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Ich Bin Ein Bad Dude
Nazis: not the most sympathetic of villains. In some ways they’ve become the perfect videogame bad guys – an impersonal horde, enacting designs of unspeakable evil, ready and waiting to be blown from their polished boots by all-American heroes wielding Thompsons, bazookas and, in Wolfenstein’s case, Tesla guns.
Yet films have been able to paint a much more complex picture. It may have taken them a while, but movies eventually made the journey from monocle-wearing SS goons sneering “For you, Tommy, the war is over!” to the gut-wrenching moral complexity of being a secretary in Hitler’s bunker. When will we – or could we ever – see games make a similar transition? Games have let you play as Nazi forces, of course, but usually only in the contextually neutered realm of multiplayer, or at the morally ambivalent macroscale of strategic warfare. But will we experience a more personal account? Of all the different media we have at our disposal, you might think that an interactive form might be most able to express the conflict of being a moral cog within an immoral machine.
Such complexity was hinted at in Modern Warfare: players may feel uncomfortable with the SAS’s treatment of prisoners and their attitude to collateral damage, or disquieted by the cold detachment that comes from bombing men from a great height. But then the moral ambiguity was tempered by the fact that you are, when contrasted with the caricatured enemies, on the side of right. World At War, despite its claims to explore vengeance, shied away from actual atrocities.
Nonetheless, games have dealt with immorality in a mature way: Far Cry 2 gives you pause over your terrible actions; Fallout 3 sabotages good intentions with terrible consequence; Deus Ex brings you to see that your paymasters are less than wholesome; and RPGs have long delighted in forcing the player to choose between personal benefit and benevolence.
Perhaps embodying a Nazi is simply a bridge too far – still too recent, still too likely to be seen as controversy-bait. The headlines alone are enough to put off any publisher. Or maybe the reason is simply a practical one: being shot for insubordination would make for quite a short game.
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We did this with TIE Fighter back 1994. We based a lot of the story on what we imagined it would have been like growing up in Hitler's Germany - believing that you were the good guys, and that your cause was just. Of course, as the story unfolds you begin to realize that everything isn't as it seems and you start to question your loyalties. You learn that your leaders are not to be trusted and you see just how corrupt the Empire is.
- David Wessman, mission designer and lead writer on TIE Fighter
Great article however i have ONE issue.... Please someone explain me one thing: WHY there is "No Germans" only NAZIS in almost all WW2 games? Nazis ARE FROM OUTER SPACE!? Nazi nazis nazis NO, no no no! G-E-R-M-A-N-S, Third Reich et cetera! game developers are messing up with history. Why?
AndyLC: I just want to say your comments are spot on and pretty much identical to my own take about this whole 'inferiority complex' issue. I tried to present a similar argument in a letter I wrote to Edge about the 'games as art' debate - you can find it in Edge Magazine issue 197 - it's the letter about Shadow Of The Colossus.
I might put it up online if anyone is interested at all.
A lot of this is just based on perceptions - people have a particular impression of a particular medium, then they turn around and look at a different medium, feel they somehow need some validation or some recognition for playing these games, and then we go on and on with this droning, ad-nauseum debate that is basically a lot of fluff about nothing. Here are the familiar talking points:
* - Films have been exploring rich subject matter - fear, loss, love - for a long time, games do not
* - Films were regarded as a childish medium back in the 1910s or twenties - look at them now.
* - Oh, we need more 'sex' in videogames (why? So you can feel justified about playing games or as a justification for wanking off at the screen? You know that having 'sex' in any particular medium is not really about exploring any issues, right? 'Sex' and 'violence' are used in pretty much every movie precisely because by using these two basic themes, it triggers all the tiny neurons in your brain - hence you're more attentive. Basically, rather than 'enriching' you or whatever, it's debasing you - it's lowest common denominator stuff)
* - Oh, we need some 'realistic characters' in games
* - Oh, we need 'older' designers.
You almost get the impression these people want their own Congressional Medal Of Honor for indulging themselves in their leisure time. I beg all of you who look slavishly to Hollywood for this correct 'way' to present themes and issues in a medium - just point me to the latest film where all this 'sophistication' you accuse videogames of lacking was actually there.
Because let's be honest here, most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood these days - Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Saw 1-2-3-4-5, American Pie 1-2-3-4-5-6, The Incredible Hulk, GI-Joe, Inglorious Bastards - this is basically ALL videogame fodder.
