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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion? 64

Posted by simoniker from the n-n-nineteen-different-games dept.
Thanks to the New York Times for its article (free reg. req.) discussing the plethora of recent videogames based on the Vietnam War. The piece notes: "Before the year is out, the game industry will have released five major titles involving a conflict that it has largely ignored for nearly two decades", and muses: "World War II games have in principle been simple to design. But because Vietnam changed the rules of engagement, the virtual battles had to be chaotic and the goals less clear." The article ends with a quote from one of the creators of Shellshock: Nam '67, arguing: "With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."
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Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion? More

Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion?

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  • Vietnam (Score:1, Funny)

    by elasticwings ( 758452 )
    All I know is I loves me some Battlefield Vietnam. I can just hear my soldier screaming as he falls to the ground from a sniper wound, "Why Nixon WHY?"

    • Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I wonder how the pro-war people of today will act when we flashforward 30 years and kids are playing Battlefield: Iraq, with soldiers screaming as they fall to the ground from a car bomb. "Why Bush, WHY?"

    • Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yeah Richard Nixon sucks! Oh wait, he ended the vietnam war. It was the French, JFK and LBJ that fucked it up.

      • Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Don't confuse the children with facts. This is Slashdot, you can't let the truth get in the way of the Republican bashing.
      • It's a quote from the Chappelle's Show skit where Dave is on 'Inside the Actor's Studio'. IOW, it's a fucking joke that you didn't get.

        And Eisenhower sent in the first military 'advisers' if you want to be pedantic.

    • Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by BoomerSooner ( 308737 )
      I'd like to play GWBush in Vietnam. I guess I'd be campaigning for a Republican and periodically picking up a paycheck.

      Bush Slogan should be: "Vietnam, only the poor go to war."

      I guess the same goes for Iraq as well. The more things change the more they stay the same.
      • I'd like to play GWBush in Vietnam. I guess I'd be campaigning for a Republican and periodically picking up a paycheck.

        Despite the early headlines the media eventually got around to reporting the whole story not just the anti-Bush party line. While serving in Vietnam could be hazardous, assuming you are not a Senator's son and have gardian angels - see Gore, serving as a pilot in the Air National Guard is not risk free. Bush flew a single seat jet fighter, one that had a demanding reputation. When the pla

  • Simple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by minusthink ( 218231 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:41AM (#8733646)
    It was hard to create a convincing jungle prior to today's ultrapowerful computers and graphic cards. Look at the levels in Goldeneye for the n64 and rainbow six (1), they aren't environments that are too impressive.
    • i thought the jungle level in goldeneye was really impressive, especially considering the technology then. It had alot of fog, but i thought that it added to feel of the level and worked rather well. It helped that the m16 had a scope on it...

      but i agree with you though, it worked as a level, but wouldn't have worked as an entire game. However, battlefield: vietnam is about as near perfection (not from a graphics perspective, but from a game play perspective, although the graphics are pretty good).

  • Other forgotten wars (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joeljkp ( 254783 ) <joeljkparker.gmail@com> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:42AM (#8733653)
    I think this is probably just the game industry trying to find new material after WWII has been beaten to death over the past few years. After the Vietnam Era, what'll be the next video game wars? Gulf Storm? Somalia? Afghanistan?

    What about the old forgotten wars? The War of 1812? Korea? WWI, for crying out loud?
    • Or howabout the Civil War? I'm surprised nobody has created a good Civil War FPS yet. They could make multiple covers of the box like Warcraft 3. They could sell one with the American flag in the northern states and one with a Rebel flag in the southern states. You know every redneck in Tennessee would have to have that game based upon the cover, even if they don't have a computer. I'm not sure if there would be too many class options, but you could make up for it with a soundtrack of the era.
      • Bad choice. Fire! reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading, etc, etc, etc. And of course, everyone will want a Sharps rifle. All other players will be cannon fodder.

      • Re:Other forgotten wars (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ronfar ( 52216 )
        Well, you could always play Gods and Generals [anivision.com], review here. [gamezone.com]
      • Gettysburg and Antietam from Firaxis. Here [firaxis.com], and here [firaxis.com]. Reviews here [gamespot.com], and here [gamespot.com].

