Redefining the Anti-War Video Game
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
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About this video essay:
What do video games really communicate to us about the reality of war? This in-depth analysis examines how our interaction with video game violence is contextualized through game design and storytelling, how they reflect and shape our perception of war, and explores the real purpose and meaning of immersing yourself in virtual warfare.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction: A New Art of (Anti-)War
8:01 Part 1: Engaging the Video Game
16:44 Part 2: The Gamification of Combat
24:34 Part 3: In Search of Meaningful Gameplay
33:27 Part 4: Hero Simulators
43:44 Part 5: The Struggles of Narrative
53:58 Part 6: The Good Fight
1:03:00 Part 7: Righteous Warriors
1:16:18 Conclusion: A Liberating Ideal
Sources:
[1] “Is there any such thing as an ‘anti-war film’?” www.bbc.com/culture/article/2...
[2] Noah Caldwell-Gervais - The Complete Call of Duty Single Player Campaign Critique (For PC) • The Complete Call of D...
[3] Footage by SmileLantern: / @smilelantern
[4] Dr. Glenn Walters, in; wonder.ph/popculture/why-we-l...
[5] “Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?” people.unil.ch/agnieszkasolty...
[6] Footage by KahalachanGames: • Playing Grand Theft Au...
[7] Ernest Becker - Escape From Evil amzn.to/3koXV0a
[8] Donald Rumsfeld, in: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/C...
[9] Ulrich Beck - World at Risk amzn.to/3s0zn1C
[10] Jacob Geller - Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything? • Does Call of Duty Beli...
[11] William James - The Moral Equivalent of War www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/mo...
Further Reading:
Like Stories of Old - The Complete Reading List: kit.co/likestoriesofold/readi...
10 Books that changed my life: kit.co/likestoriesofold/10-bo...
10 More books that inspired my thinking: kit.co/likestoriesofold/10-mo...
My Camera Gear: kit.co/likestoriesofold/my-tr...
Media included:
Battlefield; Brothers in Arms; Call of Duty; Death Stranding; Metal Gear Solid; Hell Let Loose; Killzone; Spec Ops: The Line; The Last of Us; This War of Mine
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“We collect the most astonishingly brave people, don't we?” Jim said. “And then we watch them die.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls.
Ooooh The expanse series.
We all die in the end, better to die how you want than not.
@@alexforce9 I expected no less than men and women of culture at this channel :P
God I love the Expanse so much
Watch! Amateurs, we cause them die!
I remember the first time a war game grossed me out.
I was playing Call of Duty World At War, and killed a Japanese soldier who was wearing glasses. It was one small little detail, but it made me think of how much it must have sucked to have to fight for your life with shitty eyesight. The game felt a little bit more real, reminding me that real war isn't just a bunch of fit dudes shooting each other.
Every individual had an entire life they've lived, only to have it taken by a little piece of metal flying through the air and ripping through their skin. Gone, just like that.
Sonder.
Yeah were all gonna die, just like that. Die an epic way at least
People should stop killing other people
world at war forces you to do what you don't want to.
just like real war
you could hide in one place and wait for everyone do do your job for you
but they won't
@@ryszakowy OK, but what _"job"_ are we talking about...?
In the words of American Major General Smedley Butler, “Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. The was the 'war to end wars.' This was the 'war to make the world safe for democracy.' No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits."
And the general said this about American warfighting in 1935, *_before_* World War 2.
"You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies-which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world-what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
This will definitely be another journey into the heart of darkness.
Thank you for this!
Thank you for this - what a great quote: I fear lies as I would a trap
15:50 to be fair, I COD WaW is designed this way because it assumes you’re going to play as a bloodthirsty killer. The Russian side of the campaign in particular was specifically designed around the themes of how war changes you. You can see this most prominently in Reznov, where he knows the Nazis must be brought down, and he knows he’ll have to do horrible things to achieve that; he realizes that his and his allies’ actions against them are a necessary evil, but he slowly forgets about the evil part as the campaign progresses. As for the American side, you see your allies die alot more than you do with the Russian campaign, and you know you won’t be getting backup. Your brothers in arms are your only allies, and the only way to protect them is to kill the Japanese. In essence, WaW is designed in a way that forces you to commit violence against the enemy because that’s exactly what real life wars do. Thanks to anyone that reads this.
👍
tbh World at war on Soviet campaign ignited my extreme hatred against the Germans, whenever the cutscene shows up and with Reznov speaking i feel his anger and hatred to the Germans, for the Pacific campaign i felt the horror and the brutality of the jungle warfare. I have tendency to shoot any trees and even shoot the dead bodies just to be sure.
I just realized it when my friend pointed it out how in the last campaign of the Okinawa i shoot every dead Japanese body, he was shocked and i told him that they are always playing dead. I send him the game after i finished it and a week later he changed
Chernov in his notebook will also change based on how many warcrimes you do or how you disobey and not kill unarmed soldiers
He will say that you are a hero and Reznov was right about you being a role model or he will say you're no different than any other Red Army soldiers, cold blooded and vengeance seekers.
“necessary evils” always strike me as a dangerous myth, people have perpetuated far too many pointless crimes under that justification.
Honeslty, Reznov is a horrible person. Hate seeing people idolize him.
“None of this would have happened if you just stopped”
Spec ops: The Line was a masterpiece in my eyes and always will be
Kind of defeats the purpose of buying a 60$ dollar entertainment thing.
@@ghostrecon1171 I think the point is less about shaming people for buying it and more about demonstrating that we enjoy the things we do in these games, even when some of it is truly terrible, which imo is a pretty smart spin on the usual military game story.
@@stanners1714 That's true too, though kind of sad then people went crazy with battle royale later. Which is survival at any cost for entertainment.
@@stanners1714 hotline miami did it better with one line. "Do you enjoy hurting people"
Not really. Spec ops is about as meta as a videogame is ever going to get. The only way to truly "beat" the game is to stop playing it, and yet you don't fully realise and accept that until you've finished it, by which point it's too late, which is practically the whole human experience in a nutshell.
It's easily the most philosophical experience I've ever had playing a shooter, and one that I'd gladly pay £60 again to experience afresh.
When I was ten I played a lot of Operation Flashpoint. In the game I was just promoted to leutenent and was finally leading a whole battlegroup. Durring our first engagement, about ten seconds into the mission, I start to hear bullet zipping close to me. I got shot by a hidden enemy somewhere sixhundred meters away from me.
For anyone who never played this dinosaur of a game, Operation Flashpoint was hard, really really hard, and I died at least two hundred times before this specific event. And yet somehow every time I died it always felt like any other game death. It happened because I made a mistake, it happened because I was not familiar with the mechanics or because I was just bad at the game.
Somehow this one death felt different. I didn't make a mistake, I didn't do anything that I was not meant to, I died by absolutely random chance. The enemy was not even aiming at me specifically and got shot himself a fraction of a second later.
When I think about the true essence of war, I think about those zips.
Operation Flashpoint... The getting your legs blown off only to get captured by Soviets simulator.
10/10 game.
@@hajimeokajima lol
I have PTSD from playing that game... Playing as Armstrong during the evacuation of Everon was scary...
@@LayLowOfficial My personal scariest moment was when playing the pilot I had to escape in the night from the russian camp. I remember the terror of skulking in the night around the woods with no weapons or any other mean to defend myself, knowing that dozens of soldiers were right behind with the order to shoot on sight.
It was rather cathartic when I restarted the mission, climbed inside of the Hind that had landed near the camp and rained every bullet and rocket it had loaded on it on my former jailers.
@@jacoporegini8841 Oh shit... i remember that one! I ran into a squad of spetsnaz in the dead of night while they were wearing the nv goggles. I remember seeing those green dots in the forest and just running for dear life. I only stopped once i made it to a friendly base...
Spec Ops The Line has always stuck with me. And I wish more games had writing like it.
Came here to see if he talked about Spec Ops. The perfect Anti-war game.
@@RogueOriginFilms I know, right? I wish more military shooters took chances like Spec Ops did.
Spec Ops The Line was the only game I ever finished that felt like I finished an entire series of books. If you know the feeling you know what I mean.
I still never played it but it changed me.
Haunted to this day by it.
One really surprising Anti-War game for me was Ghost Recon Wildlands with it's introduction of "Ghost Mode", a perma-death mode which added many other desired features like friendly fire, bleeding out and being restricted to carrying only one primary and only being able to change your weapon at ammo/weapon crates.
And having friends that would play it with limited HUD options it became less of a game about night invincible spec-ops dudes single-handedly taking down a terrorist organization and instead a story about technical guerilla warfare where every tactical option available was used to minimize risks, because small mistakes could cascade into major disasters.
If an operation to blow up some soundstage speakers going south due to a panicking civilian accidentally running over one of the operators while he's crossing the street and only one operator surviving the ordeal by stealing a car from a civilian isn't a perfect anti-war game scenario I don't know what is.
Or when we had a mission to assassinate a cartel bosses assistant.
His house was on a lake's peninsula and I figured out I had enough resources to upgrade my drone into an explosive variant.
So I came up with the plan where we took a fishing boat to the side of the peninsula closest to the target house from where I then sent my little drone away and blew it up behind the target while he was talking on the phone.
In the non perma-death mode we would have thought of the most fun strategy to use, but instead we went with the most pragmatic solution.
It also got me thinking about the brutality of modern drone warfare.
Man, I play that shit every day... such a good mode, would operate again 10/10.
