GamesTM - Issue 75

[Asura]

That would be a pity. It's great fun to play. Which is all I care about.

In the case of the multiplayer, I wouldn't really care so much - it's really the single player campaign. It might be great fun from gameplay stakes but if it painted a ridiculous worldview on part of the developers/target audience, that the player is supposed to "buy into", then it'd hamper my enjoyment.

[Eight Rooks]

and the stuff [the Allies] produced to foment hatred amongst an apathetic population against the Japanese is some of the most racist material you can imagine, as strong as Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.

The difference between Allied and Axis troops in WWII being the Allied campaign was not based on a sickening and completely manufactured notion of racial superiority to those being vanquished.

Ohohohohoho.

...no, I know it's not entirely what you said, I am partly just winding you up. Ultimately it's not as if I want to force every man, woman and child on the face of the planet to play my hypothetical interactive horrorshow so they can consider themselves properly educated. It interests me, though, because I see much less divide between active and passive interactive entertainment than some people - I'd play a game like this certainly in a similar way to how I'd watch a film dealing with it. I didn't play the Russian levels in Call of Duty thinking "The idea of conscripted men being forced into battle at gunpoint is barbaric, and offends my moral sensibilities to their very foundations - I'm going to jump straight on the first landmine I see and never load my save up again", any more than I turned off Schindler's List (easy example) because it didn't show every soldier in the camp putting a gun in their mouths in shame. Easy, crude, mismatched examples, sure, but I'm not trying to strawman; I would like the opportunity to play as the bad guy; I would like to play through a story which was an out-and-out catalogue of human frailty, weakness and error; I would like to play through something which really, really made me think "Why in the name of God am I doing this?", that built substantially on the ideas of player choice, freedom and so on that Bioshock only toys with... and I think you could do all this in a modern-day or recent historical setting basing it around things that really happened. Although you wouldn't have to, obviously.

I'm probably going to get laughed at but again I steadfastly believe the ending of The Darkness was a beautiful example of this. I loved, loved, loved the fact it took control away from me because I was doing things no-one in their right mind would ever actually want to do, and at the same time it was touching on ideas about human nature, stubborness, people's animal qualities, propensity for evil... I can hear the giggles now and yes, it was crude, yes, it was an out-and-out cartoon, yes, it was a deeply flawed game but my God nothing else I've ever played has ever shocked me, affected me on some level quite that much. The final scene before the credits was just heartbreaking and I just couldn't help but think "Surely you could do this with something that much better written, that much more realistic, that much more... relevant...? Couldn't you?" Obviously it'd be a mammoth effort to apply the same kind of thinking to any setting even close to the two world wars but I think it could be done. Should be done, financial losses or outcry from the moral majority be damned. Would it be fun? In the same way Sonic is fun? Christ, no. But I maintain a belief it'd be worth playing, in the same way any war film is worth watching - I don't learn anything I couldn't learn from reading a book, but my God it doesn't work the same way.

I'll stop, I'm rambling, I'm sure I've said something that makes me look as if I've got the brain of a twelve-year-old which I will no doubt get deservedly slaughtered for. It's just something I feel pretty passionately about, is all.

[anephric]

Oh, I agree with you completely - you're never going to see something like that in the current market on console, though, and even on PC you're talking the sort of minor efforts from two-man teams/academic exercises that have already been released.

It's worth remembering that it took war films a helluva long time after WWII to stop being jingoistic exercises (outside of Sam Fuller and the occasional blip). I remember playing the Das Boot game years ago on my Amiga, and just the dreary sort of utter realism of that was exhausting. I remember playing it all night, though, because it was utterly absorbing. Plus, I pretended I was Jurgen Prochnow. I don't do that so much anymore.

[averybluemonkey]

Sorry I wasn't terribly clear, I was referring in my earlier post to the actions taken by Allied infantry towards the German civilians in the towns they conquered. We lost any moral superiority claims at that point.

[Asura]

Oh, I agree with you completely - you're never going to see something like that in the current market on console, though, and even on PC you're talking the sort of minor efforts from two-man teams/academic exercises that have already been released.

It's worth remembering that it took war films a helluva long time after WWII to stop being jingoistic exercises (outside of Sam Fuller and the occasional blip). I remember playing the Das Boot game years ago on my Amiga, and just the dreary sort of utter realism of that was exhausting. I remember playing it all night, though, because it was utterly absorbing. Plus, I pretended I was Jurgen Prochnow. I don't do that so much anymore.

