They also didn’t give her purple hair, tribal tats and a prosthetic arm that acts like a cybernetic enhancement. :)
Look, I’m sure a lot of it is the video itself, but I think I can see why a lot of people are turned off by this offering. And to dismiss all of that as the rantings of GamerBros trolls is disingenuous. And to say that for those who were hoping that it be more of a historically immersive offering and are taken aback by what they’ve seen are just spouting poppycock…well, that’s probably just as hidebound or imperceptive as the GamerBros and their “No Gurlz allowed” nonsense.
With the news reporting on and having discussions about the Alt-Right + Neo-Nazis, framed around a backdrop of concern, and there being forum topics on QT3 about it, perhaps a bit of traditional respect & caution around WWII is not to go amiss.
It’s all well and good talking about how there are no laws stopping people from cribbing public WWI domain content for expressly commercial reasons, until people get offended, and then public pressure groups become a force to factor in the discussion.
In the UK, there are Russian people who, on occasion, spend time outside Parliament Square remembering WWII in their own way, feeling very strongly about family contributions, loss etc, and they don’t see WWII as being ‘a long time ago’. They feel it is still quite relevant to their present day lives, and are connected to it, and by it.
And, c’mon now, I didn’t ‘laud’ MoH: Underground. Artistic license still affordable, it seems?
So, In a world of (growing?) Alt-Right concerns, I do see the potential for FUNWorldWar2.exe, sorry I mean Battlefield V, and its ‘everybody belongs’ approach to WWII and focus on Fun over authenticity (as established by DICE), leading into the development of an ‘artificial’, constructed or tertiary connection to the events of the past.
Call of Duty: WWII of course invites its share of responsibility, and is not immune, but the developers were seen paying constant lip-service to their respect for the subject matter. Compare that to Bethesda and some public reactions to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and Battlefield V - both with PR teams that were in favour of publicly engaging with and bemoaning their detractors. Hey, Pete Hines from Bethesda + the lead writer of Wolfenstein II really hate Nazis, and that is an admirable and completely understandable stance, but was it tactful and effective?
The potential problem of having an artificial connection to WWII is the sort of loose link that the Alt-Right could be capable of exploiting, since, in their view, the past is whatever they want to see it as.
So, yes, things have changed since the original Wolfenstein 3D, though we don’t yet know what the future might hold.
Gaming hasn’t been mainstream before, and now even bored & under-stimulated young people in Gaza have had access to Counter-Strike for a long time.
(on a TV programme, young Gaza men talked about how their boring life is punctuated by Counter-Strike & the fantasty of armed proficiency etc… they were content to divulge this in hoperson that their lives would improve)
You understand one group encourages and commits harassment campaigns and the other questions why anyone would claim Battlefield is some sort of piece of media that’s so important to history that people who survived the holocaust would suddenly think a game that used to emphasize vehicle classes and how many weapons it has will suddenly not take it seriously anymore because they added female models and a trailer that has a woman in it.
Did the Battlefield V trailer glorify violence? In my opinion, yes it did, gratutiously so, and this where a lot of that distasteful feeling comes from. It also used women as a mechanism for glorifying gratuitous violence.
Perhaps I’ve done a poor job of expressing this concern, since I didn’t want to go all ‘Jack Thompson’ on everybody, but it is getting difficult to argue that games are a benevolent entity, when the media seems to delight in hating on the people that play them, which can lead one to believe that either a subset of ‘horrible’ people seek out games as fuel to be ‘horrible’ or that subset is somehow created by the games themselves. Either way, video games developers may seek to isolate themselves from tackling that concern, and leave governments (i.e the tax payer) to sort out the mess.
When the group that questions how strong this historical accuracy claim of yours and it’s place in this franchise actually is, chases you down in social media, hunts you down while you play these games, and tells you not to play games for a few decades, then you tell me how similar they are.
I understand you you want to be heard, but it’s disingenuous to claim these groups are even close to the same set of mind or attitude.
I don’t want to be heard, nor are these my claims. What I am saying, is that I can understand what those people are saying. And listen without prejudgements.