Look at what drones are doing in Ukraine
“Anti war” you mean reality lol
@@michelangelo4483 i completely get what youre pointing out, but tbf that is kinda the argument surrounding pro- and anti-war media. The media that gets praised for being anti-war is usually that which best captures war and makes it seem as if youre really there, because the horrific nature and suffering of war is inherently an argument against going to war. you cant accurately represent war without showing all the soldiers dying on the frontlines and civilians suffering on the homefront, and by showing them you shatter the romanticised view of war. meanwhile games like COD and battlefield potentially distort the nature of war too much for the purpose of entertainment and thus can be seen as pro-war in a way, in terms of making it look like a heroic crusade and not accurately depicting what war is actually like
Damn I never though anyone would mention this but you're right, although there's some ways to kinda workaround the perma-death, it does hit me when you see your stats of your dead character, like no matter how ultra-super-secret-special-pro-operator you are, you still can die very easily to even some stupid bullshit. I think about how this could have been a real person who went through all this to become this spec ops soldier and be chosen for this mission and just die like that. I like the perma death because it helps bring back the fear and tension and thrill of being in fights instead of death being a small inconvenient setback.
As we get older we realize there is reason behind most actions, rarely is there a cartoonish villain but different people who seek to serve themselves
The only difference most of the time is which side has a better grasp of optics
I think it's even omre gray than that. The quest for "good optics" has led people to making up lies when the truth was damning enough.
1st gulf war - Iraq annexes kuwait, a woman appeared to the world and told of heinous crimes commited where she worked (Maternity hospital). The problem was, this woman was lying, she was a kuwaiti princess.
Don't forget that after the Iraqi army had done with Kuwait it actually ventured into Saudi Arabia. Think about that, Iraq had a huge feared army at the time, it was capable against these lesser arabian penusiula peers and on the "outside" being baathist. They agressed against kuwait by invading and then, jumped the shark further by going into Saudi, which ruined their previous arguments of Kuwait undermining their oilwells.
That was in the 90's. The 2nd gulf war involved us ignoring the historical fact Sadam used Teargas and various other chemical weapons on the Iranians and also used the same shit to harm ethnic groups in his own country. "No WMD;s" i guess no one was around for the iran iraq war or what happened to the kurds or shia.
@@BigFormula93 took the words right out of my mouth I have relatives in their 80s that are still as ignorant as they were as kids arguably even more now
As we age into our late 20s and 30s I think it's also important to realize that though this is often true, and will almost always be true in our personal life, the goals, methods, and self imposed limits of these two sides, at scale, are rarely equivalent. There is real evil out there, true unbridled avarice, and the kinds of monsters we forget exist because we rarely see them and aren't bothered by the ones we do. They're too far away to be the "bad guy," and surely there's a reason for their behavior.
I don't care that the sex trafficking kidnapper of children had a rough childhood, he's evil now. Putin, same deal. Xi Jingping? Argue there a misunderstood leader just trying to lead his country into the future beneath the mask of hate and lust for power.
It's not a sign of maturity to forget this. It's a sign of privilege.
Absolute horseshit.
Different people who seek to serve themselves are villains by definition
@@userJohnSmith what is xinjang
He used the CoD: Vanguard mission of the russian woman getting caught in a sudden attack, and i get it, its really is a powerful scene, but for me, ever since the Embassy mission, in CoD: Modern Warfare 2019, there hasn't been a more shocking scene them that of that one moment where you reach the ground floor, insurgents are storming in, and their leader grabs a man, asks you to give back their General, and once he gets no response from you, executes the guy in front of you, Price, and his son... and after that, he asks again, and points the gun at the kid, and without hesitation, kills the child once you refuse to comply with what he is asking.
What stuck with me the most about that, is that, the entire time you see that you can in fact open the security door to have access to where they are, but the game won't allow you to be a hero in the sense of a action movie, and to gun down everyone before they can even react, the decision of opening that door, much like in real life, will result in your pointless death, and the death of everyone behind that security door as well, so even though you can "do something" you have to sit there and accept that, you have to let that father and son die, that its the "best choice" you can make.
Moral relativism and the path of least resistance. Is there a right or a wrong? Doesn't matter, the best you can do is the best you can do and you have to accept that that's enough. Pretty damn sobering and realistic.
@@gooddoggo3547 Thing is, MW 2019 doesn´t hide the fact that its main characters do terrible things. The issue is that it presents them as cool and/or necessary. Here is cocky Captain Price with that charming smile of his, all manliness and bravado, telling you that "hey, you wanted to commit war crimes, so enjoy the ride".
So few modern war games ever bother to ask the question "is there no value, no positive result in doing what is right?" We have accepted war, we have accepted the worst crime there is, so it doesn´t really take all that much to get worse. All you have to do is ease people into it, and Modern Warfare has decided to participate in that. In dragging civilization through the mud and down into the cesspit.
@@gooddoggo3547 I never argued against that. MW has become the videogame equivalent of "24".
@@katamariroller2837 didn't get that feeling. just seemed like it was telling us what price thought. Not what we should think. I think you are just a little impressionable.
@@gooddoggo3547 the problem with that is that at the very base of what pro war or anti war means is to argue the point of fighting. The game tried to show you what it's like to fight barbarians. People with little to no provocation who are willing to go aggress and even kill others for their own benefit or purpose. At the end of the day fighting is simply fighting. You can't have a pro or anti stance as you run the risk of implying you can be anti justified war or pro unjustifiable war. It's never as simple as pro or anti this or that. Of course your end judgement may (even justifiably) be as simple as that. However, if you're taking a stance and you don't want to appear as nothing more than nunce. Than you must present yourself as being either anti or pro reason (for that war).
However, there are reasons for why your judgement of the game maybe correct, but you neglected a better reason for it. There's never a reason given on the part of the barbaric actions from the russians. What do they get for all the blood shed? Are they being paid well? Are they being offered the spoils of the war? Are they desperate for some reason, maybe resources? None of that is given. All we get at the most is a reason on the part of the leader. However, that is simply not enough. There must be reason given behind the troop. Otherwise you get what we have here, blood thirsty automatons. This doesn't even touch the egregious history rewriting the game practices. Which makes presenting the the enemy that which is a nation of people a bunch of blood thirsty automatons.
Absolutely brilliant man
If you want something anti-war, you show it all. The horror, the suffering, the unrestricted violence and obscenity- the quiet moments between battle, when soldiers probe at their finite chances of survival, but never acknowledge it directly. You don't have people waxing poetic about the suffering they're in- you have people distracting themselves, mentally exercising their violence as a job, and nothing more. You show violence, unabridged. Any observation should come after the fact, when the trauma sits below the surface. Suffering persists throughout the work. Nobody likes war, that's a fact. But wars are fought, regardless. Even the toughest soldiers detach the suffering from themselves, even when they took a part in that suffering.
The way war is portrayed in most media is what we call 'Hollywood'. It's dramatized, too flashy, too much dialog and not enough of the suffering of the human condition, and tries to wax poetic on morals, rather than reality. There are no 'good guys' or 'bad guys' on the battlefield. There are men on both side with varying degrees of compassion, empathy, and humanity, compelled to act or die, either by the enemy's hand, or by the hands of your faction for being a malingerer or a deserter.
Combat should feel rough, sloppy, rushed, laden with anxiety. Weapons never jam or fail to extract rounds in games. Your weapon never fails to feed. You always throw grenades with accuracy, they go where you put them. Fear never takes hold of your avatar, impacting your aim or your ability to reload or throw those grenades. The impending anxiety of being shot and possibly dying never seems addressed. The importance of missions seem to overstate your ability of self-preservation.
'Hero simulator' is an apt metaphor for these kinds of games. You're given all the tools you need, all the handicaps necessary, to win, to be better than the 'enemy'. There is at no point in these simulations where you are truly out-matched. Your pack is never too heavy to carry comfortably, you sprint with little effect impacted on your legs and back, you never falter in your steps. The absurdity that the enemy has no heroics of their own- all of it is detached from you. This is what creates the fallible nature of games, war games in particular. Nobody's mental health is questioned, their grip on sanity never put at risk, nor is the ambiguous moral nature of war ever depicted- 'good guys' never do bad things to civilians, to each other, and in turn, 'bad guys' never show compassion, mercy, hesitation in their mission.
Nothing depicted has come close to that, even when critics say otherwise. One day, someone will come along and make a game that addresses these 'shortcomings', depicting war in all its macabre idiosyncrasies, and it'll be shelved; denied its chance to show what war is, because at the end of the day, if people stop playing these games, these big companies stop making money. Games that don't sell are 'bad', by their metric.
Even those that adhere to the 'anti-war' philosophy would pan the release of this game with the empty claim that it would 'glorify' the violence. Those that advocate the use of war would use the same arguments to point out that it's too damaging to players to undergo that kind of suffering.
Would that really change how we see war? Or would we, by that point, be so numb to the thought of conflict itself, that it would simply be another drop in the bucket, scrutinized and made inconsequential?
Good points, though, from my understanding, some of the things you say "never" happen have been in a game or two. (I've heard several of those points might be in spec ops: the line.) But I don't know if they have all been in the same game, and I will agree that they are rarely acknowledged in the majority of games.
One thing that pulls me out of my immersion is when a game enemy begs for mercy but is incapable of surrendering because the code just doesn't allow it. That alone could potwntially provide a different perspective for the player.
@@GnarledStaff Exceptions don't make the rule, which is why I spoke in general, because most don't address these ideas and topics- some do, if only briefly.
Then it's not a game, it's a documentary. These shortcomings don't need to be addressed because that would make the game not very fun.
@@nipoone6109 I bring forth Operation Flashpoint and other MilSims as a counter point.
Operation Flashpoint specifically rather than ARMA, because OF was originally designed as an anti war game in mind. While ARMA devolved into a context-less MilSim.