The reality is that things have been going the other way around: Hollywood and film have become more and more like videogames and have lost all these things the editor in this piece wants to see in his games, while videogames have tackled more and more serious issues (like BioShock that explores transhumanism and Austrian school economics - like Shadow Of The Colossus that is basically a retelling of the story of Nimrod and the Tower Of Babel - like Resident Evil 5 where apartheid South-Africa eugenics/biowarfare is presented in a fictionalized form)
[quote]still too recent, still too likely to be seen as controversy-bait[/quote]
Still too recent? It's about 60 damn years ago and counting! No one currently alive and not suffering of Alzheimers or senility has actually experienced the damn event for themselves.
Honestly, the only way you could ever put a stop to this 'so-called' Neo-Nazism (apart from government agencies posing as them at times as a convenient excuse to crackdown on free speech - because hey, people want to 'bring back the Nazis' so we can't have free speech) is if we stopped talking about it and making videogames/movies about it every single day.
I swear, every July there are about 10 different videogames/movies/books involving either Nazis or Hitler - you would think that people who felt genuinely morally outraged by what happened in WWII would at least have the common decency not to exploit it like a commercial thing - they know this stuff will sell, that's why they keep producing it - I can assure you they don't give a rat's ass about what actually happened because they WEREN'T there - it's all hearsay, it isn't 'REAL' enough for them - they think they know what it was like by watching Schindler's List or The Pianist or something like that. Perhaps Norman Finkelstein was right on when he coined the term 'Holocaust Industry' - but it isn't so much the 'Holocaust' industry, it's more like the 'Nazi industry'.
This is probably the best response I've ever read in a talk back section. You should have your own column somewhere!
I just want to add that I'm also tired of hearing from games journalists who have a chip on their shoulder about games not being as good or deep as films. These comments are usually made based on assessing the value of games as if they were films.
What AndyLC described about Metal Slug is very insightful. I had a similar experience with that game in my youth. Even though it's a game about the joy of blowing up aliens, crabs and nazi-stand-ins, it was also full of charm and subtlety. The love letter falling out of the plane and being collected for points is pretty dang touching in a very unique and abstract way, especially in the context of such a zany game.
Metal Slug may not offer a traditional narrative like most war films (introduce characters, build sympathy, kill them, cue music "OMG HORRORS OF WAR") but it is full of thoughtful, CHARMING touches that build a compelling narrative and world view around an otherwise very straightforward, linear, focused gameplay experience.
I'd like to hear more columns pointing out these little victories in gaming, rather than the same old sad tune about how games aren't as good as books or films.
I think, much like my Call of Juarez 2 example, that this metal slug tidbit only scrapes at the surface that other mediums have delved much further into. We have to come to grips with the fact that video games are still burgeoning and growing, and don't yet have the complexity of more mature and developed art forms. It's undeniable that film and literature handle things with much more grace and ambiguity that is often missing in video games; usually by rule. The enemies you kill are almost always 'evil' in a way that doesn't make you wonder if this isn't the right thing to do. A character in a film can often get himself killed in a poetic moment when he chooses not to do something like killing, but if you do that in a game, like the editorial points out, it gets you the game over screen. Games are still in a spectacle stage that we need to grow out of and mature away from.
The first step may be to get rid of end of level statistics and points; at least, from any game that isn't considered 'competitive.'
>>We have to come to grips with the fact that video games are still burgeoning and growing, and don't yet have the complexity of more mature and developed art forms
We have to come to grips that videogames have been developed for decades, and plenty of intelligent, thoughtful people have worked on them (Some really, really stupid people have also written books and directed movies). They can improve, yes (just as books can improve, movies can improve), but I do not thinking having an inferiority complex towards movies and books is necessary for this growth.
Roger Ebert is a film critic. I don't think he compares movies to books and goes "OH MAN TRANSFORMERS WAS SHIT WHY WASNT IT THE ILLIAD??", he just talks about why that movie was a shitty movie.
What videogames have lacked in the past is the same savvy marketing that movies have enjoyed for decades. Now we have that, and we are pretending that only games with million dollar marketing have ever dared to have a story and narrative.
>>It's undeniable that film and literature handle things with much more grace and ambiguity that is often missing in video games; usually by rule.
