Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion? 64
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."
Re:Firsta Posta (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Firsta Posta (Score:1)
Vietnam (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Vietnam (Score:1)
And Eisenhower sent in the first military 'advisers' if you want to be pedantic.
Re:Vietnam (Score:1, Offtopic)
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.
Air National Guard Service not trivial (Score:2)
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)
Re:Simple (Score:1)
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)
What about the old forgotten wars? The War of 1812? Korea? WWI, for crying out loud?
Re:Other forgotten wars (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other forgotten wars (Score:1)
Re:Other forgotten wars (Score:2, Interesting)
Sid Meier's Civil War games (Score:2)
The following was snipped from the Firaxis website:
I'm with you all the way (Score:1)
As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather play a well thought
Man that war was wh4ck!... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually the Tet offensive went well for US (Score:2)
Re:It's about time. (Score:2)
Credit where credit is due.. (Score:5, Informative)
It was a realistic depiction of Vietnam too, because it was frickin' hard and I always died.
Re:Credit where credit is due.. (Score:2)
Who's deciding what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:1)
I wonder how it will be before someone tries to copyright a war.
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:2)
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:1, Insightful)
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
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:1)
Didn't Daikatana already simulate torture in a video game?
Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernism (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
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
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
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
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
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
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
"The Diary of
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:1)
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
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.
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
Books are enjoyable even without freedom - other than c
How to imply emotional connections, should games? (Score:1)
Re:Games as the ultiamte fruition of post-modernis (Score:2)
I don't know how it would be possible without being cheezy or seeming in
Re:Who's deciding what? (Score:1)
Uh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uh... (Score:2)
Or maybe if we get an international perspective he can go work for an african warlord for the (short) remainder of his life.
Before he dies for whatever reason his wartime experiences have given him (bulletwounds, dysentry, suicide bomber), I would love to find out how he got along shaping his opinion on war. I would be interested to find out whether his opinion on war has changed since he first
Re:Uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Doncha know? (Score:2)
1942 vs. Vietnam (Score:3, Interesting)
the problem with historical war games (Score:2)
Re:the problem with historical war games (Score:1)
History is written by the winners.
Re:the problem with historical war games (Score:2)
Yeah, but there could be some revisionists and deniers among the people who make games...
I mean, the Darwinists pretty much won the Evolution vs Creation debate, but the creationists are still around, and there's plenty of evidence regarding the WW2 holocaust, yet there are holocaust deniers.
Re:the problem with historical war games (Score:1)
The history surrounding the Norsemen, a.k.a. the Vikings, was written by the monks that regularly got their asses kicked by the Vikings.
That is why, to this day, they have such a bad reputation. The losers got to write the history and make themselves look put upon.
-- Alex
Doesn't Matter Which War (Score:1)
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
older war games (Score:1)