That’s not what you said. You tried to compare people dismissing the idea that BF is some sort of historical beacon to the groups that actually harass and tell other people they don’t belong as anyway similar. That you would even think those two ideas are on the table just suggests how over-the-top this particular claim is.
No I said, English up there, that stubbornness and not listening are a two way street, that both groups can be guilty of that. You have added these other adjectives and ideas and supposed “beliefs” on to what I wrote.
You’re trying to cherry pick characteristics of two groups, that Gamerbros and No Gurlz group, they’re hostile and would remove gamers from the industry if they had a chance. I don’t care what they say, their attitude is bigotry. It’s not stubborness just because you say it is.
Yes, I am not telling you to listen to them. I am saying that others who just don’t like the other things that may not be “historical” aren’t full of beans, and maybe deserve a hearing. And that it’s common human courtesy to take them at face value and not try to find a hidden nefarious motive to dismiss them out of hand before even listening.
Edit: I am muting the thread now. I am not listening any more. :)
You do know that there were jetpacks in Battlefield 1942 right? What’s realistic and respectful to the holocaust victims about Team Domination and Deathmatch modes as well as jet packs? What did the last one have again, behemoths?
This isn’t a historical visual novel here carefully showing the intricate details of a Nazis death camps and the gas chambers they filled with women and children. It’s an FPS game that features 64 vs 64 MP battles. Is anyone asking if the piles of bones in unmarked graves are accurate or are we talking about what kind of weapons the game will have?
In reiteration:
OK. I’d like the box art to more clearly convey time period. And, no, this does not mean removal of women. I mean that EA & DICE should reconsider parts of their obnoxious ‘teal & orange’ design from their box art, i.e the ones that looks like a Michael Bay wet dream, because EA are seemingly demonstrating that brand recognition is more important than communicating the damn setting of their game. ‘Battlefield 1’ was a pretentious idea to call a game that should have been called Battlefield 5 or ‘BF:WWI’. ‘Seven Nation Army’ was a stupid idea for a song in a trailer about The First World War!, and a song which Jack White of White Stripes wrote because as a kid he couldn’t say ‘Salvation Army’? Get it? The game’s marketing marked roughly the centenary of a conflict that we have internalised to be colosally tragic & pointless, and it did so with all the grace of lions being led by donkeys!
I want DICE to retract their insistence on focusing fun over authenticity in a World War II game. I don’t want a Call of Duty clone. I don’t even want Call of Duty. I want these games to stop thinking that they are doing us a favour by changing their setting only, while bolting on game conventions that have little regard for the theme of the actual game.
… however, I ‘want’ to love these games, but it is going to be about who can afford them year on year, and that these are the ‘big’ talking piece games that I logically don’t want to play but emotionally do, because the advertising is tough to avoid, but that they are the same(ish) game from 2011 so what is the point in buying them? It is about buying the same game again, and pretending it is different. I think it is a shame that sequelitis is forever fracturing communities of like-minded people who want to play games. I’m irritated by ‘Games as a Service’ and how pernicious it can be. I’m annoyed that people refuse to recognise that, much like ‘indie’ Music magazines of the past that were wiped from the market by the power & money of music publishing companies, there is barely any such thing as an ‘independent critic’, since most critics and journalists end up so working closely with advertisers and publishers that they end up working under them! - they are in no way working for ‘us’, and we shouldn’t believe that they are.
I want the audience to realise that they might be in the process of being duped by EA… again! And that EA are going to use their newfound goodwill among the progressives, in order to shake off the bill that governments would relish handing EA for the potential damage done to society via loot boxes, sports card packs gambling etc and other valueless items they sell in a completely closed market which gets people hooked. Microsoft are also not immune from similar Market rigging.
To be honest, there are so many gripes, that I don’t think me & Battlefield V are going to get on. Still, I’m concerned, because EA is so big and major publishers have a lot of power over the industry, and could possibly make skinner-box rats out of all of us… with fear that the publishers will find this easier to achieve over successive generations.
