Israeli I find it hard to watch films looking at the conflicts "my side" had a part in, tenfold so when viewed from the "wrong side".
There were several such works done over the years, and it's very interesting to see how the public accepts (or doesn't) a work of art (devoid of political message, I'm not referring to media created as propaganda) - such as Avanti Popolo (Israeli indie film that follows a squad of cut-off purposeless Egyptian soldiers through the desert as they're attempting to return home, simply painting them as human), or, if you want to go more extreme, stuff like Das Boot.
Das Boot was made some four decades(!) - that's just short of three generations - after WWII and the holocaust, and people - worldwide, not just holocaust survivors & families - had a huge problem accepting it (I relate, I watched it with a distressing sense of unease, my own family was cut down in the holocaust from some 50 people to under 10), mainly because it humanized the Nazis (and it did nothing provocative a-la 'what about all the good things Hitler did' statementa, it just followed a bunch of young (Nazi German) sailors on a U-boat whose main concern throughout the movie was getting back home in one piece, with pretty much piss-all politics or nazi agenda. Just human beings and immediate hardships common to us all. Acceptance? Rather bad (though the amount of controversy-spawned publicity they got was rather good... "as long as they spell my name right...")
To answer your question - depends on how loaded the conflict in question was. Depends on which side it's presented from. Depending on whether the people it's presented TO have made peace with the historic conflict or not... And that can take a good while.
As a curiosity relating closure on conflicts, here in Australia we devote a day each year - ANZAC day - to paying our respects to those who fought in our wars. There is a solemn march on this day, and in it march the veterans (or those related to them etc). Keep in mind we've taken an active part in nearly every conflict America was involved in since the start of the century.
And here's the kicker - it doesn't matter which side you fought on. It doesn't matter if back then you were "the enemy". Having come, myself, from a country that lacks anything even remotely resembling closure on past conflicts.
I really think achieving closure thus is a genuinely cool thing.
I've also seen it with US/Allied WWII vets doing same with their German and Japanese vets.
And if you've got that and you can avoid carrying a political message that'll de-label you as art and label you as a form of propaganda, you can popularize it in media all you want.
-
The problem with WWII was that one of the partners that defeated "the clear enemy", the Soviet Union, was even more clearly in the wrong.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was responsible for more deaths during its reign than the NSDAP.
WWII was basically a titanic showdown between TWO evil regimes where the west got involved and won because they funded a very dubious partner.
Most of the fighting that led to the downfall of the Third Reich happened on the Eastern Front. Hitler committed a third of his army in the west and fought there 1 year and 2 months after D-Day. The fight in the East lasted 4 years. The USSR suffered 20 million casualties, the US about 400000. There is an order of magnitude of a difference here.
The USSR survived the first onslaught of the Germans in 1941 to some extent because the US rushed in a lot of supplies. They fought with US trucks, cars, ammo and US industrial might and expertise to build stuff. And used that same expertise to hold a much heavier hand on their own population than the NSDAP ever did.
There is a lot more moral ambivalence about that war than meets the eye.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Americans trying to take credit for the Soviet victories yet again.
Why can't you just accept that they were good enough to kick Hitler's ass. Even if they never did anything else good, that's a gold medal right there.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
A lot of people whine about Americas Army because of the "realistically long" training that is required. However, I find that the game itself is as fun as any other FPS. If people whine about "war games", why not completely abandon FPS gaming all together. CSS is about fighting, in a war. BF2 is about fighting, in a war. BF2142 is about fighting, in a war. Unreal Tournament is about fighting, in a war. Any game that has teams, and guns, is likely fighting.. in a war.
Rommel was an experienced general and very successful early in the war. He wouldn't be fooled by overly oprtimistic projections and wishful thinking. His boss however was a different thing.
I think it was more that the RAF and RN got supplies through to Monty, while stopping Rommel getting much.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They were even involved in a few atrocities themselves, although the SS did most of the dirty work.
How could they do it? Well, you're in the army, you're in a dictatorship, you think you're going to speak out for your conscience? A few Germans did and got hanged or guillotined--the White Rose is only the most famous example.
Come on, how many people are going to stick their necks out in *Nazi Germany*? We like to use the term for grammar snobs but these were the real deal...
When there is no innovation left in the gaming industry and when the decisions of the people buying those games are driven by not quality but by trends
Well, then to get back to that original point: what makes you think that playing as a Wehrmacht soldier in a WW2 game would be any different?
Virtually nobody wants to think of themselves as evil fucks, even _if_ they happened to be the ones who had a hint of what's happening. We've had millenia of inventing and perverting concepts like "honour" to rationalize killing someone else as "good". The humans natural instincts to not kill each other (see, mirror neurons) have been twisted against them jiu-jitsu style to rationalize doing just that. The human social urge to be liked by his tribe/group/community has been perverted into making him kill his neighbour, daughter (see, the atrocity known as honour killings), mother (see, the behaviour of some relatives in witch hunts), etc, and still think of himself as "good" or as doing something right and expected by said community.
