I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning your mind off and enjoying the set pieces. However, Cold War has a section in Vietnam and I suddenly started feeling really uncomfortable and just turned the game off.
In WWII you can easily feel like the “defender”, and even Modern Warfare felt like fighting a very specific organisation that wanted to kill millions. Here however it just becomes so hard to explain why I’m happily mowing down hundreds of clearly Vietnamese locals that I was unable to turn my mind off and just enjoy the spectacle.
I turned to the internet and started browsing and found this article and I really agree with what the author is saying.
I don’t know if I will be continuing the campaign or not, but I just feel that I don’t want to support these kinds of minimizations of military interventions.
I just wish there were more high budget / setpiece games that don’t glorify real life wars. Spec Ops The Line was amazing in that sense, but it’s also quite old already.
I would love to hear your opinions on this subject.
Perhaps my memory is clouded, as it has been a long time since I had played a Call of Duty game, but I believe there was a time when most of it felt anti-war, in that you would die frequently and often, then be shown a quote that was about how there are no winners in war, providing a sharp contrast between the actions you were taking and the grin reality of what was occuring. After I believe Modern Warfare 2, the CEOs of Infinity War stepped down, and since then the quotes stopped being more anti-war, and much more pro-war, highlighting heroism and such in the quotes. I always viewed it as a studio change and just stopped playing after that, feeling the games were just missing the mark and farming more and more of that sweet multiplayer money.
The beginning of the “campaign” in Battlefield 1 was really good about this.
SPOILERS AHEAD ^(I know there are spoiler tags, but they don’t work on my app.)
Opening begins with the following:
Battlefield 1 is based upon events that unfolded over one hundred years ago.
More than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”.
It ended nothing. Yet it changed the world forever.
What follows is frontline combat.
You are not expected to survive.
You’re then thrown into the start of a regular battle. This is the game, right? Cool, let’s shoot some bad guys.
Nope. Doesn’t matter how good you are, you will die. After you get killed, the name of the soldier and how many years he’d lived are shown on-screen.
Then you switch perspectives to a different kind of battle (eg. artillery, air, tank, etc.). Same thing. This goes on a few times.
Eventually you reach a point where it’s just you, face to face with a lone German soldier, your rifles pointed at each other. Both soldiers just lower their guns, realizing the futility of it all.
Intro ends.
The rest of the game is the typical military FPS stuff we’re used to, but that intro was pretty great about how war has no winners when it comes to individuals on the battlefield. We all lose in the end, whether we live or not.
Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.
COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.
This is the same reason TV shows like NCIS get 500 seasons.
Ooooh, I feel dumb that I didn’t pick up on this before.
I knew about movies (Top Gun and all) but not other things, for whatever reason.
Yeah there was a little bit of that in the original WW2 games: CoD 1-3 and the expansion games and console exclusives.
Activision receives preferential access and funding from the DOD. Much like with films and sports presentations, Call of Duty is a PR arm of the military industrial complex.
The upside is I don’t see how its improved recruitment numbers.
At one point in time I certain it has. Right now people seem more skeptical, which is pretty fair since anyone joining now has lived their entire life during a pointless war.
It’s always been like that https://www.eurogamer.net/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-accused-of-rewriting-history-to-blame-russia-for-controversial-us-attacks
Also there is literally a former CIA exec in the exec suite of Activision.
https://www.activisionblizzard.com/leadership/brian-bulatao
And the Homeland Security Advisor to Dubya was also an exec at Activision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Townsend
How many other game companies have executives with close ties to the military?
I think they were/are getting funding from some US military defense sector, the same one that was funding a lot of pro-american propaganda films. So even without taking the actual campaign/story of COD games into consideration, it’s definitely in their interest to make a propaganda game.
I mean, yeah. CoD has always glorified it. Even more so in recent years as they push for multiplayer and the massive payday that came with that. The earlier games often had a “war can be bad too” bits. The Russian bit in CoD1. The nuke. “No Russian”. But otherwise it’s a Michael Bay movie in game form.
Spec Ops The Line was the only game I can think of that bucked that. Even the publishers had no idea what it was, despite the antagonist literally being called Konrad.
Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.
Yasumi Matsuno’s career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.
I found Red Orchestra to be more of an anti war game too. The way people die, you can die quickly w.o. knowing what hit you exactly, strong supression, having to respawn in another wave in the single player campaign constantly etc. really make you feel that real war sucks.
The first CoD definitely showed the horrors of war. By the “Russian Bit” I suppose you mean the part where a Russian soldier tries to retreat and is shot by his commanding officer. Or maybe you mean where you have to wait for the soldier in front of you to die so you can pick up a gun and boots. But every CoD since that game has been more of a game and less of a history lesson.
Yeah, that bit.
Even though it was based on events from WW1, stolen under cinematic license for use in WW2 by Enemy at the Gates, and then subsequently stolen again by Infinity Ward.
But hey, it looks good.
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Hello. I am a game developer of 10 years. For about 1.5 years I worked on Squad, from early 2016 to late 2017. I quit for this exact reason.