I deny that, tell me why I am wrong. Titanic, we know niceguy poorguy is a goodguy, we know the rich asshole is a badguy, it's not complex at all. A lot of people like this movie, it did super well. Movies tend to be pretty direct in telling you how to feel, because they have a set beginning, middle, end, and viewing them is a passive experience. Often a movie will be criticized for being ambiguous.
Whether or not I want to kill that guard, who is an American citizen doing his job, in MGS1 is up to me. Same with the Russians in MGS3. You even sit down and talk to one about his family and kids. He is the enemy. Metal Gear Solid games award the highest rank to the players who can go through the game without killing others. This is a GAMEPLAY feature, that to be the ultimate badass, you are the man who refrains from violence.
>>The enemies you kill are almost always 'evil' in a way that doesn't make you wonder if this isn't the right thing to do
How is this different from movies or literature? Star Wars is a movie, watching storm troopers get crushed by rocks dropped from ewoks, you don't feel bad for them. Batman, those ninjas are badguys and Bruce blows them all up. Those thugs are badguys and batman kicks 'em in the head. "BATMAN MY GIRLFRIEND BLEW UP I MUST FIGHT THE BADGUYS" "NO TWOFACE YOU ARE BADGUY" and then twoface tried to kill a little boy, for some moral ambiguity.
Those Metal Slug badguy soldiers have loved ones, they chat and eat and laugh with one another. I still have to kill them because I am a soldier of the opposing force. One of the Metal Slug endings is actually a field of corpses, corpses and ruined tanks, a long pan of the swath of destruction you have laid, that is war.
>>A character in a film can often get himself killed in a poetic moment when he chooses not to do something like killing, but if you do that in a game, like the editorial points out, it gets you the game over screen.
because you failed at your objective! What if skywalker CHOSE to stay and be a moisture farmer? What if Han Solo said "nah, I dont wanna help this farmboy"? What if a storm trooper shot him in the face? It'd be a pretty boring movie.
What do you want? "KILL THE KID BEFORE HE KILLS YOU" "I CANT ITS A KID" "THE KID KILLED YOU!!" "SADMUSIC POETIC SLOMO DEATH"
It's not the content, but execution.
Or, again, look at Metal Gear, where you can take the much more difficult path of non violence.
Use examples, name movies, name games. Tell me what game fails and why. Tell me what movie has achieved emotions and depth and narrative and deepness and story that games have never, ever touched. Be thorough.
Tell me why I am wrong.
My point was merely thus: The video game industry is around 35 years old.
Film is over 100 years old.
Literature is thousands of years old.
They have significant advantages in development. You shouldn't take it as a personal assault on video games. We've seen it grow over the years, much in the same way as literature and film have (albeit the former in much greater spans of time) prior to our own medium of choice.
Now, I have no problem with blockbusters under the guise of 'merely fun.' If you like Transformers, great, good for you. If you like Halo or Call of Duty, great, that's good too. No one would think of replacing the roles these production fill.
I can't believe you would bring up the movie Titanic. No one ever said "every movie ever made is better than every game ever made.' Obviously there's a scale. Titanic sits particularly low on mine, as do many movies, which are of inferior quality to many games. However, myself, as well as anyone who bothers to make the comparison for the sake of aesthetic argument, probably consider more artistic movies than Titanic (which, really, was just another blockbuster). Think more like Raging Bull, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Maltese Falcon, or films from non-Hollywood filmmakers like Bergman or Felini, or simply the oft-preferred example of Citizen Kane. If these movies don't ring a bell whilst you reference Titanic and other blockbusters, please kindly concede you don't know much about film and probably shouldn't be consulted when contrasting the two mediums. None of the films you listed are considered partiicularly noteworthy for pushing the medium forward, or for representing the best of what they have to offer.
I am glad you brought up Metal Gear Solid, I feel strongly that, despite the game's glaring fault of overuse of cinematics (which makes it ironic that you would bring it up) to tell an often deluded story, it has pushed the medium forward in certain ways. I like to talk about the part in MGS3 where you walk down the river, and coming at you are the spectral corpses of your past kills. I think this is a brilliant way to maintain interactivity yet have real repercussions that relate plot-wise. It's a step in the right direction, though there are many more to be taken still.