So the individual German soldiers wouldn't think of themselves as doing evil either. If they had to rationalize it any deeper than "because they'll execute me if I desert", it would more likely be "because we're the world's last hope against godless Bolshevism. We must stop them or all civilized world will fall to it." That was the justification that the higher ups repeated left and right, including in the (in)famous Sportpalast speech.
Would it be morally wrong to play as a German soldier fighting to stop Bolshevism?
Well, that's funny, because that was exactly the justification given by the USA in Korea, Vietnam, or to bomb the allied Laos. We've had some 60 years of movies, novels, comics, and later computer games too, glorifying just that: fighting against the godless Bolshevism.
If someobody published a game where a good ol' American hero mows the russkies like Rambo to stop them from spreading Bolshevism, not many would have a problem with that. How many protested against Rambo II or the games based on Rambo II? So why would you or the OP have a problem with it if it's a German soldier doing just that?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to rationalize WW2 or present it as "good." I'm actually finding it just as wrong when cold-war era aggression is glorified too. Just saying that at the bottom of it, things would be less different than some seem to think. For whatever that's worth.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
n/t
Such games are the equivalent of WWII war movies with Audie Murphy etc. Pure propoganda.
Maybe this should be reworded "When does it become OK to make games about an american war". Seems to be A-OK to make games about anything else
when has democracy been anything other than the will of the the guy with the most money?
buying off congressmen and senators is old hat, true will of the majority would be new ground
...And there is a difference between a simulation and a game. A war simulation, designed to be fun as it's prime purpose might suffer some ethical issues; but a game by definition is designed to be "fun."
These are video games. Unlike flying a plane, simulating war takes much more that realistic graphics and controls.
It seems to me that such a game would be about just as realistic as the cleaned up war the Americans see on TV. No suffering, no civilian victims -- especially no children, no fucked up psychopaths using the rule free area of a war to do what they always wanted to do, no torture, no life-long suffering from handicaps, no PTSD, no being sent in again and again and again until you finally blow your own head off. Instead it will be full of cynical utilitarian rhetoric and patriotic sugar coating. A fun game for the whole family. Maybe it will even have some religious motives baked into it -- because Jesus loves the war!
while (!asleep()) sheep++
I was deployed in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 during the Fallujah and the Al Sadr battles in Najaf later that summer of 2004. Now, I personally am not a 'war' anything fan in the sense that I steer clear of video games or any movies/TV/news depictions. I don't care to drown myself in that mess and my level of empathy for people who didn't come back from that shithole will always toll over anything that tries to depict it otherwise. Anything coming out the video game is going to be skewed, one-sided unlimited ammo shootout against insurgents. Is it really going depict the other facets of war: mental struggle, anguish, sadness, loss of life, sleep deprivation, pain, etc. Lets not forget a part of the war that I'm sure won't be in the game if it ever happens: the bodies of the contractors hung over the bridge or the self-less heroism of Marines/Army personnel dying to save a captured or injured friend and the many soldiers who died during that as well.
When Did It become "taboo" To make A games Subject About Something Like war? War games Have been a Relevant Topic For Thousands Of Years, I.E. A Simple Game Of Chess. It Is Only Natural That They Would Enhance This Idea. The fact that Some People Are Just now catching Onto this Is The Real Problem. Modern Warfare Is , And Will Always Be a relevant Topic, Thus Always A Marketing Propaganda.
The real barrier to making realistic wargames in my opinion is the combat itself.
If you watch footage of either of the current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan you will be stuck by how soldiers almost never ever actually shoot at a target they can see directly. Most of the time they are piling fire at a bush or building they suspect might possibly be hiding an enemy 500-600 yards away. Actual visual contact with the enemy is almost never made. The most they see of them is usually when a patrol maybe moves into the area a few hours later and finds a couple of dead guys in a ditch or hut.
Obviously urban combat is different but the truth is real people value their lives far far too much to ever visually expose themselves to the enemy properly, especially close up. Real combat is much more grey, confusing, stratchy and "unsatisfying" than running into a building filled with 15 guys and shooting them within 10 meters of each other.
You might say it would be impossible to make a fun game whilst denying the player ever seeing his enemy or the satisfaction gunning him down close up, but personally I think it may be worth exploring games that try and replicate the chaos and confusion of real combat. Having a game filled with with characters that display some actual sense of self preservation might really change things. Maybe the player will derive a sense of fun not only from what he does and the direct consequences of his actions (shooting people, people getting shot) but simply from his sense of place and being involved in something more real and incredible. The first time I see a game without a magic hud displaying your mission is xyz displaying the number of flak88's i've yet to single handedly dynamite, or some other varient of this, I will rejoice.
"It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun"
OK, now that someone's made that obligatory statement for the politically correct crowd.
Now, back to reality. Sometimes war IS fun - when it's a GAME. BECAUSE it's a game, you can try to build it to leave in the good parts (the excitement, the cameraderie, the explosions, the mano-a-mano competition) and leave out the horrible bits (the pain, death, fear, misery).
