- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
In that case, Prototype. Which Wikipedia tells me came out three years before Spec Ops The Line, and where you casually wipe out legions of US Marines for points and events.
The US Marines are there trying to contain a zombie outbreak, on the orders of the shady black ops organisation, which they have no choice but to follow due to orders from higher up. So it's not like they're actually enemies of the state or some such.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
Neither is Spec Ops. I was specifically talking about modern war shooters. Like in Red Alert you gun down Americans, but in Call of Duty you never had a mission where the Americans are the bad guys. Hell in most action games like Uncharted the bad guys were all like Russians or British or something.
Basically if you ignore the MW side of things and just look at the popular perception of the genre (which did somehow manifest physically in this world as CoD: Ghosts) then it works
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I dunno, I'm kinda itching for a game where you fight the United States, period.
Maybe one set during the so-called "Indian Wars."
- Location
- Northern Hemisphere
One strange thing about Modern warfare FPSs, COD and Battlefield for instance, is that its full of non-state actors who serve as the main badguys.
Rogue generals, terrorists, insurgents, etc. Rarely is the state itself the enemy. If you are, it's mostly because their a coup or some deception going on. Even MW 2019 has you fighting a Russian general who is implied to be operating without full sanction from Moscow. Don't ask me how that works, he somehow has a chemical weapons facility in Georgia and uses Russian military troops. Mercenaries would have been a better fit.
It's like the writers we afraid of what other governments would think and wrote the games in such a way that they can say "Were not saying all Russians/Chinese/North Koreans or whoever are badguys. Just this small but very dangerous subset."
Interestingly enough, Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising was able to use the rogue general excuse to avoid getting banned in China even though you spend the campaign as a Marine fighting the PLA. Maybe the accurate depiction of their weapons and equipment and them being described as a worthy opponent helped.
Rogue generals, terrorists, insurgents, etc. Rarely is the state itself the enemy. If you are, it's mostly because their a coup or some deception going on. Even MW 2019 has you fighting a Russian general who is implied to be operating without full sanction from Moscow. Don't ask me how that works, he somehow has a chemical weapons facility in Georgia and uses Russian military troops. Mercenaries would have been a better fit.
It's like the writers we afraid of what other governments would think and wrote the games in such a way that they can say "Were not saying all Russians/Chinese/North Koreans or whoever are badguys. Just this small but very dangerous subset."
Interestingly enough, Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising was able to use the rogue general excuse to avoid getting banned in China even though you spend the campaign as a Marine fighting the PLA. Maybe the accurate depiction of their weapons and equipment and them being described as a worthy opponent helped.
I think you're better waiting for an Indie developer instead of a AAA studio to make it. I'm reminded of some controversy around Medal of Honor 2010 where the multiplayer allowed to play as the Taliban, or "OPFOR" as they were later dubbed, fighting against American troops. Different context yes but many Americans aren't comfortable killing American troops. Call them cowards if you like but that's how it is. Even Spec-Ops could use excuse that the 33rd was no longer operating with the sanction of Washington.
stormbringer951
Against Eternity
The MoH thing was more about specifically calling it Taliban, I think, rather than the act of shooting Americans, and that was a thing where the families of dead veterans and politicians got stirred up, not the MoH playerbase. The dev basically just renamed the Taliban to OpFor as you mentioned and IIRC changed pretty much nothing else about the mechanics of shooting Americans.
We've been shooting Americans in MP since forever and otherwise nobody has cared, mostly because people view MP sides as largely interchangeable and interact with MP on a game mechanics basis:
- Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, Battlefield Vietnam all had you shooting Americans in MP a lot, apart from Battlefield 2142 I guess.
- Ditto for Call of Duty MP since forever.
- Every notable MP milsim shooter of the last two decades, some including special mechanics for use by irregulars fighting COIN forces (OFP, Insurgency, ArmA, etc, excepting America's Army where both sides played as Americans and saw the other side as OpFor
).- RTS games in general are usually playable from all perspectives, including full-blown narrative campaigns. So historical RTS games. WiC had Rus campaigns, CoH had German campaigns, Wargame had WP campaigns, to say nothing of the actual multiplayer. You also blew up the Pentagon in Red Alert 2, although arguably Red Alert shouldn't seriously count on the "fighting Americans" front because it's very wacky.
- Wargames of all stripes are often playable from all perspectives, and often also have a bunch of simulated mechanics for guerilla movements to use to blow up COIN forces.
It is rarer to have America as the bad guy in narrative games which aren't strategy games though.
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AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What's virtually non existent are critiques of American Empire.