Okay, as I continue to read your post, you keep referencing star wars. Are you a particularly young fellow? Your attention for culture seems to be very limited. If your only exposure to film are action flicks and the like, then yes, you feel nothing is missing from Video Games and good for you. I also notice you don't reference any literature so I'm guessing you probably don't read much. May I recommend Shakespeare's Hamlet, or Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground (which I much prefer to Crime and Punishment), James Joyce's phenomenal Ulysses, perhaps?
What video games have that all those books and movies (the ones I mention, anyway) don't are linear paths with objects in the way that you typically must elude or destroy (often generic gun-wielding soldiers or erstwhile enemies of a similar sort) that you kill by the dozen. Of the movies you mention, they lend themselves very well to this pattern (with the exception of Titanic, which could perhaps instead be made into some sort of platformer or point-and-click adventure game....in fact, there does exist a Titanic adventure game, though based on the ship itself rather than the movie, that came out in the 90s). But none of the movies or books I mention lend themselves well to the video game medium, at least not as it exists today. This finds itself back in a common complaint I remember reading about a decade ago -- that most video games essentially belong to the same genre: Action. But which games represent Drama? Do any games do comedy without involving any kind of violence? Can there be a game that has deep, involving story that isn't about saving the world or beating an enemy, that has deep psychological questions, but never leaves the stage it begins on? Most games have to be get-from-point-A-to-point-B whilst solving puzzles or killing enemies along the way, and on top of that we decorate with the story. You perform arbitrary objectives for a lil tidbit of story. This amounts to little more than solving tic tac toe games between pages of a book.
The key, in my mind, is to unite the gameplay with the story to such a point that they are one in the same. Metal Gear Solid has made solid steps in this direction. So has Half-Life. Adventure games, though not terribly popular, try their best to fill in the very small comedy niche, and in a few rare cases, drama. There are gems in gaming, here and there, but frequently they undersell and fail to influence future games the way they really should.
So to reiterate: games aren't bad. I love to play games. And I love to play games that aren't necessarily telling a story -- Rock Band case in point. But as far as its story-telling capabilities are, it's still immature, infantile compared to other mediums, perhaps because it *is* literally very young compared to most mediums! Looking at how gaming develops and how film developed a century ago, you find a lot of parallels, so it's not silly or an 'inferiority complex' to look at film and literature or even music and see where video games could be going, may be going. And you know what? It's going to take a lot longer than those mediums -- authors have full control over their narratives, auteurs to a lesser but still considerable degree, but no game developer retains such control. Developing story for an interactive medium in which the player has impact creates a host of incredibly complex problems that could take decades to master the narrative of.
We should embrace any possibilities to improve the medium, and the method to get there is through proper scrutiny, as we see with the very article we are responding too. You say I have an inferiority complex, but I think you do -- you're too scared to admit the faults of gaming, so you show this confident exterior. Maybe you are simply clueless, which is a possibility I am open to. But if the past 20 years of gaming proves anything, it's that they can always get better. Modern Warfare or Halo or whatever games you enjoy are not the limit of how far games can go, I promise you. And if you think they are, well, that's sad...but you will know better 5 years from now, when you are playing better games than today's.
That said, you are wrong.
I think you've misunderstood what AndyLC was getting at.
I believe AndyLC is saying that we need to broaden how we look at games and assess them for artistic merit. Most of these articles make very broad statements (games are immature!) without very specific examples to back them up. And they're always calling for a gaming equivalent of Shakespeare or Citizen Kane.
My problem with this is that there's much more to literature and Cinema than Shakespeare and Citizen Kane. Shakespeare is unquestionably an important writer, but he's not the only writer out there. The reason he's cited as a gold standard is because he's so obviously impressive and intimidating. He uses big words (often making them up as he goes) and creates long complex plots. His use of language is obviously beautiful and poetic and it's not hard to see that. But if every piece of literature only aspired to be Shakespeare, then it'd be a very limited world we live in.
This is what alot of games journalists seem to be calling for: Be like Shakespeare. Be loud and obvious. Have tough moral choices. Tackle "adult" subject matter like sex. It seems like a very superficial solution, and it's very limiting in scope because it ignores the truly rich spectrum of human experience that can be conveyed through games.
For instance, there is a beautiful poetry to the best 8bit games. The Legend of Zelda is a wonderful paean to the concepts of curiosity and exploration. Through very limited means, the game is able to create an atmosphere of child-like wonder and anxiety. There is a stark beauty to the configuration of squares and synthetic sounds that make up the experience, and it is wordless and unforced. It is severely exacting in its configuration, yet it's effect is natural and uncontrived, like a Haiku.