I'd say escape from Tarkov is a pretty realistic game
One core truth of war that video games, and media in general, almost always overlook is that the majority of casualties in war aren't killed. They're wounded or captured. How many FPS games have the enemy surrender and you carting them off to a POW camp?
I would love to see that. But at same time, I feel like it would wind up being very experimental and limited in scope.
There's a lot of reasons both technical and gameplay side for why games give us this weird 'kill'm all' version of warfare.
I wish more games would give people reasons to surrender rather than fight until the end.
@@matthewjones39
enemy soldier who had there weapon taken away ,charging head first into a battalion with nothing but a combat knife and than getting fill with holes always gets me to laugh
They had a few moments like that in COD2 but still very few
In Metro: Exodus, enemies will sometimes surrender if you killed enough of them. You can choose to execute them, or knock them out non lethally (So you can take their weapons and ammo).
Arma was also great in showing you another reality of war... you can go a half hour or more(i've played missions that last 4-5 hours) with no contact, then all of a sudden you are under fire and have no idea from where.. and more often then not die still not knowing.
The tedium to extreme danger switch that so many who have experienced war talk about.
I have never cared much for the COD style gameplay, I always wanted the more realistic simulation, it always felt more.. right? to me and frankly more fun then killing 10 n00bs in a 10 minute match of run and gun.
I play arma , as well as airsoft and I will tell you, the most intense moments are those precise moments of acute awareness before an engagement.
The hunt, if you will. Not knowing where enemy is, or when they'll strike.
Arma 3 editor, with its self made missions , steals hours of my life to crafting the perfect scenario. Trying to recreate or create, certain feelings of nostalgia. For example recreating Socom 2 missions , purely for my self, to recreate the feeling I got when I first played it.
The impact of video games on culture and consciousness of individuals can't be ignored.
Not only is the combat (and lack thereof) more realistic and intense in Arma, but with Zeus missions you can genuinely end up with "do you feel like a hero yet" moments. One Operation I was GMing, we essentially had a situation in a Supermarket where local militia were sick of the nearby Russian garrison bullying locals, and decided to occupy the supermart to protect the townsfolk. I send my squad to meet the Russian patrol on scene, make contact with the militia and try to resolve the issue. Talks start breaking down, somebody decided "fuck it" and long story short an RPG ends up going into the shop. When the dust settled the chat was pretty fucking quiet, took the lads a minute to actually get over that one...
Battlefield 1's story missions, particularly the opening Storm of Steel, did a great job showing how horrible the reality of modern war is. The line "You are not expected to survive" sticks with me
And then in one of the next missions you spawn in as a soldier with a magic metal suit, being unstoopable and mow down every enemy soldier lmao
@@unison_moodywhich is the only mission you fail, your mission is to find and protect your brother and yet not even your super soldier level armor can help you save him. Which I think does a great way of showing just how insignificant you are individually in the bloody horrors of war , showing how your armor, your skill, none of it matters for you are just as likely to fail and or die as anyone else.
Part 6, "The Good Fight" really struck me. I worked on a WW2 museum ship as a summer job for a few years in a row, and the romanticism of the conflict was to me, the most unsettling aspect of speaking with people about the ship.
Most people working there recognised the myths surrounding the Second World War and ultimately strove to tell a story of the ship which was true. The ship being a small, relatively modest patrol ship when compared to giant battleships and even comparatively large destroyers actually assisted with a more down-to-earth telling of the story.
However, the implications of what you call "the nostalgia for righteous warfare" always haunted me. The ship too, was a modest veteran, which made people seem to admire it even more, just like their understanding of the people who fought in the Second World War. I felt that for some, the ship, no matter how modest, no matter how well we told its story with all its tragedies and faults, would still become a symbol of uncritical hero worship.
What has disgusted me the most in recent years and made me question what I was doing all those summers more than anything, was of course the currently ongoing 2022 War in Ukraine. Russia especially has invoked imagery of the Second World War (known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union) in their propaganda against Ukraine. They created a conspiracy that Ukrainian Neo-Nazis are running the country. This is of course utter nonsense. Ukrainian Neo-Nazis exist, but saying they run the country is insulting. Anyone with half a brain and access to information these days can clearly see the biggest fascist in Europe today is Putin.
However, I cannot emphasise enough the danger of this conflict being portrayed as a righteous one, even if it is so. It is not the righteousness of the Ukrainian's defence of their homes which is the danger, it is how that struggle appeals to us. Let me be clear: We should be helping Ukraine, but it must be strategic, in such a way that it narrows the scope of the war instead of causing the conflict to escalate out of control. I think it is a righteous war for the Ukrainians. However, I also believe that it is exactly the kind of conflict that could allow our nations to uncritically slide towards greater militarism. I can't help but feel this desire for righteous warfare and militarism was something I might have inadvertently assisted in fostering.
However though, I think the ship itself is such an important artefact. It's the last of its kind with so much importance to the families of the veterans who served on it. The organisation running the ship also employed a lot of veterans, which I always saw as a good thing, giving them a peaceful work environment that still had some relation to their military service. That, and I was able to get so many people to understand a the Second World War in a new way. Ultimately, I think our school system should make changes to stop inadvertently perpetuating myths about the Second World War and hero systems in general.
All that trash and u said nothing. 🥱 all countries have propaganda. All countries have a will to exist whether u agree to it or not is irrelevant. Russia will have to do what it has to do in order to keep existing.
All this bullshit your blabbing on about righteousness and "helping". Go join their foreign forces or stfu. U clowns on here with that babble, while u sit comfortably at home flag waving typing that shit. Youre about as useless as every Ukrainian man that fled that country to save his own ass before they even got there.
We all love our country until its time to really put it all on the line. Then well...then we run the other direction or we hope that people from other countries help us out...
What makes me laugh even more is people give a shit more about strangers thousands of miles away than the homeless guy who froze to death in the alley by your house.
Let us help the Ukrainians, but not our neighbors, fuck those guys. Lol
Pfbbbt. Ugh people. I swear.
You are correct about everything except the impunity with which the actual (not neo-) Bandera Nazis kill civilians and ultimately made Ukraine not a home for 17-30% of its population. Mocking the Russians with Nazi imagery, ideology and emulation was suicide and NATO encouraged it.
The more this conflict goes on the more my mind keeps drawing parallels to the US invasion of Iran in the early 2000s. What I am going to say is not a defense of russias current agressions but it does seem eerie how the two are not so different after all once we have the advantage of hindsight. Most of the reasons the US gave for the attack on Iran were of course as we later learned false some might even say propaganda and lagre parts of the goal of the war were political and economical. As Putin is doing right now the justification was based on the liberation of the Iranian people from their dictatorship where we have the advantage that the claims were a least somewhat more true than what Putin is claming now.(and of course the myth about weapons of mass destruction which is as false as Putins claim of Ukrain being lead by Neonazis) But of course on both sides the opinion of the civil populous that might prefer living like they have been (at least compared to war) and of parts of the ukrainian populace that might prefer russian conquest (though I doubt the latter are very many) are irrelevant since they dont fit the story.
It again becomes easy for people to point out russia as evil and clearly the fight against them is righteous while their reasons and justifications for their agression are only barely more false and insane than what we had from the US side about 20 years ago. It is a trapping one falls into very easily.
This again is not supposed to be a "what aboutims" argument for the russian agression far from it and I also do not want to disregard the right of the Ukranians to defend their homes. Similar my musings lead me to the question who ever talked about the right of the Iranian people to defend their homes against the foreign agressor. Sure the US was never interested in actually including Iran into the US but I feel that is a detail that doesnt really matter all that much if your home gets destroyed in the process.
What has this got to do with the video? maybe not that much but it got me thinking how when viewed from the outside there is not as much difference between the situations as one might like.
@@chidori0117 I think you are talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
@@blackoutalt2339 Yes you are correct I misstyped Iran instead of Iraq I have edited it.
God, Spec Ops: The Line was so good at making me feel like a bastard
Feel like a hero yet? lol
As a Game Designer, this is a brilliant take on a very sensitive and tense subject. I will say that most of us Game Designers want to make the types of games concerning war that are mentioned here, but suits far above us deem those things to be less financially attractive. I wish that the player audience was more willing to engage in those types of games, and to be more supportive of them financially when it counts. Perhaps there is also something to be said, then, about what the audience wants/expects versus what the creator wants. AAA games will rarely do this type of risk, which is why I want more people involved in the Indie scene, where games like This War of Mine can be created without suits hemming and hawing about profit margins.
No its not. Go see actual war. It has to be attractive to players. We dont want to be preached to by some neckbeard who has never seen a hard day in their life.
I’ve been gaming my whole life, but have never been interested in CoD, Halo, really any FPS. It’s too close to real life for me - which seems to defeat the purpose of a video game in my eyes. Guess I’m an odd duck.
" I wish that the player audience was more willing to engage in those types of games, and to be more supportive of them financially when it counts." you damn kidding right? from the Spanish speaking community to the anglo one, everyone praises and encourages Spec of the line. If we don't see more of this is because you don't have neither the skill nor enough to write this kind of masterpiece.
@@mariano98ify spec ops the line was considered a commercial failure when it came out it only gain a cult following years later, maybe if people would’ve supported it when it came out we would’ve gotten more games like it
@@chino19963 maybe if companies would be brave enough and see how a succes and a market is there waiting people would purchase the game. The problem with new framchises is due to no one knowing them, then not a lot of people would purchase them. It is not a good excuse justify not releasing more sequels or give them a chance. By that logic we no longer have command and conquer because Ea los amgeles awful management.
