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How Will Contemporary War Games Affect Veterans?
An anonymous reader writes "Recently, video game developers have begun to make games about current conflicts the world over. Many veterans and current military personnel now take an active role in the video game community. Are game companies running the risk of walking into a public relations disaster when making games about current wars? More importantly, how will veterans react to playing games about a conflict in which they have participated? From the article: 'To portray conflict in a way that not only accurately depicts the acts of war, but does so in a manner that takes into account the sacrifices of soldiers within some sort of moral framing is a complicated matter. Now add to this the idea that such depictions are essentially created as entertainment and to make money. It is certainly mind numbing when looked at from a social perspective. ... Now try and apply this dynamic to a more recent conflict such as the Vietnam War or the current conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Considering that the latter wars are still in progress, the ability for a game developer to accurately gauge the morality of such a conflict is limited at best. To make a game that takes these factors into account while trying to create something that is both entertaining and capable of mass appeal among the gaming community is near impossible.'"
We caught a glimpse of this last year with the reactions to Six Days In Fallujah.
What about the other side which is always portrayed as "bad guys" and are who the player tries to kill and ultimately to win the game you need to beat them? I think the games affect those more.
They faced the same problem in the 90s, regarding astronauts and Harvest Moon.
I see no mention of the moral framework within which civilian casualties are taken into account.
But then, that is realistic.
Just look at the movie industry to see how it has worked out.
For decades we've had films which are "essentially created as entertainment and to make money" and which depict major conflicts, often with input from people who fought in them. They'll often attack more recent subject matter than games will, too.
The stupid thing is, games have already been doing it for years. How many FPS's do we know that are featured in the middle east? We all know what the game developers are referring to and implying, they just avoid it or sugar coat it by renaming countries or featuring a country that the US/The West hasn't attacked yet. Same thing happened in the 90s when it was popular to have games set in or based around South American conflict.
Look I understand a veteran feeling certain ways about a game that depicts a war he was in, but this isn't even about him. This is about the portrayal of certain ethnic groups and them getting over emotional about a video game. These games are developed in countries that view these areas as containing enemy insurgents. If you don't like the portrayal then don't buy the game or develop you own game and stop giving the bad people of your area a free pass for more then stupid reasons.
Really, it should read "over emotional public is overreacting once again for stupid reasons"
The short answer is: if playing a video game upsets you, you shouldn't play that video game. I mean, it's a given that you can't make a game that appeals to everyone. Someone might even be deeply offended by your "murder simulator." But the people who aren't going to play your game anywaren't and shouldn't be the main concern of the game designers.
So why are movies entitled to depict ongoing wars for profit and entertainment without this risk for backlash?
How many movies haven't already been made about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and often getting critical praise for their guts to comment on something so fresh and close to heart?
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
The same thing happened in the 90s, with astronauts and Harvest Moon.
I'm looking forward to 'Grand Theft Auto: Baghdad' myself.
My father-in-law is a Vietnam vet. Anyway, he's surprisingly into video games for a guy his age, and he likes the Call of Duty style games. As far as I can tell he doesn't find it uncomfortable at all to play war games.
I did find one aspect of war games that upset him. He watched me playing Call of Duty or some game like that, and I was playing the offline campaign. A bunch of allied AI troops were in my way and I shot them down while laughing. He said that I, or maybe just my actions, were "sick" and said something else about how you shouldn't fire on your own guys, then got up and left the room.
I guess the point that TFA is trying to make is that WW2, Vietnam games are tolerated because those are OLD, long-gone wars that don't have much resonance with most people these days. It doesn't get portrayed in the media every day, etc, etc... But games set in unresolved warzones are more tricky because fight hasn't finished and people still have skin in the game.
That's true and all, but I don't think it means you can't make modern conflicts into games. It just means good judgement is much more important. You can't apply some formula, you have to actually think about how you portray each side and how people are going to react. You have to be careful, but there is still a lot of room for creativity.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
And not trying to push your anti-war message. Seriously, it is a GAME, it is meant to be fun, not realistic, not educational. If you don't like that, don't buy them.
If you want to try to make a game like you are talking about, where you have a message you want to ram down people's throats, well be my guest. However don't be surprised if, like most "message" games it completely and totally bombs (the Christians have tried this for years).
