fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1216 ]

[ SECRET POST #1216 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1216 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 15 pages, 351 secrets from Secret Submission Post #174.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 5 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - empty comments ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

War is an unavoidable fact of human nature and human history. To deny it is to deny life and death.

Sure, games and movies may portray war unrealistically (pretty much most of the major players in WW2 like to make movies that make them the single-handed winners of the war, and it's not just the US) but the mere fact that war media gets made is because it's so intertwined with humanity.

War movies exist because, depending on the movie, people want to see "their boys" kicking ass, or because they want to experience the drama of being a soldier- or a civilian. War is conflict and conflict is the driving force behind any sort of story, whether it be something as simple as trying to get a cookie from mom's cookie jar, to the interpersonal drama in a squad of soldiers marching through Normandy.

In turn, war games (not just FPS games, but I'll get to that in a minute) exist because they share a root history with chess. People like the strategy of trying to figure out what your opponent is going to do next. This is particularly prevalent when the battlefield is uneven- such as house-to-house fighting in Stalingrad, or the hedgerows in Normandy. And when the sides are asymmetrical, that's another factor- case in point, coalition forces versus insurgents and al-Qaeda in Iraq, coalition forces being heavily organized, well-equipped, and very visible, versus a go-it-alone enemy that hides in the shadows with whatever weapons and trickery they can muster. Strategists and analysts are going to be looking at Iraq for decades to come. Afghanistan too. As to FPS games, most FPS war games today draw on films- WW2 games like Call of Duty borrow heavily from Saving Private Ryan et al. and games like Modern Warfare in turn borrow from real-world conflicts and Hollywood films. (As to Modern Warfare 2... I'm pretty sure that was just a rejected Tom Clancy manuscript, seriously what the fuck was WITH that story?)

For those of you interested- i.e. probably not the OP- I very strongly recommend this book (http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Xbox-Video-Games/dp/1560256818)- it goes into the war games thing in much greater detail.

But you know what? I bet you're going to ignore this entire comment, because from the way you wrote your secret I'm guessing you think any portrayal of war, realistic or not, is exploitative, and yet completely ignoring the fact that the most realistic portrayals of war are the most effective in changing how people think about it.

I'm not even going to go into the weapons/fap material thing.

This is a very interesting comment, and I can't really reply to it with anything useful, but just wanted to say that this is stuff that doesn't get brought up often.

I try to defend war games for a lot of reasons, and I wrote up a lengthy defense of WW2 games (http://steellikevines.blogspot.com/2008/08/in-defense-of-world-war-ii-games.html) a while back, though admittedly that was in response to people complaining about there being a perceived flood of WW2 games when the reality is there really aren't that many outside of a few large franchises.

I was interested in seeing what your response to this secret would be, dethtoll. I was not disappointed. Those are some very intriguing points.

Thanks. I tried to show things from a historical/sociocultural perspective, and I hope I succeeded.

Just badgering in to comment that I think Marvin Harris was right when he wrote that war has outlived its usefulness as a social device and thus is perfectly avoidable nowadays. I would elaborate, but it's quite a dense subject and I'm way too sleepy to discuss anthropology in a language not my own right now.
Very interesting comment anyway.

I don't see how the necessity of conflict as a driving force has to manifest as violence and bloodshed. Philosophically this comment interests me and makes me think, but that's a pretty broad leap. Even an argument can still be essentially peaceful.

War should not IMO ever be seen as a logical extension of a disagreement between countries in the same way that a fight is seen as a natural extension of a disagreement between people (and even that one I would dispute). Fighting doesn't prove you right -- it just gets you a whole bunch of bruises.

We could have a whole other argument about wars of necessity and/or self-defense, but I don't think that's what's being addressed here.

I never said it has to. I'm just saying that it's going to because war is inextricably a part of the human historic/sociocultural fabric and people are going to want to tell stories about it. To cry "but that's exploitative" is not only dismissive of war's place in humanity (note that I make no arguments one way or another about whether war is avoidable now or not, I think that belongs with the necessity/self-defense discussion) but also of the people who served in war, any war.

