When Does It Become OK To Make Games About a War?

The cancellation of Six Days in Fallujah seems to have stirred up almost as much debate as its original announcement. Given the popularity of World War II games, it seems clear that the main concern about a game focusing on modern war events relates to how recently they happened. Kotaku takes a look at some of the obstacles such a game would need to overcome to achieve broad acceptance. "When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun — war is not fun — but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"

Re:So skip Iraq for another few years

[Admiral Ag]

Buy a copy of Battlestations Pacific. You can play as the Japanese side. I think you even attack Pearl Harbor. You definitely can do Kamikaze attacks.

I'd be rather pissed off if I couldn't play as both sides in a historical wargame I'd bought. I certainly wouldn't mind playing as Rommel, whom I admire.

These games aren't really about approval of one side or the other, but about re-enacting history and thinking about alternative outcomes. For example, I've often imagined that Lee won at Gettysburg, not because I wanted the Confederacy to win, but because I'd have liked to see him win it.

I wouldn't say that the people who are Civil War re-enactors on the Confederate side are racists. They are just fascinated with the (as I am) and love the history. Same goes for video games.

It wasn't that simple

[Moraelin]

did not pretend that the german soldiers did not know what they were fighting for. Notice that most potrayals of symphatetic germans conveniently accepts "ich habe es nicht gewust" for fact. But it was the soldiers who rounded up the undesirables and put them on transport. Who took civilians hostage and executed them.

Actually, it wasn't that simple.

1. For a start you have to understand that what the bulshit Hollywood propaganda presents as a one "German army", was actually several branches, some of which weren't army at all. The SS for example was a paramilitary organization, _not_ a branch of the German army, and none too loved by the real army (the Wehrmacht.)

Second, even Hitler understood and accepted that not everyone has the stomach for his racial purity solutions.

The rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc, was done by volunteer groups -- the euphemistically called Einsatzgruppen [wikipedia.org] or Sonderkommandos (special units) -- recruited from the SS, SD, Gestapo (all under Himmler, btw) and local volunteers, _not_ from the army.

So, yes, most German soldiers didn't know jack squat about the extermination, and never rounded up anybody.

If you want to see an example of how the real army felt when ordered to do some atrocity: when a German sub was sunk by airplanes while trying to tow to safety the survivors of a ship it torpedoed, Hitler was furious and ordered that subs machinegun all such survivors in the future. Dönitz argued that doing anything of the kind would cause a massive morale drop, and basically pretty much refused to do it. Hitler actually backed out of that idea. Subs did stop trying to rescue survivors, though.

2. But to get back to the rounding up, you also have to understand another aspect: people are easier to round up when they don't know they're going to end up dead. After all, if you'll be killed anyway, what's your incentive to surrender to the guys with guns? At least running away or fighting back you still have a small chance to survive.

And you can see in the Warsaw uprising what happened when people realized that they're dead in the long run anyway.

So the "final solution" was actually kept somewhat secret, because, you know, the less people know about it, the less the risk that one of them will write to their former friend in Minsk to say stuff like "dude, hide before these guys come haul you to the gas chambers" and that guy tells _his_ friends about it, and it goes downhill from there. You have plenty of historical examples from elsewhere of exactly this kind of thing happening. E.g., the Gunpowder Plot in England failed when some conspirator tried to warn some other catholics to not be in the parliament on that day.

The people rounded up and the population in those cities, were routinely told they're being merely deported to some other province, and encouraged to take whatever they think they'll need in a new home. (Incidentally, that ended up as loot for the nazis.)

No, that's the right question

[Toonol]

"Can it be fun" should be the first question asked when designing a game, through every step of the process.

And the answer for a realistic modern warfare game, is "Of course."

That nearly merits a "Duh".

Re:Who cares?

[Hal_Porter]

(Did we win in Fallujah? For how long? When we leave will it erupt into civil war? If so, can we still say we won?)

It'll probably be like Vietnam. US soldiers will win all the battles and then US politicians will decide the US has lost the war.

Re:It's always okay

[caluml]

Monty's stats are 12 overs, 3 maidens, 4 for 32. Smith was out LBW, and Jones was caught at deep square leg off a full toss from Barton. Australia avoided the follow-on, and won by 3 wickets.

There's terminology in all games.

Re:This is the politically correct version

[hughk]

Talk to some real germans soldiers when they are willing to let their guard down. The knew, just didn't want to know and sure as hell couldn't admit to knowing after the war.

Not quite correct because most soldiers saw the front and little else. Only special units were used for rounding up and dealing with the jews/other undesirables. However the treatment generally given to the enemy civilians in both Russia and the Ukraine was quite harsh, there were little of the 'cleaning up operations' near the front-lines. For the soldiers of occupation, things would have been different.

What is interesting though is the civilian machinery behind the camps. Moving vast numbers of people around required a massive infrastructure with corresponding paperwork (we are talking Germans here) and it has been shown that many people in the Reichsbahn (Railway service of the time) must have known about extermination implied movements of people in the cattle trucks into the extermination camps with no movement out.

Re:This is the politically correct version

[misexistentialist]

It took the Germans a while to come to their final solution, so it wasn't clear to the Allies that setting up camps and ghettos was a means of extermination, but they were fully aware that very bad things were happening to certain minorities in Europe. The Allies were quite sympathetic to fascism and racial theories, though, and thus were largely indifferent, at least until they found themselves under attack. Look at the world's almost non-existent reaction to the slaughters in Africa nowadays, and it's clear that secrecy is not necessary for people to get away with doing horrible things.

Re:Try this. Make a GERMAN war game

[harlows_monkeys]

He used "american" correctly. Maybe you should check a dictionary before calling others illiterate.