I thought it would be a game about honoring the act of war not glorifying it. Especially since we had veterans at the studio on the design. Instead, it was a game about making it feel as realistic as possible while still being fun. 51% gameplay, 49% realism was the motto.
Squad doesn’t do anything narratively. It just sets two factions on a map and says fight. The mechanics feel great, the sound design is the best it can be, and the vehicles give this strong feeling of weight. It’s a great game… that they then took my work, split into another company into a defense contractor, and made a real-life military simulation. Not like Arma but an actual military training tool.
Squad does the same thing, makes you feel okay with fighting and making fun of an opposing force that is just trying to preserve it’s own way of life. It’s not there narratively but in the community which Squad specifically as a team did nothing at the time to stop the racists and created a pro-war community. In fact, in a lot of ways they cultivated it.
So I have a lot of opinions about this subject, pretty scattered but I will leave you with my greatest accomplishment on Squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMnYm_6rNE
I haven’t played Squad in a bit, but thanks for the work you put into it.
I will say, Bohemia Interactive (ArmA studio) also makes military training tools. If you make a fairly realistic multiplayer milsim style game, it’s easy to roll that into something militaries will spend a lot for. I don’t think this is “wrong” but it is morally gray. It does provide low risk training, which could save lives, but it’s also training to kill people, and maybe not “the good guys” if there is such a thing.
You’re right that Squad has harbored a lot of racists though. A lot of people seem to play to larp as a racist stereotype. That said, I’ve also met a lot of vets there who seem to care a lot more about treating it properly. I don’t think there’s a way to get one of those without the other, without being ArmA which takes too much commitment for me now.
Bohemia at least heavily pushed their Laws of War DLC and their collaboration with the Red Cross
Yeah, I mean the military training stuff is morally grey. I feel like from my point of view, there would be a much better way of handling it beforehand. Like explaining to the staff that it’s a possibility your work will be used to train military staff.
I think there is a way to get a community full of people who want to treat the game properly. It’s to come out and fully say “This isn’t what we want to see in our community and we condemn it.” It won’t work perfectly but that doesn’t mean you throw away the entire concept of a better community because you can’t have a perfect community.
The most stark example against this is the original MW2 - in addition to the anti-war quotes everyone loves to talk about every time you die, the main antagonist is literally a US Army General (admittedly he is distanced from the actual Army by the end, using a PMC instead).
The black ops games have some twist that often provoke the the thought of whether the ends justify the means. ::: In Cold War, the main character, Bell, is actually a captured Russian soldier that they have brainwashed to fight for the US as part of an experimental program. When this is revealed, you have the option to betray your “team” and lead them into a Russian trap :::
That being said, I haven’t played all of the cod campaigns, especially some of the more “historical” entries. It’s more fun to play this type of game when it makes you feel like what you’re doing is justified. It’s important to remember it’s all fiction, but hey, it’s not going to be for everyone. If you feel like the game you’re playing goes against your morals, no shame in switching it off for something else.
As Reggie from Nintendo once said, “If it isn’t fun, why bother.”
As Reggie from Nintendo once said, “If it isn’t fun, why bother.”
I haven’t played enough to make a judgment about COD in particular, but like you said, this is from Nintendo, a company whose main franchise is a game for kids about a funny little man stomping evil turtles in a fantasy world. It doesn’t even have the trappings of something that you can take seriously and use to inform your real life. Nobody would mistake it for anything close to a realistic historical account, unlike COD.
Is Schindler’s List fun?
There is more to media and art than whether its fun. Art can be engaging and intriguing without being “fun”. I wouldn’t call Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice “fun” per se, but it’s definitely a good game.
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We definitely disagree on the latter. It was harrowing, but the way it handled its themes was fascinating and the gaming culture would be lesser without it.
We don’t expect all books and movies to be “fun”, why should games all be? We can see other forms of engagement and value in other media.
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If you define fun by “having a blast” then we are talking about the same thing. Why wouldn’t a game be valid if it’s about delivering a message above moment to moment action? Strip the message away and obviously it’s lesser for it. Because it’s not a message plus an entirely separate mechanical system, it’s about what everything means in context. Rather than focusing on making flashy combos, it’s more interesting to ponder over what is it supposed to represent and what is actually happening.
It’s a little funny though that I did consider Spec Ops as another example, and that I have seen people judging it the same way that you are doing to Hellblade, that it was a mediocre military FPS, but many rebutted that even its lackluster gameplay is supposed to contribute the commentary. In the same way you praise of Spec Ops, I don’t think Hellblade is nearly as bad in that aspect as you say, As an action game it is serviceable, but the action is not the point.
If you argue for serious games but only in the context of the gamification of business and education, you are still glossing over a whole multitude of media that is more about exploring ideas than moment-to-moment thrills, something other media have in plenty, and something which games have incredible potential for. You are thinking of typical games solely in terms of pop culture. There is a lot more to a medium than pop culture and strictly functional tools, and you are making that to be a massive abyss where nothing has worth.