There will be some people who whine and bitch that it should be allowed since whatever their chosen cause/event is cannot be the subject of anything fun. There will be others who will say how great it is that something is shining light on their experience and so on. Ultimately the commercial success or failure will largely be determined by how much fun the game is, the specifics of the setting won't matter so much.
Part of the reason you don't see games based on more modern conflicts is that they aren't going to provide the setting for a good game. Most war games are shooties, meaning that the primary gameplay factor is running around and shooting lots of things. Well, in case you haven't noticed, that isn't how war has been done. When you talk something like the Iraq conflict it is extremely asymmetric. Not a lot of grunt warfare. Troops will come under fire from a building, they'll call for an AH-64D to come and blow it up and so on. Doesn't make for a very entertaining shooty.
Hence why the war games that wish to be in a modern setting tend to invent a new world. Call of Duty 4, Bad Company 2, they both invented what if scenarios that involve two more equal powers. In that way they are similar to WWII games.
Always, always remember: Games are meant to be FUN first and everything else second. This means that there is real limits to the realism, the complexity, the kind of game play and so on and so forth if the game is to be a success. Some things just aren't fun, even if they are interesting, and games are made to be fun. That is what draws people to them.
BTDT, it wasn't particularly realistic, or in fact triggering. I'd say that video games have a long way to go before they come close to being a problem in this area. I'd more worry about the minor issue that the agendas are transparent to even a 13-year old, much less someone that was actually there. For SOME reason, vets don't like to be told that their time and efforts were for nothing.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
As a Marine I can tell you that almost all games fail at making real combat games realistic. Just look at the currently popular FPS; Modern Warefare 2. There's camping in absurd places, quick scoping, commando teleporting, spawn killing, bunny hopping, pistol sniping, modded controllers, laggers with laser bullets.
Here's what you can quote me on; "No developer that can get close to a realistic warfare game without making it as unfun as war actually is."
That one time we showed him Wolfenstein 3D, he had flashbacks about the Nazis! He was afraid they were returning.
Then they made Doom, and he thought he was in Hell...those were some tough days.
Fortunately, he had no problems with Shub-Niggurath when Quake came out. Told us it was no worse than the first time he did it with Gramma.
Yeah, that was a problem for US!
I want to see Lara Croft infiltrate the Kaba'a!
We want art to be relevant, so has to talk about actual events or something. So, of course, we want games to talk about actual events. Movies can do it, so.. why not games?
The danger lies in the opposite, stupid games about killing zombified nazis... thas has not danger, but also not reward.
-Woof woof woof!
If I'm playing Dawn of War THQ will pay money to Games Workshop for the license. If I'm playing their brand new free WW2 game do they pay any money to veterans associations? I'm just saying it is much more likely a WW2 game would try to license Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers and pay money to Hollywood than pay even a single cent to the people or families of those that suffered through the war. War games are popular with publishers because it is a free license.
Maybe if this is a concern instead of waiting for movies to lead the way by contributing to a veterans association games should be showing how do things right.
"...such depictions are essentially created as entertainment and to make money..." Isn't that pretty much all war is anyway? Especially the current one... If the military-industrial complex and the ruling classes can get money and entertainment out of it, why can't the little guys?
The real problem is a society that transforms such things as WAR into ENTERTAINMENT in any form. That is just plain sick and wrong.
Being the big video game fan that I am, I can't help the fact that most of the stories of bravery and single handedly owning opposing forces is just non sense. Makes me think that the veterans that were searched for still turn everything into a hyperbole so that they can get the maximum fictional action possible while making it seem plausible. Either way, it makes the games better none the less. The depiction of the mass murder of the crowd of people when Modern Warfare 2 came out was one example. It's hard to believe that a group of 4 guys armed with machine guns can actually do it without out any sort of retaliation from either the crowd or the mall cops that coincidentally have such horrible aim? Exageration is nice, but not in hot situations.
I'm sorry but anyone who thinks that a first person shooter, no matter how "realistic" the blood and guts is anything like actually going out and fighting has needs a reality check. They've either never played the game, or they've been playing for too long or they are just plain idiots.
Same goes for the movies. They might be used as recruiting tools (chiefly for cannon fodder as anyone dumb enough to think they're going to be Maverick from Top Gun clearly is too stupid and naive to be useful as much else).
