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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.
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.
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.
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WWII has been beat to a pulp.
That's because WWII is easy: Nazi's == Evil. It's satisfying to kill Nazi's because deep down you think of them as inhuman monsters. It's worth noting that the only FPS genre currently more common than WWII is alien invasion, I think it's pretty clear what that says about our culture's current level of xenophobia.
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Mod parent way up.
The healing process after WWII is an interesting topic to study and debate. Although there were some painful moments, the US, Japan, and Europe emerged as economic superpowers, with very few hard feelings left behind after the war.
It was also important that we won the war in a manner that didn't turn the entire population against us. Of course, the warfare techniques used by the Viet Cong and Iraqi insurgency seem to have been designed to drag as many civilians into the conflict as possible.
It also didn't help that the US forces had a very poor understanding of the foreign culture and language in either of these conflicts. Had there been an extensive ground war in Japan, a similar situation would likely have emerged.
Lesson: The reconstruction is just as (if not more) important than the war itself. Also, make sure you understand the people you're invading.
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Is that as opposed to e.g. the firebombing of Dresden or the two atomic bombs? Don't kid yourself, WWII was always intended to be a "total war".
What made it "relatively" safe for civilians in the occupied territories and in places far from the action such as America was merely the huge distances involved coupled with the limits of technology at the time. If America had been as close as Britain to Europe, it would have been in danger of bombing just as much.
I also think you're off on the reconstruction. It's easy to reconstruct an already highly developed country, it practically reconstructs itself. That's why Germany and Japan are such success stories. The war lasted a handful of years, less than a generation. That's short enough so that people can rebuild their society as it was, and incorporate simple changes in structure like who's at the top. Just give them peace and some money.
If you look at Iraq or Afghanistan, these places have been at war on and off for most of two generations. Those places can't reconstruct themselves to a prior point, because the people who remember how the institutions worked and how society worked are mostly gone, and most young people have experienced only misery and have no idea what a modern developed society would look like.
Lesson: if you have to wage war, make sure it doesn't go on for more than five years...
Well, that's actually a perfect example, if you're willing to use your brain.
How do you know about those tortures? Well, because there's a free press and Internet and all sorts of channels outside the government control that told you about it.
In a totalitarian regime, with the press controlled by the government, yes, probably very few american soldiers would have had the faintest idea about what the CIA does. The american soldiers would have just seen their narrow slice of reality -- you know, some fighting, some patrolling occupied cities, some getting sniped, some of your pals being blown to bits by a roadside bomb -- and would have had no idea at all what happens to those arrested "terrorists", or in some cases that anyone was arrested at all.
Except apparently it was secret enough that with all the partisans, and resistance, and spies, and captured german officers and all, the allies had no fucking clue about it either until they ran into an actual death camp. You'd think that something which is no secret at all (or so you claim) would leak sooner, no?
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There are other factors too.
Culture plays in to it as well. How do the people see themselves, their culture, etc? Both the Germans and Japanese have a sense of cultural identity, and a sense of duty and importance above ones self. There is an idea that you are part of a larger community and that matters, and that you should work for the betterment of the future generations. That's not so much the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a very tribal mentality there. It's about what's good of "me and mine." People outside your tribe (which has varying definitions of course) aren't important, and maybe are even enemies.
Now of course this is not universal in any case, when you have a group of humans you'll find all different types, but it is a strong cultural trend. Well, that makes for differences in rebuilding. When you have people who are more willing to accept the idea of "Work to improve the country as a whole," work along those lines will go better. When you have a culture who's more worried about getting a leg up on the tribe next door, it doesn't go so well.
Also, the extent of defeat is important. You mention some famous bombings and there are more (Tokyo was firebombed, for example about 100,000 dead). Germany and Japan weren't beaten, they were crushed. Their militaries had been totally destroyed to the point Germany was fielding 13 year olds as soldiers near the end of the war, their industries destroyed, and their spirits broken. This wasn't a case of "Well they beat us this time," this was a case of being pushed to the brink of total destruction. Goes double given that the US propaganda said they had warehouses of atomic bombs and, had that really been the case, they could have laid waste to a country with ease.
Much easier to get cooperation out of a people when they've been defeated to that extent. Any large amount of resistance is hard both because there is just no materials for it (weapons and such), and in terms of having the morale to do so.
Then there's the situation of outside support to consider. In Iraq certianly, many of the resistance elements are not coming from the country itself. They are foreign, sometimes even backed by foreign governments. That makes it easier to keep a fight going. When you've got someone else supplying weapons, personnel, supplies, training and so on makes it easier to keep the fight going. That didn't happen in Germany or Japan. In both cases, the nations around them were none to happy with them, and weren't going to be helping out. Also, the allies wouldn't have put up with any shit. Trying to fuel a German resistance would have been a good invitation for an ass kicking.
I could keep going, there are many more differences. A whole lot of it just relates to the way war was done. WWII was a no fucking around conflict, the allies went all in and were willing to do whatever it took to win. If that meant leveling multiple cities and killing millions, then so be it. That's precisely what was done, too. That really changes the aftermath.