The other day I was suddenly struck by a rather odd realisation- I’ve been killing Nazis since the tender age of 7, back when I first got my grubby little mitts on a copy of Wolfenstein 3D. Games based around WW2 have been hugely popular for the last 10 years, and perhaps I’ve just hit my personal quota for German killing- but I’m beginning to find it all a bit tasteless…
Ooh, he said GERMAN there, not Nazi! Did you see that? Did you?
That’s right boys and girls- Germans. A word that’s become a little taboo in WW2 Nazi Shmups, and for good reason; Nazis for the purpose of entertainment have become aliens- faceless and soulless creatures that continue to act as the perfect punch bag for a generation of gamers obsessed with mindless FPS slogging. Killing Nazis is socially acceptable- the culling a group that no one will stand up to defend, least of all Germany… The German government’s admirable guilt for the events of WW2 still seems to be clearly reflected in the stoic stance they take on the portrayal of violence in their media distribution, particularly in videogames…
Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not bringing beer and streamers to the Nazi party- I just think it’s important to understand the situation we’re thrown into in these generic WW2 games a little more clearly- were all of the Nazis evil? Of course not, so next time you storm an MG nest bear in mind the possibility you might have just whacked a couple of blokes who were never really into all that Hitler stuff, and would have much rather been on a package holiday in Denmark. This concept of humanizing Nazis isn’t socially unacceptable; films like Downfall do a damn fine job of telling a true story in a level-headed and reasonable manner- so why do we blindly accept iteration after iteration of SUPERNAZIBLAST To be released shamelessly on our beloved consoles?
Oh, and for anyone who’s read through all this without gracefully dipping their high-and-mighty hat to their chest, don’t forget that Hitler had a massive amount of respect for Britain due to the lovely empire we forced upon a large chunk of the globe back in our heyday- and if you’re over the pond in the U.S. then you may have been one of the many who went to the polling stations to buy tickets for the ‘Democracy World Tour’ we’re beginning to see flourish in the middle east- the global equivalent of Bob Geldoff showing up without invitation to your family BBQ to perform an impromptu gig.
So what’s my point? War in games- lets get clever.
If you’re going to base a game on real life events then do it tastefully- paint both sides of the canvas, put an emphasis on cause and effect- show WHY such events occur rather than taking advantage of the taboo nature of a subject in order to trivialize events without fear of repercussion. And with the recent increase of games depicting middle-eastern conflict, it’s more important than ever that we get this sorted out sharpish or things are gonna get messy.
Eat Buns, Not Bombs.
Matt works with a number of publishers as a research analyst for one of the world’s leading videogame market research companies.
In his spare time he writes articles and records podcasts for DarkZero.
17 comments ↓
damntheirlies
April 17th, 2008
100% totally agree. I think the games industry don’t feel they have the same responsibility to strive towards maturity as the film industry do. As our perceptions of war and so on evolve out of an archaic black and white understanding towards a complicated awareness of the complex psychology in play – where misguided motivations are considered, rather than a will to do ‘evil’ – it’s about time that such an immersive medium as video gaming took up the reigns of responsible thought.
Have a look at this forum post that I submitted as an idea for Call of Duty 5 (I also emailed it to the publisher, with no reply):
http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board/message?board.id=62&thread.id=676517&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
joel.
April 17th, 2008
This is why i liked COD4, it wasn’t all black and white. The Americans and British did some less than nice things in the game. In the very beginning you see the SAS kill soldiers in their sleep.
Killing Nazis is one of those done to death ideas anyway. All countries, including America have to committed atrocities during war.
Jake
April 17th, 2008
So we want realism in our WW2 games? Let’s show the Allies liberating some of the Concentration Camps if you really want realism. Or why don’t we include some of Hitler’s speeches translated so we can hear the true hatred and bigotry of a truly diseased mind. Would that be realistic enough for you?
Or maybe we could have game where you play a Nazi rounding up the Jews in Warsaw and burning their neighborhood. That’d be really realistic.