        The following was snipped from the Firaxis website:

        Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, released in October 1997, was voted "Wargame of the Year" by the game industry's top opinion leaders, including Computer Gaming World magazine and GameSpot online; and was also awarded with "Editor's Choice" awards from both PC Gamer and OGR. Sid Meier's Antietam!, released in December 1999, was awarded "Wargame of the Year" by Computer Gaming World m

    • Believe you me, there will never be a shortage of wars to make games about. I can't wait until developers stop worrying about what fads are "in" and actually do some of their own research about a war instead of just playing their competitor's games. I'm to the point now where another WWII game comes out and I just say, "blah, WWII again?" Vietnam is the same way. The only vietnam game I've even played was vietcong and I'm keeping it that way.

      As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather play a well thought

  • Man that war was wh4ck!... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gnovos ( 447128 ) <gnovos@NOSPAm.chipped.net> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:48AM (#8733690) Homepage Journal
    Damn, if ONLY the Americans had known about the quad powerup behind the stairs to the left of the embassy, the Tet offensive could have ended up completely different. War is hell.
    • Actually the Tet offensive went quite well for the US. The Viet Cong was comitted to pitched battles in urban terrain and was largely destroyed. NVA operations didn't go much better. The civilians failed to rise up and support the struggle for Communism. The only US failure was domestic public perception. The US public bought the North Vietnamese spin, there is no light at the end of the tunnel, rather than the US Army spin, it's like World War II's Battle of the Bulge - one last failed desperate push befor

  • Credit where credit is due.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Migrant Programmer ( 19727 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:08AM (#8733812) Journal
    SEAL Team [mobygames.com] was a pretty groundbreaking game set in Vietnam, all the way back in 1993!

    It was a realistic depiction of Vietnam too, because it was frickin' hard and I always died.

  • Who's deciding what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:33AM (#8733973)
    "With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."

    True, if a game is really well made a developer can leave the verdict of the actions in a game to be justifiable or not. But the problem is, as long as human beings form these ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS, there will always be the insertion of bias into the game.

    Take Battlefield : Vietnam. Why don't American players find strung up dead allies in the middle of the jungles as warning? If I was a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam and I saw that I'd think the Vietnamese were savages. Vice versa, why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S.? You don't see this because its not what the developers WANT you to see.

    The developers want you to see a war with no goals, no black, no white, just a lot of greys. If I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years, you'd think the U.S. was justified (And yes, there would be lots of gore). On the other hand, if I made a Vietnam game with 50% of the game having the player be nothing more than a rice farmer sneak past American soldiers killing and taking away innocent villagers, you'd think its only right that the Vietnamese were justified.

    The whole idea of looking at a war through someone else's vision is misleading at least, and propaganda at most. Wheres the gore? Where the years in POW camps? Where are the villages being napalmed?

    WWII events are captured well in WWII games (other than obviously the Holocaust and the Pacific theatre but thats changing). Air raids? Got that. Seemingly out of nowhere artillery attacks? Got that. Charging machine-guns nests while your buddies go down? Got that. Tank battles? Got that. This is why people have generally let WWII games off with such ease. They knew what happened, they knew how it happened, and developers knew enough to put those events into the games. They didn't skimp on the details whenever possible and the public respected them for that, even if they avoided topics such as the Holocaust, and the Russian and Pacific theatres until recently.

    • No, developers are just trying to make something that's FUN TO PLAY. How many tabletop wargames set in WWII incorporate concentration camps? Few, if any. The focus is on the combat, not the surrounding political entanglements.

    • Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S."

      Because that wouldn't be accurate. What would be accurate:

      -The Vietnamese player starts out in North Vietnam, as a simple unarmed peasant trying to feed himself and his family.

      -Unfortunately, "Uncle Ho" declares that oppressive property owners should be summarily executed. Your mother, who owns a shack and 2 pigs, is randomly singled out and shot in th
    • I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years

      Didn't Daikatana already simulate torture in a video game?

    • Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by superultra ( 670002 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:54PM (#8738652) Homepage
      Great post, so I'll attach piggy back my post to your's.

