‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda
‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda
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.
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Perhaps my memory is clouded, as it has been a long time since I had played a Call of Duty game, but I believe there was a time when most of it felt anti-war, in that you would die frequently and often, then be shown a quote that was about how there are no winners in war, providing a sharp contrast between the actions you were taking and the grin reality of what was occuring. After I believe Modern Warfare 2, the CEOs of Infinity War stepped down, and since then the quotes stopped being more anti-war, and much more pro-war, highlighting heroism and such in the quotes. I always viewed it as a studio change and just stopped playing after that, feeling the games were just missing the mark and farming more and more of that sweet multiplayer money.
The beginning of the "campaign" in Battlefield 1 was really good about this.
SPOILERS AHEAD ^(I know there are spoiler tags, but they don't work on my app.)
Opening begins with the following:
Battlefield 1 is based upon events that unfolded over one hundred years ago.
More than 60 million soldiers fought in "The War to End All Wars".
It ended nothing. Yet it changed the world forever.
What follows is frontline combat.
You are not expected to survive.
You're then thrown into the start of a regular battle. This is the game, right? Cool, let's shoot some bad guys.
Nope. Doesn't matter how good you are, you will die. After you get killed, the name of the soldier and how many years he'd lived are shown on-screen.
Then you switch perspectives to a different kind of battle (eg. artillery, air, tank, etc.). Same thing. This goes on a few times.
Eventually you reach a point where it's just you, face to face with a lone German soldier, your rifles pointed at each other. Both soldiers just lower their guns, realizing the futility of it all.
Intro ends.
The rest of the game is the typical military FPS stuff we're used to, but that intro was pretty great about how war has no winners when it comes to individuals on the battlefield. We all lose in the end, whether we live or not.
Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.
COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.
This is the same reason TV shows like NCIS get 500 seasons.
Ooooh, I feel dumb that I didn’t pick up on this before.
I knew about movies (Top Gun and all) but not other things, for whatever reason.
Yeah there was a little bit of that in the original WW2 games: CoD 1-3 and the expansion games and console exclusives.