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.
It’s a game.
This sort of response shows that even some people who care a lot about games, think little of them. Like they are all inconsequential playthings.
Can you imagine anyone saying “it’s a book” to try to say that they don’t matter?
Yes
Atheists do it all the time when talking about the Bible
In comparison to “the inspired, living word of God”, only the edgiest would argue it hasn’t been an important piece of literature.
In my time, I’ve encountered edge sharp enough to cut the very universe itself.
Sure, but that is a whole different argument. When atheists say that that the Bible is “just a book” it’s not a dismissal of the value of literature, it’s saying that they don’t need to be bound to what it says, that to them it’s no more than any other book.
It being a game doesn’t change anything. A film can be pro-war propaganda and it continues to be a film.