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‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda (progressive.org)

submitted 1 year ago by knokelmaat@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

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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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[–] comicallycluttered@beehaw.org 47 points 1 year ago

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.