Because it’s not a message plus an entirely separate mechanical system
Except they kinda are separate. It doesn’t matter how good your story is, if it’s a total slog of mediocre boring gameplay to get that story I’m just not gonna bother. If the actual game part of your game is bad, it’s a bad game; if only the story is good, you may as well make it a movie,book or something else like that.
Telltale games were also really bad games for basically the same reasons, should’ve just been direct-to-video/streaming movies. Fight me.
You can come at me however much you want. It doesn’t change that Hellblade is a acclaimed, beloved game, and so were many of the Telltale games until they oversaturated the market, really. You can not like them but insisting that they are bad doesn’t make them universally bad.
What makes Hellblade good is putting the player in the shoes of the protagonist, and for that it’s better as a game. A movie wouldn’t cut it for this. Frankly to me it doesn’t matter as much if the combat is not as fleshed out as God of War. The point is not doing sick combos at the enemies that we don’t even know for sure if they are real. But the struggle matters.
There is no point in making a fuss about how extensive the gameplay aspects of a game should be, unless you are writing game design theory that uses these concepts in a helpful practical manner. I wouldn’t really call “the game is bad if the game part is bad, make it a movie” a very helpful one. Even as a critique it’s pretty lacking.
Comes to mind that something like Phoenix Wright has very minimal game elements in a story-centric format. Would you call that bad?
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I find it difficult to discuss productively when you come up with such overblown analogies like that. I could even argue that artistically there could be merit to the equivalent a book full of thumbtacks, and Fear & Hunger comes to mind as a game to be described like that, One where a myriad ways to suffer is central to the experience and themes. But to say that Hellblade is like that is so uncalled for it makes that whole angle of discussion pointless.
You may have written about what a game is and if it has to be fun, but you are not staying true to what you preach. You can’t even seem to acknowledge merits in games that you are not personally entertained by.
To judge Hellblade for being linear is several decades too late to start that argument, and there is no reason to single it out. Loosely half of all games today are games where you perform as expected in a predefined context where your choices don’t matter, but most people still think of them as games. What was the benefit of that semantic argument then?
And even if you were to say that Hellblade, like Spec Ops The Line, is more like a “theme park ride” than a “game”, to compare it to “a book full of thumbtacks” says absolutely nothing about how it’s constructed and what may be issues in that. It just says that you really, really don’t like it. If that’s what you have to say, then there is no point in even talking about it. I can acknowledge that you don’t like it and that’s it.
Would you define this as your “Are we the baddies?” moment?
Well, not really as I’m European and have no connection to any side in the Vietnam war.
I just feel that if your game is based on real life wars than you should be very careful to give a nuanced view of the situation. Even allowing a campaign on both sides would be interesting if executed well.
French colonization of Vietnam was what the VCP were fighting against at the beginning of the war. The Soviet Union and China got involved to help kick France and Britain out and US involvement came when it was clear France and Britain had lost the war. But other than that and the coalition troops I guess Europe wasn’t involved in the Vietnam War.
I knew about this. As a Belgian though, I don’t believe we had a lot of presence there.
Sadly, we have done our share of horrible stuff on foreign soil (but we haven’t made any videogames about it)
(but we haven’t made any videogames about it)
I tried to find one, but it looks like you’re right. This is the closest I could find, and they seem to be based in Paris.
Certainly we already had this conversation like ten years ago right? Call of duty has never been anything but that, you really can’t make a war game that is both fun and anything but pro war
I don’t think this is a conversation we can have once ten years ago and forget about it, as long as the franchise is still going.
I think you’ve mistaken being pro war with being unpopular or being abolished or something
I don’t even know where you got that from. What I’m saying is that there is plenty of reason to keep talking about it.
I never played much CoD so I might be wrong here but there is a difference betwesn debicting war and rewriting history in favor of the US and I think that’s what the author wants to point out, the US loves to be debicted as the good guys even if it’s anything but true and their collaborations with Hollywood show that really fucking well.
Yeah well, the propaganda has gotten even more blatant and it’s still the worlds best selling game every year. So I think it’s totally reasonable to continue having this conversation.
Yeah. I never played any other CoD games than the WWII ones. CoD 1, 2, the Pacific one (world at war?) and the latest WWII.
When I saw them release the modern warfare one after the invasion of Iraq, I thought it was so distasteful I never bothered to pay any other CoD game because I knew it would be uncomfortable.
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I expect any war game or film to be at least somewhat propaganda-ish, though some do it with more nuance than others.
My go-to example of an anti-war war game is Ace Combat. Despite having licensed planes from Lockheed, Grumman, Sukhoi and many other real life defense manufacturers, every single depiction of the wars in its games are negative. In fact, one of the most often cited criticisms of Ace Combat 5 is that it took the anti war message too far and became preachy.
This is the Ace Combat 04 between mission storyline, it’s twenty minutes and is a nuanced view of the war you fight in those missions, from the perspective of a young boy in a city occupied by the enemy.
Don’t they recieve funding from the us armed forces? No shit its pro army propaganda
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Oh no, someone is having a thought you’ve already had before. The world ends. 🙄
Did anyone not realize this?
A lot of teenagers with poor history education probably never did.