I think the differences here are that
1) The games have become more mainstream. Every man and his dog has a phone or a netbook or a tablet or something else that can run some sort of shooter
2) The conflicts are current. In the 80s conflicts were short, few and far between, at least for the western world. Games about Vietnam, Korea and the World wars or some future WWIII scenario were all you could write games about because there wasn't much that was current and in the mainstream public eye (at least till the Gulf War)
What amazes me is that all these people whining about video games probably grew up playing WWII games, Cops and Robbers, racially insensitive "Cowboys and Indians" etc. without a thought. Yet I'd argue they're more realistic in many ways than clicking a mouse cursor on a screen. The only way you're going to get a bloody nose doing the latter is if you're stupid and trip over your own shoelaces.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Simply because of the massive outpouring of shock, rage, and incessant bloody whining from people who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and so assume no-one else can either.
A triple-A game costs $lots, and every developer wants to maximise returns. They want words like 'fun', and 'exciting' to be used by reviewers and players describing their games. Phrases like 'screams of the wounded', and 'dragging intestines' are right out. It doesn't matter how good physics engines get, or how much memory is in a PC; when bodies are shot, they will fall to the floor inert, and no amount of further shooting will do anything other than maybe nudge them about a bit. Enemies will have hit points, and once they're gone, they're dead, but until then, they're fully functional. Nobody's ever going to crawl away with a shattered kneecap, or frantically flail for their medkit trying to staunch a spurting artery.
There will never be children in a warzone, either as refugees or inhabitants. There will never be veiled and burqa'd women with suicide vests approaching soldiers at checkpoints. There will never be entire rows of houses filled with the dead, some still frozen in place with food in their hands, killed by cyanide gas bombs. What will be presented in-game will be the illusion of war, as seen from the safety and comfort of an armchair; sanitised by the news corporations who don't show you footage of anything that might actually upset you. Oddly enough, this doesn't extend to natural disasters, where they're often ghoulishly happy to show piles of fly-blown corpses, or 'dozers shoving piles of limed and flopping meat into vast unmarked graves.
It would be perfectly possible for a developer, hell, probably even some members of the modding community, to release a game that came a good deal closer to replicating the horrors of war than anything we've seen so far. Instead, I think they'll continue releasing things that are essentially toy soldiers, because nobody wants to be pilloried in the media for what amounts to trying to tell the truth.
Now add to this the idea that such depictions are essentially created as entertainment and to make money.
You do realise that the wars themselves are there to make money?
And if you don't think there's a certain segment of the public deriving entertainment from it, you have never been to the youtube channel where you can read the comments on videos showing Iraqi insurgents being killed by Apache gunfire.
At least the video games are honest about it.
Pretty sure one of our last World War One (Wikipedia it, kids) vets would have had something to say on the issue. Probably "Get a grip you self-obsessed loons."
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Once morality has been eroded to the point that it has been, does it really matter anymore? I swear, day by day, I am in awe of how accurate biblical prophecy is....and THAT is coming from someone who was raised orthodox christian, and despite that, thinks that's it's all bullshit....or maybe it's not.
You want a clue as to the state of our current reality? Just watch the history channel....they cannot churn out the patriotic b.s. fast enough these days it seems.
Ugh...there is just too much to say on this topic, I don't know where to begin, but for this particular topic....Moneyhats > all. Duh.
If it's the same as WW2 veterans complaining about CoD games, the letter of complaint will be titled "Get off my lawn!" Truth of it is, people are straying away from traditional morals and begin to understand how it's all opinionated. However, that doesn't mean it's a good think for humankind as a whole, but it's not the minority of complainers that matter to companies like EA, it's what the majority wants. Your typical corporate cut-throat corporation prefer numbers over good PR but if they can do both they are doing something really well. If the majority wants a game that depicts something so grotesque and the government doesn't disallow it and it gives the company an enormous amount of money, they might actually do it (sadly). Who knows, but then again our children and their children will all have their own different views about what's ethical and what's not. Bugs Bunny used to have a lot of racism in their episodes because it was acceptable, now racism isn't acceptable. Feminism, stereotypes, homosexuals, the list goes on... The world is opening their eyes and hopefully for the better and in my opinion I would like to see more simulated war games like modern warfare. But that's my opinion and it's nothing more than just one of millions. Which ever opinion is highest regarded will likely be the next trendy game scenario.