As Robert E Lee once pointed out "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it" - and here's a man who saw very closely one the most gruesome conflicts of the modern era, while AT the battle of Fredricksburg. Homer said "Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than war. "
And before anyone starts expressing vague politically-correct qualms about the morality of divorcing violence from its effects, I'd point out that MUCH if not all of our "entertainment" is about celebrating the good parts of things while conveniently filtering out the bad. Any drama (book or movie) at the very least compresses time and space, leaving us with the (entertaining) core story, and leaving out the distractions, the plodding dull bits, and the irrelevancies that would ACTUALLY exist in real life. Hell, porn is about celebrating the exciting bits of a sexual relationship without the consequences emotional or physical.
So if we're going to discuss when and how a wargame can be fun, first we must honestly dispense with the PC baloney about (simulated) war not being fun.
-Styopa
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Can a realistic military shooter be fun? As soon as it's fun to have a realistic flight simulator called "1 day of September 11th", or a first person shooter called "1 day of Columbine" Tragedy + Time = Comedy. I think a reasonably eminent American came up with that line.
Maybe
Its a matter of portraying a crime against fellow Iraqis in a game, the White Phosphorus, the children killed, injured elderly men shot dead in cold blood and in houses of god none the less.
No matter how Entertainig or fun some might find it, its not going to be taken lightly by people who actually have lost friends and family in the invasion and the battles that followed. For Iraqis the First Battle of Fellooja is a source of pride, for the US Army declared a cease fire, but to see children and teenagers relive killing Iraqis who made us (the Iraqi people) proud by resisting the invasion, is simply sick.
As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation.
if a game isn't fun on some level i am not paying you 60 fucking bucks to buy it
from Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: game
Pronunciation: \gm\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English gamen; akin to Old High German gaman amusement
Date: before 12th century
1 a (1): activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
lack of fun in games is at the very least a large part of the reason so many developers are tanking in the current economy if you bought their games before and didn't have FUN you're less likely to make the $60 mistake again
Look, just to clarify one thing: I'm not saying that _everyone_ in the Wehrmacht was some kind of saint. Some were arseholes, a lot weren't. Some vented frustration on innocent civillians, a lot didn't. Some had probably figured out the "final solution", some had no idea, and most likely a lot chose not to think about that kind of stuff at all.
What annoys me about the GGP post is the implication that _necessarily_ if someone made a WW2 game from the perspective of a German soldier, it would _have_ to be about shooting russian peasants and rounding up jews. Something like that can only hold if you or him are willing to claim that every single German soldier that ever got recruited was involved in that "final solution", and that's simply not the case. There is plenty of room to make a FPS from the perspective of a German soldier who's simply freezing his balls off and shitting his pants on the Easter Front, under a screaming Katyusha missile barrage. (Think: the ancestor of the MLRS.) And if anything goes through his head, it'll more likely be just "I wish this was over and I could go home" rather than anything evil.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Realist thinking leads to very uncomfortable questions indeed. It promotes the danger of seeing that the nazis did not start out exterminating people, but started with the idea of equalizing german society. It makes people dangerously prone of seeing the connections that are evident, connections that we are deeply uncomfortable with, like socialism + darwinism -> healthcare cost mounting + "the weak will perish anyway" -> socialist "eugenics" -> isolating "the weak that will perish in camps" -> "the weak" not perishing nearly fast enough -> costs mounting -> extermination. (please note that this train of thought took somewhere between 40-50 years to complete)
E.g. were the "national socialists" the only ones who came to the idea of an "endlosung" ? (no, the soviet socialists did the same thing, many arab "states" like Iraq and Syria did similar things, many so helped by either hitler or the Soviets)
E.g. the volunteer groups : uncomfortable question : "Were some of these groups Jewish ?". Ridiculous thing to ask, right ? Unfortunately the answer will illustrate the blatant ugliness of human nature.
"They didn't know" - perhaps not about the extermination itself, but the rounding up most have been a dead giveaway, right ? So what happened (mostly the removal of these people initially resulted in much less trouble for the rest of the inhabitants. Rouding up cripples/sick/... resulted in less cost for hitler's "national healthcare")
The above post makes it seem as if the decision for rounding up Jews (and gypsies, and cripples, and ...) and exterminating them was one single decision. It wasn't. They were in fact nearly 3 years separated. So what triggered the first (the "eugenics" component of the socialist ideology, which came out of darwinism) and what triggered the second (darwinism's predictions not matching reality : when isolated the "weak" (ie. the Jews) did not perish ... this resulted both in costs which the government could not support and in the uncomfortable question "what if the Jews aren't 'the weak' ?")
Given that hitler "hated Jews", how come so many sick and cripple native germans were rounded up ?
What were the "innovations" that hitler courted the German vote with ? (he had a majority before he became dictator by falsifying attacks) You really don't want to know the answer to this one.
People don't listen to sad songs because it makes them sad; people enjoy sad songs. Tragic plays don't make you feel as if the tragedy had befallen you. And whether a war game is fun has nothing to do with whether war is fun.
Words are placeholders for concepts generally. The difference between using "fun" with Six Days in Fallujah and "fun" with Pac-Man is not a matter of the experience, but expedience.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
What kind of question is this? If people will purchase it and the developer can make money on it I don't think an entertainment company has any moral obligation to do delay a product in any way. In good taste? Maybe not, but that wasn't the question.
