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General discussionMilitant propaganda and cross-dressing in video games(89 posts) (89 posts) 
(89 posts) 
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 19, 2015
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DieRuhe: And no, I didn't join the Army because of video games.
Me neither. I went to army because I got a letter which told me to do that.

I went to coastal artillery, and the real kicker is that apparently that section of the army doesn't even exist anymore, or at least has been changed considerably. Big coastal cannons have apparently been replaced with rockets, missiles and shit right after I left.

At one point they wanted me to join the military police, but I didn't feel like it. I didn't want to wrestle with drunk recruits returning from a short vacation.
Post edited January 19, 2015 by timppu
Posted January 19, 2015
Of course no one criticises America's Army, that's like drilling holes into Swiss Cheese. What's the point? The game wears its purpose on its sleeves and was never really popular to begin with. Plus, everyone knows that war is bad and I bet 90% of CoD players would piss themselves if they had to pick up an actual rifle. It's just a stupid fantasy.

I also love the totalitarian use of the term "progressive". Substitute is for "holy" and you get a cult.
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Emob78: Kasper, do you ever enjoy anything?
I bet he enjoys flagellating himself.
Posted January 19, 2015
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Shadowstalker16: Lets not forget what a lot of us take to be ''messages'' weren't even put into games intentionally ITFP by developers (the tropes vs women BS is basically that; and not ''the patriarchy trying to assert male dominance to children from a young age'' or some other BS).
Now, hold on... That fits the "Patriarchy" (as far as I understand it) perfectly. You must realize that the Patriarchy isn't like the Illuminati, the Patriarchy is like God. It's not a group of people, it cannot be seen, it is assumed to exist by virtue of explaining certain facts about the world. The Patriarchy is something that affects people who are unaware of working under its influence, they pass it on by merely acting in ways they perceive as normal.
Best analogy? Watch the X-files' episode "Unruhe". I won't spoil anything - it should be pretty clear eventually...
Believing in the Patriarchy isn't being afraid of evil people who are out to get you. It's believing that literally THE WORLD is out to get you.

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Emob78: No, games don't have to be fun. Many aren't for many different reasons. But to me they should be. If you play video games only to dissect and analyze content and interpret social/political issues, then IN MY OPINION you have mistaken this industry for something it is clearly not.
As a man who likes to think, I kinda take offense to that ;P.
More importantly - there are these things you COULD call "different sort of fun" or just ditch the label and outright distinguish them from "fun"... Such are the experiences of playing, say, horror games. Do people playing them have "fun"? Not in the "haha FUNny" sense. Then there's esport - people take pride in victory, don't necessary have "fun" all the time, but certainly enjoy games on a certain level. I guess we could conclude that good games should be "entertaining" or "satisfying to experience", not necessarily merely "fun".
Posted January 19, 2015
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Brasas: So you see, it's not hypocrisy. AA is no more propaganda than most other games.
Considering that AA is like the only multiplayer shooter ever where your team always appears like American soldiers to you and the enemies always look like "terrorists" (despite perceiving themselves as US soldiers as well) it is not "no more propaganda than most other games".
Posted January 19, 2015
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HiPhish: Of course no one criticises America's Army, that's like drilling holes into Swiss Cheese. What's the point? The game wears its purpose on its sleeves and was never really popular to begin with.
Actually you could easily find a lot of criticism of the game in the media, especially when it was first released. I even saw shows which normally don't talk about video games criticize America's Army a lot.
Posted January 19, 2015
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Brasas: So you see, it's not hypocrisy. AA is no more propaganda than most other games.
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F4LL0UT: Considering that AA is like the only multiplayer shooter ever where your team always appears like American soldiers to you and the enemies always look like "terrorists" (despite perceiving themselves as US soldiers as well) it is not "no more propaganda than most other games".
What's so special about representing US soldiers and terrorists that immediately equals higher propaganda? Being against terrorism is to me an objective point, of course I don't include unconventional warfare per se as terrorism automatically.

Also outside of FPS there's many games where specific armies are represented, and even something like Op. Flashpoint was explicitly about US soldiers off the top of my head. Wasn't there also something about Blackhawk Down? Or Vietnam? That's not looking at WW2... So what's unique about AA really? Only its recruitment intent if you ask me... it is probably not the most jingoistic, nor the most militaristic of FPS games...

Want to restate your point? I don't see how it disproved me that level of propaganda in AA is nothing special... to me the only lens through which AA propaganda is obviously stronger is a lens of anti-Americanism. Since I don't think America is particularly good, nor evil, I see it from a more neutral perspective.
Posted January 19, 2015
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo
Posted January 19, 2015
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Brasas: What's so special about representing US soldiers and terrorists that immediately equals higher propaganda?
I think you didn't understand: in America's Army you have multiplayer combat between two factions and the developers used a trick that always makes you an American soldier and your enemies some sort of terrorists. Who plays the terrorists? Other players who play Americans and to whom you appear like a terrorist. I'm not aware of any other game that does that in multiplayer.