I've met far too many people who are so kneejerk anti-war and so completely lacking in historical knowledge that they seem to think those nice Nazi fellows would just stop conquering/exterminating their neighbors if we had asked them nicely, so I don't have much patience for secrets like this.

All right, fair enough.

I think you make great points, especially about what people are looking for in war games, but I think the point remains that in the end, when you play a game, most people don't think about the social implications, the fact that it's part of history, that it is humanity itself - they'll think "LOL omg guise did you see me blow that noob's head off? The splatter was so real and everything! Wee let's throw more bombs AND KILL SHIT YAY TEABAGGED MOFO!"

I think the OP was concerned that in the end, all these important messages will be lost and all that will be left is how to use war to make a better game, not help us look back at our history and try to extract lessons from them. Do I think war movies/games are evil and must be stopped? No. Do I think OP has a point? Yes, I do.

No, I don't think that's what the OP was concerned about. If it were, that's what she would have said. Instead, the OP chose the typical "such and such is SO EXPLOITATIVE guys i judge u >:(" bullshit. In which case, no, the OP didn't have a point.

As to the other thing, I can't help it if the Battlefield playerbase is a bunch of kindergartners, and if anything, games are growing increasingly focused on story. Hell, Call of Duty: World At War had a surprising amount of character development for a Call of Duty game- watch the Russian sergeant slowly yet increasingly become unhinged over the course of the game.

As to modern combat games, that's a bit more up in the air. Warfare is a reality, with small-scale fighting in all sorts of arenas around the world for all sorts of reasons. (There's large-scale fighting too, obviously, but most ModCom games prefer to avoid that, or in the case of Modern Warfare 1, just make up a fictional war in a fictional country, albeit one that has several superficial similarities to Iraq.) Most modern combat games draw elements from Tom Clancy (which is why so many games have his name on it) and/or from Hollywood portrayals. My point is, a lot of ModCom media tends to focus on small-scale, largely fictional conflicts such as stopping terrorists (Islamic terrorists are extremely rare in video games) precisely because to focus on larger-scale conflicts that everyone is aware of (as opposed to secret ops that nobody's supposed to know about) is something developers want to avoid. Vietnam is largely ignored for similar reasons, something that kind of annoys me because it'd at least be something different from the endless invasions of Normandy.

Okay, that's fair enough. I don't know enough about war games to make any further comments, but it seems like you do, so I'll take your word for it. Eh, I'm sure it must bother some veterans that their personal hell is being turned into a game for teens, but I think it's more complicated than that, and the OP was too quick to judge. But yeah, those games are getting crazy detailed, which must be interesting for a gamer. I'm more of a Legend of Zelda girl myself.

Yeah, I noticed. ;)

Interestingly enough, in a way Zelda is kind of the spiritual root for some of my favourite games.

Yeah, Zelda is really amazing. Ocarina of Time, I hear, was the granddaddy of those 3D adventure games, and that a lot of games are modeled after it. All I know, is that they are super fun, and that I don't completely suck at them. Seriously, the only other games where I don't die within the first 10 minutes are Harvest Moon and the Sims. :/

Plus, the music!!

I'm not that big a fan, Metroid is more my speed if we're going to talk Nintendo franchises. All I know is that the concept of open-world overworld with various underworld sections is something that pops up again and again in later games, including the Stalker series (which is amazing+beautiful) and Fallout 3. And I guess Elder Scrolls too but those games are boring.

tl;dr I love exploration games. I probably should like Zelda more because of that...

Eh, to each his own. There are lots of games I "should" like, but what can you do. Have you played the recent ones, though? They're really good (but I'm biased, don't take my word for it). A new one is supposed to come out this year, I'm really excited.

And I would love Metroid a lot more if I didn't get my ass handed to me every time I try to play it. I seriously die within 20 minutes of starting the game, to my brother's eternal amusement.

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[ SECRET POST #1216 ]

heads up, dethro toll gets wordy

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