Or look at Pokemon. The game's designer suffers from Aspergers, a crippling social disorder, yet he was able to make a game that brought kids together all over the world. His fondest childhood memories were of collecting bugs in the forest. It saddened him that many modern children would not have this experience due to urban development. His solution was to boil down his fondest childhood experiences into an elegant system of rules and aesthetics. The result is a very refined experience that's very unique to the medium of games and as profound as any piece of interactive digital art I've ever seen.
Games don't need to have an obvious moral, ethical or emotional point to them to be a success. When I play Super Mario World I can experience what it's like to ride a dinosaur across a chocolate island. The beauty of it is far deeper than just the idea, it comes through the way it is presented: the piddling little steps of the sprite; the absolutely perfect expressionistic sound effects; the exact sense of weight and torque to the controls. This is as weird and wonderful as any surrealist literature I've read (and I'm a BIG fan of Raymond Roussel).
I'm not saying that games have already plateaued or that we shouldn't be critical of games. I don't think AndyLC or squarepusher or anyone else is calling for this. It's quite the opposite. We'd like for gamers to be more aware of the existing history of games and to build off of that instead of pushing forward blindly, imagining that each new game will reinvent the wheel. And personally, I'd like to see a wider scope of appreciation for what can be achieved with games outside of typical "adult" drama.
>>Literature is thousands of years old.
And Michael Bay is 44 years old. I don't know any 1,000 year old authors though (Perhaps one of those vampire novel writers would claim to be...)
>>I can't believe you would bring up the movie Titanic.
You can't believe I would bring up a global blockbuster beloved by millions around the world? Hey, middle aged women are people too! (and apparently make up the majority of PC gamers, if you count popcap hahah). Bonus Points: Figure out why, of all movies, I would bring up Titanic, in a thread about how mature&deep movies are and videogames being poo poo smalltime.
>>Obviously there's a scale. Titanic sits particularly low on mine, as do many movies
There's a Scale!? and it varies with people's... opinions???
>>Kramer vs Kramer
lol that sounds hilarious, is there Kostanza vs Kostanza too??? I would watch that.
>>No one ever said "every movie ever made is better than every game ever made.'
Perhaps not in those exact words (AndyLC gently whirls with his snifter of brandy, the warm reflection of his fireplace reflects in his snifter as he reflects in his study, smelling of fine mahogany and leather bound books)
Yet films have been able to paint a much more complex picture.
When will we – or could we ever – see games make a similar transition?
We have to come to grips with the fact that video games are still burgeoning and growing, and don't yet have the complexity of more mature and developed art forms.
Games are still in a spectacle stage that we need to grow out of and mature away from
Instead Videogames is... an immature baby still in the infantile stage of its life where it helplessly poops itself. Unlike Movies, who is responsible adult and credit to society.
But WHY (this is today's word, "Why?") do you think that?
>>Think more like Raging Bull, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Maltese Falcon, or films from non-Hollywood filmmakers like Bergman or Felini, or simply the oft-preferred example of Citizen Kane
>>Okay, as I continue to read your post, you keep referencing star wars. Are you a particularly young fellow?
>> May I recommend Shakespeare's Hamlet, or Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground
Cool, you've named some names, if you are an erudite and mature fellow who also reads them outside of high school lit, then thumbs up to you good man. Now... what ("why"'s cousin!) about them? Because "SHAKESPEAR IS LITERATUR!!" is not really a secret I haven't heard of. Nor is "BOOKS ARE OLDER THAN VIDEOGAMES!!" a revelation 1,000 years in the making.
SAY SOMETHING about these books and movies! WHY are you recommending them? What point are you trying to prove, other than you had english class in high school?
>> You say I have an inferiority complex, but I think you do
No, I'm fine, I've been going to the gym and losing that embarrassing gut fat and whitening my teeth. Now I can smile with Confidence with Crest Whitening Strips!
>> And if you think they are, well, that's sad...but you will know better 5 years from now, when you are playing better games than today's.
Were movies from 1955 guaranteed to be better than movies from 1950? Is a book written in 2008 inherently superior to one written in 1908? You are using time as an argument, as if newer=better, this contrasts a bit with your first statement of "books are old!"
This is an important point, History. This next paragraph is about History.