Theres a "game" called Command Modern Operations. It's a simulator of most of the modern and post war weaponry, planes, instalations and ships. It is so hard to explain to people who don't play games that graphics mean nothing when whats happening under the hood if only represented by text, can be some of the most mind grabbing gaming you can have. You can see the absolute instant death of modern conflict, or see if a nuke can really be shot down by modern interceptor missles.
I appreciate that you put Spec Ops: The Line in, brilliant Colonel Kurz Simulator, but there is much more than just cinematic set-piece gaming, I know it's hard to write content related to your channel with my contrary ramblings, but beyond the big AAA games and more normal action orientated first person games, there are true showings of the intensity, futility and harshness of war and combat in games that have no story, things like Squad, Post Scriptum, Hell Let Loose, ARMA franchise and so on.
There's something to be said about the slightly embarrassing enjoyment and appreciation for military things, the male dominated trend of being a bit too into war stuff when you're a civilian, surely, if you take any interest in these kind of things, you'll love the stories of heroism, but cannot ignore that for me or you, we'd not be the one who made it and join the nameless droves of men in the ground who didn't make it through their respective war either.
This kinda reminds me of the time I played Project Reality.
I remember being on the Mortar Squad, sending death upon some poor sod unlucky enough to be spotted by our Squad Leader who was acting as our spotter. And we had like, 30 kills in that particular round. However, it made me realise that 30 lads lost their lives by some random dude firing a mortar shell upon them. This is modern warfare, death comes from nowhere.
@@hajimeokajima Scarier still when mortar rounds are pretty unchanged from ww2, apart from some laser trickery for precision. The true scary things came out of the Armenia Azerbaijan war. Loiter munitions, imagine a robot bomb flying round looking for targets and when it finds none, it goes back to base to be sent out to kill again.
wait what? ARMA has a story
@@watch.v-dQw4w9WgXcQ No one plays the single player. The jank is only enjoyable with other people.
You are right though, operation flashpoint's story was rather good and had that unknowing boil of a real conflict, i can still remember having to patrol an island and bumping into spetznatz and it was not hinted or suggested that conflict would happen this soon in the game. So yeah, fair point, well made.
@@dadoogie So you never seen Miller memes?
The most anti-war video game in existence is, to me, Arma 3. I play it twice a week and even design scenarios for my group, but every operation makes me dread the horrors of war. I play it because I love using it as a tool to improve my cognitive abilities and communication skills, especially when it forces me through my decision paralysis. If it devolves into just "clicking on bad guys", it's not a very fun game.
The stories in Bohemia's official campaigns is so full of ra-ra military bullshit. It's like they don't realize what game they've made. The jank of the engine and subpar voice acting makes a lot of the "hoorah!" moments feel hollow and the gameplay consists of throwing yourself in the dirt to hide from a shooter in the woods half a click away that you can't see.
@@jasonfenton8250 It wasn't always like that. The earlier games like Operation Flashpoint and Resistance had a stronger anti-war message.
@@jasonfenton8250 Oh come on, didn't you like End of the World in ARMA 2? It also had a pretty fantastic main campaign with just you and your three squad members acting alone like in the Conflict series.
ARMA losers lol
Same with me in squad
And find it funny because I love titan fall 2 as well, but any call of duty or battlefield just ain’t the same you know? Go for the extremes of the best parts of those games.
One game I know that tries to make combat a daunting task is Farcry 2. Your guns often jam and even explode, enemies are relentles and smart, you have malaria and navigtion is difficult. It's one of the few games that deliberately make the gameplay "unfun" to deliver a thematic message.
How are guns jamming not fun?
@@matthewjones39 Because trying to unjam your weapon while fighting enemies is hard and panic inducing, and dying means loosing half an hour of progress because the game doesn't use checkpoints.
@@bkrcovers2906 I’ve played the game. Weapon jamming makes the game more complex, in a fun way.
The guns jamming was fine for me i'd honestly like to see that in more games, I didn't like the fact you could collapse from your sickness at anytime even in a firefight, that made the game hard to play for me at least even after you got the pills.
Far Cry 2 is far and away my favourite in the series. Even though it's still a "one guy vs the world" game, it really nailed that feeling of being a burnt out mercenary out of his depth in a country that is descending into hell. There was no glamour about it at all. Nothing heroic either. It didn't even have a heroic climax.
All the other games in the series dumped the grit for fun, which is fair enough given that they are games at the end of the day, but I'll always love it for what it achieved. There are other games that pull something similar off, but there aren't enough of them IMO.
For me, Wargame series by Eugen is the best anti-war game. It shows very well how fragile is human life in modern conflict.
When half of platoon dies because of one explosive shot from tank, it is terrifying to see. The game shows well that there are almost none chances to survive for units who were firstly engaged into battle.
Your point on the deconstruction of hero systems as an act of deconstructing meaning itself is spot on. Been having a real hard time lately on trying to deconstruct the inherently problematic thing that principle itself is-and the moral purgatory that recognizing that creates. Relativism is a real beast. I think, in the end, we are all suffering from the gift of global contact providing us with what I feel is like an infinite loop of parental lecture; where the lecture is from the personified voice of trend and the emotional consequences of intercultural awareness in real time. I feel constantly like a child listening to videos like these, feeling like I am becoming more aware of how I should be, but literally not having the physiological make up to know how to feel right in the context presented yet. Like humans aren’t meant to know how relative everything is, or like we are all existentially too young to know. It is like any ‘improvement’ can only ever be transitional and therefore without reward-and thus, beyond being an intellectual exercise that tends to exorcise fun, facing relative meaning seems only to be a thing without meaning. But then, maybe that’s the point? That there is no point, no feeling right, no place or age or maturity-only feeling in the moment and being just okay with probably being wrong every other time, both about that passed time’s feeling and every time’s feeling later, according to everyone else, all the time?
The backlash one risks bearing for trying to challenge hero systems is also very disheartening. So many people are entrenched far enough into their delusions that presenting anything that contradicts them, intentionally or otherwise, is virtually impossible without immediate and scathing retribution. Questioning hero systems and the conflicts they bring has turned into a conflict itself.
@@WhatIsSanity Humanity and it's timeless and never ending cycles
The conflict that you attract by questioning hero systems is warranted because most deconstruction is essentially solipsistic and seeks to replace social structures with one’s own peculiar and non-unifying vision, and we can’t afford to stake the entire culture on your idea of heroism. It continues to be this way for as long as we keep relying upon any particular culture’s technology and ingenuity to escape the ultimate problem of death.
@@KevinPaterson
That gave me a good laugh, thanks for that.
Some advice, consider the idea that you're projecting.
The reason I say that is because nobody at all, at any point suggested any form of anarchism to replace hero worship. Not in the video and not in this thread.
@@WhatIsSanity anarchism at least has group-directed effort as a possibility, unlike the individualistic relativism of most postmodern deconstruction attempts.
Excellent philosophical deep dive in a difficult & complex subject! As an US Army infantry veteran who served in a combat zone & also played these types of games, I can honestly say the contrast couldn't be greater. Real war is not a game & never will be. Nothing wrong with a digital piece of entertainment, as long as one recognizes the fundamental difference between death in a video game & real life death. Sadly many young people become influenced by the violence & have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. They lack the critical thinking skills & nuanced moral reflection on the actual price of real war. This is all benefits the military-industrial complex & corrupt government officials, who are the real winners in any war, while the soldiers die & kill for economic & geo-political hegemony. That is the sad reality of modern warfare, much like it was in the past. War is hell, a senseless waste of life that is created by greedy, selfish men who send others to do the dirty work. President Eisenhower was right..."In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." And so was General Smedley Butler...“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.” Peace to all!
Actually war is a racket only because you are the top dog. Please don't act like every country is the same
Young people are influenced by old people who sell them how they serve their country if they fight for it ;)
Hate to break it to you. All things fight for survival, all things include countries, religions and groups of people. Life at the expense of life.
Feel how you want about the past. The cold hard truth about the universe is, it revolves arounds violence.
What a POG post, 74D checkin in
@@michelangelo4483 74D is POG, sit down
I as many of us men seem to, have always had a paradoxical reaction to the concept of war. The evils of modern war are obvious and undeniable, but they've never been enough for me to despise war entirely; and I've maintained a fascination with it, especially ancient warfare and warrior heroism. This fascination with heroism seems to be the underlying motivation for warfare based games, apart from dopamine inducing competition and gory spectacle. I experienced a profound revelation regarding this fascination after reading Metaphysics of War by Julius Evola, and now I think I truly understand it. I've realised to understand war requires apprehension that goes beyond simple rationalistic or moralistic thinking. It's true that for most of recent history war was fought for profane reasons (conquest, ideology, political, economic/monetary interests) but in the ancient past warfare had a supra rational, spiritual value when constrained within certain parameters. The call to war goes beyond the brutal industrialised slaughter that is the expression of modern warfare. War as the occupation of the warrior, fought voluntarily, and as a renunciation of material illusion was a pathway to higher states of being - a pathway to transcendence. “The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities. From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one realize the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.” - Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War. This was the sentiment that can be detected by varying degree in warrior traditions such as the ancient Greek, Roman, Vedic, and Germanic traditions. Evola explains, "The sacrality of war constitutes a tradition in the highest sense of the term. The pacifist deprecation of it, as well as the conception of war as a ‘sad necessity’ or purely political or natural phenomenon, does not correspond to any tradition. It is but a modern fabrication, born yesterday, as a side-effect of decomposing democratic and materialistic civilization." Warfare was an elevating mechanism, “Two ways of overcoming the ‘human’ level are open: the shift to the sub-human (down), or the shift to the super-human (up). In one case the beast reawakens; in the other, the hero; in the true sense, the sacred and traditional sense…” The warrior's philosophy is stated simply in the Bhagavad Gita, "Life like a bow; the mind like the arrow; the target to pierce the supreme spirit; to join mind to spirit as the shot arrow hits its target." Metaphysics of War quotes: czcams.com/video/mRekDCQHJUQ/video.html
That's a lot of bullshit to justify taking stuff from other people through violence.