Multiplayer has kinda traditionally always been neutral ground, even with a clear separation between good and evil in singleplayer campaigns multiplayer would allow you to see the conflict from the other perspective, to feel some sort of sympathy for the "other side" and to treat American soldiers as the enemy. America's Army is possibly the only multiplayer shooter ever that omits this option. Why? Obviously because it's not just another military shooter, it's a propaganda tool. Not even games like the Call of Duty or Medal of Honor series do that kind of thing.

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Brasas: Being against terrorism is to me an objective point
What's that supposed to mean?

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Brasas: Op. Flashpoint... Blackhawk Down... Vietnam... WW2...
All of these/such games allowed you to play the "bad guys" in multiplayer and usually all elements that characterize the enemies as "evil" in the single player campaign are completely absent in multiplayer.

Also Operation Flashpoint IIRC included individual missions where you play as Russians already in the base game. There was also the Red Hammer addon campaign for Operation Flashpoint (not by Bohemia Interactive but still published officially by Codemasters) that was told from the perspective of a Russian soldier (in the end you'd actually hunt down the evil rogue general together with the Americans but you'd still kill many GIs on your way there). Not that it has anything to do with my point, though. It's perfectly common that single player portions of games only allow you to play as Americans (or allies of Americans) and shooters like Vietcong 1 & 2 or Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood are total exceptions. The thing is that America's Army is unique in how it approaches multiplayer.
Post edited January 19, 2015 by F4LL0UT
Posted January 19, 2015
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KasperHviid: The game DEPRESSION QUEST makes the rather brave decision not to define if you play a man or a woman. Instead, the game just says that "You are a mid-twenties human being." The strange thing with this is that it actually works - I got into the role of this character, despite not knowing if the person has a penis or not.
I'm going to call this out. No. No way. It's pat-on-the-back checkbox-checking bullshit. You know how a minimally competent writer would've put it?

"You are in your mid-twenties."

The "brave decision" to make the protagonist gender-ambiguous is so immensely brave that one of the more prominent games which parodied it is already old enough to buy alcohol.

(Also, the game lost me as soon as my terribly depressed and completely incapable of a public life character got worse and automatically decided to go back on meds.)

It's not good. It's not even original. It's a pile of shit shat out by a talentless hack who decided to capitalize on another game's (whose dev can code) viral popularity.

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KasperHviid: Normally, the faceless-undefined-gender protagonist exists in games where he or she doesn't play a role in the story as such - he/she is just a force that make stuff happens, solves puzzles, finds gold keys, but who he/she actually is is irrelevant for the story.
There's so much wrong with the paragraph that I don't even. Have you ever played videogames? Did you ever look into the dictionary before writing nonsense like "protagonist doesn't play a role in the story"?
Posted January 19, 2015
To be honest I found America's Army a fairly unflashy game which quite accurately depicts what military training is going to be like. Actually it reminded me how boring my own time in the army was so I'm not sure what the propaganda value of it is, games like CoD is were the propaganda is IMO.
Posted January 19, 2015
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Emob78: No, games don't have to be fun. Many aren't for many different reasons. But to me they should be. If you play video games only to dissect and analyze content and interpret social/political issues, then IN MY OPINION you have mistaken this industry for something it is clearly not.
I think the words 'fun' and 'engaging' are interchangeable between your and rtcvb32's posts. That a game is engaging, yet not particularily fun doesn't mean it's designed to be dissected, analyzed and interpreted - it simply means that it wasn't designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. X3 series would be a fantastic example - 90% of the time, you're not having fun. You're mostly flying around and looking at pretty backgrounds. The reason why you're playing the game is the end goal, the reward which you get for persisting - a better fighter craft you may purchase, a space station you may construct, optimization of trade routes etc. etc. Why would you do such a thing? To get a feeling of actually being there, of immersion. If you got to pilot a space ship, flying around would be what you'd do most of the time realistically. Now thinking about it, most simulators in existence are hardly designed with being 'fun' in mind. Nonetheless, not having fun with a game doesn't mean it's not engaging, it doesn't mean that it's not compelling - it just means that it caters to higher functions of your brain than just mindless 'Entertain oneself'

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Vestin: Such are the experiences of playing, say, horror games. Do people playing them have "fun"? Not in the "haha FUNny" sense.
I don't know about that, while most horror games aren't funny, they're definitely designed to be fun. I might be just playing with words at this point and if it is so I apologize, nonetheless, most horror games that I have ever played only ever terrify you for brief moments, and the filler between these small thrills are usually simple puzzles, shooting sections or such - what people seem to associate wit 'fun' in games.
Post edited January 19, 2015 by Fenixp
Posted January 19, 2015
Technically, "propaganda" simply means "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view", with wikipedia saying "Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented".
That's it, and nothing else.

