In the video game’s latest sequel, Black Ops Cold War, players are tasked with committing “highly illegal” atrocities.

I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning your mind off and enjoying the set pieces. However, Cold War has a section in Vietnam and I suddenly started feeling really uncomfortable and just turned the game off.

In WWII you can easily feel like the “defender”, and even Modern Warfare felt like fighting a very specific organisation that wanted to kill millions. Here however it just becomes so hard to explain why I’m happily mowing down hundreds of clearly Vietnamese locals that I was unable to turn my mind off and just enjoy the spectacle.

I turned to the internet and started browsing and found this article and I really agree with what the author is saying.

I don’t know if I will be continuing the campaign or not, but I just feel that I don’t want to support these kinds of minimizations of military interventions.

I just wish there were more high budget / setpiece games that don’t glorify real life wars. Spec Ops The Line was amazing in that sense, but it’s also quite old already.

I would love to hear your opinions on this subject.

  • MJBrune@beehaw.orgEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    Hello. I am a game developer of 10 years. For about 1.5 years I worked on Squad, from early 2016 to late 2017. I quit for this exact reason.

    I thought it would be a game about honoring the act of war not glorifying it. Especially since we had veterans at the studio on the design. Instead, it was a game about making it feel as realistic as possible while still being fun. 51% gameplay, 49% realism was the motto.

    Squad doesn’t do anything narratively. It just sets two factions on a map and says fight. The mechanics feel great, the sound design is the best it can be, and the vehicles give this strong feeling of weight. It’s a great game… that they then took my work, split into another company into a defense contractor, and made a real-life military simulation. Not like Arma but an actual military training tool.

    Squad does the same thing, makes you feel okay with fighting and making fun of an opposing force that is just trying to preserve it’s own way of life. It’s not there narratively but in the community which Squad specifically as a team did nothing at the time to stop the racists and created a pro-war community. In fact, in a lot of ways they cultivated it.

    So I have a lot of opinions about this subject, pretty scattered but I will leave you with my greatest accomplishment on Squad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMnYm_6rNE

    • CethinEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      I haven’t played Squad in a bit, but thanks for the work you put into it.

      I will say, Bohemia Interactive (ArmA studio) also makes military training tools. If you make a fairly realistic multiplayer milsim style game, it’s easy to roll that into something militaries will spend a lot for. I don’t think this is “wrong” but it is morally gray. It does provide low risk training, which could save lives, but it’s also training to kill people, and maybe not “the good guys” if there is such a thing.

      You’re right that Squad has harbored a lot of racists though. A lot of people seem to play to larp as a racist stereotype. That said, I’ve also met a lot of vets there who seem to care a lot more about treating it properly. I don’t think there’s a way to get one of those without the other, without being ArmA which takes too much commitment for me now.

      • MJBrune@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, I mean the military training stuff is morally grey. I feel like from my point of view, there would be a much better way of handling it beforehand. Like explaining to the staff that it’s a possibility your work will be used to train military staff.

        I think there is a way to get a community full of people who want to treat the game properly. It’s to come out and fully say “This isn’t what we want to see in our community and we condemn it.” It won’t work perfectly but that doesn’t mean you throw away the entire concept of a better community because you can’t have a perfect community.