For example if you play Fallout 3, you'll discover you can't kill children. You can shoot them, but they just pass out and pop back up (critical NPCs do this too so you can't permanently screw over your game). Now why is that? It doesn't have to be that way by engine limitations, there are mods to change it. It also wasn't that was in the original Fallout. There not only could you kill children, you got a special evil perk for it which lead to more people wanting to kill you.
Well the reason is that in some countries, it is illegal to have a game where you can kill kids. In the case of the original Fallout, they had to modify it to make all the children go away (they replaced them with invisible sprites). In the case of Fallout 3, they opted for the path of least resistance and just made them unkillable, since some of the kids play a role in the plot and can't be removed.
Oh and games do sometimes go for some nasty scenes, even big ones. In Call of Duty 4 you play as a solider when a nuclear weapon detonates. You then are crawling around, trying to get out of your downed chopper, as you die.
However the real reason has nothing to do with "telling the truth" or any of the rest of the things you scream about. It is because people want to play games to have fun. It is the same reason many non-controversial choices are made in games. You'll notice that having food and water in a game at all is somewhat rare, and being forced to eat to survive is near non existent. Why? It's boring to worry about. So they dispense with that. Less realistic, but more fun.
OP asks:
> How Will Contemporary War Games Affect Veterans?
Answer:
Badly.
Often it is the less overt more sensory things which will trigger off the PTSD though, and no one in the room except perhaps your loved ones will have any clue of why you've just had the wind knocked out of you.
Well, seeing how the US Army seems to (partially) enjoy killing and their wonderful power over civil, er, sorry, terrorists, I'm sure the veterans will like more video games like that.
(Yes, I read WikiLeaks)
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
As a nation we have many secrets. Our public has no way to evaluate the morality of a war in which we were involved. And we can never judge the consequences of a war either. For example Adolph Hitler was subjected to the type of percussive shelling that is now known to cause serious brain injuries in the first World War. He was also gassed and the effects of that gassing may also include brain damage. He was hospitalized by the British to treat his gassing injuries after WWI ended. It may very well be that the awful carnage of WWII was due in great part to the brain injuries sustained by Hitler. Think about it a bit. He displayed idiotic tendencies yet was also an intense genius in some ways. He may well have been the most spell binding orator in all of history. So we may have seen the horrors of WWII due to Hitler's brain injuries. He was rather like an evil version of an idiot savant.
So how do morals come into play? If we bombed and gassed a wacko like Hitler into existence and that directly fed the world into WWII just how moral could w
I'm a Vietnam vet, and for what it's worth, I think some people are way too uptight. I think a company that lets a few complainers talk 'em out of making a game is just too uptight too. If I'd been to Iraqistan, and had experiences like I had in Vietnam, and then played a game, like some of the recent war games, I'd just remember that it's a friggin' GAME, and if I don't like it, I don't have to play it. These games ARE supposed to be for adults, and if adults don't like it, they too can turn it off. Myself, I'd like to play it, and I think that if it made people THINK a little, if it made war a little more appalling, scary, well, that'd be GOOD. We need more games and less war, but that's just one man's opinion. I earned the right to one. Peace. D.
@Shadow of Eternity
Well, its a mod coming of a 2005 game. Fancy skeletal animations was not the focus, the gameplay of capturing points was. Now if you want "realisitic" Black Sand Studios is bringing Project reality to ARMA II. I bought ARMA II on sale on steam simply because they are bringing PR to it.
For you guys out there. Buy BF2 and add PR and you get to play Taliban and Iraqi insurgents. It's hype whores like MW2 get attention but yet there are games that let you play the "other side"
I like like the Iraqi insurgent maps because you can get a mental inkling of what it's like to drive through a crappy town knowing you can be blown up by IED's anytime. Or how it feels to "bring it" to a more technologically superior enemy(U.S.)
Hopefully more vets will get so upset that they will tell others how bad war is.
I propose a new MMO called "Active War" or similar. Every time the USA decides to invade another country the MMO will get an invasion patch so players can enjoy the latest campaign of their country.
Maybe a future patch could provide a battle cam which connects the player to the helmet camera of a soldier for some real blood-spattering action.
Don't hide information, get it out there!
