First of all I've not been here long so if a similar topic was posted here recently feel free to link it and call me names. I'm into military sim games and flight simulators. For example DCS, ARMA and Rising storm 2: Vietnam. I really like the gameplay, but I sometimes can't help thinking about the real world atrocities that were committed with the simulated war machine I'm using.
For example, I'm googling the name of an Air-to-Ground missile so that I can find out its effective range or something, and the wikipedia page has paragraphs about how it was "really effective" in bombing bridges in Vietnam, or how it was used extensively in Iraq. Less often it's something more wholesome, like how improper handling of a Zuni rocket resulted in a huge and very destructive fire on a US aircraft carrier while it was deployed in the South China sea during the Vietnam war.
It doesn't help of course how any story or campaign on such games is basically unapologetic NATO propaganda. It's also interesting how games like Call of Duty don't usually trigger this for me, because their mechanics are so far removed from reality it's basically an arcade game with a "realistic" coat of paint, no different from DOOM or whatever.
Anyway, those feelings aren't enough for me to stop playing those games, nor do I think they're fundamentally unethical or something. I'm just wondering if anyone here had similar experiences.
The people I meet online in military shooters make me a lot more uncomfortable than the game's lore.
Lol I feel you. Although I have to say, the years I've spent in the toxic wasteland that are CoD lobbies and LoL solo queue in my formative years have left me numb to this kind of thing.
I think I should start roleplaying as a communist spy, just joining the US team and teamkilling until I get kicked
Hmm, depends. In my case I can't play as the Germans in Hearts of Iron III/IV, I just can't, the game makes no effort to show you the horrors of Nazism but you know better, you know about the immediate genocidal campaign that rained upon Poland as soon as the Germans crossed the border, you know that by invading the USSR you're literally killing thousands each day, again, the game makes no effort to tell you about that reality, but you know it's there.
Same happens in TNO, a HoI IV mod. A friend says that playing as Heydrich is very fun from a gameplay point of view, and he is probably right, but holy shit you will have to play as a genocidal maniac, I can't do it.
Now I haven't played many milsims lately, IL-2 1946 was the last one and I haven't played it much, other than a few missions with random airplanes here and there. Can I bring myself to play a full campaign as a German pilot in the USSR? I don't know. As for others milsims, I don't play ArmA but I used to play Project Reality for Battlefield 2, and that is mostly fine, I haven't been around for a while so I don't know how many chuds are there.
My personal ideology does shape the way I play some games, for example Rimworld, I shape my colony as a true Communist society, I accept everyone into the colony, everyone gets their fair share, their personal room, I treat raiders decently well (with decent facilities to live, food, medicine, I will recruit them or send them back to their homes once fully healed and in good weather) and I try to be a pacifist, even going as far as burying all the deceased, enemy or not. I haven't done a "cannibal colony" in which people harvest organs from the dead, I can't bring myself to do it. I also "lead" a clan in a game called World of Warships and it's basically Anarchism, I always ask my fellow members about the possibility of playing things like Clan Wars or Tournaments, where we should spend our resources and so on, I'm a "leader" but just because the game is designed that way, I'm just there to help others. Plus I have a bunch of lefties in the clan as well, and when I speak openly about Communism I don't get people yelling at me or anything.
The only military game I've played is the first level of COD: Finest Hour where you're a red army conscript killing Nazis to defend your home in the battle of Stalingrad, and I don't feel remotely conflicted about it. That said i have no desire to play anything else that was funded by the DoD to make war cool and fun lol
Half of the campaign for CoD: World at War is playing as a Red Army Stalingrad survivor who eventually takes part in the storming of the Reichstag. Pretty dope
The other half is playing as an American in the Pacific. Admittedly less cool
That WaW stuff is legitimately the coolest "realistic" fps storyline (sidenote: could that actually have happened?). I wish you could just play that half. Come to think of it, my love for the campaign of WaW may have influenced me a little
Damn maybe I should bust it out again and try to get my hand-eye coordination up to snuff enough to storm the reichstag
I have fond memories of Finest Hour, though the intro is 100% an Enemy At The Gates homage, complete with Soviet human waves running into machine gun nests, commissars executing deserters, and the old “one soldier holds gun, second holds clip, first dies second picks up gun” thing. Still, it’s hype as hell, the soundtrack is amazing, and I won’t deny that I still mark out over the “Kill the German!” speech
Never played the early CoDs unfortunately, but from what I've seen they're much more grounded than the newer ones where the protagonist is straight up Rambo.