No one particularity cares about "oh no, americans died RIP" or even "lol, killed some Americans". But "Why the fuck are the Americans even here?" is a vanishingly rare thing to see. Spec-Ops: The Line is one of those rare works that is critical of the American Empire, and is also Not Fine with the voyeuristic love that games have for experiencing the American Empire by pretending to kill brown people while not even questioning the morality of American Empire.
No one particularity cares about "oh no, americans died RIP" or even "lol, killed some Americans". But "Why the fuck are the Americans even here?" is a vanishingly rare thing to see. Spec-Ops: The Line is one of those rare works that is critical of the American Empire, and is also Not Fine with the voyeuristic love that games have for experiencing the American Empire by pretending to kill brown people while not even questioning the morality of American Empire.
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Just have a game where there's an "American Hitler" rising to power and the other nations have to gang up or some hero has to take 'em down.
Boom.
You can get rid of the whole controversy by saying that "Well, they're not the America that you and I grew up in."
Of course, I would prefer that we don't resort to such measures and play it straight but you know how things are...
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes. That's the coward's way out.
Instead of critiquing all the evils that America perpetuates, right here, right now, you've instead pushed it off onto WRONG AMERICA. Such a message wouldn't land because everyone would compartmentalize WRONG AMERICA from America as it exists right now.
(There's also that fun reading of COD: Ghosts, where the US is actually a fascist state in a death grapple with a Libertarian Socialist Latin American. But that's heavily reading against the text.)
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
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- He/Him
I agree.
And I believe that such a game could happen in our life time given that the video game industry is spreading in places such as Asia and Latin America. Eventually, we'll get our game. I just can't see it happening in this decade. However, that a game made by Marxist-Leninists like myself like Disco Elysium exists is a good indicator that we may be moving in such a direction. But for now, I don't believe that it'll happen sometime soon. Probably next decade, even. We'll see.
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- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Also, it literally isn't the American empire, our power doesn't lie in conquering territory and subjugating its populace. It's from the web of alliances, trade agreements, and favorable international institutions that we've created to benefit our interests, all backed up with agitprop and the deployment of military force.
It's objectively a different kind of empire than the one we have now.
As a criticism, it's about as worthless as trying to act as if the Galactic Empire in Star Wars is a meaningful critique of the US.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have no idea how you don't see that as an Empire. What the fuck do you think an Empire is?
"Oh no, we just have trade deals, and then topple or invade governments who refuse to cooperate with us and act exactly how we want. #NotAnEmpire"
"We exterminated and invaded every single one of our neighbours to take their clay. #NotAnEmpire"
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- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not saying it's not an empire, I'm saying it's a different kind of empire.
I was making a technical point, not a moral one. Their example doesn't work because it doesn't reflect the realities of American foreign policy, which means people can dismiss it easily.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah. Right then. Sorry
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's fine, I wasn't clear enough.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Besides that, America in fact did conquer territory and subjugate or genocide its populace.
It's just that now that it's a fait acompli we ignore it, at least most of the time.
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wait a sec, we already do that.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't think pointing out that we did bad things a century ago is an effective critique of modern American foreign policy, which is what I was talking about.Besides that, America in fact did conquer territory and subjugate or genocide its populace.
It's just that now that it's a fait acompli we ignore it.
Hence why I said we don't do it, as in we don't do it now.
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is a very liberal critique.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, I don't think liberals have a monopoly on understanding effective critiques.
TheColorPurple
I'm purple lol
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, I mean what you said is very liberal.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
A lot of games have some dissonance going on where they have a desperate pressing desire to talk about how much America and it's empire sucks, but seem afraid to actually pull the trigger and instead offload the shit-talking to some rogue general, or corporate bad guy, or some PMC, or some asshole individual. Actually tackling the system without nationalistic sentimentality or 'But what if the ends justify the means?' handwringing is what's actually rare.
I suspect that there are corporate reasons for this, either than publishers do not want to court controversy by offending the military or getting media attention as being a Troop Shooting Simulator. Or the more paranoid view that publishers actively take money from the military industrial complex like the MCU does.
I suspect that there are corporate reasons for this, either than publishers do not want to court controversy by offending the military or getting media attention as being a Troop Shooting Simulator. Or the more paranoid view that publishers actively take money from the military industrial complex like the MCU does.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I know what you meant, you were just wrong.
Criticizing American colonialism does jack shit to criticize modern American foreign policy because they are in-fact different. As in they function differently, the average person on the street can fairly easily see what was wrong with genociding Native tribes while not seeing anything wrong with maintaining the web of alliances that is our modern empire.