Slashdot Mirror
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.
Nice stereotyping there. Terrorists are a completely different aspect than national defense forces. Did Iraq do so? No, nor did Vietnam or any other country that USA has attacked. North Korea and Iran haven't done anything like that either, but still US demands them to stop developing their defenses. Doesn't it kind of make sense for a country to develop same kind of defense mechanisms than what other countries have? Would you feel good if North Korea had nuclear weapons and USA didn't and they said they'll attack USA if they don't stop developing them?
Then there's games like Modern Warfare 2 where Russians are portrayed as bad guys. The entertainment industry alone is a big propaganda machine. It's quite boring how one-sided it always is.
I agree that clearly my father-in-law interpreted those pixels as "men", but to me they are just game pieces. I feel no more sympathy for their virtual fate than I feel for that of a chess piece.
So while I could have or should have considered his perspective on the game, there's nothing "a little off" about my outlook.
until you've walked the walk on the streets of a foreign country where people want to kill you, don't believe everything you hear in the media. i'm sitting in abu ghraib, iraq right now, and just because i haven't been hit by an IED in the last 6 months doesn't mean it's not going to happen. we (as soldiers) do not overreact in the situation. we're also never "bored" while outside the wire. i understand that posting a reply on slashdot will not change your opinion, but i feel a need to defend my profession and my brothers in arms. i've lost a lot of friends here, and whether or not you agree with the wars or the actions of my comrades doesn't matter. you should still respect them for volunteering. what's reported is (mostly) never true.
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.