"The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. Is it right and proper that today there are 7500 offensive strategic nuclear warheads, of which 2500 are on a 15 minute alert to be launched at the decision of one human being?"
- Robert McNamara, TheFog of War
“At the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you've lost.”
- In The Loop
Beeps & Boops readers, being some of the canniest on the Internet, may have noticed that politics has grown into a major theme of this site. This was not really by design, but – in retrospect – was an unsurprising result of two politically-minded young liberals starting a video game blog. We’ve talked about games with unintentional political content, and games with very intentional political content. Today, I want to talk about DEFCON: easily one of the most political games I’ve ever played, probably the most effective, and certainly the most beautiful.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an ugly, ugly game, and I’m not talking about the quality of its graphics. It’s a moral sewer, putting you into the sorts of senselessly murderous scenarios that would have sparked national outrage 20 years ago. The game’s titular heroes can be described, at best, as selfish, psychotic killers. The game can be called, without exaggeration, a cop murder simulator. The game opens with a firefight between Kane and the police, and before you even know the story, before you have any narrative reason to squeeze a trigger, the game asks you to shoot cops. Why? Because they’re in your way. As the game progresses, you shoot more cops. You shoot security guards. You raid a prison. If you’re not careful, or if you’re feeling a little anarchic, then you’ll mow down plenty of civilian passersby as well. Doom has nothing on this game; Mortal Kombat looks like an episode of Gumby in comparison; even Grand Theft Auto, as murderous as that series can be, does not so singularly make cop killing your objective.
Where, then, was the outrage over Kane & Lynch? It’s only coincidence that I started playing this game shortly after Jason posted about Heavy Fire, but I feel pretty confident in stating that Kane & Lynch is just as morally reprehensible. Kane & Lynch lacks the overt racism and the political edge, but is still dehumanizing, still inhumane, and still mindlessly destructive. The game still takes a very real, very serious social problem – crime – and tries to make it fun and exciting and appealing.
My question above, of course, is rhetorical. There was no outrage over this game – at least not related to its content – and gamers had absolutely no qualms about murdering cops by the dozens. The game’s story, in fact, was praised by many, and I only read one reviewer who remarked on the striking amount of cop killing. Even then, the reviewer seemed almost amused: "Hate cops? Kane & Lynch's designers sure hope so."
In the past few weeks, I’ve been playing a pretty diverse range of games: some old, some new, some major releases, some independent. In playing these games and talking about them, I’ve realized there’s one common link between all of them, and this link usually manifests in offhand comments like, “It’s really stylish,” “It’s gorgeous,” “The visuals are charming,” and on and on ad nauseam - statements that may be true, but are made casually and without very much enthusiasm.
In short, all of these games look great. It doesn’t matter whether I’m playing Red Dead Redemption and enjoying the sweeping vistas of the old west, or the 2008 Prince of Persia reboot with its painterly style, or the old-fashioned cartoon stylings of The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, or the abstract elegance of Flotilla, I am very rarely disappointed by a game’s visual design. Even though these games run the gamut of genre and production value, I don’t have to worry about playing a visually uninteresting game. I could probably run through my entire game collection and pick out only a small handful of games which I’d call truly ugly. (And even then, that’s half the appeal of Earth Defense Force 2017.)
I’ve written before about how we talk about graphics, and in that article I speculated that “we are perhaps too easily impressed by advances in technology.” That may be true for some, but I feel almost the opposite now: that I’m not impressed at all. I’m a spoiled, ungrateful, 21st century media consumer who only takes notice if a game doesn’t look amazing. Great is the new normal, and if a game dares to not be polished to a shine, then I’ll huff in my smoking chair, stroking my moustache and submitting something to White Whine. “This game isn’t as stylishly arresting as it could be, huff huff huff.” When I said before that game critics fail to talk about graphics with any sort of depth, I now wonder if that has less to do with a lack of ability and more to do with a simple lack of caring.
Teyon may choose to call Heavy Fire an "Explosive Arcade Experience on WiiWare!", but a more apt description would be "Arab shooting gallery." Whatever narrative or thematic values we may find in games like Call of Duty 4, however meager, are jettisoned in Heavy Fire.
...
Your job is simple: kill or blow up as many Arabs as you can. The game rewards efficiency. Pay attention. Where will that nasty Arab pop up next? Look! There he is! Shoot!! How many can you kill? It's Duck Hunt in the desert.
Heavy Fire: Special Operations is atrocious. Nintendo should be ashamed for approving it as a WiiWare title. It crosses the line, not merely because it eliminates any semblance or illusion of player choice, responsibility, or contextual behavior. Heavy Fire turns a painful and bloody contemporary conflict - June was the deadliest month of the 9-year war in Afganistan - into the setting for an arcade shooter. It makes killing hordes of dark-skinned foreigners feel like a carnival ride. It's despicable.
Honestly, sexy design and a "nonspecific" setting couldn't convince me that Modern Warfare 2 was any better than this. I would love if someone could articulate why they draw the line right here -- is it just the words "middle east" on the box?
There are really two different things to be upset with here. In Modern Warfare 2, the "illusion of player choice, responsibility, or contextual behavior" it is just that: an illusion. It may be more realistic and engaging and feign artistic intent, but it's still a murder simulator, just like Heavy Fire. Both of these games desensitize us to war and death. Only through trivialization and glorification can a society come to terms with the pain and brutality and senselessness that is War, and these games are both part of that historic narrative. While Heavy Fire may have more immediacy by trivializing current events, it's just a more potent version of the same stuff that every other war-setting, human-enemy shooter provides.
Where I get mad, and what Abbott seems to really be mad about as well, is the line that this game crosses that Modern Warfare 2 (mostly) and other FPS/murder simulators do not: racism. Every Arab that appears in the game is an enemy, and every enemy is an Arab, shouting gibberish at you and waving their AK-47s in the air, just like on TV. The game is wholly disinterested in Middle East culture, except as a target. It treats Arabs like zombies, rotting flesh replaced with brown skin. It really is disgusting that Nintendo would approve a title with such contempt for a region of peoples.
Perhaps the saddest part of this game is that the racism is actually a part of that necessary coming-to-terms therapy that a society goes through to justify its horrific actions. We've been fighting two wars in the Middle East for nine years, and have been militarily involved in the region since the 1970's, and there's little sign that we've made progress, if progress is to be defined as bringing peace and making our nation safer. How can we as a people possibly justify this endless war? The only answer to some is that there just has to be something inherently wrong with Those People. Because if every last Arab isn't our sworn enemy, what the hell are we still doing there fighting them?