A similar question is - when does it become OK to make fun of a war? I've been through a war, a proper one not a "bomb-technologically-inferior-military-from-gazillion-miles-away police action" type; this was a traditional war, with close combat and mass slaughter of civilians (which matters, because I was on the side of civilians and this side loses by default). Personally, I would never make or watch a comedy movie about the war nor make or play a game based on it, but it never occurred to me there was anything wrong with laughing at 'Allo 'Allo or playing Battlefield 1942. I fully expect that people sometime somewhere will do all these things based on "my" war. It's human nature and it doesn't really provoke any kind of feelings about those who will watch it / play it. Go ahead.
-- Sig down
"When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"
Sounds like the rationalizing in the torture memos.
If you can't make a game about one war, you should not make a game about any war. It's the same about jokes, if you can't tell the joke to the person it's about, you should not tell it to anyone. It's ok to make a WWII game because it was long ago, and there are no veterans, or a few of them complaining about it. If you made a game about WWII just after it was over(not that this is possible, just an example), you'd probably not be able to release it because a lot of feelings would get hurt. In my opinion it will never be ok to make a game about war until a good deal of time passes. Time heals all wounds.
All the sexy babes want me... to fix their PC.
... those that participated in the war to begin with. I get tired when a minority of vet's say this or that shouldn't be made about the war, who's more at fault, someone who makes a game about war that is harmless, or someone who actually participated in it and killed people?
I really dislike the double standard people have, game's are a medium like movies and any game that can bring the horrors of war to gamers without killing anyone in real life IMHO would be one of the greatest things one could possibly do. No game has AI or graphics really advanced enough to make killing stand out as 'horrible' but one day we'll get their and it will trigger your emotions. In Bioshock they allowed the player to save the little girls or kill them but it really wasn't "real" because it was so obvious it was a gimmick, any game that does that and does not use it as a gimmick will probably get stellar awards one day.
If they want to make a "realistic" war game, they should set it up so that as soon as you die the first time, it deletes itself and then you can never play the game ever again. I play Americas Army every once in a while. As far as FPS games go, it is pretty good and the fact that it is free to me makes it that much more appealing. One of the things that struck me about the game is how quickly you die as a new player. The first couple of times playing on any given map, the odds are you won't even know where the enemy who killed you is shooting from. The game is supposed to be a recruitment tool. If the kids they are trying to recruit spent a few seconds to think, "I sure do get killed quickly in this game." They might think twice about actually joining the Army and doing it for real.
How about a nice game of chess?
I don't hold modern-day Christians or Jews accountable for the crimes committed by their old-testament forefathers, or self-reported instances of mass murder committed by their deity (see: Sodom, Gomorrah). Why would you expect Muslims to be held to a different and higher standard?
It's okay to make a game about a war after we've decided that we've won.
Not everyone is looking for a *fun* game. At a certain level of play many games are no longer fun but are still challenging and rewarding. I'm not just talking about PC Games.
Football at a professional level can not be called *fun*. It is hard, requires incredible amounts of training and experience and is a very competitive exercise in athletics, skill and strategy. Yet when you played it in elementary school it was a *fun* game.
Chess is a *fun* game when you first start out, learning the rules and putting yourself against your other peers who also are novices. When you begin competing it may still be fun but after a few years of rising through the ranks at a certain point it will stop being *fun* and will simply be challenging and rewarding as you reach your own limits and abilities.
The same observations apply to almost any game where skill is involved. They are typically easy to spot as they have "levels" which let the player know how far they have progressed both in terms of the game but also in terms of the skills required to play. Multi-player games however do not follow such a tradition and certainly competitive games do not though they may have "leagues" or ratings which helped to group players of different skill levels so that there is not an unfair matchup.
There are games which do not reward the player for improving their skills, such as The SIMS or Hungry Hungry Hippos which have built in limits to play which are set extremely low so as to be accessible to the youngest of players or are completely arbitrary in their reward system based on frequency of play rather than level of play.
Most FPS war games are of the "level" type of game play though with different leagues as well (beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert) which determines the starting skill level of the opponents. These can in fact be *fun* as they do not require the player to max out their own skills as a competitive multiplayer game would, regardless of the goals in the game... it is always *fun* to learn new skills and new game rules.
Games cease to be *fun* when you as the player are already an expert and have to compete against other experts which requires you to try new things, be creative, break the rules in undetectable ways or otherwise apply innovative strategies to overcome your opponent.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I think the OK-ness mainly depends on your target demographic's openness. You don't present the same things to people who download New York's map for Flight Simulator for the fun and to people who get offended by Janet Jackson's nipple.
In Battlefield II you can play in Vietnam as Americans or as viet-congs. I could have a game where you could play as a GI or as an insurgent (or terrorist, Iraqis or Iranian, whatever your scenario is).
