That was during EndWar plot, aka the three superpowers (EU/US/RU) were at each other's throats, mercenary forces was buying the stuff wholesale from the army to ease their supply lines.Ishal said:
Games With Fake Wars Are Stupid
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
This reminds me a lot of one of The Big Picture episodes where MovieBob said that conspiracy theories are the modern equivalent of ancient nature myths. People naturally want something to explain something that seems unexplainable. Now while it may seem counter-intuitive arms dealers don't necessarily want actual wars to happen war is messy and expensive and while you may make a profit in the short term from immediate sales to keep a party fighting in the end one of them is going to lose and the winner may not be in a position even after that to continue buying your produce. What you really want isn't a war but an arms race. It isn't the war but the fear of war and being out-gunned in that war that would drive up sales and would keep them going longer. The most you want is fairly limited conflicts that simply serve to keep the fear of preparedness for a greater conflict alive. Starting an actual all out war has too great a short term cost and your customer could end up bankrupting themselves rather quickly. If you just keep the fear alive you maintain the customer base longer and, since they are not actually having to leverage the costs of an actual conflict, you can get them to buy more expensive products that if purchased in the course of an actual conflict would be impractical. Of course if you customer does get into an actual war the cost of that war goes through the roof rather quickly. For example the US costs in WW2 were $US4.2 trillion (2011 inflation adjusted). The Iraq/Afghanistan war is just slightly less than that at around $US4 trillion. However in WW2 the US mobilized more than 16 million troops whereas the Iraq/Afghanistan war was less than 2.5 million. As you can see it is far more expensive now to mobilize far fewer troops than it was then and this is a direct result of the high cost of equipment. Equipping a soldier in WW2 would cost about $US190 (2011 inflation adjusted) whereas the cost of equipping a modern soldier is $US17,000. The cost of the rather small scale wars (relative to the men and material used for larger conflict such as WW2 not as a matter of duration) fought against Iraq and Afghanistan have had a severe detrimental effect on the US economy but are a fraction of what would be expected if there was a full scale conflict with a major power such as Russia or China. If you want them to keep buying your really high priced goods you actually want to keep them out of large scale conflict.
I think that we partly have Kiefer (William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus - lol!!) Sutherland and the series 24 to thank for popularizing these types of storylines. In a thinly veiled attempt to not appear TOO racist or xenophobic the series 24 often ultimately has the muslim terroists in the role of puppets of some sinister, shadowy PMC or private syndicate. Which (when you think about it) is almost more insulting to the muslims as it suggest they are not only aggressive, violent terrorists but also stupid... too backward to actually think or act for themselves!
Now actually the idea of the man-at-the-top or the main villan as being somebody fully prepared to make many suffer for their own personal gain, treating human life as "collateral" and selfishly manipulating politics in their favor is not completely unacceptable to me. I think that in real life there are many powerful people who, living in very insulated, privileged worlds, end up playing with the lives of real people with little or no conscience, guilt or understanding. However where the whole idea falls down for me is where they manage to find the legions of henchmen fully prepared to lay down their lives, take huge risks and generally get put through the grinder so that their boss can realize his evil (is the evil mastermind EVER a woman??) plans.
In 24, for example, I really have trouble believing that the legions of "bad guys" lining-up to be bettered by "Uncle Jack" are being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them to shoot at federal agents, attack government installations and generally wage war on an entire country... usually the one in which they live, no less. On an individual level, once you are identified as being part of this there is never any going back, so the rewards have to be enough to be truely life-altering. And given the HUGE numbers of these morons we are asked to gun-down in these games or that Jack-in-the-box leaves lying in his wake, the monthly salary expenditure for these corperations must be astronomical! Maybe the buisnees strategy is that enough of them will die before they get paid to make it econimically viable - but you'd have thought that after a while word would get around and they'd have trouble finding personel.
The sad truth is that video-games have always had a serious deficiency when it comes to good story-telling. Now maybe this is partly understandable, the technology to tell interactive stories has only been available for 25-30 years, and over those 25-30 years the technology has also evolved dizzyingly fast. Looking back, the first 25 years of cinema today seem amazingly naive and unsophisticated.
Unfortuneatly, in recent years, massive over-commercialization and market-saturation of product choice has meant that it's no longer the ultimate quality of something that sells it. With so many things to divert our attention if something wants to stand out or sell itself, then it needs to do so in a VERY short period of time. This negates the possibility of any real depth or complexity and results most things being reduced to nothing more than a few sparkley objects thrown together.
Most action games are trying to ape hollywood in producing glittery roller-coasters that spend their entire duration bombarding us with fast-moving, visually complicated information whos basic job it is to distract us from the fact that what we are experiencing actually has no substance or content. It's like playing white-noise in order to distrupt a persons train of thought.
I come from the "old" school of action gaming, the original Doom, Blood etc. The first ever next-gen FPS I played was Half-Life2, followed by Bioshock,the first FEAR and then Painkiller - all excellent titles. I played a little of the CoD series on console around the CoD2/CoD3 era, but nothing since then. The thing is with the exception of a CoD4 MP free weekend I have never played a "modern military shooter"... that is until Yahtzee wouldnt't stop banging on about Spec-Ops: The Line. Now whilst I did find the Spec-Ops story interesting, by my standards and experience of FPS I would hardly even call Spec-Ops a game... more than half the time I spent in Spec-Ops I really didn't feel like I was "playing" at all. For me a scripted event simply is not gameplay - gameplay by definition is "interactive" which means that your decision processes should effect the outcome of events on the screen.