I agree that games have a tendency to not be neutral about the protagonist being right and the enemy being wrong. That said, I think it would be very difficult for most gamers to get into a game where they didn’t feel that their character was in the “right.”
Without sounding like a broken record, that being said, it’s the Nazis…to be fair and unbiased would be like asking people to create and play games that you ran a plantation with slaves in the Southern states of the US, or you are a member of the apartheid government in South Africa. To me, and I hope to most people in the world today, these things should never be thought of as “okay because of the circumstances surrounding it.”
Oliver
April 17th, 2008
It is a good idea. Not everyone who was fighting for the reich was a NSDAP member; most fought for their vaterland. It’s idiotic at best to claim that the whole nation is responsible for the acts of few. If that’s how you want to see it, then one could say bin Laden is right when he keeps going on how the American citizenry deserves to be struck against, since they chose Bush to be their leader and whatnot. Same for Spain, Britain… Almost every western country.
It’s not so damned black and white. Why don’t we ever think of the atrocities which happened in Russia, or specifically USSR, once Stalin got into power? Because he was on the winning side. Later, when the relations between US and USSR deteriorated, USSR got vilified again. Media is, has been and will be a powerful tool. Gaming is part of media, in a way. Do we want to keep on playing with overly exaggerated “B&W views”, or do we want to see something different? I don’t know. It’s entirely up to people, not me.
(I’d like to see a game where the player is an ordinary German soldier during WW2, just trying to survive the whole ordeal known as WW2, or specifically either Barbarossa or Ardennes offensive.)
Monkey Rimmer
April 18th, 2008
If we want realism in games can I have a Vietnam War game whereby I’m allowed to shoot women and children in the belief that they’re VC or NVA, then burn the whole village down. Then the end of the game, you as a player lose in the most amazing of ways, and then you’re left with the cover up that you got beaten by a bunch of jungle dwellers!
Of course games will be biased, they’re in it to make money! As if a game based on reality would sell?! There’d be uproar! Much better to have a nice sanitised version for the masses…. unfortunately!
Personally, I’m all up for it! Put the setting in the gutteral blood splattered technicolour realism… show how vicious human kind can be. But then get ready for Anne Diamond and her cohorts to condemn the game for it’s un-ashamed violence! No-one can win in this war………
bibibob
April 18th, 2008
So basically what you’re saying (Monkey Rimmer) is that it’s art or sales, and developers are always going to go for sales?
That may be true – but it hasn’t always been the case in the film industry, maybe it won’t always be so in games either.
Also, there’s no reason why being fair and unbiased (which isn’t the same as not presenting Nazism as wrong, Jake) would necessitate more violence than other war games that present a black and white vision.
Also, you think gamers can’t get into a game if they can’t rest completely assured that their protagonist is some kind of moral saint? GTA? FFVII? Manhunt? Don’t be so patronising. (Also, I’ve never seen someone so completely unaware of the atrocities commited by the allies before and after the war – Dresden? Tokyo fire-bombing? Rape of Berlin?)
Awesome idea, damntheirlies. Would be good if they’d actually do it. But to be fair, you’ve got no chance!
bibibob
April 18th, 2008
meant to say ‘during and after the war’, not ‘before and after’. But they did plenty of sick stuff before as well.
Perty Slick
April 19th, 2008
The nice thing about fighting the Nazi’s is you know for sure who the bad guy is and you know what you’re fighting for. When you’re fighting aliens, who knows. It could all be one big mis-understanding. While fighting terrorists in games like Conflict Desert Storm, how do you know all the people you’re killing are hostiles? There’s one scene where a guy is walking among a bunch of sheep holding an AK-47. He could be protecting his sheep from marauders but to protect myself I must put this poor shephard down and move on.
Vietnam is a terrible incident to put into a video game. It’s true we did some terrible things over there. But the reality is, it was a very dangerous situation where armed men, women, and children were hiding amongst the un-armed. Our soldiers did some terrible things to protect themselves. Some justified, and some not. I won’t ever pretend to know I would do anything different until I myself can say I’ve been in their shoes. But as far as video games, they should never put you in a situation where you’re expected, or allowed to kill un-armed civilians. Splinter Cell: Double Agent went a bit too far with that I thought and it was pretty disturbing.
