level250geek said:
I'm not disagreeing with you. All I'm saying is, like shooters or not (and I rather like them myself), they do indeed sanitize and romanticize warfare. So if somebody says "Hey, this game makes war look fun!" and voices their opinion saying so, they have a point. So long as they don't ruin the actual game play for everybody else, then I will respect both their opinion and their expression of it.
But they only have a point if they imagine that the player doesn't already know that, which is condescending in the extreme. I doubt many gamers are so utterly dense as to imagine real warfare is as simplistic and entertaining as a game of Counter-Strike, and by imagining all players who enjoy such a game
are that dense they're just showing how little regard they hold for any viewpoint but their own.
The America's Army guy is probably the best example of this; he apparently believed that nobody playing the game could possibly realise that real people had died in a war, so took it as his perogative to spam the in-game chat with names of the dead. It requires a special kind of arrogant stupidity to believe this to be in any way useful or necessary.
MorkFromOrk said:
Not to mention how war is glorified and portrayed purely from a one sided, usually pro-American, perspective in video games. The "Hey, it's just a game" excuse doesn't wash anymore when you have millions of people spending hours of their day pretending that they're murdering another human being because they were told so and so is a terrorist and deserves to die. Sounds rather Orwellian, does it not?
Nonsense. Imagining oneself as a hero in a morally black-and-white world is simple escapism; we go to those worlds because we wish to inhabit, however briefly, a world where we are necessarily righteous and our enemies necessarily unrighteous. This is why games proclaiming themselves to be morally complex like Haze and Blacksite failed so miserably; nobody wants to put themselves in the shoes of a man who isn't allowed to achieve anything in order to teach the player An Important Lesson That War Is Bad.
As for why so many games are set in modern warfare situations or WW2, it's simple: laziness. If you use a contemporary or past setting, you don't have to invent your own weapons, terrain or scenarios, nor do you have to explain who the bad guys are or why they're the bad guys. It's like instant FPS, just add water and a couple of control gimmicks. Even some supposedly futuristic games like Halo and Killzone do this: most of the Marine hardware in Halo is based on contemporary equipment, and Killzone is basically just anime Nazis versus modern US Marines. In fact, you have it backwards; the game uses your existing recognition that the enemies are bad to avoid explaining why they're bad, it doesn't try to convince you they are.
Trying to make out a political message where there isn't one just shows you have trouble percieving anything except in terms of left or right wing politics. Nobody is pretending they're murdering another human being; the enemy avatar only has two real properties; you die if it shoots you, and it dies if you shoot it. It has no beliefs, no motives, and no purpose in the universe but to fire bullets at you. Any idiot can see such an object is not a human being. You are told to go that way, these things try to stop you, so you stop them stopping you. Nothing Orwellian about that.