Meh, why would you want for the box art to convey more accurately the time period, if the game itself doesn’t accurately portray… anything at all. The series is as accurate as a bunch of kids playing cowboys and indians.
Interesting point. Please understand that I am not always saying ‘old games were better’, but what I am trying to convey is that earlier games were an example of a more fledgling media, where there were limitations on what could be done, and what was understood.
You make a good point in saying that ‘Team Deathmatch’ doesn’t do a good job of conveying an ‘Authentic’ World War 2 message.
My argument to this is straightforward: Now that there are many more years of experience in video game creation than the earlier days, doesn’t it seem disappointing that we are STILL stuck with the same gameplay models or attitudes of yesteryear? Shouldn’t developers, with the benefit of extra knowledge, know by now? The fact that they know these things are wrong, everything from hitscan weapons to team deathmatch, and fun over authentic, makes it all the more surprising that developers are choosing to stick with it - especially when it would be delivering asimilar product to before.
Metaphorically, now that CoD:WWII is a mainstream game that finally recognised concentration camps within a WWII game narrative framework, it sort of makes any new game which doesn’t acknowledge it a bit of a holocaust denier by comparison. Depicting concentration camps in a mainstream game was something that was previously considered, unthinkable, but it has now (inevitably, imho) been done, and now, we are through the Looking Glass, people.
In a similar way, that a person who is unaware of the holocaust isn’t a denier, but a person who is confronted with evidence but chooses to deny would count as a denier (and, in parts of Europe, holocaust denial is becoming seen as an actual crime), now that developers are aware, that makes it all the more strange that they would insist on FUN above authenticity, when blessed with the knowledge that earlier developers didn’t have the luxury of having. We know why they do it - because the games industry believes that fun offends the least number of people.
I worry that Battlefield V may come to represent, in worse case scenario, a craven video games industry that doubles down on its bad habits and refuses to take risks to further the medium, but instead panders to a cash cow and wish-fulfilment mentality, and that other games could rush to follow the example.
Now, onto myths:
Introduce a game that young people might believe to be authentic (but which isn’t) and then suddenly parents have the additional onus to explain to young people that, no, there were very few women involved on the front line in WWII. The image of ‘Warrior-grandma-in-her-youth-frontline-killing-Nazis’ is a construct of urban myth making. I know why this belief is held - to make the individual feel better about your own elderly relatives, particularly their grandmas - it makes people think that their grandparents were powerful, and heroic, in control of their oend destiny and standing up againt Fascist tyranny - but isn’t how wars work. Everybody of every nation believes that their (great) grandparents were heroes, probably even Germans, but aren’t those (WWII German) soldiers supposed to be the bad guys? Am I supposed to now believe that even their great grannies were Nazi soldiers?
Hopefully people now realise that these myths, and choices of flexible reality in favour of vido game fun, simply don’t stand up to scrutiny, and bring forth more uncomfortable questions. Eventually, the legacy of German WWII soldiers may end up safe, sanitized, absolved of, and completely separated from the taint of Nazism, because this is what Germany has wished for since the 1950s.
Who are the young people going to believe? Their parents? The schools? Or that FUN video game? They are more likely to internalise the game, and it would be false. False information, false memories - Ghost in the Shell or French philosophy lecturer about second order simulacra levels of falsely internalised reality.
Historian Dan Snow knew that there would have been no female Spitfire Pilots in WWII, and yet he said that he once told his children that there were, but that there was conveniently no picture, even though it was a big fib. Apparently, he lied in order to ‘save their innocence’, and because he believed that they would find out the truth someday anyway. What is they don’t? What if they do find out the truth, and realise that their dad, a famous Historian, lied to them?
Some of us don’t like being willfully lied to about stuff like History, Santa Clause, Easter Bunny and Religion, because when we find out the truth, it raises the question: what else were they lying about? We then might inherit a situation which requires explanation to others that they are being misinformed by their favourite entertainment properties, but those people get angry because they don’t want to be told that their favourite entertainment franchises might be built on top of at least a little bit of bullsh*t, even if the aroma is faintly noticeable at all times.
