(AUTHOR'S NOTE AND CHARITY LINKS) I've realised that my comments at 10:52 could be taken along the same lines as the "Why are there black people in my medieval history" crowd, which wasn't what I was aiming for. My main issue with this game is that it ignores the racialised history and causes of WW2 and the Holocaust, and I feel that the customized player avatars contribute to that erasure, by cynically using identity politics for mass appeal whilst also minimizing those same identity politics that caused such atrocities in the first place. I have no issue with "unrealistic representation" when it helps people feel seen in media, but I dislike when the significance of race across history is lost in that process. CHARITIES TO DONATE TO: Save the Children in Iraq: www.savethechildren.org/us/where-we-work/iraq Aid to Iraq Refugees: donate.unhcr.org/int/en/iraq-emergency Vietnam Friendship Village: www.vietnamfriendship.org/wordpress/get-involved/support Agent Orange Record: agentorangerecord.com/donate/
One thing you overlooked was that you described the German army as "The Nazis" at the start of your segment on cod ww2 which is an inaccurate way to frame it. It's not that one dimensional. The SS divisions would be, but it's not correct to imply basically anyone in the wehrmacht were party members. A significant portion were people conscripted, or regular army members without those political views. You can read diaries from stalingrad which highlights the relative normality of many caught up there (not that it means they were "good guys") - similarly to what you were saying in your world war 1 segment about the german side, they weren't all faceless nazis. None of the above refutes the good points you make though.
@@Fampini The German army during WW2 might not have individually been card carrying NSDAP members to the man, but I don't think it's inaccurate to call them 'the Nazis' as they were in fact part of the fighting force of the entity known as 'Nazi Germany' (the German state between 1933 and 1945). It's a pretty standard naming convention in the context of WW2, both contemporaneously and up to the present day and I don't think it implies that literally ever soldier was a Nazi party member (which itself isn't even a particularly ironclad guarantee of someone's individual politics given the social advantages of party membership in Germany at the time). Not at all to say this is what you were implying, but I am generally wary of efforts to differentiate the SS and the Wehrmacht in terms of culpability for Nazi crimes because it's a common tactic of people espousing the 'clean Wehrmacht myth', the suggestion that all/the vast majority of German atrocities were committed by the SS alone and not the Wehrmacht, which is completely false.
@@Fampinifactually speaking, the German army was the Nazis. They represented the interests of and acted on behalf of the Nazi party. That some held reservations is true, not strong enough to defect but it’s absolutely true. It’s also absolutely true many rank and file soldiers did support their government and weren’t simply caught up or innocent bystanders. This desire to separate the Nazi government from the German army isn’t really done for any other group. The Japanese soldiers by and large aren’t considered separate from the whims of the Imperialist government. Describing Germany in WW2 as the Nazis isn’t inaccurate. Its your opinion that they should be separate, it’s not what really happened
Dice could've fixed your complaints of Battlefield 1's opening scene so easily: when the player dies as a frenchman, he respawns as a german and so on. Would've made the scene way more impactful
Even sniper elite gives some humanifying blurbs of targets you scope out scattered among the evil/comedic/embarassing ones. Not saying the game isn't as propogandistic as the others.. but it's something, I guess
There showed a crying German soldier and several shell-shocked German soldiers, in Steel Storms. If this is not an attempt to show that the Germans are not just NPC mobs, then I don't even know.
16:57 I think it should be pointed out that the original sentence was "We are all Jews here", while in the game its "We're americans. Period". So its not only using a real story in a bland action scene to make a hero out of this character, it also changes the identity that that character values and is willing to defend. It kind of paints the event as in germans attacking americans. For a lack of a better term, it "whitewashes" the event
Absolutely correct, I think I outlined that in a response to another comment. This is further reinforced by the first line uttered by your friend when you stumble across them: "These were our guys". It's less of an attack on an ethnic group, but an attack on "our guys" instead. I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason this game set its ending in Berga is to further highlight the victimization of American troops over other groups.
