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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 to c/gaming

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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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[–] sobersquid 80 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Perhaps my memory is clouded, as it has been a long time since I had played a Call of Duty game, but I believe there was a time when most of it felt anti-war, in that you would die frequently and often, then be shown a quote that was about how there are no winners in war, providing a sharp contrast between the actions you were taking and the grin reality of what was occuring. After I believe Modern Warfare 2, the CEOs of Infinity War stepped down, and since then the quotes stopped being more anti-war, and much more pro-war, highlighting heroism and such in the quotes. I always viewed it as a studio change and just stopped playing after that, feeling the games were just missing the mark and farming more and more of that sweet multiplayer money.

[–] glockenspiel@programming.dev 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the same reason TV shows like NCIS get 500 seasons.

[–] oddspinnaker@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ooooh, I feel dumb that I didn’t pick up on this before.

I knew about movies (Top Gun and all) but not other things, for whatever reason.

[–] thoro@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah there was a little bit of that in the original WW2 games: CoD 1-3 and the expansion games and console exclusives.

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