How Will Contemporary War Games Affect Veterans? 288
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.
Re:Bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
So if I'm a guy who builds explosive devices to detonate in crowded markets or on school buses, I should get mad that kids get to play soldiers who kill me and men like me? Poor me!!
Why target games specifically? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad guys (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Or you could worry about making a fun game (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
It is probably unfair for the US to demand that North Korea or Iran disarm themselves. But as an American, I don't care. North Korea has threatened to attack the US, and Iran has a day of hate directed towards the US. The call the US the great satan, and have threatened to try to destroy our allies if possible.
I admit I am utterly selfish, and you can call me that, it's ok; but if it is between N Korea or Iran surviving and the US surviving, I am choosing the US. And I don't want those two countries, ruled by a dictatorship, to have weapons that will enable them to carry out their threats.
Finally, I think it's more accurate to view the entertainment industry as an industry that mainly gives people what they want, although it has a propaganda component to some degree as well. It certainly isn't controlled by the government.
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or you could worry about making a fun game (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you missed my point. I was replying to the AC stating that a game seen from "the other side" would be about suicide bombers and ended with "oh poor me". Stupid stereotype, s someone else said (but I think the "avoid the missile J&R" might actually be fun :P
Anyway I don't see how game would be less fun if you were playing afghani guerrillas shooting at "invading" UN troops. It might actually make the game stand out of the crowd in terms of gameplay.
Re:Or you could worry about making a fun game (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, it is a GAME, it is meant to be fun,
If you want to make it fun then don't put it into a current day war, better yet, don't put it into any war that ever happened, as you will just end up twisting and mutilating history. If you need war then do some fancy fantasy or sci-fi or whatever that is far removed from reality. If you portrait current day war you have a responsibility to do it at least somewhat accurately.
Re:Bad guys (Score:5, Insightful)
Realism will never be allowed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, actually, I did. I wasn't even born yet.
Oh my god. Aren't we supposed to know things that happened before we were born? So much time lost in History classes.
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
It's why you have this huge slew of World War II FPSes because the bad guys were very clear in these cases.
It's interesting how other nations are now being portrayed less and less as bad guys because they're potential paying customers. More and more, you're seeing games which allow you to play other nationalities as your team like in the Battlefield series.
Re:father-in-law Vietnam vet (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you don't (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:father-in-law Vietnam vet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Realism will never be allowed (Score:3, Insightful)
" 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."
While that moral high-horse may be a very comfortable, self-validating place to perch, my explanation would be more prosaic: nobody's going to release the game you describe because it's NOT ENTERTAINING and their jobs are to make something that will SELL.
Not sure how this got missed, but "games" are meant to be fun. Kids play cops and robbers (well, they used to) but don't simulate the mind-numbing extent of paperwork, bureaucracy, and tedium involved in a real investigation...I wonder why? Perhaps because it's not fun?
Yes, a 'game' company might release the title you postulated, but I personally wouldn't buy something that's a long excursus into the agonizing brutality of war because that really doesn't seem like much fun. I doubt many people would.
And before anyone begins the predictable rant about this giving our populace unrealistic ideas of how clean war is and thus make us more likely to resort to it as a solution, I'd have two points to make:
- in an historical context, there is no populace that understands better than we do what graphic, horrible things happen during war, thanks to the media's pornographic obsession with showing it to us. Or do you really think that the people of WW2, WW1, Civil War, or other wars throughout history before photography, really understood war better than us? Where do you think our antiquated mythopoeic concepts of the 'warrior hero' came from, but from them?
- the likelihood of (in the US at least) our politicians sending our troops to war has far, far more to do with the tacit agreement between Congress and the President since Korea: that in exchange for the Congress not being FORCED to declare a position on an issue, the President is allowed to dispense troops without too much scrutiny. If the President was FORCED to wait for a War Powers resolution to send troops abroad, he would hesitate to deploy them in any but the more serious, justifiable circumstances. If congress was FORCED to call out votes on a War Powers Act - meaning their positions are clearly laid out and usable against them later politically, Congress would be hesitant to endorse the use of troops for any but the clearest present danger. Either way, once troops finally were deployed, the political futures of both congress and the president would be LINKED and inseparable, and thus less subject to the backbiting bullshit we see today.
Re:Bad guys (this shit doesn't equate) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Or you could worry about making a fun game (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to make it fun then don't put it into a current day war, better yet, don't put it into any war that ever happened, as you will just end up twisting and mutilating history.
You can make a fun game *and* mutilate history at the same time. There's no reason you shouldn't.
If you portrait current day war you have a responsibility to do it at least somewhat accurately.
Why?
This shit doesn't equate. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
I often hear this from intelligent geeks. It's a viewpoint issue, imo. You assume that everyone thinks as you do and that nobody would enlist for good reasons. There are good reasons, you just don't think they are. To support and defend the constitution. Dad and Grandpa, and all the way down the line, were soldiers. You feel it is your calling. You want to protect the weak. You want to be a hero. You want to serve your country.
Then of course there are good reasons that people generally look down on anyways. You want to do something important with your life but don't know how. You come from a poor family and stuck in a poor neighborhood and need to escape.
It's not the military's job to decide to attack anyone, that is a civilian function. It sounds like all your facts and opinions should be pointed at civilian government because none of them apply to the military. I'm serious! look at what you wrote.. it all applies to corporations and civilian government.
Re:father-in-law Vietnam vet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad the military follows "bad orders" from the civilian government. It's not their job or their privilege to judge the merit of orders at that level.
I use my own judgement (no shit huh?) (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
until you've walked the walk on the streets of a foreign country where people want to kill you
That's the problem right there. Maybe you shouldn't go there in the first place.