The point is Americans want to project fascist hatred onto Nazis because of their insecurity about their own fascist state. Activision Blizzard was probably pushed by the NSA, CIA, or some other federal agency to rewrite the script. The original story is one of camaraderie unification, and protection of the oppressed. But that doesn’t fit with modern American politics. Those are ‘liberal’ values now. So it appeals better with the audience (American conservative Nazis) to claim nationalist ideals rather than communal ideals. And what do you know, it works. Fuck Nazis, fuck fascists
15:30 The Holocaust killed 17 million people, not 6. For some reason, most Americans (including the Holocaust Memorial Museum) only ever seem to count the Jewish victims, but the Romani and various Slavs were victims too. As were disabled people, homosexuals, and fringe Christian groups. They deserve to be remembered and respected too.
I remember when I first played Call of Duty WW2 and how I felt about it's ending. Going through the concentration camp, taking photos, I was so confident that I knew exactly how it was going to end: the protagonists would find where they were dumping all the bodies, all of them disfigured from being burned, and with very few words the protagonists would realize that Zussman was somewhere in the pile. The protagonists would finally understand that Zussman was just one of millions that were murdered, and that they couldn't save any of them. I was dismayed when I watched the actual ending unfold, and my brain checked out for the entire end credits. What a waste of potential.
But you do gotta remember that some poor modelers, texterers, and devs would have to have spent time making that and implementing it into the environment, wich is why i give that a pass. Game dev mental health is already bad enough.
@@mrusername3438In Cold War, they justify it as it being "neccesary" or shit like that, in every Black Ops, really, the enemy gouging weaver's eye out is monstrous and inhuman but you putting glass on a dudes mouth and punching him for information is justified because "It's what needs to be done", the double standard is palpable
The dissonance between ‘war is hell’ and ‘war is glorious’ has always been an integral part of military propaganda. Going through the spiritual hell of war is what makes the heroes glorious and ending war (with more war) essential.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a great treatment of this, as these optimistic propagandised boys are very quickly traumatised by war. And oh look, it's a WWI fiction set in Germany!
Thing is there's no way for a game to depict war accurately, because it would be boring and after playing it you would be devastated and diagnosed with severe PTSD.
Wrong. Spec ops the line, mgs3/mgsv, and COD WAW all do an excellent job showing the brutality of war and remind you that there are victims on all sides of a conflict. COD WAW probably does the best job of being a brutal and accurate war game in my opinion, but spec ops does the best at showing how a warzone affects the mental state of soldiers and how PTSD can ruin some people if they even make it out alive.
@@princetchalla2441yeah but as a player I am still enjoying the diss associated killing of faceless and nameless pixels, Video games can have anti war themes and tones but, it’s not a real experience or depiction of war, that’s why I treat games as either a sport(multiplayer) or a action movie(character driven fictional narratives to entertain me). Trying to make Video-games into the premiere or any art for that matter, anti-war propaganda is a joke to me, I don’t need art to tell me war is bad or war is hell, And I don’t know why others do. It should be pretty self evident.
Funnily enough al assad's Arabic speech somehow had a few lines that are clearly anti imperialist (لنحرر اخوتنا من الإحتلال الأجنبي) "to liberate our brethren from foreign occupation/reliance" and (كما اتحدث انهم يتفسدون جيوشنا بما سنحارب لاستقلال شعبنا؟) " As i speak they approach our armies how will we fight for our people's independence ?" Which makes sense since his country is litterally being invaded.Don't get me started on the fact that al Asad and all Iraqis are speaking modern standard arabic(which is only mainly used for paperwork,news and professional documents and not speakers in day to day life not even politicians use it during war time for they still use each country's respective dialect (which are radically different). I always found that odd/funny as an arab myself
I Think The Arabic Nation In Modern Warfare Is Not Iraq Persay Its The Collective of Nations From Saudi Arabia Iran And Afaghanistan And The Other Arabic Muslim Nations Why So The First Invasion Happend Atound Saudi Arabia Like Missions Like War Pig And Raid On That TV Station And The Mission Shock And Awe Happens At An Area Around Iran And In MW2 In The Team Player The Rebels Are Bieng Rooted Out In The Area Inside Modern Day Afghanistan I Think Its Not The Nation Of Iraq In Tge Game But A Collective Federation Of Nations Of Muslim And Arabs
100% they hire a translator/consulting company from LA/California or whatever is closest to them and just hire some local actors who speak arabic to voice it and call it a day. They do that with more languages that are not as "common" in the English speaking market.
