Probably the worst article I have ever read on the Escapist.
Why are IED's not included in video GAMES? Because they don't make sense in a FPS context. While most Iraq or Afghanistan vets probably know someone who was hit with an IED, still it's not like it's happened to the majority thankfully. If it was actual gameplay, it would just be a random game over, from which a player would restart and move on. And if it happens in some big pre-animated cut scene, is it really different than in video games where your chopper crashes or the road is blocked, so now the mandatory vehicle section is over? And this all over looking the most important part. IED's hit vehicles during boring times. Most convoys don't get attacked, so to accurately reflect the true devastation of having your friends die during a routine commute, you would need the player to just drive a truck or Humvee somewhere, hour after hour, and randomly, so possibly never for some players, they would get hit by an IED.
Games would be more realistic if characters also had to have bowel movements once in awhile. But that would be a pretty boring or very juvenile aspect of a game. Games exist to entertain, and players PLAY them. Mixed forces throughout history have found it's often hard to avoid friendly fire. In a game, either it wouldn't matter, and thus the friendly fire aspect becomes trivial and borderline sociopathic, or players would simply restart a level, until they got frustrated and quit.
Oh waaa, games don't treat the Russians nicely enough. It's not like they are backing Assad or Iran or recently invaded Georgia or anything. The Russians are not our friends.
This is just like feminists complaining that there aren't enough games made by or for women. Games didn't just fall into men's or American's laps. If some indie studio of Iranians wants to portray their side of the horror of the Iran Iraq war, that would be perfectly fine. But how many other sides should US studios have to make?
This is really an indictment of our school system than an argument about what should go into games. By that logic we should make games primarily about science and math because that's where Americans are really lagging behind.
Our tech has given us a tremendous edge. It obviously can't cover all military and strategic mistakes, but games don't incorporate those aspects to begin with. We don't have a game that combines the Sims with Civilization with a RTS with a FPS.
If the author applied the same standard from Iraq to WWII they would not say we won that war either, because reconstruction was violent and long as well.
Very few people would argue that tech is the only thing that matters. If it was, there would be no point to most RTS games or many others, because the way to win would simply stay technologically ahead of the enemy, strategy and production wouldn't matter.
The British could have afforded far more Isandlwana-esque conflicts than the Zulus could. Their casualties were atrocious and hit the Zulu nation far harder than the British losses affected Britain. even repeating it 4 times would have left 5,000 of the 125,000 Zulu men dead and another 10,000 wounded. This would have greatly impacted farming and would have had long term impacts. Meanwhile the British would have lost 3000 men, from a population of 5,750,000 men. Nor would it have impacted British farming.
In Afghanistan, the Russians were actually easily crushing the Afghanis until the US decided to give them Red Eye and few Stinger missiles.
