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.
I mean, yeah. CoD has always glorified it. Even more so in recent years as they push for multiplayer and the massive payday that came with that. The earlier games often had a “war can be bad too” bits. The Russian bit in CoD1. The nuke. “No Russian”. But otherwise it’s a Michael Bay movie in game form.
Spec Ops The Line was the only game I can think of that bucked that. Even the publishers had no idea what it was, despite the antagonist literally being called Konrad.
I found Red Orchestra to be more of an anti war game too. The way people die, you can die quickly w.o. knowing what hit you exactly, strong supression, having to respawn in another wave in the single player campaign constantly etc. really make you feel that real war sucks.
Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.
Yasumi Matsuno’s career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.
The first CoD definitely showed the horrors of war. By the “Russian Bit” I suppose you mean the part where a Russian soldier tries to retreat and is shot by his commanding officer. Or maybe you mean where you have to wait for the soldier in front of you to die so you can pick up a gun and boots. But every CoD since that game has been more of a game and less of a history lesson.
Yeah, that bit.
Even though it was based on events from WW1, stolen under cinematic license for use in WW2 by Enemy at the Gates, and then subsequently stolen again by Infinity Ward.
But hey, it looks good.