People would protest about any inaccuracies that there would be (and they would be right in doing so). And many people would say that it is unethical to have fun while virtually killing GIs or Iraqis. But don't worry, it is roughly the Jack Thomson crowd. In a world where GTA 4 is accepted by mainstream audience, I don't think that Gulf War II Arena would be rejected.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This isn't really true. Consider "Hitler's Co-Conspirators" in The Atlantic:
The situation is far more complex than you think, and the knowledge of the German population greater than your post implies. As the article states regarding the many books it reviews:
In other words, the German population did know quite a bit, and a vast genocide bureaucracy existed. The article argues that this knowledge drove the Germans to keep fighting after it was obvious they had lost; to cite one representative quote, "as a soldier who had witnessed the massacre of a village of Jews on the Eastern Front put it, "God forbid we lose the war. If revenge comes upon us, we'll have a rough time." "
I think Time is the bulk of the factor but it isn't just time on it's own. Every war leave dead people on the battlefield. These can be soldiers for either side or collateral damage to civilians. The biggest obstacle is that almost each dead person leaves behind a living dependent who life will be altered by the deprivation of whoever got killed.
Now given enough time, everyone will get past the disadvantages of the loss of the soldier or civilian and at some point, they are in control of their own life. This is true even if they haven't mentally gotten over the loss, but not having a father or mother would have transformed from determining your life to you having control over your life. The popularity of the war only increases the amount of casualties which increase the number of people directly or indirectly effected. WWII and Vietnam were both long enough ago that everyone effected by losses in them have taken the reigns of their life and control their own destiny. So it is about time, the time it take to remove the fun at their expense and simply apply fun to it.
I think the 50+ year old board wargame industry might be a better example. They have gotten some flack, but hardly ever this public.
Are you adequate?
I dunno, but http://www.insmod.net/ is a great game.
Well... they were eventually good enough to have beaten the Nazi's all by themselves, but the GP did limit his comments to 1941.
The Soviet Union was disorganized, demoralized and still in the process of moving its industry to safe locations in 1941. All of that was eventually altered and the Soviets became a steamroller, but that was by no means a fixed conclusion in 1941.
If Stalin thought that it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to win, he would not have been so insistent on the second front being opened to draw off German reinforcements, he would have just marched to Paris himself and "liberated" Europe.
Don't think that a recognition that the Soviets needed some help to overcome their challenges early in the war represents "taking credit" for Soviet victories.
The attack on Fallujah featured deliberate attacks on civilian areas, hospitals and ambulances, resulted in huge civilian casualties, and is very likely a major war crime. Is making a game about it OK ? I don't know, maybe make a fist-person shooter "The Warsaw Ghetto uprising", while you're at it.
It's not a higher standard, it's an equal one.
Europe hasn't launched a crusade for several centuries, but jihad is alive and kicking.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
War is so intimately part of human language and thought that it's hard to avoid the metaphor. I suppose there are only a small number of game paradigms possible: war, hunting, exploration, perhaps a few like that.
Thee question "when is it OK" is easy. The answer is "Whenever there is no reasonable ground to object." The question "What are all the reasonable grounds to object?" is what is unanswerable. We have to be specific.
I can think of two grounds for objecting to the game in question; whether these apply in fact I cannot say, not having played the game myself.
The first charge might be that it is propaganda. While war as a metaphor is very common, shooting games are not metaphorical. They present models of war; they immerse the player in an artificially constructed experience of war, sanitized from the real, raw emotion, human pain, and political nuance. This is not a problem for chess because chess is evidently metaphorical, and not an immersive experience. One is not going to take any conclusions about real conflicts, the real actions of individuals, or real historical issues from a game of chess.
This charge is particularly worth considering in games that model real historical situations, particularly ones that are driving current events. However the charge could be extended to immersive combat games in general, to anything that presents a sanitized pseudo-experience of violence against people.
The second grounds might be one of privacy or perhaps in this case decency. There is a kind of intrusion involved in representing what was a horrific experience of real marines, many whom are still serving or who perhaps have returned from the battle with psychological or physical wounds. To treat those experiences as light entertainment bespeaks a lack of appreciation. Another consideration are those who still serve in Iraq; to turn of the civilian suffering and physical damage to the city into entertainment is certainly callous towards the Iraqi survivors, and might well endanger US troops still serving there.
Personally, I would have grave doubts in participating in creation of a game that represented a battle in a still ongoing war. It is irresponsible and in bad taste. However, I don't think this game would add very much to the net bad taste and irresponsibility in the world, nor would banning it subtract much from the stupidity and banality everywhere.
For that reason, I'm not for banning anything. The right answer to propaganda is the truth; or at least to shine light on the truth from a different direction. The movie "Three Kings" is a comedy about the first Gulf War -- you might say that it is open to the same charge of treating real pain as a subject for laughs. However, I think it isn't just played for laughs. The bitter irony of the film is an attempt to speak what the filmmakers saw as an unspoken truth.
Ultimately, that's the only answer to propaganda: to show the missing pieces of the truth. The only answer to ignorance is education. The only answer to bad taste is better taste.
Speaking of which , I am reading Fagles' translation of the Iliad. Highly recommended..
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The whole concept is a bit silly.
As a TV host said (and I paraphrase):
Gamers playing World War II over and over again.
Get over it already, we've won!
