El Comandante said:
This looks very interesting! Could be good.
Therumancer said:
You don't see say "Master Chief" throw some 12 year old Alien child who happened to join the opposing youth corps up against the wall with a dozen more like him and cut loose with a mini-gun, or say force a village to dig a trench, line the people up inside of it, and then machine gun all of them and cover it with a bulldozer, because that kind of crap just isn't fun. It's a necessary part of a real war (because it scares the living hell out of people, at first they become angry and line up to face you, but as you do it more and more, and it becomes inevitable, the spirit breaks and people will pretty much be willing to agree to what would otherwise be unthinkable terms to avoid it happening to them).
Genocid is not a necessary part of a real war! These crimes happen during a war because it is often thought to be the easy way. Maybe sometimes it is, but then you need to be very "rigorous". Otherwise it will come back and violence is going to happen again. The suffering comes with war but it´s not an necessary evil, it´s a direct or indirect consequence.
You named Bomber Harris and I think you allready said his tactic of demoralisation didn´t work. In fact it did´t the oppsite, most people already had given up all hope, but the fought on sometimes purly to get some kind of revenge. The nazi-propaganda was able to use these bombings to strech out the suffering even more. Here in germany even today neo-nazi-groups use these crimes as some sick kind of justification.
Actually "Bomber"'s tactics worked beautifully which is why he was lionized, and decorated by both his own people (the UK) and the US. He's just one example as well. By many accounts Patton himself would be considered "unworthy to wear the uniform" by the standards which politicians hold the military today.
The thing is that these tactics work, indeed they are the only tactics that truly work, which is why for the most part every "war" which has not employed them has been a failure. It's very true that the US military has not actually won a serious armed conflict since World War II, and the morality with which we try and fight is a big part of it. Those that try and buck the politicians and engage in real warfare, as per what we did to win World War II, are frequently considered war criminals and punished by their own people (ie us), and oftentimes have to try and hide their actions, as opposed to being decorated for doing the horrible, horrible, things that nobody wants to do, but must ultimately be done.
It should also be noted that groups like the UN have tried to re-define genocide substantially over the years, and in general liberals try and use that definition. In a proper sense genocide is when you are genuinely trying to kill ALL of a given people, and furthermore requires a people to be defined by ethnicity, as opposed to culture or beliefs. The Holocaust was an attempt at genocide, "ethnic cleaning" is an attempt at genocide, simply attacking large numbers of civilians is not genocide. If your going to try and frame it negatively it's properly "mass murder" but at the same time in war "murder" is not really a crime anymore when inflicted on the enemy. The idea of the tactics I'm mentioning are to end resistance, stop militias (people just defending their home), and of course shatter an idealogy by making it so a people are willing to surrender and give up what their culture has believes in for survival. For the most part if you say killed everyone in Germany, it wouldn't be genocide in a proper sense, as the white ethnicity would continue to survive, all you'd really be doing is destroying a specific culture. The UN tries to extent "genocide" to encompass cultures, but really that's stupid, and kind of hippocritical. At the end of the day it's generally a political move to try and end wars, and as a principle wasn't established when looking at cultures that are pretty much destructive to all other cultures. It's also noteworthy that by this liberal-redefinition we would have been considered guilty of "genocide" towards the Nazis, as would the current Germany government. After all that's an idealogy (an offensive one, like a lot of other cultures now), and one we continued to persecute for decades after the war ended, hunting down minor military figures (camp guards, etc...) who had long since stopped fighting and were pretty much just minding their own business. You might say "but that's different" but really it's not. That's what it takes to truly defeat an idealogy like that. You'll also notice you haven't exactly seen the UN backing "Nazi Pride parades" in Germany which has taken upon itself to be among the most harsh in attacking it.
At the end of the day you can't "win" a war or end the threat posed by another culture by say invading and trying to tell people what to do while letting the backbone of the culture and the beliefs that caused the problem (the people themselves) remain more or less unmolested. As long as the ideas continue more or less unfettered, you ensure more fighters, covert if not overt, will always be stepping up to face you. It's why despite our ideals of doing things like bringing women's sufferage to The Middle East, and helping the culture become progressive, we failed, seeing both Afghanistan and Iraq pass constitutions that declared themselves Islamic states (as opposed to nations where most people merely happen to be Islamic). The cultures by and large continued doing what they were doing, the worst excesses held back merely by gun toting Americans being everywhere and the possibility we could always change our mind. As many critics of "The War On Terror" have pointed out, we literally accomplished almost nothing trying to pursue a "war" in this fashion.
Now don't get me wrong, as I've said many times (and people tend not to get) I'm not saying mass murder is a nice thing, rather than it sucks, but it happens to be the reality when a war happens. It's also why while I'm a militant I believe in only going to war when there are good reasons for it (I am simply opposed to people who have "peace at any price" sentiments, but that's an entirely different discussion).
The overall point of this is that if your doing a game where a proper war is presumably being fought, either between humans and aliens, or two human factions, or whatever else, with the premise being that either side could presumably win (and perhaps with the starting assumption that the player's side is slowly losing in the beginning), these kinds of tactics are what is going to be being used. It just doesn't make a for a fun game though, both from a challenge perspective, and also because it's supposed to be entertaining, and really blowing away some 12 year old because he happened to be conditioned by the other side (Hitler Youth style) is a nasty thing, the kind of thing that needs to happen but people don't want to think about. This is why such games tend to focus on confrontations between military forces, and usually in fairly isolated areas where there aren't civilians around (or where the civilians are presumed already dead before the PC gets there). Games that have put civilians into games have generally made them more of an annoyance than a fun part of gameplay as well, or introduced them in such a way (Crusader) that they are functionally just a loot drop that doesn't fire back.
As I said, a game where your trying to survive/guide a bunch of people through a war zone could be interesting if done right, I mean functionally it's pretty much a stealth game. But doesn't strike me as being an intristically good idea or one with a valid message which some people might get from it. Not to mention that making something like this "fun" is always a big question. Violence against civilians is a necessary part of a real war, something people need to understand, especially nowadays, but it's not something people really want to see in the scope of an entertainment product which is pretty much why nobody has gone there.
To put things into one final perspective, there have been a few different video games over the years that let you play both sides of an old war. The Nazis are a popular choice for this, and it seems to always get some degree of controversy. The "fun" of it is that the Nazis had some really interesting weapons in terms of tanks, planes, and weapons that were in development but were never deployed (leading to some "what if" scenarios). People playing such games want to command some kind of super-tank, or one of the Luftwaffe's cooler planes, and that kind of thing, which is why such games for all the complaints tend to focus on the fighting as well. In general you only see sociopaths creating say "concentration camp simulators" and focusing on that aspect of the war. The same thing applies to the good guys albeit without the same inherent controversy, in reality we were just as bad in our atrocities when you get down to it, but nobody wants to play that, they just want to drive an awesome tank, or fight a battle, or whatever.
In theory you could say make a war game where your heroic GIs were say invading a city trying to get the Nazi elite out of their final bunkers, battling building to building, with most of the opposition coming from "Volkssturm" who were largely civilians simply trying to protect their homes, with the actual military NAzis not showing up until the final bits where you actually get to where "Colonel Von Evil" is shacked up or whatever. Over the years I've seen pictures of body piles and mass graves the US/UK/Russians left behind when they went on the offense, and it's just as sobering as the concentration camp footage (and deeply ingrained in certain anti-US propaganda). Again that's not fun, and exactly why when you start a level your PC is typically right in front of Colonel Von Evil's doom fortress (or on the final approach to it) rather than focusing on all the stuff you presumably needed to do in order to get there.
