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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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
This is why most FPS games have no civilians, something I miss given the richness of detail gamedevs put into creating maps and environments.
It's like you have entire cities composed of ghost towns occupied by nothing but soldiers, something that detracts from the experience and atmosphere.
On a similar note, there are also no children or killable children in most "violent" video games. They were not put in Oblivion and made unkillable in Fallout 3 because of moral objections. You don't see 'em in the GTA series too for the same reasons.
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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.
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.
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).
You've clearly never watched Band of Brothers or The Pacific. They were placed in a conflict very different than the ones we are involved in now, but they were two of the most moving series I've ever watched and it truly changed the way I look at combat.
I'd say that The Wire had the same affect in terms of my perspective on crime.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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.
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.
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).