@@vault1021 It was amazing, and everyone I've ever talked to about it agrees. I think a lot of the battlefield playerbase was just butthurt that they couldn't use a rocket launcher or grenade launcher as a primary weapon. Hardline would have done much better if it wasn't a battlefield game.
@@notme5844Hardline was straight broken and unplayable for months on launch and everyone just went back to bf4. By the time hardline was fixed it was too late.
This is so complex and reaching, you can really write entire theses on individual games, let alone the entire industry. Portrayals of war in games before Modern Warfare, the relationships to other war media like movies, even just the specific impact of Spec Ops: The Line - a game so influential that white phosphorus instantly became synonymous with "war crimes in video games" - are all well worth looking into if this video grabbed your attention as a viewer. I've got a few video essays to start you off: Jacob Geller's analysis "Does Call Of Duty Believe in Anything?" and Innuendo Studios' "Blood Is Compulsory: How We Talk About Advanced Warfare" are other medium-length essays about particular games. For short, more game design-focused perspectives, Extra Credits' "Call of Juarez: The Cartel", "Spec Ops: The Line" parts 1 & 2, and "The Division" - though not their 6 Days in Fallujah video, which was made long before the game was actually developed and is generally bad. "Rationalizing Brutality: The Cultural Legacy of the Headshot", also by Geller, and "Anti-War War Games" by Super Bunnyhop are starting points for the wider context, also on the shorter side. This is a very...homogenous list, just the first that come to mind, I'll come back and add to it. If anyone else wants to drop recs I'll add them to the list.
I really like the extra credits video, i miss those types of videos they used to make, some really good exploration on topics that are still relevant today were discussed MANY years ago by them
Maybe reading an actual anti-war book would be a good start? Lord of the Flies maybe? Or at the very least watching Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket as opposed to video essays about video games
Wow, this is such a good video! I love that when you talk about anything, you provide concrete, visual examples - it's super helpful and I can't imagine how much time it must have taken you to collect all of the footage... Also, love the additional refernces and sources, like the Blackadder Goes Forth, controversy surrounding CoD WW2 and how many stories were changed into an action-forward propaganda and many more. The editing and the script are top-tier, there is enough comedic relief from time to time to keep me watching, while it doesn't take away from the topic at hand and the seriousness of it. AND you posted an author's note clarifying the only point in the video that I was a bit unsure about, charity links and a doc with sources??? God, you are really good at what you do 👏Massive respect!
Personally, I view Spec Ops: The Line as a more accurate view of being a soldier in Iraq. Even if it takes place in Dubai, it doesn’t shy away from fucked up shit that the US actually did in Iraq. It shows the use of white phosphorus, needless death of civilians, oppression by an AMERICAN occupation of a country. All the things that MW and other games inspired by Iraq didn’t.
@@hurricane7727 COD 4 Arab mod, yeah, I play that too and probably more than anyone did, I feel nothing and no emotion which is the same as playing vanilla/base/original version, I just think No one is a good person except all wankers in this cursed world.
I think it also bears mentioning on the topic of Operation Paperclip that none of the nazis who joined the west after WW2 had any ideological qualms about it - the nazis were against communists, who were among the first groups of people to be put into concentration camps during the holocaust, while their (the nazis) ideas about the world were pretty normal in places like the US at the time including hatred of jews. For many of them the Cold War period was merely a continuation of their already ongoing war "against communism".
Not just Germans and nazi collaborators from Europe, but also war criminals from Asia including infamous Japanese Unit 731, saved and even hired by Americans.