There's nothing heroic or transcendental about war.
We humans should be better than that, we have just been convinced not to.
@@ungetabe Your viewing war through the eyes of a modern. Evola reveals that the function of war has long been corrupted and turned to a means for material and egoic gains. True war originally had a competitive and purifying function. Men would test each other in a renunciation of the temporal, illusory nature of reality. Men, ideas, and gods, were all tested through war as the purifying mechanism to separate the strong from the weak. War was aristocratic, individualistic, ritualistic, and voluntary; it was the ultimate trial of life - an initiation from the realm of Becoming into the realm of Being. By embracing death, the suffering of life was overcome. By voluntarily overcoming fear, man gained a profoundly lucid and deathless state of being. When men fought, the defeated would grant the victor material trophies in honour of strength and courage. Overtime the pursuit of war degenerated from existential gain to material gain. War become conquest, pillage and death conducted against those who were not warriors. The Iliad reveals a point in Greek memory when war partially retained its original form but has begun to take on the profane nature of conquest. War is turning from the profession of the individual warrior into that of the massed soldier, subject to vainglorious, avaricious kings.
Based Evola-poster
Unfathomably based comment, I applaud wholeheartedly
Valiant Hearts The Great War will always have a special place in my heart. If you have not played it give it a try. The perspective of war that it will leave you is incredible😢
One thing I enjoyed about the older CoDs was that when you moved forward you had these soldiers moving beside you, in front of you; pushing onward as an entire unit. Compared to not just the new CoDs but overall shooters in general, I noticed when I was moving forward I could see no other soldiers to my side or in front of me. I was the vanguard leading the rest into the fire. Excluding moments in games where the AI is to lead, charge into a hail of gunfire to expand the spectacle of the battle, or go first for a script for us to witness. Nevertheless we're the one leading the rest unto victory. Every moment I could, I let the AI lead while I hang in the back, as an observer, more to immerse myself in the scene of being another one of the average Joe's.
While playing Hell Let Loose, I regularly have moments where it's just me in the middle of nowhere, creeping along and then suddenly a lone enemy soldier and I see each other at the same time, we raise our rifles and start firing, and luckily, he's the one who goes down first, slumping down unceremoniously. No +100 points, no headshot bonuses, no killfeed telling me who I killed. Just a soldier laying in the snow or grass or mud, quietly muttering his last. And after the adrenaline wears off, you realize this is what soldiers actually experienced, and it doesn't feel good. In some way, by feeling this way, you feel how you should in such a circumstance. It's hard to call it 'fun', but you feel a bit like you're honoring the true sacrifice that was made by not being glamorized for the representation of life you just ended.
Played Operation Flashpoint years ago. Remember how difficult it was just to survive till next mission especially when your whole squad got killed. We lost a transport vehicle once very early an I decided to just walk to the objective, it took more than half an hour and I was praying no to get into any enemy on the way.
Just gonna say this: gaming is not like cinema. Most war/shooter games are not gonna be played by ppl who are looking for anti-war or philosophical musings. Game devs are always gonna tend towards creating a product that best exemplifies the wants of its target audience. That will seldom be accomplished by putting the player in situations where they are made to feel guilt in the enjoyment of their actions.
Furthermore, if one wants to find a deeper "message " in a war game...one should steer clear of big ticket franchises like Battlefield or Call of Duty. These games are stuck in a mold that will seldom tolerate deviation from their audiences' expectations.
If you really want to play games that have something to say about morality and humanity, youre better served looking to other genres. Games built around action are almost always gonna make an effort to paint the player as a hero. Its an artifact leftover from the genesis of the entire hobby...which is one of escapism
far cry 3 is a perfect example of a game that doesn't glorify the killings for its audience. The main character questions whether he is becoming too accustomed to the killing which is a big reason why far cry 3 is arguably the best far cry.
@@michaelflorentin1758 Far Cry 2 dies that well too, but 3 definitely punches the whole "what am I becoming" deal
Just gonna say this: We need more FPS games that have questions of philosophy and morality within their storyline.
Same thing applies to mainstream American war movies that were made to justify wars.
One of the few FPSes that I am closely reminded of…and it is not even done is Six Days in Fallujah.
The delivery of, "Do you feel like a hero yet," with the Zeppelin in the background... That was epic.
Ive had entire day long campains in arma as a mg operator and never actually got a single kill, but supporting fire allowed my team to achieve victory. I love Arma , you spend an hour getting ready then spend another half hour moving to the objective only to get dome'd by the first few shots fired. If you don't get hit immediately you can look forward to a harrowing slog from cover to cover while maintaining communications with your team mates cause if you lose coordination you all die.
I haven't really played a hero simulator or really any other shooter since I got into arma over a decade ago. They just have zero appeal to me.
Whilst I'm a gamer, and have been for twenty years, I'm also a history PhD, I specialize in Romance - the chivalric kind. Your observations here are not only spot on, they have a far greater genesis then you realize. This video essay could just as easily function as an apt commentary on the war commentary present in the romances of the medieval period. They too struggle between portraying war as it is, and war as an ideal; this is made all the more complicated by the ideological backdrop of chivalry itself and its prevalence in a society dominated by a political warrior class in the feudal era, and the inherent performativity of that ideal that they struggle to reconcile with.
Their are a few texts that truly stand out as being willing to shine a light on the figure of the Chivalric Knight (the parallel to the 'hero' of your video essay) with an uncompromising honesty, and these are as likely to be loved as loathed by their audience. Unlike many modern games, however, that shy away from commenting on the underlying ideologies that support 'hero-simulator' outlooks on conflict, and their role in the conflicts themselves, some of these texts are also highly reflective on the responsibility of chivalry for fostering unachievable performative virtues within the framework of conflict; though most do not.
One idea I had was what if there was an HP mechanic where your HP is the dame across multiple levels or even tye whole campaign with only limited ways of slightly boosting or replenishing it. At the start you might be all Gung ho and charge in butvthen you realize that even a scraping meat shot hurts and suddenly your staying closer to cover and really hoping that the next artillery shells isn't going to hit you.
It could make interactions with NPCs more meaningful too as you can choose to give up some of your precious med kits to help someone else, fulling knowing you might not get another one for God knows gow long.
Really like and appreciate you attention to detail in your video description. Please keep it up.
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What are your thoughts on war in video games? Which games have offered you a meaningful (anti-)war experience, and how did they do so? Despite this being my biggest video yet, I'm sure there still are many examples that I have missed, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to share them!
1:04:50 i remember i loved playing this level because it DID make me reflect on how fucking disgusting war is. the voice confirming the kills is completely dead-pan like your current task isn't actually about firing missiles at people but stocking boxes in a warehouse or something. sent shivers down my spine.
watch footage of ac130 gunners or apache pilots its exactly how they sound. its something called mechanical distance. much easier to kill people far away through a screen than say bayonetting someone up close. see a book called 'on killing'
@@alexd6557 thank you for that term. yes i can absolutely imagine that this is exactly how they behave in such situations.
22:30 I'd like to imagine an angry god is throwing freight cars at our protagonist
My only real complaint with this entire video is that you're cherry picking, a lot... Which to use your own words against you, makes your argument feel disingenuous. I fully agree that if a game about war makes you feel good about war, it has completely missed the mark, and it's my biggest complaint about modern CoD games, especially, but criticizing Spec Ops: The Line for achieving exactly what it set out to do isn't really fair... A secret ending would have been cool, but that's hardly a fair criticism to throw at the game. The scene where you shoot your gun in the air to scare the civilians only works because you're playing into Walker's idea of a hero, not because you are being merciful and choosing to avoiding violence... Which is the driving theme of that game - hero worship is bad. It is not that violence is bad, or that war is evil... The game isn't even about a war, you're investigating a humanitarian crisis intervention gone horribly wrong.
Ironically it makes it look like that you're sort of played into your own ideal of heroism on that one. I would level the same at your reviews of Death Stranding and MGS, it was disingenuous. I loved Death Stranding, but to pretend that game didn't have violence, or the fact that the easiest way to get high scores in MGS is to go full Rambo as fast as you can, is extremely misleading and cherry picking for the sake of your argument.
Because ultimately, at the end of the day, there is a fair criticism to throw at the ideas of pacifism and conflict avoidance... Sometimes standing by and letting bad people do bad things can be just as damning. War is hell because you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. To think otherwise is just as naive as glorifying violence.
i sure wish more people in this world understood those last two lines.