These days, its just used in a derogatory way to refer to something the writer does not happen to like. Most games certainly have an implicit tone and set of rules and ideas, never mind explicit message. I guess people just get annoyed when it is a tone or message they personally disagree with.
Still, I'm certain few would disagree that AA is "Military Propaganda".

As far as "fun" in games, yeah, I agree, it is not necessary at all. Fenixp gives a better alternative, the use of "engaging". Some games I'm quite happy I played for the experience of having played them, while they may not have technically been considered "fun": The Walking Dead and Spec Ops: The Line (would that count as 'propaganda'? Maybe, but at least it was interesting and unique in its attempt to question what has become totally normal to gamers) come to mind.

It seems a different discussion from what Kasper is talking about, but I never got the whole argument about "removing yourself objectively" or "it's just pixels on the screen" or "It's just entertainment value".
I absolutely, totally disagree with that, but I consider story to be a very important aspect of the video games I play, and of video games as a medium for telling stories (as opposed to stuff like Tetris, of course, although some pretty awesome games have been made by weaving narrative into the gameplay of fairly abstract games). If at the end of the game you're still seeing your character/NPCs/the enemy/whatever as just "pixels on the screen" instead of thinking in terms of characters, names, motivations, etc., like "My character is bad ass!" or "I am sad that my companion nobly sacrificed herself" or "That guy wasn't really the antagonist at all!" and so on, it seems that game has failed as a game.
Posted January 19, 2015
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Strijkbout: To be honest I found America's Army a fairly unflashy game which quite accurately depicts what military training is going to be like. Actually it reminded me how boring my own time in the army was so I'm not sure what the propaganda value of it is, games like CoD is were the propaganda is IMO.
I aggree. CoD is full of propaganda.

I played America's Army online a bit when it was fairly new and have to say, that I didn't see anything in it making people join the army, maybe it was too subtle for me. Even after playing it, I'd probably still rather shoot my own sergeant than an enemy soldier of a nation that isn't much worse than my own and who I don't even know. ;)
Posted January 19, 2015
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infinite9: First of which, the people I met who wanted to join the United States Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard did so not because of video games but because of their own reasons ranging from patriotism to a desire to be apart of something far greater than themselves. I believe spending money on a video game was a dumb idea but that's because I felt it should have gone into training simulations instead.
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KasperHviid: Nope, the human mind don't work like that. When we are asked about the reason why we behave a certain way, our conscious mind don't have access to the raw data. So all we can do to make a guess, which just as easily can be total bullshit.

The book You Are Not So Smart lists countless examples of this - the science guys manipulate their subject into behaving a certain way, and then they listen to the subject make shit up to explain their behavior; bullshit answers which the honestly believe is the truth. (I can recommend the book btw.)
And how would you know that? Just because you read some book or listened to some college professor doesn't mean you know everything about other people. You are not those people who I met that who joined the military and they are certainly not you. Hell, some of them just plain don't care about video games.
Posted January 19, 2015
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KasperHviid: Nope, the human mind don't work like that. When we are asked about the reason why we behave a certain way, our conscious mind don't have access to the raw data. So all we can do to make a guess, which just as easily can be total bullshit.

The book You Are Not So Smart lists countless examples of this - the science guys manipulate their subject into behaving a certain way, and then they listen to the subject make shit up to explain their behavior; bullshit answers which the honestly believe is the truth. (I can recommend the book btw.)
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infinite9: And how would you know that? Just because you read some book or listened to some college professor doesn't mean you know everything about other people. You are not those people who I met that who joined the military and they are certainly not you. Hell, some of them just plain don't care about video games.
I agree with with you infinite9, that book "You Are Not So Smart" is itself just another load of subjective propaganda from the "Brain & Behavior Bullshit Brigades". The sort of Richard Dawkinsian science morons that claim we are all "just biological automatons whose only purpose is to replicate our genetic codes". The book is just utter bilge IMO - and written by those smug bastard scientists who think they've cracked "the meaning (or rather NON-meaning in their opinions) of life" and can 100% predict (and control) us all, like the dumb little gene-writing robots we all are.

"The God Delusion"? - HA! The only God Delusion is with nutters like Dawkins, Hitchens (dec'd :-) ), Dennet, Harris and all the other Brain & Behaviorac idiots and their brainwashed fans (or militia if you like). They think they ARE "Nu-Gods".

PS/ All Militant atheists, anti-theists and Anton LeVeyans - don't bother replying with any of your ridicule, scoffs or insults..... thnx. :-) !!!!!
Post edited January 19, 2015 by JMayer70
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionMilitant propaganda and cross-dressing in video games(89 posts) (89 posts) 
(89 posts)