      The very nature of a game creates a protangist and and antagonist. Some good old deconstruction is in order here. The player, however morally neutral the game makers have crafted it, is still the "good guy," even if he's the bad guy, as in GTA. The player is still trying to reach an objective. Conversely, the "bad" guy is whomever is attempting to stop the player. What's more is that the game is always designed so that the player can theoritically win, or do better. In a game like BF:V this becomes more complicated in multiplayer, but the idea is the same. The more skill you exhibit, the more often you receive a reward. Therefore, even in attempts to neutral-ize the game, they are still placing bias, even if that bias is inherent in the nature of playing.

      I suppose you could call these games the ultimate manifestion of post/anti-modernism. The moral attachment to these symbols, say of the Nazi party and the Holocaust, or of American soliders killing Vietnamese civilians, is drained completely because the when the player is a German in Battlefield 1942, it doesn't matter anymore that the team they are virtually fighting for committed vast atrocities. What matters is that they take hold the flag for 10 seconds longer and receive a point. I'm not sure what the cultural long lasting effects of these games will be, but I'm sure there'll be some.

      What we need from game developers, I believe, is a moral awareness, a realization that when dealing with violence, particularly within the context of a war, that they ought to acknowledge that these symbols mean something more than merely scoring a point. Merely because the public is less sensitive about an issue doesn't necessarily mean that the human harm committed disappears, or even loses its importance. I remember the backlash to games that included Osama Bin Laden immediately following 9-11. Fundamentally, though the only difference between those games (exempting quality, of course) and Battlefield Vietnam is a timespan of 30 years.

      We'd be outraged if Dice's next game was, say, one side trying to esacpe the WTC and another side trying to hit it with airplanes. And yet, in 30 years that may very well be a game. Why aren't we addressing this more in gaming? Why can films address this, for example, the Vietnam War so astutely immediately following it, but our games can't do the same with the WTC?

      My feeling is that the gaming landscape is ripe for someone to truly integrate the moral reality of war into a video game. I suppose that the creators of Call to Duty somehow think they're doing that, and I suppose I could concede that they are making baby steps in that direction. Still, it's within the basic framework of a protangonist seeking a reward and hindered by an antagonist. Like you said, violence and war are far more complicated than this. What would impress me is if the Call to Duty game developers had borrowed more than just style from Band to Brothers and instead included a level where you are forced to shoot at point blank range a 13 year old German soldier who doesn't fit in the uniform. The challenging question becomes: how do you imply an emotional connection, and communicate that this collection of pixels represents a human being with brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers that you ended the life of?

      Anyone?
      • Or how about I just communicate that deconstruction is masturbation. Its a game. Its supposed to be fun. Keep your hippy crap out of my games.

        If the gaming landscape is so ripe, why not do it? Oh, that's right, because everyone would hate your preachy little game.

        The question isn't how to imply an emotional connection. Noone does that because that's called awful game design.

        OMFG YOU GOTTA GO BUY THE NEW IRAQ WAR GAME!!!11 IT TOTALLY BUMMED ME OUT ON THE REALITIES OF WAR AND I CRIED ALONE IN MY ROOM
        • Or how about I just communicate that deconstruction is masturbation. Its a game. Its supposed to be fun.

          I'll give you the deconstruction = masturbation. But your kneejerk reaction to my post merely proves that it's not just about fun. If it were just "a game", we'd still all be sitting around playing only Tetris, Pac-Man, or Pop Cap games. Or, Dice would have created a context-less game in which representations of people as square boxes went around capturing small yellow squares and "shooting" littl
          • Wow I was trying to get modded and failed. Anyway...

            All of that breaks down when you look outside of the scope of games set in reality. Doom III is obviously not set in any real world conflict. The setting is merely another way to enhance the gameplay. If you want to create a creepy horror thing you set it in a Mars base. If you want to encourage the player to drive tanks around an island surrounded by destroyers and aircraft carriers you set it on Wake Island. If you want to force the player to sl
        • I would agree that Pong or Tetris or Mario is masturbation in the same way a cheezy romance novel or action movie is masturbation. But just as movies and books _can_ be enjoyable AND thought-provoking or emtional or social commentaries, I think videogames can too. No one is going to force you to play a game that is set as a social commentary on Vietnam or the Holocaust or September 11th, just as no one is going to force you to read a book commenting on those topics or watch a movie about them.