I’d kill for a remaster of finest hour. I can’t find a computer port or anything to replay it, and my PlayStation 2 is long gone.
Only briefly played EU4 myself, but I can say Vic2 gets a lot of things right about the nature of political power:
- The best way to get concessions from those in power is to credibly threaten violent revolution
- Food scarcity is one of the surest predictors of social unrest
- You can get away with just about anything as long as you don't fuck over your soldiers
I couldn't get through the first Black Ops. It was just so disgusting, the whole game is "kill the commies".
Thinking back on it a lot of that game is hilariously dumb propaganda
- soviets bad bc Nazi scientist defected to them (did they ever mention Operation Paperclip in CoD?)
- shooting down a soviet space rocket because... uh... soviets bad
- Uh oh it's "Ascension" which is Operation Paperclip but the soviets are doing it!
- several 'bad guys' torture you, because they are bad and evil, not because you are a spy/soldier from a regime that's bombing the shit out of them
- Your guys torture you, along with references to MK Ultra. This torture is for good stuff, like freedom
- US planning a pre-emptive strike on the USSR. but only bc the USSR is super evil
Just wait till you see how they portray Castro
https://youtu.be/UCFI3g-6B_I?t=649
I haven’t kept up with cod but I have the fondest memories of playing that first black ops. It made me vaguely aware of history. But now there’s no way I can go back and play the campaign without getting into angry fits about how the VC is getting slaughtered.
The multiplayer was garbage. But it was MY garbage.
When I started reading the thread, I IMMEDIATELY thought of Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, before I got to the part where you mentioned that game.
It's something about the realistic movement, difficult aiming, and 1-2 shot kills from most weapons. And the iron sights, and the slow reloads. Not to mention the voice lines.
It's also the way they handle the objective system in that game, which makes it so that teams usually run together instead of having individual players sprinting around like Quake.
The result is that playing as the Americans really does feel vaguely wrong. I agree it's just a game, and I don't care, but it really does make me feel a little bad playing it.
Half the time you're basically attacking a village, trading gunfire with a bunch of farmers from relatively nearby villages. You're just landing and machine gunning this village, blasting through wicker, relentlessly until one side runs out of men. And so much of the game shows the result of previous bombing and destruction- rubbled buildings, napalmed hellscapes - all imposed on this country by your unseen allies.
I've never really preferred one side or the other in war video games, beyond liking certain weapons on one side or the other. Even WWII. This one feels different. Im not a Soviet larper type, but that game really does make me prefer the VC over the US/Australians/etc.
I'd probably feel even more uncomfortable if the allied side of a WWII game was like, resistance fighters in their own homes.
Great breakdown, those are my thoughts exactly. The devs did a great job of humanizing the Vietnamese side, and it's almost completely done through the environment and the game's mechanics. There isn't even a story or single-player campaign in the game after all. And yet the difference between the two sides is very apparent. The Americans are coming in with Hueys practically blasting Fortunate Son, machine-gunning everything that moves and raining down hellfire. The Vietnamese are dressed in civilian clothes, armed with third-hand WW2 pieces of crap and pure determination. They're fighting in their family's rice field, in the burned down forest they probably played in as a child and in the ruins of their hometown.