Sorry but I get tired of this "You have to make things realistic," crowd. I don't care if you think that's what's needed to prevent war (here's a hint: it's not) that's not how things work. Games are for fun, and they can use a wide variety of topics for that, including those which themselves aren't fun. They don't have any "responsibility" to make it real, no matter how much you claim.
The folks at Penny Arcade toyed with this idea a little bit. Bear with me here, it's a long walk to get to my point.
October 13 2003, Tycho posts:
Then, on October 15 2003, Tycho posts again:
Nothing for a while, then on November 24, 2003, Gabe posts:
Then... nothing. for a very long time. I even emailed them a few months, perhaps a year later to ask what happened. Did I just miss the interview? I wasn't finding it in the site's search. I never got a reply.
On December 3, 2007, Gabe partially answered my question with this post:
To make a long story slightly shorter, here's the interview.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed. It was not a well conducted interview. I don't know what I was expecting. They're not journalists or historians, or authors. They're a comic artist and a humorist (although they are great at what they do, and I often marvel at their writing). The first half of the interview sounds like what you'd expect a 10 year old to ask on an interview for a school assignment. The three or four game related questions at the end just barely scratched the surface.
What really struck me was Tycho's quote "I'll ask him what it's like to have someone make a toy out of your best friend dying in a jungle". This is one of those situations where the question is a bit more powerful than any one literal answer you can expect to get.
There seems to me to be a line. Simulation vs Toy. One treats the subject more seriously, and the other uses the subject as a setting for yet another more technically impressive clone of Doo
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
would be to make a game that is extremely realistic about Afghanistan. From the ridiculous rules of engagement like now having to carry rifles in "non-threatening ways" (kinda stupid when your guys are on patrol for actual, armed Taliban fighters!), to fighting in a highly fluid, tribal society where the AI bots that fight alongside you at the start of the mission will turn on you if the enemy gets too much of an advantage. Throw in heaping doses of scenes like Taliban AND our "allies" cutting off women's noses and ears for leaving their husbands and you'll have the moodiest, most depressing, "WHY ARE WE HERE" war game ever.
You couldn't make a propaganda film has as effective.
I'm with you on that. There is no need to make games with war in as realistic as possible. There is no 'requirement' to make the game portray a war in a historically or technically accurate light, as it is, at the end of the day, just a game.
However, portraying say, World War II in such a light that the Germans were correct in their philosophies and they manage to exterminate their target races of choice...while not required to say otherwise, that could have some social issues. Same with modern war, which is the whole point, no?
Requirement or not, people will not be happy.
Crap, I invoked Godwin's law...
To much anime is bad for the brain...desu.
Sorry. Couldn't help it.
Just go to the streets and talk to the homeless, and you will see how many of them are veterans. Or just keep yourself in the comfort of your basement and see this guy's work: http://www.fotolog.com/mashuga/75578872
Seriously, your people just doesn't care about them. So why bother?
I was very excited when I heard about it, but then it just sucked. I'm now not expecting anything better from the upcoming contemporary Tron movie.
dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I joined the army 2 months after planes flew into buildings. A war in Iraq wasn't even being talked about on the news yet. Signing up for the service didn't have anything to do with anything other than volunteering to put myself in harms way for the rest of the country. That same story goes for a lot of people, especially now, with how very apparent that danger is on television every day. In any case, soldiers don't chose where and which battles to fight. Politicians do. And, speaking from experience, politics don't matter much when you're receiving incoming artillery or something like that. Soldiers carry out the missions YOU as the public chose for them (by casting votes on election day). So don't ever be so short sighted as to blame the horrible shitty messes soldiers are put into by other, third parties, on the soldiers themselves. Now, speaking of being shortsighted, I'm not so much that that I don't realize that there is no black and white when it comes to reality, only shades of gray. If you think there is, you're fooling yourself. The is no such fucking thing as "bad guys", ok? When people are put in positions of having to use deadly force, or having deadly force used against them, they tend to dehumanize the opposition. Hence, throughout every war the American armed forces have become involved in, service members have come up with nick names or slurs for the enemy ("krauts", "reds", "slopes", "gooks" and now "haajis" for our current wars). More than just terms of endearment created out of anger and violence, these terms serve to de-humanize the enemy. You know why? Because it is near impossible to organize a fighting force with the rationale that "We're going to go over here and shoot to death all these *people*". Because the fighting force that is going to kill all of those *people* happen to be *people* too, and the act of killing *people* is a fucking horrible thing to do. Now, imagine all the vets coming back from... wherever. The vets that had hand grenades thrown at them by "little abu-dabbi mother fuckers", or, as you and I may call them, "children", and in response these vets had to "open fire" on the "little abu-dabbi mother fuckers", to keep from being killed. You can't. You can't imagine anything like that. You may think you can, because you've seen some sort of bullshit on CNN or FOX news or whatever, but you're wrong. You don't know shit about it, and neither does some asshead at some game studio. These fucking bullshit games that are "based in reality" are only about shit than never fucking happened. The entire Idea of putting "real life" war scenarios into video games is like turning the bombing of an abortion clinic into a fucking cartoon show, and then feeding it to children.