What were the "innovations" that hitler courted the German vote with ? (he had a majority before he became dictator by falsifying attacks) You really don't want to know the answer to this one.
Sure, it's not what "we" want, not actually what the right wing "Nazis weren't right wing" guys like you doesn't want. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/schutzengel.jpg http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/papen2.jpg Nazi election propaganda was full of Anti-Communism and Anti-Socialism, Jingoistic, Militaristic - IOW just like the usual GOP ads.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Religious moderates are posers. They enjoy the ceremonies and the community, but they don't believe the religious teachings are actually true. Sure, they will agree with some of the religious teachings, but their agreement is merely coincidental; not based on acceptance of divine authority or infallibility of sacred texts.
That is the level of piety that secular society is willing to tolerate. Anyone who actually believes the teachings of their religion is a Zionist or fanatic or extremist. Religious ceremonies are tolerated. Religious belief is thought-crime.
Bullshit. There hasn't been any Jihad proclaimed by any religious authority that would have the authority to do so.
The Jihad can only be proclaimed by the head of the global islamic nation (which title hasn't been claimed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire) or a grand ayatollah. None did.
A bunch of nutters proclaiming their own Jihad is exactly on par with a bunch of rednecks proclaiming their own Crusade. No, it ain't. Unless it's proclaimed by a Pope, it's not a Crusade. Ditto for the Jihad.
So at least do your homework before doing anti-Islam trolling.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I know a WW II vet and he HATES WWII games, or seeing young people play them. He isn't keen on any war games due the how hellish actual war is.
Time, and being the victor in a war where you see your side as the morally correct side certainly makes the game (or movie) more palatable to most people, but it will never be ok with everyone.
Anarchists never rule
I hate George Bush
When Does It Become OK To Make Games/Books/Movies/Art/Poems... About a War?
It's always been ok. Infact the more discussion and original media about war the better, because the alternative is censorship.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Actually and literally never. Install Peggle as an advice of relax!
And for an example of your logic applied to movies, Rambo III. The one where Stallone helps a bunch of poor religious Afghani tribesmen fight off the Godless Russian Communists.
Hey, the Cold War was over, right?
The problem with your approach is that some wars never end. You wanna know who's responsible for 9/11? John Rambo.
How literal of a reading do you need to take before you're no longer a poseur?
Clearly, you don't believe the Pope to be genuinely religious -- he believes that Genesis was described in terms its audience could comprehend rather than trying to feed them the literal truth, and that the age of the earth can't be measured in tens of centuries. There must be a dividing line somewhere; where is it?
(On a side note, if you take the Bible to be completely without error, this means that any discrepancy whatsoever topples it totally; how do you justify the discrepancies between the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18? One can be strong like steel, which is able to flex and give and thus remain intact, or strong like carbon fiber, which despite its greater nominal strength cracks or shatters when forced to move; "religious moderates" are those who take the former path, and whose core beliefs are thus able to survive and persist in a changing world).
While some players of WWII games might think it would be glamorous to really be there, my attitude is the opposite. While I enjoy the challenge of playing WWII-themed games, I also notice how often I die. I have no illusions that being in the real situations that inspired the games would be fun.
a realistic war game would involve u not being able to play the game for 6 months to a year after u get shot once. or mb if u die not able to play the game ever again. no realistic game has EVER been made
This is stupid. How is this game any different from Insurgency for HL2 (http://www.insmod.net/)? You play as either US forces or Iraqi insurgents in realistic multiplayer. Nobody batted an eyelid about that. Why this new game has attracted more attention is beyond me
There are other "rules" about muslims : such as the fact that they cannot live anywhere except in the caliph's nation.
They are to emigrate immediately. Seen any muslim do so lately ?
So let's stop the "oh no here's a tiny inpractical detail" bullshit. 9/11, constant attacks everywhere just didn't happen in the liberal mind. They mean nothing.
Except of course, if you were in the towers, or on the subway, or on the bus, or just minding your own business in the many places where muslims are massacring.
See, this is exactly what I mean. "NOOO the nazis (national socialists) were right-wing. They are the republicans. And we just can't discuss it".
The fact is that the nazis were more "modern" socialists than the soviets. They did not have faith in the automatic nature of the socialist revolution and needed to cause it themselves.
There are many, many uncomfortable truths about socialists. They were racist for the largest part of the 20th century. The KKK was, for over 50 years, a department of the democratic party, which was nearly exclusively a defender of, shall we say, the "southern way of life". A salient detail : Al Gore was secretary of his father, when his father was fighting to repeal the equality of black people.
And of course lefty propaganda is totally free of scaremongering and propaganda. Say ... what's this whole "anti-racism" thing, and this "global warming" stuff, that just doesn't exist right ?
(oh right, like socialist eugenics before them, those are "scientific"* facts**)
* or whatever word makes it sound more serious. Liberals don't care about the contents of words, just the effect they have. Scientific, for example, would imply that there's a model of global warming that made predictions that ACTUALLY HAPPENED. As opposed to the totally unforeseen massive cold streak that's been with us for 3 years and counting, which would invalidate all those models if the rules of real science were followed and send all the alarmists back to the drawing board.