Paperclip was only the tip of the iceberg. Western Germany was basically handed back to spicy Germans and worst offenders were hired by US alphabet soup agencies and sent out to terrorise basically the entire global south
@@AlexC-ou4ju the Soviets had ex Nazi scientists in scientific labour camps, the Americans gave them comfortable lives in the us and sometimes put the ex Nazis in positions of power in NASA and NATO, this is the fundamental difference between Soviet "partnership" with ex Nazis and the Americans fraternization with them.
The stuff discussed in this video is how I felt playing CoD, particularly the Modern Warfare series, from the beginning. Even as a young teen, I could clearly sense that they were "USA good, every other opposing state bad" pro-US propaganda. Yet I played them anyway because those were the games all the cool kids at school played, albeit the campaign and multiplayer experience was enjoyable. So thank you for expressing what I've felt from the beginning.
@@LordOfTheJizz*People forget that WW3 in that trilogy is caused by an American General cooperating with a Russian Terrorist so that he can become a war hero after being in charge of a complete disaster in the middle east.*
Quick note. The use of game controllers in war to remotely pilot unmanned vehicles isn't because of it's association with video games, that's just an unintended bonus. They're used because they're compact, can be deployed in the field with extreme ease, can connect to any computer with USB and very simple drivers, cost practically nothing, and they have everything needed to control the movement and some other functions of any kind of unmanned vehicle. It's almost entirely a cost saving measure chosen over developing their own controls that'd likely be so much more expensive to make.
There are a lot of very different games out there, and you can control all of them with a video game controller, that shows the controller design is practical
@@matthiuskoenig3378Source? Challenger 2 first deployed before modern game controllers, so which vehicles and which systems on those vehicles are based on game controllers?
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Game controllers are designed to be extremely ergonomic and easy to use, and most of the population are at least familiar with game controllers. The US based a line of hand grenades on Baseballs for these exact reasons.
I HEAVILY disagree with your take on BF1. You cherrypicked a couple of instances of the Central Powers being patriotic and painted those as being all over the game. Whereas the same can be found in Allied power cutscenes. The British talk about fighting tooth and nail to the death in the Amiens cut scene. The British Oil of Empires announcer displays instances of racism against the opposing Ottoman Forces and how the coming battle will be a breeze. You are hypocritical in this respect by generalizing the central powers faction by discussing a few instances of them being "blood thirsty". You even brush over the instances of humanity in the very operations you discussed. Here's a list of humanized Central Power soldier instances below Conquer Hell operation, German cut scene. The speaker discusses how desensitized he and his comrades have become to war, and how they barely remember the outside world. If you lose the operation as the Germans, the announcer discusses how they must remember the fallen to prevent such a war from happening again. Kaiserschlact operation cutscenes. The announcer discusses how he feels pity for the British getting shelled, in the Amiens cut scene he discusses sending food home to his starving family. Brusilov offensive operation. The Austrians discuss how awful the Eastern Front is and how they fear for the Austro Hungarian army collapsing. Gallipoli operation cut scene. The Turk speaker discuss their childhood and how he detests this memory being tarnished by the British presence. Beyond the Marne Operation. The German speaker in the cut scenes is actual the same speaker as the person in the Devils Anvil operation cutscenes. In those, he was bloodthirsty and wanted to bleed France white. In the Marne operation, he is broken and terrified of dying at this point in the war. He discusses not caring if Germany wins the war, only that he sees his family again. Furthermore in the campaign the random conversations you can hear between Central Powers soldiers makes them feel almost like real people with thoughts and experiences, rather than being cardboard cutout people to kill. In MP, the intense battle reaction voicelines paint a picture of the Central Power soldiers as being real and vulnerable people who are terrified by war. Same as the Entente soldiers. They cry for their mothers, and go insane from the shell and gunfire. Could have DICE done a better job by having a dedicated Central Powers campaign? Of course, it would've gone a long ways. But to overgeneralize the entirety of the game by discussing a few cherrypicked instances is incredibly disingenuous and not professional when discussing BF1's approach and respect to WW1 history.
i agree 100%. Dice could have done a lot better with central powers (their own singleplayer, campaign, more languages spoken in the austro-hungarian army, perspective switching to german troops in the intro) but saying that germans are portrayed as an bloodthirsty horde while the entente is portrayed as heroic is just completely wrong, especially with the dlc operations being accounted for.