Monkey Rimmer
April 19th, 2008
One point that crops up here numerous times is the right fighting wrong. Playing Devils advocate here, but who’s to say the Nazi’s were wrong? Ok, the Holocaust aside, the German people fought for what they believed to be right. They were told a version of the facts/truth that the Government wanted them to believe, and so they followed.
Case in point, the current Iraq / Afganistan conflict. I, amongst countless others, believe that war was declared without true reason. The british government deliberately mis-guided the public re: WMDs in order to push forward an agenda. Now the current war games e.g. COD4, don’t portray that….. why? Cuz it’s not exciting! Who wants political realism in their war games? I don’t! No.. the games companies want the gamer to feel like a Hero (Master Chief et. al.) which is why we will always get war games sans realism. We’ll never get the full cause and effect because no-one wants to be on the losing side of a war, whether in a game or in real life. Would Halo have sold as many copies if Master Chief was a homicidal dictator hell bent on wiping out a whole race? Oh….. hold on… that actually sounds like a decent game?!
Hamad
April 19th, 2008
The movie industry isn’t much better. in a 100 movies where Nazis are depicted, you will be hard pressed to find one where they are portrayed as something close to human. This isn’t just about Video Games, or movies alone; it’s just mob mentality. Simplification is easily understood, and conforms to any kind of prejudices and fears you have. Middle Eastern = terrorist, black = lazy, blond = stupid..etc etc. Makes life much easier doesn’t it? Most of us have ones we believe.
Ford Prefect
April 19th, 2008
I’ve always wanted a game in the call of duty etc style where I get to play the axis forces for once. They could plot the course of the war, from the axis triumphs thru eastern europe, france, the lowlands and into denmark and norway. then later the absurdity of the russian campaign and eventual slow retreat. The latter could be most fun. instead of risking all to try and capture some point on some map that some officer says you must reach, you could employ any method in order to make it out alive with the rest of your group. So many games are based in europe post D-day and make fighting the germans look like shooting fish in a barrel, which they bloody were not!
Lloytron
April 22nd, 2008
100% disagree!
Games are entertainment, not history lessons. Would it be fun to play a game where one of the characters was a Nazi, but he didn’t really subscribe to the ideals but had a family to feed, so did what he could for them?
“Downfall: The Game” would be bloody awful.
Aliens get a bad time in games too. Maybe they are just misunderstood?!
The real point here is that game plots should be more original. Yawn, more Nazis. It is quite telling that we have been playing games with Nazis in for much longer than the second world war actually lasted.
bibbob
April 22nd, 2008
So just to get this straight – games shouldn’t become psychologically and ethically realistic, because gamers are too dumb and would rather play as some one dimensional captain america?
If that’s true then I guess the critics are right – what a bunch of morons.
…Oh, and perty slick: “they should never put you in a situation where you’re expected, or allowed to kill un-armed civilians” – ever heard of a little game called Grand Theft Auto?
Matt
April 22nd, 2008
“Would it be fun to play a game where one of the characters was a Nazi, but he didn’t really subscribe to the ideals but had a family to feed, so did what he could for them?”
Yes. Yes it really would.
Perty Slick
April 23rd, 2008
Who hasn’t heard of GTA?… I played the original GTA IV but I didn’t play the last one too much and I won’t play the next one. That game goes too far with being expected to kill innocents as well. Thanks for adding to my point bibbob.
Plus those games are all the same thing over, and over, and over again…
Lloytron
April 23rd, 2008
@Matt – “Yes. Yes it really would.”
In certain circumstances, yes it could. I was being a bit more generalistic. To pull off something like that would require a high level of creativity – which is unlikely if a developer has decided to knock out yet another run and gun game.
So yeah point taken, it *could* be good – but it would have to be perfectly executed. Only a few developers could pull it off, and I’d hope they were the ones to avoid the tired Nazi ‘genre’ in the first place.
Pete
April 23rd, 2008
Why are you all fighting? Can’t you see this is what the Nazi’s want!?