          "The Diary of
          • I have seen these games. They are all crappy flash things that lead you to a conclusion (typically based on a false dilemma) that the designer wants you "learn". You can't let the player both do what they want and force commentary on them. They are mutually exclusive. Though I would agree that games should be considered art, they are really the first interactive art form. If you start forcing a world view on the player you lose the interactivity. I might as well just go to a movie.
            • Nah, I wouldn't say it is mutually exclusive. For example, you could put a 13 year old kid on the opposing side shooting your allies and you can decide whether to leave him be, or take him out yourself. Or maybe you go to this country and you see horrible atrocities being commited, ones you may be able to circumvent, but not without extreme difficulty and going way out of the way, and perhaps for little or no reward (maybe even an ass chewing by your staff sergeant for straying from your duties). It's po
              • And all of that would be more fun and superior to game such as Call of Duty, how?

                I know where you are trying to go, but I'm not coming along. Sure you can give the player morality choices, but they won't mean anything without consequences. If you enforce consequences based on the player's choice, especially when both sets of consequences are negative, you have already taken the player's choice away. Then its called a movie.
            • I agree that there haven't been any successful moral or social commentary games (that I know of) I'm just saying I don't think it's impossible. Maybe the only commentary would be that the situation WAS morally ambiguous (with the Holocaust as an example: is it more moral to save the life of a child who will be sent to the camps, or to ignore the child knowing if you DO try to help, YOUR family will all get killed. 1 death vs 3 or 4: which is "better"?)

              Books are enjoyable even without freedom - other than c
      • To create an emotional connection, the game would have to make the player identify with the opponent somehow, which usually involves character development. This is usually reserved for major roles of allies or opponents, like the super villian. For Battlefield Vietnam, you could have families of civilians running around. Trying to huddle together and survive the battle. Or maybe have families huddled in rooms in the bombed out buildings. There would have to be some penalty for killing civilians. My m
      • I want to compliment you on your post. I too think videogames have the opportunity to be expresive in a way that is emotional and/or a social commentary and I look forward to the experimentations in that direction. I think videogames have the potential for, in specific areas, being more effective as emotional or commentative mediums because the player - by virtue of controlling the protagonist - is inherently more conected to the plot.

        I don't know how it would be possible without being cheezy or seeming in
    • BF: Vietnam is more like a sporting game (football) than an actual depiction of war. Complete with the penalty box (spawn delay). I still think it's a great game.

  • Uh... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sahrss ( 565657 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:35AM (#8733986)
    "Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."
    Woah, that's messed up. No video game can be realistic to the point where a gamer should use it to "come up with a verdict" on what they think of war...
  • Quagmire wars are, like, all the rage these days. Simply everybody has gotta have one! Popular game for popular times.

  • 1942 vs. Vietnam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FriedTurkey ( 761642 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @09:57AM (#8735850)
    I find that playing Battlefield 1942 is a much better experience than Battlefield Vietnam simply by the context. Battlefield Vietnam doesn't really add that much to Battlefield 1942 with gameplay/graphics. What makes 1942 better is simply that WWII portrays a feel good war versus Vietnam which just conjures up images of horror. WWII was probably just as bloody and horrific but the image I have been presented though the media for my entire life has been of an honorable war. Playing 1942 just gives me a much better feeling of wanting to win. I gave up on Vietnam after a while. Maybe I just want to escape to something that is more black and white when I want to have fun.
  • the problem with historical war games is that they represent a sanitized version of what really happened, probably the winner's version of history, too.
  • Which war the game is set in has very little relevance to the enjoyment of the gaming experience. Haven't you played and enjoyed FPS games like Quake or Half-Life that aren't based on historical campaigns? The engine and gameplay mechanics are all that matter.

    About the only use a historical setting has is to help teenagers justify the purchase to their parents (But Mom, it's educational...). Older historical eras (pre WW1) aren't very enjoyable in an FPS, mostly because it's such a pain to watch your muske
    • Actually, I played a half-life mod that was placed in revolution era colonies/US (can't recall the name). It was really really fun. You had to really time your shots (which were still for more accurate than a real musket), and of course close quarters combat with a sword or bayonet was quite hilarious as we leaped at each other. The fact that the weapons were "diminished" required you to rely on your strength in numbers as well as coordinating movements. it was a great change of pace.

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