Scientific would imply that, if someone from the GOP said it.
** the real uncomfortable truth is that socialist eugenics were based on actual scientific studies, the sad truth is that according just about any scientific study blacks and whites are, in fact, different. White people are weaker and slower, white women cannot, on average, match the number of children a black woman can give birth to, and, unfortunately, black people are, again on average, dumber, just like whites are dumber than yellow people. This are statistical truths. They do not mean that every white is weaker than every black, nor that every black is dumber than every white. These are just a few examples, there are so many differences. AIDS immunity, for example, is a few thousand times more prevalent in blacks than in whites (some 10-15% of blacks are immune). In case anyone hadn't noticed yet, blacks have bigger lips and a more pronounced mouth.
So many mistakes ... so little space to illustrate them
(On a side note, if you take the Bible to be completely without error, this means that any discrepancy whatsoever topples it totally;
If you were a 100% perfect human, yes. However the bible clearly states that any human is merely a little fallible being, much less reliable than the text of the bible (which seems to me an evident truth, even if the bible were not to be all that accurate, beating human's reliability isn't hard at all).
One example of this is the values of pi that can be found in the bible. You can find different values for that constant. Of course, upon closer inspection this turns out to be untrue : pi is said to be "about 3", and yet it is said "you should relate a circumference to it's radius like 22/7" (which is a very good and simple to use approximation. I know architects used it right up to 2001 : it calculates heavenly, yet is accurate enough for quite large structures).
Clearly things like that have bearing on the correct way to read the bible.
how do you justify the discrepancies between the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18?
So, obviously, the answer is that further study is required, as the flaw is obviously in our reading comprehension and not in the bible. Just like the contradictions in science (e.g. we know the universe to be bigger than 26 billion light years and no older than 13 billion light years. So either faster-than-light travel is possible (and quite likely, if a few billion galaxies have done it), or the big bang theory is wrong. But that's just one, there are many others. Contradictions are how science advances. Contradictions are how theology advances).
Apparent contradictions demand further study, not a rejection of everything we know. After all, we know that the theory of natural numbers has a contradiction related to infinite collections (does the collection of all collections that don't containt themselves contained in itself ? The answer is both yes and no). All theory in exact sciences is utterly dependent on the theory of natural numbers (since rational and real numbers are constructed out of this collection).
So if you were to reject everything that contained a contradiction, rather than realizing it's imperfection, you would in fact have to drop all of science.
You see, to a believer, contradictions in the bible are like scientific contradictions. There is no shortage of either. They are further similar, they merely mean that there are (hopefully small) imperfections in both our understanding of the bible and our understanding of the universe, even in our understanding of basic mathematics there are known contradictions.
We know Newton to be "wrong". Yet everything we do, putting down buildings and structures, is in fact done disregarding the differences between Newton and Einstein. Therefore you should conclude that our past understanding does not lose it's applicability to everyday problems just because it's shown to be slightly inaccurate. Just like one apparent problem in reading the bible does not mean everything is inaccurate.
One can be strong like steel, which is able to flex and give and thus remain intact, or strong like carbon fiber, which despite its greater nominal strength cracks or shatters when forced to move; "religious moderates" are those who take the former path, and whose core beliefs are thus able to survive and persist in a changing world).
This is the absurdity of the "lucas argument". It is utterly dependant on the consistency of human thought.
A consistency that is non-existent. Just look at the democrats who blame bush for "the biggest deficit in history". Say, how much did Obama spend in his first single month, again ? Of course, THAT spending has nothing to do with our debt.
But that's just one example many people are frustrated about. Unfortunately it can be trivially shown t
So -- Human interpretations and understandings of the Bible are fallable, and prone to revision over time.
How exactly does this differ from the "religious moderates" position?
See, this is exactly what I mean. "NOOO the Nazis called themselves Socialists, so they are exactly like the people WE call Socialists - and not like us." Thanks for proving the point.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Because the "moderates" view the actual content of the bible as not important.
Just like postmodernists view the actual relation between science and reality as subject to change, and irrelevant. Needless to say, science is supposed to be an approximate model of reality, getting closer to reality all the time. It is most certainly not independant of reality.
Both positions are disastrously misguided. In reality both groups are the same, the "moderates" will betray their religion the first time it seems like a good idea and postmodernists enact policies they can perfectly well predict will backfire. They have no ideology at all. Right now their "ideas of the second" seem invincible, but you just wait 5 years and they'll be forgotten. The global warming craze, was ironically preceede by a global cooling craze and will make way for the next idiocy once unmasked for the idiocy that it is. Just like the latest pushes for extreme accomodation of enemies will give way once they get blown up. They are mere fashions, posing as science or religion, nothing more.
E.g. Obama's national healthcare. Exactly how many times must this be implemented and disastrously go wrong before we learn ? A basic respect of science would make them at least explain, honestly, exactly how their scheme differs from that in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the many European states where it's collapsing. But they don't even attempt to show the difference.