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
I strongly disagree. Sometimes the future of the human race depends on not surrendering even in the face of overwhelming odds. YOU might die, but others will go on.
Well I'm not talking about surrender on an individual level. If your group surrenders and comes to acceptable peace terms, that's better than fighting just for the sake of pride. I don't understand your argument about the future of the human race depending on it, since what I'm saying has happened so many times in history and the human race is still around.
Let's talk about some concrete examples. Japan in WWII, France in the Franco-Prussian War, Egypt under Rome, Persia under Alexander the Great, and the South in the US Civil War. All of them surrendered and the human race continues. Sometimes they surrendered as victims of an aggressive enemy, sometimes as maybe deserving victims (if you consider the Civil War to be just, for instance). Which ones would have benefited the human race, or themselves, by fighting to the death and never surrendering?
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
On a ground level, if your commander says "Rape that girl, I want to send a message" then yeah. On a high level, where the country has elected the president, and the president says "Go attack this country"... I don't care what the generals think. Civilian control of the military is such an important principle that it's worth an almost unlimited amount of bad decisions. What you're talking about is basically a coup by generals.
What are you going to do when some general's idea of bad orders doesn't coincide with your own personal idea? Maybe some general doesn't want to stop the Iraq War because he honestly believes that if we let them rebuild more of us will die in the long run. Your method leads to chaos.
Re:Bad guys (Score:5, Insightful)
volunteering to fight an illegal recolonization effort and you want respect? It's precisely that sort of thinking that has them wanting to kill you in the first place. Think long and hard about what you said. Seriously. There are countless british and french army types who volunteered to help 'civilize' various parts of the world (including Iraq), and countless colonial troops of various countries who wanted to variously bring religion to 'savages', wipe out the natives to make living space etc. Volunteering to help a colonial power expand it's ambitions is not worthy of respect. It is worthy of our disgust and disdain. If you idiots would stop volunteering they'd be forced to make truly difficult choices about what to do in Iraq. Is it worth conscription? Even after what happened in Vietnam? Right now they pile on the money and they get mercenaries, I'm sorry PMC's, and volunteers, none of whom are helping the situation. The reason, after you apparently 'liberated' them from Saddam Hussein they still want to kill you is that your still there, and still volunteering to go, (and when you are there tend to have a habit of killing innocent people, though that by definition is not intentional). It would be comically farcical if it wasn't so serious. Iraq, whether there are colonization forces there or not is a teetering mess, because it's the hub of the clash between saudi and iran for status as the dominant regional power, stabilization comes when those two stop funding a proxy war, at least temporarily.
One could reasonably argue that Afghanistan at least started out as a different situation. It certainly isn't now. But back in the 1990's and 2000's the driving forces behind the Anti-US movement were related to Israel, Egypt, and the US forces in Saudi, not all of which were particularly legitimate grievances (hence the terrorism for all its flair remained mostly rare, and of somewhat less dramatic support). Since the US recolonization effort in Iraq, you've put a giant beacon to the world saying 'hey look at us, all that crazy evil stuff OBL claimed we were doing but weren't, well, now we are!'
And no, a /. posting isn't likely to change your mind, or your income tax free + 225/mo imminent danger pay either. But your sob story of 'oh I'm in Abu Ghraib, I volunteered and they still want to kill me, you should respect me' isn't going to change my view. I'll presume you weren't involved in that previous business in abu ghraib with the torture etc. The people trying to kill you are all volunteers too, though they're more likely to be in it for an ideology (however crazy that may be) than the money. So ok I'll be at least sympathetic to you for that, at least you're probably in it for the money rather than for some misguided ideology about bringing some combination of Christianity or civilization to iraq. So no, you don't have my respect, you might have my sympathy, if you were so hard up for work and money to feed yourself this seemed like your last resort. At least if you learn arabic while you're there you can get a respectable job importing or exporting stuff with the middle east, just as a tip, don't tell them you were in Iraq, unless you want them to try and kill you during a meeting.
Re:Bad guys (Score:4, Insightful)
First: I'm military, just a disclaimer.
There's a difference, though even WE screw it up sometimes, between a 'terrorist' and an 'insurgent'.
What's the difference? The terrorist goes after civilians with marginal connection to any occupying military. Insurgents go after military forces.
Let's take a roadside bomb - if they deliberately detonate it when a schoolbus passes, they're terrorists. If they blow it up when a military convoy is passing, they're insurgents, even if civilians are killed. The deaths of the civilians are collateral/accidental/secondary effect.
As a military member, I'll do my best to kill both; differences in treatment comes later, when the terrorists end up on trial for murder who the insurgents are released when the conflict is over/settlement negotiated.
Re:Bad guys (this shit doesn't equate) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you in the US (or other supporting country)?
Do you pay taxes?
If so, based on your comments, I have to wonder what your real convictions are.
To paraphrase your own argument:
YOU are responsible for the war, as a group, you tax payers. If most of you refused to pay taxes, specifically stating the cause, the war wouldn't have happened, regardless of what the "leaders" said.
So, put your actions where your words are.
I was one of the thousands that specifically asked you all not to go.
Well, whoo hoo. Good for you. Now, did you stop funding it? No? Why not? Maybe being put in jail was a deterrent? Hmm. Well, I didn't see you caring about any consequences of a soldier disobeying the Government. Perhaps it's just easier to recommend disastrous outcomes for other people than be responsible for your actions?
So, stop paying taxes and deal with your convicions the way you are requiring others to do/
Unless you can come up with a coherent set of convictions that you attempt to live up to, instead of requiring other people to do so, why should I truly consider anything you said?
Regards.