Spec:Ops did have an interesting story, and forcing the player down a narrow corridor occasionally pressing "use" to open a "door" does allow the developer tight control over the delivery... but HL2 showed us years ago that you can have a fantastically paced, involving story, with well developed characters and a coherant arc whilst NEVER taking the basic mechanic control away from the player and never needing to resort to "press this button to make this thing happen"... in HL2 (and HL1 so far as I remember) every "obstical" in the game is passed using the fundamental control mechanics of the game.
Why is it that almost all other game developers feel the need to resort to cut-scenes where control is taken away from the player? When valve want to advance the story with dialog they would simply lock you in a "room" with the other characters for the duration of the dialog still leaving you free to do what you want... runnage through cupboards, play with headcrabs or balance phys objects on one another. Occasionally you would be required to assit the other characters in some way to keep you engaged with what is going on, but otherwise the player always had total control. Gordon, being a silent protagonist, makes this system a little easier to pull-off, but it can still be achieved with a vocal protagonist.
After seeming to stray from the original point somewhat (what was the question?!) I'll bring it back into context (for anyone insane enough to still be reading by this point) that video-game story-telling is still a very elusive art, and over the whole history of video-gaming there are really very few examples that have managed to completely nail good story-telling within the context of the gameplay. I think it is fairly safe to assume however, that for those people looking for the magic marriage of story and gameplay, any IP that relies upon a PMC to drive the story is probably not going to be your "holy grail"...
Now actually the idea of the man-at-the-top or the main villan as being somebody fully prepared to make many suffer for their own personal gain, treating human life as "collateral" and selfishly manipulating politics in their favor is not completely unacceptable to me. I think that in real life there are many powerful people who, living in very insulated, privileged worlds, end up playing with the lives of real people with little or no conscience, guilt or understanding. However where the whole idea falls down for me is where they manage to find the legions of henchmen fully prepared to lay down their lives, take huge risks and generally get put through the grinder so that their boss can realize his evil (is the evil mastermind EVER a woman??) plans.
In 24, for example, I really have trouble believing that the legions of "bad guys" lining-up to be bettered by "Uncle Jack" are being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them to shoot at federal agents, attack government installations and generally wage war on an entire country... usually the one in which they live, no less. On an individual level, once you are identified as being part of this there is never any going back, so the rewards have to be enough to be truely life-altering. And given the HUGE numbers of these morons we are asked to gun-down in these games or that Jack-in-the-box leaves lying in his wake, the monthly salary expenditure for these corperations must be astronomical! Maybe the buisnees strategy is that enough of them will die before they get paid to make it econimically viable - but you'd have thought that after a while word would get around and they'd have trouble finding personel.
The sad truth is that video-games have always had a serious deficiency when it comes to good story-telling. Now maybe this is partly understandable, the technology to tell interactive stories has only been available for 25-30 years, and over those 25-30 years the technology has also evolved dizzyingly fast. Looking back, the first 25 years of cinema today seem amazingly naive and unsophisticated.
Unfortuneatly, in recent years, massive over-commercialization and market-saturation of product choice has meant that it's no longer the ultimate quality of something that sells it. With so many things to divert our attention if something wants to stand out or sell itself, then it needs to do so in a VERY short period of time. This negates the possibility of any real depth or complexity and results most things being reduced to nothing more than a few sparkley objects thrown together.
Most action games are trying to ape hollywood in producing glittery roller-coasters that spend their entire duration bombarding us with fast-moving, visually complicated information whos basic job it is to distract us from the fact that what we are experiencing actually has no substance or content. It's like playing white-noise in order to distrupt a persons train of thought.
I come from the "old" school of action gaming, the original Doom, Blood etc. The first ever next-gen FPS I played was Half-Life2, followed by Bioshock,the first FEAR and then Painkiller - all excellent titles. I played a little of the CoD series on console around the CoD2/CoD3 era, but nothing since then. The thing is with the exception of a CoD4 MP free weekend I have never played a "modern military shooter"... that is until Yahtzee wouldnt't stop banging on about Spec-Ops: The Line. Now whilst I did find the Spec-Ops story interesting, by my standards and experience of FPS I would hardly even call Spec-Ops a game... more than half the time I spent in Spec-Ops I really didn't feel like I was "playing" at all. For me a scripted event simply is not gameplay - gameplay by definition is "interactive" which means that your decision processes should effect the outcome of events on the screen.
Spec:Ops did have an interesting story, and forcing the player down a narrow corridor occasionally pressing "use" to open a "door" does allow the developer tight control over the delivery... but HL2 showed us years ago that you can have a fantastically paced, involving story, with well developed characters and a coherant arc whilst NEVER taking the basic mechanic control away from the player and never needing to resort to "press this button to make this thing happen"... in HL2 (and HL1 so far as I remember) every "obstical" in the game is passed using the fundamental control mechanics of the game.
Why is it that almost all other game developers feel the need to resort to cut-scenes where control is taken away from the player? When valve want to advance the story with dialog they would simply lock you in a "room" with the other characters for the duration of the dialog still leaving you free to do what you want... runnage through cupboards, play with headcrabs or balance phys objects on one another. Occasionally you would be required to assit the other characters in some way to keep you engaged with what is going on, but otherwise the player always had total control. Gordon, being a silent protagonist, makes this system a little easier to pull-off, but it can still be achieved with a vocal protagonist.
After seeming to stray from the original point somewhat (what was the question?!) I'll bring it back into context (for anyone insane enough to still be reading by this point) that video-game story-telling is still a very elusive art, and over the whole history of video-gaming there are really very few examples that have managed to completely nail good story-telling within the context of the gameplay. I think it is fairly safe to assume however, that for those people looking for the magic marriage of story and gameplay, any IP that relies upon a PMC to drive the story is probably not going to be your "holy grail"...