I joined the army 2 months after planes flew into buildings. A war in Iraq wasn't even being talked about on the news yet. Signing up for the service didn't have anything to do with anything other than volunteering to put myself in harms way for the rest of the country. That same story goes for a lot of people, especially now, with how very apparent that danger is on television every day. In any case, soldiers don't chose where and which battles to fight. Politicians do. And, speaking from experience, politics don't matter much when you're receiving incoming artillery or something like that. Soldiers carry out the missions YOU as the public chose for them (by casting votes on election day). So don't ever be so short sighted as to blame the horrible shitty messes soldiers are put into by other, third parties, on the soldiers themselves. Now, speaking of being shortsighted, I'm not so much that that I don't realize that there is no black and white when it comes to reality, only shades of gray. If you think there is, you're fooling yourself. The is no such fucking thing as "bad guys", ok? When people are put in positions of having to use deadly force, or having deadly force used against them, they tend to dehumanize the opposition. Hence, throughout every war the American armed forces have become involved in, service members have come up with nick names or slurs for the enemy ("krauts", "reds", "slopes", "gooks" and now "haajis" for our current wars). More than just terms of endearment created out of anger and violence, these terms serve to de-humanize the enemy. You know why? Because it is near impossible to organize a fighting force with the rationale that "We're going to go over here and shoot to death all these *people*". Because the fighting force that is going to kill all of those *people* happen to be *people* too, and the act of killing *people* is a fucking horrible thing to do. Now, imagine all the vets coming back from... wherever. The vets that had hand grenades thrown at them by "little abu-dabbi mother fuckers", or, as you and I may call them, "children", and in response these vets had to "open fire" on the "little abu-dabbi mother fuckers", to keep from being killed. You can't. You can't imagine anything like that. You may think you can, because you've seen some sort of bullshit on CNN or FOX news or whatever, but you're wrong. You don't know shit about it, and neither does some asshead at some game studio. These fucking bullshit games that are "based in reality" are only about shit than never fucking happened. The entire Idea of putting "real life" war scenarios into video games is like turning the bombing of an abortion clinic into a fucking cartoon show, and then feeding it to children.
The only people who "enjoy" killing are the ones who've tricked themselves into thinking they enjoy in, in order to carry out whatever disgustingly horrible tasks they're given. Either that, or their sick and derranged. Just because you're a soldier, like I said, it doesn't mean that you are no longer a human being. Saying that the entire US Army enjoys killing people, and alluding to these people they enjoy killing being civilians is indicative of the speaker not wholly understanding the subject their discussing.
This is nothing new: http://en.kendincos.net/video-jlrdnnj-operation-desert-storm-bungie-s-2nd-game-.html and remember playing a more "3D" version on the SNES around 1992-3.
But in any case, when will people realise that hollywood and games are often just a big propaganda machine? That people actually pay for!
It's win-win for the US most of the time...
As a twice deployed Iraq Veteran with PTSD, and an avid gamer, this is right down my alley, though I will stay brief.
While I am adamantly opposed to both of our current wars, I don't have a problem with games being made about them. I've played a few games based on current conflicts (or modern era fictional conflicts) like BF2, modern warfare, etc, and I enjoyed them a lot. Sure, sometimes it got a little too realistic and I've had to take a break, but not a big deal. Real war isn't a game, there is nothing enjoyable about it. In fact, most of the time they're quite boring. I look forward to playing Six Days in Fallujah, and if it gets to be too much - I'll take a break and smoke a bowl.