The game emphasizes their 'guerilla' aspect by allowing them to climb vines and drainpipes, fight better in the tunnels, and create low-tech traps in dirt. They face an invader trained by the wealthiest empire in the world and armed with space-age technology. The american airstrikes are precise and devastating, the Vietnamese artillery has a 50-50 chance of hitting you or the enemy. And on top of that the combat feels visceral and gritty, because the limitations of the weapons are modeled very well. Machine guns overheat, long guns are unwieldy in tight corridors and the sniper scope the Viet Kong got their hands on might as well be a tin can with a magnifying glass. I won't forget the time I fired an RPG without checking my 6 first and burned 3 teammates to death lol. Also, the screams of death after a napalm strike will haunt my dreams. Like you said, there's this feeling of feeding meat to the meat grinder until one side just runs out.
Anyway, if you haven't done so already you should check out Tavisota: Winter War. It's a full game conversion mod for Rising Storm 2, free as long as you have the original game. It takes place during the Soviet-Finnish winter war, and I have to say it's comparable in quality to the base game. New maps, weapons, drivable tanks etc. The Finns can deploy skis, and most classes fight with bolt-action rifles so the pace is a bit slower, it's really great.
Oh I'll have to try that, I do really love me some realistic bolt-action focused combat with the occasional SMG thrown in. Beyond the Wire scratches that too.
Spec Ops: The Line sort of does it on purpose, never played it myself but from what ive heard, it's basically worse war crimes after another and your squad/character(?) start to realize that the answer to "Are we the baddies?" is a resounding "Yes"
Yeah, that game is really good, it makes you do war crimes in a very AAA mil-sim way and makes you feel unapologetically evil and vile for it.
At least in BO Cold War you can side with the Soviets at the end, kill all your imperialist asshole friends in dramatic slowmo fashion and nuke the shit out of Europe :lenin-shining:
Do red orchestra 2 and kill fascists and the Soviet Union. It’s what I do. Or steel division 2, disco Elyium, Tonight We Riot, etc.
I played Disco Elysium last year, such a great game. Breath of fresh air in the world of RPGs. I played as a communist hobocop who chugs every bottle of alcohol and other drugs he can get his hands on, it was great.
Also, here's my fascist-killing outfit.
I do indeed know this feeling. Sim games are super interesting and have great mechanics but they are just another avenue for NATO propaganda at the end of the day.
I used to play a lot of war thunder and it might be part my skill level, but also I only really felt comfortable playing WWII era planes as the US or Russians. I leveled up some german planes for an event and despite being high performers, I always felt super uncomfortable flying a BF-109.
I love fighter planes due to a combination of weird special interests, between planes, technical flying, and projectile paths, but its weird to have fun with tools of imperialism.
It definitely is. On the other hand, I'd say such games and simulations are basically the only moral way to enjoy those marvels of engineering, since nobody gets hurt in the process.
One of my fave games of all time is/was the original Operation Flashpoint set in '85 against the soviets. I've played all its Arma sequels where the baddies are Russians or their proxies. Ironic for games developed in Czechia, I must say, but thems the breaks.
As a communist now, I'm conflicted, but nonetheless I still, to this day, want a good Soviet mod for Arma 3. So I can play as the good guys (the USSR).
That sounds cool. I've personally only played Arma 3, which I loved just because it's basically the only big-budget game set in modern Greece (I'm Greek) and they did a pretty good job with the environment. The story was the usual cool American operator shit that's in every FPS from what I remember, but I still enjoyed it. Fun fact: Two of their developers got arrested back in '12 and charged with espionage because they were visiting Lemnos and were caught taking pictures of military installations to put in the game lol.
There is a good Soviet mod for Arma 3! There is a mod campaign called Operation Peacemaker where you play as Soviet peacekeepers sent to help stabilize a chaotic socialist republic with a suspiciously well armed rebel army (hey is that a stinger missile?) I highly recommend, and I also loved the original Operation Flashpoint, though I liked the Resistance campaign especially.
Man, I played the shit out of OFP back in the day; one of my favorite games, too. It was such a shame that they actually included a Soviet campaign with Red Hammer, but you ended up defecting part way through to join the Resistance faction. Such a cop-out move.
I don't keep up with games but the I absolutely loved the Advanced Wars series for the Game Boy Advance.
Did make me start thinking about child soldiers after awhile since a chunk of the Commanders are coded as being between barely in their teenager years and young adults.