I try to think in my mind of those last two lines to consider which is worse/better than the other. If you decide to go to war against an invasion for instance, you have the chance to emerge with your sovereignty and freedom intact. Though you then have a major loss of life and will spend decades rebuilding the war damage. On the other hand, not fighting allows you to avoid the brutalities of war, but are instead replaced with the brutality of occupation depending on who is occupying you. Most of the time, it won’t go well. The American occupations of Axis powers after WW2 honestly could be the only time in history in my personal opinion a military occupation of a losing nation was mostly humane. And that might honestly be a generous opinion at that. With occupation you may eventually be free again depending on whether another war breaks out or if political change leads to your conquerors leaving, but neither is quick. Look at Okinawa. While I wouldn’t call it’s current condition an occupation since they live free lives like everybody else in Japan, it’s not really equal. While officers of American soldiers don’t tell their units to go brutalize people, their soldiers practically get away with any crimes they commit if American MP’s get them before local police do. And this is probably something that happens to a lesser extent across the rest of Japan. While progress to remove American bases and return territory has occurred since the reversion of Okinawa in the early 1970s, at best there is only just a little above a third of that territory returned. A half century and there hasn’t even been 50% progress. Just only above 30%. I think bases are needed for Japan, but they can still go for a major downsizing. Honestly, I think Okinawa will be lucky if they reach the 50% base removal mark by the anniversary of the end of the war in 2045. However complete removal of the bases seems to also be unwise given the tensions in the Pacific. China has already proven three times before that they are willing to use military force, usually only being scared off by American forces who arrive in scene. Now China has every reason to avoid war and just stick to its grey zone operations to bring back Taiwan. Even without American intervention and even with a Chinese victory, the body count is going to be high. Losses may be worse than even Russia’s during the invasion of Ukraine. Still, the possibility is there and despite America’s Pacific allies increasing their defense budgets, China still easily outpaces them and spends the most on its military with the exception of the United States. And that’s just below the 2% GDP budget. Imagine if it went above it like the US. Peace talks and pacifism are great during times of growing tension to remind nations the horrors of war, but eventually you reach a point of no return. Damn if you, damn if you don’t. Each option likely leads to immediate suffering with positive effects only occurring years, maybe even a generation later. Damned either way.
Well said.
It has been said that Evil triumphs when good men stand by and do nothing.
War is ugly, brutal. Many times the start of a war is never justified. But finishing that war by means of war typically is the only way to stop that which was right to begin with. Reality is once war has begun we have already lost, and all that is left to do is to finish it before it gets worse.
Further more there are times when war if completely justified, but even that doesn't make it any less tragic. Only that it is less tragic then the results of not getting involved in the first place. Such is the world we live in.
@@tristankawatsuma8962 dang good stuff. 9 months later and things are even more Tense. China currently is outpacing the USA in the amount of naval ships. Soon they will out pace us by well over 100.
To put thay into more perspective we have our naval ship all around the world. So it's not like we can dedicate 100% of it to the area around China. Meanwhile China can dedicate the vast majority of its navy around its zone of influence.
They have been slowly building themselves very pretty for what is looking like an inevitable future conflict.
And Taiwan is looking ever more like an easier target for them to take. Curious and not exactly optimistic to see what the next 9 months brings.
Just thought of a way developers can make an interaction more meaningful in a war game.
Let's say you're fighting Germans and you get pinned down by a sniper. The sniper yells something at you. Instead of having a subtitle translation on screen, you have someone on your team who speaks German and you ask him to translate. From there you have the option to get into a conversation with the German. This humanizes them and can facilitate a moral grey area, especially if you find out they're just like you (wife and kids at home, forced to fight, etc). Instead of mowing down bad guy #487,226, you've created a memorable set-piece.
"There should be no contact with foreigners.. If [the citizen of Oceania] were allowed contact with foreigners, he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies."
~ _"1984,"_ George Orwell
Media would probably paint it as Nazi sympathizers and people who never play a game would lose their minds
Such anti-war games just doesn't seems allowed because of these people making controversial out of nowhere
No females, the game too gore, too much black people, too much white people, playing as bad guy is wrong, male fantasy, and just anything they can make out of their unexistence brain to ruin games
That is actually a good idea
Good but not realistic. Talk is not free action.
You cannot just avoid war. When you become pacifistic, you get consumed by someone who did not, and who understood that taking your stuff is easier than producing his own stuff. You cant just turn away and say "NO".
And when it comes to people that stood up to such aggression, the least we can do for them is honor their achievements.
Hell Let Loose is one of the most immersive, brutal and sometimes hauntingly beautiful game I've ever played.
Chatting with real life squadmates until an artillery shell wipes off 90% of your squad, with you only a few meters away from them. The realization that death everywhere and nowhere comes close when you see their body parts flying across your viewpoint.
It's also beautiful, downright serene when you trek through the lush forests and verdant plains of a farm village before hell breaks loose once more around you. It's one of the few games i play consistently because it's a game that's precisely *not* mindless, but forces you to stay aware and contemplate at times, the brutality of war.
Its an absolutely fantastic game. Best ww2 simulator around at the moment. Totally agree with you.
WW1 video game: you're an average dude that somehow fights like a special forces unit.
WW1 in real life: "Damn it, these rats are going for my toes in the trenches" while your buddy is having his limbs amputated.
What an absolute masterclass of a video my friend. This one is arguably my favorite you have done.
I grew tired to the Call of Duty games, as I feel they became too enamored with the violence and became too detached from the anti-war sentiments of the early games.
However. I have loved Spec-Ops The Line since I first played it. And maybe that's a problem? See, I experience it as a horror title rather than anti-war. Not that it doesn't have any anti-war sentiment, but for me I enjoyed it as a reality twisting, psychological horror story. So maybe that's my failing rather than the games. I dunno. Nonetheless, The Line should be experienced by as many as possible.
Good video. Nice Noah Caldwell Gervais shout out too
Yeah I totally agree, I always see spec ops as a psychological horror disguised as a modern war shooter
There's no such thing as an anti-war game. Even in Spec Ops. They're just pro war games that only show a few civilians and allies dying before you murder hundreds of more people.
A true anti-war game would be one where you solve wars diplomatically. Real wars involve making compromises to people that you heavily disagree with to make a peaceful outcome for both parties.
@@kloa4219 you sound like someone that didn’t understand the plot of spec ops
@@kloa4219 as Ukrainian, screw off, there's no peace with ruzzia. To stop Germany in WW2, there was suppose to be a war.
Spec Ops: The Line does show how rich get scott free and leave simple people to die while soldiers become stuck in destruction of circle of self justification.
Whole plot of Spec Ops show how Konrad while tried to do good got stuck and made everything worse and how Walker does the same, while being used by CIA to hide Konrad failure. Whole game is about how hero complex and self justification go beyond reason and just fuel own ego.
@@kloa4219 You sound like someone who's never owned a game console in their life and has only ever seen footage of Call of Duty and think that represents all games everywhere.
Spec Ops the Line was good, I enjoyed the missions, and the ending was mind-blowing.
Arma 3 milsim is probably the pinnacle of multiplayer immersion/realism , it borders on roleplay and makes you feel like just another soldier
Brilliant, well thought out 'essay'! Glad ~I'm not the only one who remembers the rather different feel of the very first COD games...
The problem with Spec Ops: The Line is that it has the illusion of you making choices. During my second playthrough, I sat on that platform and purposefully didn't use the mortar. You literally can't progress the game. You can't even go back and leave. You can't just fight the Marines with firearms. When the only option to not use the mortar is literally to stop playing the game... I don't take the "you chose this" condemnation seriously since you could have just "chose" not to make the video game in the first place. Another illusion is at the start of the game where you come upon the refugees/survivors thinking you're the 33rd and you have a stand-off. If you don't take any action whatsoever, they simply start combat against you and it's self-defense at that point. Now, there ARE other places in the game where you DO have a choice and it makes it less obvious: when Lugo is dying, you have the crowd angrily approaching you. Most people seem to think you have to fire into the crowd, but you don't. You can just fire into the ground/air and scare them off. THAT is an effective and well-down ACTUAL choice that you have in-game that has moral/ethical connotations to it. The mortar with white phosphorous? No. When the only way to not use it is to not play the game, you lose credibility with that because it's an illusion. Sure, it's potentially meta-gaming. But that fact doesn't change it's an illusion.
Build a game where you can get into a firefight with NPCs, wound them, have them surrender and offer them medical aid or choose not to. And, change that up even more by having them fake surrender or lure you in for a suicide bomb sometimes. Or have a situation where one of your men is dying painfully and begging you to get revenge on the guy that mortally wounded him and then surrendered. Or have where you're running out of medical supplies/food and have to choose to help a starving/dying child or keep your supplies to yourself. I don't care what it is, BUT MAKE IT A CHOICE. And not an ILLUSION of choice. It cheapens it then.
There's a similar problem with The Last Of Us 2 and it's themes regarding the cycle of violence and punishing the characters for engaging with it, as the game largely removes any option for conflict avoidance/mercy and in the few instances where it is offered as a choice the player is punished for it.
For example occasionally at the end of combat encounters an enemy will drop their weapon and beg for you to spare them, but if you choose to do this every single one of them will use it as an opportunity draw a hidden weapon and attack you (Meaning that the correct option as a player is to mercilessly kill anyone who tries to surrender.) however the game then tries to have "Look how bad the protagonists are for massacring all these people" as one of it's core themes, even though every enemy in the game attacks you first and you're punished for trying to spare them.
People really miss the point of Walker being main character who will justify any action player made. Whole point of Walker is not "cycle of violence" but justification we give ourselves to do it. Whole helicopter blowing radio tower is straight up him going nuts and being big point on how this whole game is him justifying all his actions for own appeasement.
Besides they were planning choices, but development was hell and they were pushed to do multiplayer. People here love to make some revolutionary systems which can easily break or complex enough that unless you got corporation interested for 5 years, your game is dead as hell.
@@mikhaelgribkov4117
"People really miss the point of Walker being main character who will justify any action player made."
Argument rejected because you can try, in-game, to "just stop" like how "Conrad" later suggests to you. You can't. *_Again: it's an illusion in this case._* You can argue it's meta-gaming (and that's iffy, because even if you were unaware you might want to jump straight to using a mortar with WP while playing as the character), but it doesn't subtract from the fact that it's an illusion.