The bottom line is this - take them for what they are: GAMES. Nothing more. Nothing less. Don't like them? Don't play them. It's not rocket science.
A little OT, but a friend of mine (who is serbian and was in the nasty part of the war) was affected the moment he saw me playing call of duty (the first one). To clarify: he has no military training outside the mandatory training and was more or less involuntarily in this war.
Even though it was a different war that was in the game, he got really nervous all of a sudden. Wide eyes, shaking and sweating and amplified reactions to ingame events (onscreen: enemy crossfire, him: ducking and cowering).
He later told me it was because the depiction of some situations alone (a scene in a house with intense room to room fighting in particular) brought everything back to him because for the first time in a game the developers went too close to "the real thing".
This makes me think that it really doesn't matter how recent a war or which war it is. If the depiction of the actions of war are very close to the real thing in some ways, vets will be affected. Again, not right on the topic of TFA, but somewhat related.
the ability for a game developer to accurately gauge the morality of such a conflict is limited at best.
And such an ability has zero relevance to the requirements of game development.
It's my job as a media consumer to gauge morality of a situation. I don't particularly like being told what to believe.
By showing people what war is really like we may be less inclined to support unnecessary or optional wars in the future.
The sooner we see horrors of war for what they really are, the better.
The only people who "enjoy" killing are the ones who've tricked themselves into thinking they enjoy in, in order to carry out whatever disgustingly horrible tasks they're given. Either that, or their sick and derranged.
What a nice fantasy that is.
Soldiers carry out the missions YOU as the public chose for them (by casting votes on election day). So don't ever be so short sighted as to blame the horrible shitty messes soldiers are put into by other, third parties, on the soldiers themselves.
If you really believe that, then you must also believe soldiers do get to choose their missions, when they volunteer. It's the same sort of indirect (and, in my opinion, nonexistant) control.
Soldiers carry out the missions YOU as the public chose for them (by casting votes on election day). So don't ever be so short sighted as to blame the horrible shitty messes soldiers are put into by other, third parties, on the soldiers themselves.
Soldiers aren't responsible, but voters are, yes?
Can soldiers not vote?
After the United States murdered the civil population of two cities with a military innovation, that forced the Japanese to surrender. Afterwards the US celebrated their "military" victory. The United States have a positive relation to bombs. Murdering civilians with bombs is more humane than shooting people. That is why the model is so successful and is used again and again. And they freak out when they suffer damages. The overall casualties at Omaha Beach were riddiculous, 3,000 people. Look what hero stories the Americans make out of it.
Really, and what real-world actual experience do you have on the matter? Or are you just going off of what someone may have told you, or what you saw on television. What a nice fantasy THAT is.
Yeah, they can vote, but how does that negate the responsibility of all of the other US citizens? "Any soldier worth his salt should be anti-war." -Norman Schwarzkopf (CENTCOM commander during the first gulf war).
Yeah, there is no black and white. No good guys and bad guys. Only shades of gray. How many people were killed in the nuclear blasts? Like 100,000+? Most of them civilians. War is what is evil, not the enemy.
Well, that would be my point, wouldn't it? Soldiers are citizens and share an equal responsibility, rather than a lesser one.
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The OPs premise is fatally flawed and laughable.
It's not immoral to give someone an excuse to take offense.
Enough, sufficiently sympathetic, weepy and victim-like people may feel offended that it could affect sales of the game. The creator of the game might worry about that, but in the end--it's just a game. If you're offended, I can only quote Shattner: "Get a Life."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I'm assuming war veterans just won't buy games based on the wars they fought in? Anybody else having trouble with this leap of logic?
You see, the problem here is that you want to defend the decision to enlist in terms of the intentions of the guy who enlisted. But as far as I'm concerned (and I suspect drinkypoo's gonna agree with me), a person's actions should not be judged by intention, but by a combination of factors that gives priority to their effect, to the extent actor could have reasonably judged it. By this standard, drinkypoo's argument is basically that in the recent past, people who have enlisted you're basically doing something with negative effects that they should have foreseen.
And when it comes down to it, American soldiers' actions over the past 10 years haven't really been supporting or defending the Constitution or the values it defends. The arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo is the prime example, where the armed forces undertook a policy that is contrary to the rights and values that the Constitution is supposed to enshrine.
Are you adequate?