Another example. The IPCC was founded on the prediction that 2008 would be the warmest year on record. In reality it's was close to the coldest year on record. A real scientist would go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong (because we don't even know why 2008 and the years before it were so cold, we haven't got a clue. Perhaps the solar cycle had something to do with 2008, but that leaves 2006 and 2007 unexplained ... apparently "something" caused an ocean oscillation is the current theory. Well I sure hope that this unknown "something" factor that apparently regularly causes sea changes in global temperatures are modeled correctly. How do you model large unknowns ? You don't). Before that, they declared la nina, a wind of south america, for their previous disastrous misprediction.
The fact that you don't immediately see what is wrong with that sentence is indicative of just how wrong current opinion on the subject is : if models don't match reality, the blame rests, not on reality such as winds or ocean oscillations, but with the scientists makin gthe prediction
How exactly does falsifying a quote (just check it) prove anything ?
You make it sound as if gays are forced to sit at the back of the bus and drink from separate water fountains. Gay marriage is not a civil rights issue. Saying it is an insult to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and any other person who's ever fought for civil rights.
While there certainly exist parties whose views are that extreme, I worry about those with more severely traditionalist views lumping those with whom they disagree into the category unfairly. That said -- while we may disagree about where exactly to place the line, I think you've given an entirely fair and reasonable answer to my questions on this subject; thank you.
Funny thing about weather -- it tends to defy attempts at short-term prediction. If (as opposed to cherry-picking a small subset of data selected to make one's point) one uses an adequately-sized dataset, the trends are quite clear. Moreover, as opposed to overstating the effects of climate change in the last few years, the IPCC's estimates for both sea level increase and reduction in mass of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antartica have been far less than what is actually observed.
The United States healthcare system is doing horribly in terms of both average life expectancy and annual per-capital expenditure (or, if you prefer, total healthcare expenses as a percentage of GDP). Japan has a universal healthcare system which costs less than half the per-capita spend of the current privatized US system, and almost a full five extra years of average life expectancy.
You speak of applying scientific principals to political decisions; reproducing the Japanese experiment is an action which would do us all quite a bit of good.
Funny thing about weather -- it tends to defy attempts at short-term prediction. If (as opposed to cherry-picking a small subset of data selected to make one's point) one uses an adequately-sized dataset, the trends are quite clear [noaa.gov]. Moreover, as opposed to overstating the effects of climate change in the last few years, the IPCC's estimates for both sea level increase and reduction in mass of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antartica have been far less than what is actually observed.
You completely sidestep the issue. The IPCC has had models for a long time. They're basically the same models they're using now. So surely we can trust those models, right ?
Well 2005 just barely fitted in the 95% confidence interval of the IPCC, 2006, 2007, and 2008 all failed to fall withing the 98% confidence interval of the IPCC "optimistic" forecast (they were all better, co2 rised, temperature dropped, this was supposed to be impossible. And if I might be so blunt, the models STILL don't explain the drop, while the cooling keeps getting extended every month).
In physics, such a result would lead to the destruction of the theories. It would be considered the equal of a theory that cars fall into the sky when dropped of a cliff.
The trends in the temperature data are only clear if you look at them for certain time intervals, and only rather specific time intervals will give you a rising temperature. Very few time intervals will lend credence to the "co2 leads to temperature increase" claims.
Here is a graph that contains, at a reasonable resolution, the long term temperature data of a specific region :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
Now, look at the graph. Suppose you were to look at the last 10 years (not very clear I know), you would see a stable, ever so slightly declining temperature.
If you look at the last 100 years you see an "impressive" (but not that consequential) rise in temperature (though you can evidently see that the cause, whatever it is, is not co2).
If you look at the last 1000-10000 years, you would see an even larger massive increase in temperature (that's because 10000 years ago fell straight into an ice age. In this time interval we see rising temperatures, but much evidence contradicting the co2-temperature relationship. Co2 concentration was the highest at the start of the last ice age. Contrary to what people like to think, there is no real explanation for ice ages. The theory involving the gulfstream explains at best a 4 degree drop in western europe, but nothing more, yet everyone both knows that ice at one point pierced the border of texas, a point that should have heated up in that theory, *and* everyone believes that the gulfstream blocking theory is correct. Also I would like to make the point that europe is not a synonym for "the world". Yes we have much more accurate readings for europe than for the rest of the world, that does not mean only europe deserves an explanation.
Lastly if you look at the last 100000 years you would clearly see a (single) oscillation in temperatures.
If you look at the last few million years you would, correctly*, conclude, as the "oh no another ice age is going to start" crowd did in the 1980-1990's, that it's just about time (give or take 1000 years) for another ice age to start. You would also correctly conclude that the stagnation that global temperature has recently encountered has a very good chance of being indicative of the start of a new ice age.
So unfortunately, scientifically defensible predictions of temperature are all over the map. The IPCC's models explicitly reject the older information because we frankly haven't got a clue about what caused them, and that doesn't model all that well.
* if you extend the graph with a fourier analysis, it would indeed drop "just about now" (again the error margin for the drop is a few hundred years)
What a bunch of PC crap! War is fun! Killing is enjoyable if you are doing it for the right reasons. Why try and deny our basic human instincts? History has shown that humans love to fight and kill each other. Shrink, I want to kill!