"People here love to make some revolutionary systems which can easily break or complex enough that unless you got corporation interested for 5 years, your game is dead as hell."
Metro Exodus has enemies that will surrender and even put their hands up. SWAT 4? Same thing. And that game is old as dirt (approaching 20 years now) - that's where I also had the idea of fake surrendering from. FEAR still, sadly when you think about it, has the best AI in the FPS industry (by accident, no less) and while enemies don't surrender, they do try to flee/retreat/regroup and soldiers get panicked when they're losing. And, again, that game is as old as dirt (even older than SWAT 4). Turn-based games? Extremely doable. Hell, you could probably mod this into Jagged Alliance 2 if someone hasn't already done so. In STALKER you could wound an enemy and get them to surrender and reveal a stash location to you sometimes.
I can tell you're a younger gamer or someone extremely jaded if you think this is a big ask or something incredibly difficult. You're just used to mass produced garbage games that are the same year-after-year now. Doesn't have to be that way, wasn't that way, and if you're willing to look at older or indie titles or something other than an FPS - doesn't *_have_* to be that way.
4:30
ironically it's multiplayer modes that inevitably run into a tonal contradiction
in a singleplayer story you can basically gun down thousands of paper targets programmed to optimzie the experience dessired by the designers
in multiplayer it is for the most part a mathematical inevitability that the average player, on average, gets killed as frequently as they kill which kindof dampens the thoguhtless fun - though developers have found ways to deal with that
Problem with that is we engage with mp in a totally different headspace. Most mp games arent about immersion or story, they are sandbox to unwind, socialise or competition. They arent designed to make a point of have any deeper meaning. The thoughtless fun is replaced by frustration with your team, your skills or the devs, abandonment of the game or plain mindless consumption.
@@mdd4296 btu that's kinda the interesting thing about it
multiplayer in theory hould be much better suited to having someone see the futility and randomness of war while singleplayer campaings have a much easier time creating spectacular superhero setpieces
but due to the way videogames are consumed and marketed theyh ave to be designed so that each component attempts what the other one is better sutied for
@@JulianDanzerHAL9001 Well the vast majority of both sp or mp games are about bombastic superhero set pieces. It's just what the market ask for in general
The biggest hurdle to create a feeling of futility, desolation... tragedy in general in a mp game is you would need to make sure the players are willing to be vulnerable to each other without somebody moderating them, which rarely happen between strangers.
Though terrible at teaching about war, mp games can teach something about life, or alternatively, drag you through the mud. It's not due to their game design but by interaction within their community.
@@mdd4296 If you're on a shit team who keeps mindleslsly running into the enemy, just pretend you're part of the Charge of the Light Brigade
@@mdd4296 well, there's a huge differneceb etween playing with friends and playing alone
playing any videogame with friends tends to make the game more of a topic of conversation or jokes than anything else for better or worse
playing alone without much communication with other players though a multiplayer game can at times get close to showing futility though this potentialy is not very well used since well... that's just not the goal/purpose of the game
easy respawning being one of the main hurdles to this
but if you play alone on a server with a lot of players you practically have a 50/50 chance of winning with your actions having a notable but small impact on this chance
and you will on average die as much as you kill
if you now imagine having to sit through he story of your characters lie before getting... one life in such a multiplayer round it would be rather easy to see how wasteful it all is
admittedly, that is neither the goal of the game nor the most practical/elegant/effective method to do this but just as a food for thought I find it kindof interesting
I think about the concepts in this video often. Very well made and I find the ideas well stated. Thank you for creating this.
I think your content is some of the absolute best on youtube. Cheers to LSoO.
Hey this topic remembers me of Final Fantasy type-0. A world in war where you forget about people after they die. It showed that soldiers are just tools that are worthless for the nations as people.
Maybe nobody here remembers that game but i always saw it as a great game to show what war do to people. They become just numbers
It might be interesting to explore games and media that explore mental illness. The best example I can think of is Hellblade, where the gameplay mechanics revolve around conveying the experience of schizophrenia to the player and the conflict revolves around figuring out how to overcome one's inner demons.
I binge watch these videos all the time. I feel like someone puts words to the things I feel and makes them into videos. In a strange way, I feel understood and it's a nice feeling.
Thabk you for this video its a lot to think about i really appriciate it!!
They missed a trick when the nuke goes off. Anyone in the vicinity sees a bright blue flash. This isn't light from the explosion - it's radiation interacting with the fluid in their eyeballs to produce a flash of blue light.
FINALLY ive been looking for this comment thank you
Make the player hate the battle parts and make the player seak to avoid having to battle in game. Make the player only want to use violence as a last resort.
Alien isolation?
Sounds very unfun, you'd have to develop a compelling reason for the player to not seek violence or conflict.
Sounds like A Plague's Tale: Innocence
Good luck with that
Pathologic is not a war game but it does this perfectly
Beatifull work dude, amazing, special pointer to the end. To liberate ourselves from a perspective that can only see victory through destruction, towards a new ideal. Truly beatifull
This video is amazing. Thanks for what you do.
What about a war game where you play as a medic? Could be a way to keep that intense experience which explores the horrors of war and as the gameplay focusses on trying to help people instead of kill them, it could counter the contradictory nature combat centric gameplay has in trying to present an "anti-war" experience.
I have no clue how this could be implemented into a good game btw, I'm just thinking out loud.
There were moments where you played as a medic in Valiant Hearts: The Great War. The healing was done as a rhythm game, which seemed like way too arcadey and jaunty a mechanic for something so serious, even given the game's cartoon art style. Worst still it was used in several very significant story moments.
Also Valiant Hearts is good and you should play it.
@@jasonfenton8250
Yeah I suppose the gameplay mechanics of being a medic would be much harder to do than the far simpler “aim and shoot” mechanics of a traditional FPS/third-person shooter. Would be good to see a big company with the resources try and implement it though.
I have watched play throughs of it. Not quite the same as playing it but games like that with strong narratives can still have an impact regardless.
My idea of an anti-war shooter is that you start as a newly deployed soldier in an unit with high morale, which translates to snappy and responsive control like in Call of Duty, which the first or so level plays exactly like it. Then the operation went to hell and your solider is constantly trapped in high stress situations that devastes their psyche, which gradually makes the game more difficult to play. For example, reload slows down or even fails because their hands start to tremble; Kill confirms shit from hitmarkers to nauseating screen effects as kills are no longer heroic but traumatic. They no longer have the will to kill, but keep killing sometimes seems inevitable in the path to stop doing it. The game doesn't end with a victory, but a broken shell of a person destroyed by a conflict beyond their control barely crawling their way out.
Wow i really love this. To add on to this, maybe friendly fire can also play a part. At the start your cross hair goes green at allies and civilians but over time it just stays white as if to signify you aren't quite sure anymore. Maybe depending on what you do, your crosshairs turn red at everything.
Additionally there could be a change of words going from "I'm doing my part/duty." To "I'm doing my time." As if to say that the character no longer feels like they are playing the role of a hero in a story, but instead literally trapped in a prison of violence.
@@richyhu2042 Those are really good ideas. I may add that there should also be moments of humanity that offer small relief for the players, like looking after a civilian child separated by their parents or burying a fallen squadmate being left behind. Otherwise I feel the sole focus on misery can come across as gratuitous and make people turn off the game before its conclusion.
Sadly this is the opposite of what happens to real ppl exposed to the realities of war. They start off terrified, hesitant, and doubtful...and gradually become more robotic, focused, and entrenched. Its a difficult thing to recreate in virtual form using gameplay mechanics. Moreso due to the fact that the player knows that its ultimately not real...therefore bypassing all significant effects on the psyche
The best gameplay elements ive ever experienced to convey the horrors of war were ones where you or comrades could be killed instantly by things randomly or by things you had no way of foreseeing..even when youre doing everything right. Problem is that game devs know that that kind of lack of control is a turn off for 95% of gamers. So they seldomly take the chance on such features
@@razorfett147 Far Cry 3 actually managed to replicate a portion of this. You start out as a pretty generic rich tourist dude just fighting for survival but over time as you kill literally hundreds of people other characters start to see you more and more of a mass murderer and react accordingly. Eventually the player character himself starts thinking that this violence is what was missing from his life and its what completes him.
This is one of the best videos ive seen, made me reflect a lot
It's amazing how more nuanced this video is about this topic, than another video that came out years ago that tried to tackle the same subject in a very superficial and clearly not very holistic way that has the infamous line, "bang, you're a nazi, you did didn't ask for it, you didn't want it".
This is what I've been looking for since I wanted to make games and started a degree in Game Design. Popular military games in 2010s have arcadey feel but misses that "ugly" parts of combat but recently tactical shooter games are becoming more popular. I like to point out Ready or Not. You play as a SWAT, you have rules of engagement, and gunfight is very chaotic despite lasting less than 10 seconds. They pay a very good attention to realism of firearms. The gunshot is very loud as it should be and how being shot at feels, and these detail to realism of combat add so much suspense and chaos that it becomes a good game design too.
At 17:32, when he mentions that "video games have definitely gotten more interactive over time", I was so ready to see the "press x to pay respect" footage..
Amazing work as always, thank you!
Another awesome video as always. I haven’t really been so big into movies or shows over the years, but video games have always been a big thing for me. So it’s really interesting to see your views on video game storytelling!
Thank you for your work, this is truly amazing analysis. I really like your video on heroism in movies (in fact, I started following your channel with that video) and this one is very relatable for me as well, since I do play a lot of games and always wanted to frame my experience into more critical perspective (especially in the past few months and current events). Thank you again, watched the whole video in one go right after notification.
please do a video on "The Northman" !
