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| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| Is World War 1 Too Hot to Touch for Gaming? | |
| 2016-05-14 | |
| The new trailer for Battlefield 1 (the counterintuitive sequel to Battlefield 4) was released this week to overwhelmingly positive reviews. It was so well liked, in fact, that it garnered the distinction of being the most popular trailer in YouTube history. But while players were stoked for a game set in World War 1, a setting rarely touched by the genre, culture critics in the media and on Twitter found it in poor taste. After decades of ultra-violent video games depicting all sorts of travesties, apparently WW1 is the line in the sand for some critics. Guardian writer Alex Hern asks if it’s wrong to set a war game in the trenches of WW1, before answering it with an implied yes. “Asking whether the first world war is an appropriate topic for a first-person shooter may reveal a more pressing question: why do we think any war is?” Hern says. “A game set in the Great War will necessarily whitewash the horrors of trench warfare. Even when games do tenderly address these subjects, they rarely do so through the medium of 64v64 class-based combat.”
But that doesn’t mean some version of the war should not be translated into a game. While Battlefield 1 will partially take place in the trenches, its developers made a point to include many variant fronts in the war. The Italian Alps, Arabian desserts and the forests of the Eastern Front will lend themselves better to the fast pace of multiplayer. Wired’s Jake Muncy had similar reservations. “This might sound like an exciting new frontier for the genre, but there’s a reason WW1 has long been no-man’s land for developers: It was a quagmire of death and disease that turned strategy into slaughter, with no handy narrative of heroism to layer gameplay atop.” Where was Muncy during the launch of the thousands of Vietnam games? While the carnage and death tolls of the two wars don’t compare, it’s not the first time games have been set in pointlessly destructive wars. Besides World War 2, most modern wars were quagmires. We didn’t see people tiptoeing around video game depictions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Probably the most naval-gazing criticism came from radical SJW Jonathan McIntosh. You may know him as the guy who led a Twitter mob after Joss Whedon, causing the director to quit Twitter for the crime of putting a Black Widow-Hulk love plot in Avengers 2. “Everybody about WW1 was horrific, brutal and tragic,” he writes. But that’s true of most wars. So is hell for that matter, the setting for the popular Doom franchise. That does not mean it won’t make a good video game. In a long Twitter screed, McIntosh even parroted ’90s fears of violent video games leading to real life violence. He took an argument straight from Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer who spent his career in a losing battle against “amoral” video games until he was disbarred for misconduct. The problem with these critics assumptions about Battlefield 1 is they treat a game as some definitive source of knowledge regarding the war. Obviously it won’t perfectly capture how terrible it felt to be bombed to hell inside a trench just like FIFA doesn’t teach you how it feels to win a World Cup. If I want to learn about the war, I’ll watch a Ken Burns documentary. If I want to dogfight in biplanes, flamethrower some Germans and run over people in antiquated tanks, I’ll play me some Battlefield 1. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #9 Thing is, all the Battlefield games play about the same in multi-player mode. They have to because each character and weapons package has to be balanced. If not, nobody plays. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2016-05-14 20:26 |
| #8 Their can only one Raj, but that's okay, And I just remembered I can't make a link with iOS, but that's okay, things are different now, not better but different, is it me or was the Sunday Joint better before 1972? The roast beef was better as well. Anyway, here's the link, can't imbed. http://youtu.be/T6xJzAYYrX8 |
| Posted by: Shipman 2016-05-14 17:38 |
| #7 I think the reason there has never been a WW1 game was not because of the carnage but because nobody had found a way to make trench warfare fun. They apparently have figured that out now. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2016-05-14 16:03 |
| #6 Interesting link, Raj. I never realized Ken Burns was such a douche. Still, credit where credit is due, he *is* responsible for the Ken Burns Effect, that slow pan across a still photograph that fools you into thinking something insightful is happening. As in this episode of American Experience, for example. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2016-05-14 14:04 |
| #5 If I want to learn about the war, I’ll watch a Ken Burns documentary. Self parody. |
| Posted by: Raj 2016-05-14 12:08 |
| #4 Rhetorical question. However, the answer is NO. Someone had to fill space in print or on the web for this one. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-05-14 08:03 |
| #3 never underestimate the Left's willingness to beat a dead horse. Or willingness to back a dead horse, for that matter. Remember that a big part of virtue signaling is therapy for for the signaler. These [gender indeterminate descriptor] are prone to being a mess mentally. The sad part is, when this line of rhetoric blows up in their faces, the best possible outcome will be a church-lady-esque "Nevermind" |
| Posted by: Nguard 2016-05-14 07:50 |
| #2 SJW! Stilts plug-in never got off the ground. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2016-05-14 03:38 |
| #1 A writer for the Left Wing Guardian huh. Another Social Justice warrior trying to revive Gamer Gate. Trying desperately to keep history on their side and signal their virtue. Meanwhile they couldn't make a popular game if their lives depended on it. |
| Posted by: Chaith Oppressor of the Lutherans1517 2016-05-14 02:50 |