Literature and film build up from what came before them, and we generally hold certain historic titles in reverence for their contributions (the cinematography of Citizen Cane, for example). What I see here is people looking back on the games that have come before and go "oh, all immature, when will we be more like movies?". The videogame world has never been so immature as it is now, because this attitude is very immature. Imagine a little kid going "I need to be an adult! I will do adult things!!" and then he goes and smokes and looks at boobies. I don't think Shakespeare sat around and thought "HMMMM HOW CAN I CHANGE THE WORLD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE??? I GOTTA BE MATURE!!", he just wrote good plays with his audience in mind. Videogames already has a history of its own. It's not as long as that of cinema or books, but it's not like those things are mutually exclusive and a videogame maker will never, ever read a book, y'know? I have had plenty of memorable, touching, emotional, deep, blah blah blah and just plain fun experiences with games. Many of them did not have to scream "I AM BEING ART!!" to be artful, they simply were.
You are a mature and responsible adult and with these hard economic times you must worry about taxes and healthcare and the future so vidyagames are a low priority. I hope your kids go into good colleges and gud careers and you can retire to sail around the world on your yacht with your loving glasses wearing wife before the Mayan calender kills us all.
>>Yet films have been able to paint a much more complex picture.
Hey, what's the latest movie with Nazi's to come out? I think it's a Tarantino flick where a bunch of all american badasses kick the shit outta Nazi scum. (It's still a good movie, by the way, I'm just saying that there's nothing wrong with guys killing badguys, or badguys killing badder guys)
>>When will we – or could we ever – see games make a similar transition?
Do you really believe games have not reached that level before? It makes me sad that professional videogame journalists would think that about their own field, all of this self flagellation is really unpleasant to read. Yeah, games can get better, but we don't always have to then go "b..bubut movies are still better... ;_;" every time we talk about it!
There are a lot of poopy movies out there, along with crappy books and crummy games. "I am the badguy, but WAIT I AM PROTAGONIST!!" is not exactly the most clever, deep, emotional narrative idea either.
>> to the gut-wrenching moral complexity of being a secretary in Hitler’s bunker.
(zoom in on secretary making SADFACE next to ANGRY HITLER) I AM TRAPPED BETWEEN ROCK AND HARD PLACE!!! This is very easily digested moral complexity. Next thing you know we'll be killing little girls for power ups.
---
Have you ever played Metal Slug? That game came out 12 years ago, if you missed it you should check it out. It's a straight forward run&gun game where you fight Nazi-esque badguys.
But are they faceless goons?
I destroyed one of those not-Nazi helicopters, it dropped a Love Letter. That man had somebody who loved him back home, she will never see him again because I killed. I think I got 500pts for collecting that (worth more than a pig, less than a medal)
At the beginning of a stage where I infiltrate a town, I see some soldiers at a camp fire. They are cooking food, chatting, smiling, laughing. Unaware that I am going to kill them all.
Metal Slug is not a game known for its intense narrative and emotionally gripping (actually, the anguish of running out of coins at a crucial boss battle is a DEEP and EMOTIONAL experience, hahah), but it gave a face to the badguys. It did not beat me over the head with it, the game did not grab me by the head and go HEY, LOOK AT THESE GUYS THEY ARE HUMANS TOO DONT YOU FEEL BAD NOW??? and I wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't paying attention. Metal Slug is 12 years old.
Edge Staff, I think that when you guys talk about narrative, story and whatnot, you tend to only mention games that have come out in the current gen. That makes me feel like an old man, and I am not an old man.
Part of the problem here is how people view video games and to a lesser extent entertainment mediums. Many people switch off the news in order to play a video game and therefore don't want to be preached to.
Now I know that isn't quite what your saying but I feel that the more moral ambiguity there is, the less satisfaction there is in beating the game. I sense many people play story driven games to have some place in which they can be the hero. So it's okay John Smith that you work in an office doing a boring admin job, it's okay that you've never saved anyone's life or done anything that has massively benefited society.Hell for a short time it is okay that many of the world's problems aren't easily fixable if fixable at all e.g. famine, overpopulation, genocide, cancer, aids etc. Reason being is that for the time your in this little world we're giving you, you get to save the world, you get to save individuals lives and bring the "bad guys" to justice.
See as soon as you put in notions like, "ahhh but DID you save the world" the whole fantasy goes to pot and is less fun.