You've just reminded me; I always wanted to play Silent Hunter and never got round to it

[anephric]

Sorry I wasn't terribly clear, I was referring in my earlier post to the actions taken by Allied infantry towards the German civilians in the towns they conquered. We lost any moral superiority claims at that point.

That's a very controversial topic and there's quite a lot of misinformation floating about - I can quite accept that were many cases of individual units taking out their resentments on the German populace (as I said, although even the most overstated case would pale in comparison to the vengeance the Russians took) but I refute anything took place on the scale that David Irving clones like James Bacque claim. That said, the US was astonishingly barbaric towards people of German and Japanese descent within their borders, and also had a nice line in sending Jewish refugees back to Europe and fairly certain death (as in the case of the St. Louis) when at that point, despite not "officially" being in place, the US and UK were well aware that the Final Solution was underway.

[Welrain]

It intrigues me that everyone seems to feel the Germans were the bad guys. I'm sure they didn't see it that way, as I'm sure the British didn't see it that way as they casually slaughtered their way around Africa and India. Time and Propoganda have created a fairy story out of the war, made it black and white, good vs evil, which is crazy.

[anephric]

If you're going to argue that the Nazis weren't the aggressors and the "bad guys" then that really is revisionism gone too far. There are a lot of socio-industrial factors that have been sometimes (though certainly not all of the time) conveniently ignored/written around during the years: including the fact that neither the UK nor the US gave much of a toss about the plight of the Jews at the time - Winston Churchill even wrote a pamphlet in the '30s praising Hitler for his handling of the "Jewish problem" and indeed most world leaders generally admired Hitler for pulling Germany out of the doldrums and kicking the communists in the face; the fact that some of the biggest companies in the US, including Standard Oil, IBM, GM and Ford had made a killing, pardon the expression, doing business with Nazi Germany even into the '40s (IBM certainly had designed their products so that they only functioned with proprietary IBM consumables, so they were resupplying the Nazis and their concentration camps all through the war) - Standard Oil furnished them with the high-performance fuels that would enable the Luftwaffe to extend the range of their sorties with lethal consequence; Von Braun was quite obsessed with fatality metrics and providing his Fuhrer with a rocket that could reach America: hey presto, after the war he's in charge of the US rocket programme.

Sure, it's not as easy as saying the Allies were all shining light and purely dedicated to freedom and smashing the dark oppression of the Nazis - but there's really no argument for saying that the Nazi regime was anything other than an absolute blight: okay, they may have put on a pretty televised Olympics and made the trains run on time, but other than that, it's all bad. Of course they didn't see it that way, and of course the British did despicable things in India. All conquerers do. What's your point? We invented concentration camps and the Nazis nicked our idea.

Just to get all Only Fools and Horses for a moment, my great-grandparents fled from Italy to the UK to get away from Mussolini, and my granddad, even though he was a full-blooded Italian (though naturalised), fought against the Germans and Italians in Africa. I can't imagine what it was like for him, let alone what kind of stick he got off the squaddies he was fighting alongside of (let us not forget, the Americans put anyone vaguely Japanese in internment camps during the war).

I'll shut up now because I'm ranting. Just remember, when you put your hand into a pile of goo that was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do.

[Welrain]

I meant more that the German army and specifically the Nazi's are seen as some sort of cliched army of evil, rather than just the boys and men they were. So to play as a member of the German army would make you the "bad guy" and therefore be an unpaltable gaming experience, which is clearly wrong.

[PrayforMojo]

Wow, after hearing Matty's disdain for CoD4 I almost feel like I should do the decent thing and trade in my copy for Viva Pinata or something.

While I agree that there is an agenda to CoD4, otherwise why would the military give their advice, I'm not entirely convinced it's as sinister as Matty suggests, though. I mean, the CoD series is such a curious beast. Of course, it sells combat as something exciting and fun but it also throws up these poignant, anti-war slogans at you every time you get killed. Therefore I think the agenda is simply to garner respect for the military man to a predominantly young demographic. Not just because there is something romantic about laying down your life for a noble cause, which I personally think is the single biggest lie about war, but rather because young men risk their psyches, maybe even their souls, so the rest of us don't have to. I honestly don't think IW intended the game to be used as a recruitment tool or to turn their audience into brainwashed zombies, but of course there is always that possibility. But, hey, even some of the greatest anti-war movies can be misconstrued.