For me the best depiction of war isn’t a CoD
campaign but a really good match of Squad. It really captures the intensity of combat, and the surrounding teamwork and logistics are more than most games are willing to commit to. It’s Arma with the sheen and accessibility of Battlefield, and is incredible
This video was absolutely brilliant. Well done!
Your section about Hell Let Loose were very informative, ever since I started playing the game it has fascinated me in a way I was not able to articulate until now. It really does offer something that most shooters do not grasp, or do not grasp without loss of being engaging. Although I will say that there is definitely satisfaction in hitting headshots since it plays an audible, "Ding!" Great video though, an excellent companion piece to your video about anti-war film.
No people are more outraged by war and its evil than people who have never experienced it and are nowhere close to experiencing. Your great moral grandstanding against war is just a luxury that the largest and most powerful military establishment in the war. It's meaningless. People dont feel this way when the enemy is at the door. People want to fight! This tells me this is a far more complicated than "War is bad"
So glad I stumbled upon your channel (and subbed).
I really enjoyed this video. It has so many interesting points.
I remember watching that demo for Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway. I was so excited at the time for the same elements you mentioned to finally be incorporated into a first person shooter and was sad to see it never come to fruition.
I can almost imagine a futuristic dystopia where humanity’s wars are literally fought via war video games.
Thank you, Tom, for another of your best analyses.
Honestly, I'd rather wars be fought with some kind of fighting game scenario. Only individual fighters and it has to be fair and honored.
@@LadyAstarionAncunin thats just a modern day 1v1 of the yesteryears lol. Like when kingdoms settled disputes with duels btw their champions. Probably a lot less bloodshed too
This is so well done
Excellent video! 2 additional notes worth contemplating:
1. It's generally not fun to play morally ambiguous (or perhaps honest) games, especially about war.
2. Those few games who get close to hitting the mark (looking at you Spec Ops), typically aren't big moneymakers.
These 2 points combine into a general industry sentiment that there's no business to be gained from such a venture. A CoD/BF title costs A LOT of money and must be recouped and beyond because 1) game companies are in the business of making games (make a game, make a profit so you can make a game again) and 2) AAA games are usually made by large, publicly traded companies with a responsibility to shareholders.
It's really remarkable that a company as large as 2K made Spec Ops. But they also haven't touched it or the theme with a 10 foot pole since then. Our best bet at getting the kind of storytelling and game design many of the viewers in this thread want is gonna come from indie companies, and they must be supported (hopefully at full price) so that other (larger) companies take note and do the same.
I'm going to mention games which are not specifically about war but, have you ever played SWAT4 or (the spiritual sucessor) ReadyOrNot ? In them there's a interesting difference from mainstream FPS games because you are not set for huge scale battles but specific missions and you have a small squad of four people instead plus you being the leader. Most of the time playing the game you feel responsible for each action you take and failures - like hostage injuries or team mates causalities - make you feel genuinely bad. While playing it I intentionally decide to not cause lethal damage to enemies and to capture them in the best condition i can so (at least in my own role play) then they'll be prosecuted by the proper authorities.
I'd recommend you giving it a try if your sense of emergency got numb by modern shooters.
Nah, he'll just criticize it and say it's just another police fantasy.
No one has played it, dead games LOL
Great, great video Tom. Just incredibly insightful, like the anti-war cinema video. I have never been on the battlefield, so I can’t speak to that, but I’ve played a good amount of the games in this video. There’s so much to be unpacked with the concept of engaging in violence and warfare in a virtual space, and I think you’ve done that excellently. Thanks
used to play squad , i was a combat medic, whole games healing and dragging others to cover for healing, and not shooting a full mag. that is an experience !
I love that you highlighted Brothers in Arms Hells Highway, that game was a great mix of tactical action and cinema
Video games quickly hijack our need for meaning in life because they're a powerful, accesible machine to induce a flow state.
Only surpassed by music in my opinion in terms of it's accesability and effectiveness.
They are an art form with potentially a huge downside.
I miss COD but stopped playing it when it started to make me physically sick.
COD made you physically ill? explain please
@@alexd6557 I completed 2-3 of the old releases, my last one was Modern Warfare . The next version seemed so intense that would make me sweaty, nauseous and cause severe stomachache after 15 min in it.
I couldn’t play anymore.
Was looking forward to this one and was not disappointed. This topic has fascinated me for a long time, as I grew up playing games like this. Spec Ops: The Line was really the turning point for me. Even though before playing it I already started to question why war games were fun, and morally questioning my enjoyment in killing enemy soldiers even though they were not real.
Spec Ops is a narrative crafted exactly for people like me, who grew up mindlessly enjoying games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Even though you don't have total agency in the narrative, it still makes you question your enjoyment in mowing down groups of enemies. Is it because it's satisfying to land headshot after headshot and to feel like you are skilled, or is it the power trip and feeling like you are dangerous? In the end it doesn't matter, and after playing it it really shaped my perception of combat in video games in general.
Now, unless the game directly forces me to, I'll never kill in a video game, and If I do I don't enjoy it and feel remorse for the enemies I kill even though they are not real and I know they aren't. It's simply principle for me now, this is the kind of person I am and I feel self-gratification in putting in the effort to exemplify that, even if nobody is there to see it other than myself. It's simply the way I want to be.
Games that allow non-lethal means of defeating enemies are very satisfying as they usually require at least moderately more effort than the lethal options or take more time. It's a small difference and marginal to some but I really enjoy it as it gives player choice and eases the conscience of those that simply don't like killing even nameless NPCs in video games.
Of course sometimes I'll simply have fun and disconnect and go on random killing sprees in games for the hell of it or try to be as "good" or stylishly violent as I can, but looking back on the experience it is never satisfying and a bit uncomfortable to think how enjoyable violent killing can be. I'm curious how this topic will evolve in the future.
This was the best movie I've watched this year. Nice stuff dude!
I see a video essay that even remotely mentions Spec Ops: The Line, and I just know I need to give it a watch.
Your critic at the end is also the usual warning any good creators and writers must take care when trying to break or go beyond the boundaries of immersion; never demonstrate to your audience how stupid they are by just blindfully following your narrative. When you repeat too much this without providing alternatives, you pretty much tell them their best decision is actively to not let you take the wheel anymore. Most of the best games that brings this morality dilemna in play or try to break the very common expectations most often offer options and pathways in regards to what players choose to do on a second try and even on a third.
“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.” - Will Munney - Unforgiven
I've been in a drought for good new video essay content for a while, so happy I came across this!
Very well put together video
Thank you for covering this topic : )
Watching your conclusion, I was reminded of two other games.
One was Undertale, and is the one I think is more relevant. I feel like most people who have played it have it stick in their head mostly because the game successfully did what most games fail to do with respect to violence; it gave you alternatives that made them rewarding, and it also marked every choice you made. And violence is frankly un-fun in that game, which only strengthens it in a lot of ways. I don't really feel like going deeper into it than this, but I wonder if war games could benefit from looking at titles like Undertale.
.
The other game I thought of while watching the video was Tales of the Abyss. Several games from the Tales of series have wars in them, but the only one that really stood out to me was Abyss' war sequence. During the war, your party doesn't really actively participate in the conflict; in fact, your goal is to avoid conflict as you escort refugees from the war zone in a desperate attempt to save as many lives as possible. I remember playing it at the time and thinking "I have never seen anything like this before in a video game. I'm playing competent warriors with partisan alliances who have chosen to run into the middle of two armies to try and save a bunch of civs caught in the crossfire, and these competent heroes feel reduced to being borderline powerless. In every other game it's always been me playing the "good side" fighting the "bad side."" Tales of the Abyss has some issues but I had a lot of respect for the vile senselessness of war it crafted during its second arc, and the powerlessness of the people caught in it.
I recall hearing Sam Peckinpah say something like (paraphrasing here) "it is impossible to make a realistic war film. The only way you could even approach the reality of war would be to strap the viewers into their seats, and then stand behind the screen while the movie plays, randomly firing a gun into the captive audience. I tend to agree, if you want a truly honest war game, you will need to introduce randomly exploding keyboards and monitors that periodically shoot real live bullets back at the player.
Not sure if it's mentioned in the video - still making my way through it - but the Dishonored games, while not "war" games per say, did a fantastic job of making me question the real-world morality of my in-game actions. Now I always try and sneak my way past the sleeping grunts in Halo without killing them. Poor methane babies need their dreams too :'(
I subscribed for nebula and curiosity because of videos like these. Totally worth it
The hard work of 'civilization' is collaboration. Say what you will about capitalism, but I think sucking more people into that is more productive than raiding one's neighbors for slaves and goods. Now we just need our morals to follow the material reality
War and capitalism are deeply inter-twined. Look at the history of colonialism and the East India Trading Company or for a more modern example, look at the military industrial complex and the expansion into the 'forever-war' against and terrorists and non-state actors.
The material reality is that war is good for business.
@@alexandersaunders7071
the true answer is that it depends of the business and their trade , some businesses go bankrupt during war. some wars crash the economy of nations who caused the war and of those others.
war has it benefits and its downsides for any political party.
all that matters really is who you are, what are your goals, and what you are willing to do to achieve those goal.
"You want the gloves off ? Their off."
Modern Warfare 2019 has so much grit and reality in its narrative. Especially when you see children get involved, they get shot dead and portrayed as "truth serum" for one of the main villains as a weakness. Within two of the characters, Alex and Kyle are both tools of war.
Seriously great stuff
excellent video, first time viewer and you have a new sub.