Games with moral choices are certainly admirable in their intent, but I don't think they'd quite convey the same kind of ...theme...as a game that would shoehorn you into a considerably 'less moral' position.
I have recently been playing Call of Juarez 2, in which the game begins with you (as either one of two brothers, Ray or Tom) joining the ranks of the Confederate army during a battle with the Union. The end level screen said I racked up 147 kills, and you better believe that throughout the whole experience I was feeling a sort of aversion I don't normally experience in shooters. It just felt wrong.
The two brothers end the level with the intent to abandon the army, however, not for any moral ambiguity involved, but out of fear of the (in)famous general Sherman's scorched earth policy affecting their homestead and family. They placed the value of filial piety over that of allegiance to the army (not the confederate army, but any army). They did not, as such, invalidate the point of the Confederacy, only that their own personal family was more important to them.
In the next level, then, you are killing just as many union soldiers prior, but this time in pursuit of preventing the burning of your homestead and the killing of your family rather than for confederate purposes. It still felt wrong, though less wrong. However, that either level feels 'wrong' is something you're forced to come to terms with as you play the game. It forces you to adjust your assumptions of the Civil War. It isn't necessarily as black and white as we often think as we look back in history (indeed, there are many people today who still identify with the Confederacy), and that for small soldiers on the front line, it was less some moral imperative (or lack thereof) that fed the chaos they were embroiled in, but a necessity demanded of them as a wind greater than themselves picked them up and flung them about. Perhaps it is the power of games that allows this sort of moral ambiguity be thrusted into the purveyor.
Similarly, it's unwise to consider the Nazis simply as 'evil', to even consider Hitler as simply 'evil', as complexities are in all humans, and they're are motivations and microcosms to consider. That isn't to say that the Confederate effort was a noble one or that Hitler is at all justified in any of his tyrannical actions (worst of which was organized genocide and the ravaging of Europe), but that it isn't sufficient explanation to simply conclude that they are evil and that's that.
I doubt this was the true intent of Call of Juarez. It was developed by a polish company that was probably heavily inspired by old westerns, in which (unlike video games) it's not so unusual for the protagonist to be a former Confederate (for example, John Wayne in The Searchers). The moral quandary an american audience might experience in any depiction of the Civil War may not even occur to the average polish man or woman, to whom the war is simply a historical story very much removed from their own culture. Even so, that such an effect can be incidental speaks loads of what could be accomplished with considered intent.
It's not unfathomable to make a game in which you would be a Nazi soldier. It would have to be done with as much taste and love as the soon to be released Beatles game bears, and practiced with the utmost delicacy. It would not be a Call of Duty clone or resemble any other WWII shooter up to this point; certainly not another Wolfenstein. But it could be done, and if it dared, could even be video games' Citizen Kane.
That is what I think, anyway.
It's not unfathomable to make a game in which you would be a Nazi soldier. It would have to be done with as much taste and love as the soon to be released Beatles game bears, and practiced with the utmost delicacy. It would not be a Call of Duty clone or resemble any other WWII shooter up to this point; certainly not another Wolfenstein. But it could be done, and if it dared, could even be video games' Citizen Kane.
Eeek. i don't even know where to begin here, so I won't. However, a bit of research for you:
There are PLENTY of WWII-themed games focused on the German viewpoint, but no "nice" Nazis, sorry. It's kind of a perspective thing, I believe. Anyway, I quickly searched my collection and this is the best I could come up with:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_VTnDFT33Dt0/SqvxHfVUtDI/AAAAAAAACKw/dZpVxPxOys0/s1...
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_VTnDFT33Dt0/SqvxHdQufFI/AAAAAAAACK0/GWGosgD9jJs/s1...
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_VTnDFT33Dt0/SqvxHtXvptI/AAAAAAAACK8/vu4rFNliWAQ/s1...
You also have Panzer General, a lot of console strategy games from the German viewpoint and a whole bunch of PC games that have been released over the years.
In terms of seeing a game based on your idea... don't bet on it. A film, perhaps, but an actual retail game? Nope. Any developer tackling the project needs to find something that's actually positive about the Nazi viewpoint and try and make it sympathetic to players. The Civil War is a totally different type of conflict, given that you had Americans fighting Americans, so yes, like it or not, one could take BOTH sides of that argument (although one side would be wrong in the end from a moral viewpoint).
the conflict of being a moral cog within an immoral machine.
No conflict there, just hypocrisy.