Should historic games have like world war two games avoid harsh subjects?

[Barbas]

War games should start showing a lot more of what happened. They should show the distrust, the atrocity, the disastrous and suicidal battles, the horror, the moments of all-consuming hatred, the engineered starvation, the torture, the barbarism and the absolute shattering of any notion of chivalry or any semblance of order to the proceedings. They shouldn't leave out the basements of raped German women, the British nurses bayoneted to death or the frozen corpses of Russian conscripts, propped up to stand like morbid scarecrows. They should be a chilling reminder of just how lucky anyone is not to be born into war.

But they should do it when they're ready, and they're not ready yet. Baby steps.

Why do you think they're not ready?

We're still seeing a lot of games that retread fairly safe ground by going with a western protagonist fighting some unmistakably alien and evil force. When we see games addressing something like World War II, it's often on the western front and rarely explores the world or lives of the soldiers you're fighting against. The more distant action, like what was really happening to people in China, Russia or Poland, is more difficult to address without resorting to cliches and if you get it wrong, you risk alienating both your audience and the people whose lives you were trying to portray. I don't think they're ready, but I think they should be getting ready, because too many people who served in wars or national service feel cut off from those who didn't, because they feel that there isn't really any way for those who didn't partake to understand how they feel or live.

 

[the_dramatica]

Well they have to, with a AAA development budget you need your game to appeal to a mass audience.

Hundreds of jobs supersedes the importance of attempting to have an impactful narrative. Devs, like the ones of SWTOR, have had to lay off over a thousand employees after the game released and they didn't even try anything. Then you have Nintendo that would never risk have a narrative at all, and prefer to appeal to all audiences with every internal game they make.

 

[Tilly]

Um...absolutely? As long as they take is seriously. I mean a game where a grizzled, handsome white male rides in on a flaming motorcycle, punches out Heinrich Himmler and then bangs Eva Braun and her twin sister while singing the American National Anthem should probably not be made.

Are you disputing the official story?

 

[Smooth Operator]

They should some day for sure, but right now we are going through the age of offended nancies ... release a game with serious topics and they will have your head on a spike.

Some day however, in a galaxy far far away a good writer will sit down with a good dev and they will make something worth taking note. But the requirement for high quality production is bigger then anywhere else, even without a spazzy audience it is very easy to miss the tone of a scene and make sour the entire story.

 

[Kristoffer]

They had an xbox game set in a concentration camp.

It was just ok.

 

[Ravenier]

Considering that at least one person will have his or her sensibilities offended by absolutely everything, there is no point in trying to avoid "harsh" topics because they might offend someone. That being said, I think not all platforms are equally suitable for such topics.

For instance, there is a wide plethora of WWII strategy games (both RTS and turn-based), but neither of them really makes you care about the people you commandeer. They're disposable units on varying battlefields. As a result, I think that a First Person shooter would be better to capture the gruesome conditions on the battlefields of WW I and WW II (especially the former, about whose trench warfare relatively few games exist).

More extreme examples such as the Holocaust or the Mass Starvation during the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" are harder to package into a game. "I have no mouth and I must scream" had one chapter that was clearly based on a concentration camp (sans the proper insignia) but had a proper border, so to speak, because the entire game revolved various forms of living nightmares. Even so, said KZ chapter was removed from the German version, making it impossible to achieve the game's good ending.