@@ralsei66 yea, it’s just a stupid and baseless claim. Is it wrong to include instances of bloodthirstyness? I would say no because beliefs such as that were present in the war. But to say that’s the way across all of the game is just plain wrong and stupid. DICE did take shortcuts that I find to be annoying, ex the Ottomans and Austrians being a German reskin and the US being a British reskin. But to downplay the historical value of BF1 by discussing only the faults and not mentioning the details and substance is again, stupid.
Well done comment, Oil of Empires has the Triple Entente as the most antagonistic of the operations at launch. Which is funny when the "protagonists" is the most genocidal empire of the war, and he just... ignores it?
@@NoImNotJonsAltWhatDoYouMean Yea, the British speaker in the Fao Fortress literally calls the Ottomans "savages". How can the creator of this video complain about the supposed "blood thirsty" Central powers and "good guys" Entente when something such as this exists in game? I seriously think that this guy has not played more than a couple of hours, because if you actually played/watched all the operations and their cut scenes, then he would realize his claims are completely false.
He also Ignores that in “blood and steel” and “mud and blood” that he definitely played because his whole point is dedicated to it, and they’re not hard to miss, they’re right in your face you see shell shocked german soldiers, one with his face in his hands Crying, another walking away slowly, clearly traumatised and unable to process his surroundings, which the player has to make the choice to shoot even though they’re clearly not a threat made the whole video invalid in my eyes tbh
The question who actually started WWI is still a highly debated topic. There are actually good reeasons to blame the French, Russians or British, just as much as there are arguments to blame the Germans or Austrians. Also the 1980s idea of incompetent officers who willingly and coldly sent soldiers who didn't want to fight to their death has also been challenged a long time ago. Reality was much more complex than that.
I think no one’s to blame. Every big European country at that time was highly industrialized and everyone wanted to show and use their power and conquer land. The youth was brainwashed into thinking war is a glorious, fun, honorable act. It was just a matter of time until they all started going at it.
No specific country is to blame, it’s a plethora of socio-economic conditions coupled with militarization, the prominence of alliances in Europe, and a series of Nationalist movements.
No one is really to blame, I feel like if Germany gets to be depicted as the bad guys in WW1 video games and movies is because they first declared war and invaded their two neighbors France and Russia. Also because with WW2 it’s easy to put Germany in the bad guy role every time, even if it doesn’t even make sense for WW1
@@A410-f1o Pretty sure Russia went on the offensive against the Central Powers first. The Germans wanted to focus on France in the beginning, and Austria on Serbia.
I always knew call of duty was always a power trip fantasy with some serious implications caused by the need to make a fun game out of the atrocities of war, but Jesus I never realized how disrespectful and the amount of willful negligence and rewriting of history. Like when the pinned a famous American war crime on the Russians in modern warfare.
I think the most shocking part of the Highway of Death parallel is how lazy it is above anything else. Like they couldn't even be bothered to make an alternate name for it, it's such a middle finger to people who know the actual history.
@@datamale The actual history of it being a legitimate military airstrike on a armed military convoy? It was lazy asf to use the same name, shoulda just based it off one of the numerous real Russian warcrimes.
@connorbranscombe6819 Sure you could say it was a legitimate target but it was also needlessly cruel. Striking soldiers pulling out of the country you're defending is pretty iffy to say the least. It was clear that command wanted to strike Saddam for any reason they could grasp.
@@clinicallyarsonistic Why is bombing an armed, combative, actively retreating enemy force cruel? To be clear, they should have just let them retreat and set up new defensive position right? Do you have the same opinion during WW2? Was it rude of us to attack the Nazis as they retreated across France and back to Germany?
@@connorbranscombe6819 attacking a beaten and retreating enemy is fucked up. like if i won a sword fight and then stabbed my opponent in the back when they limped off to lick their wounds.
On your point of Germans being portrayed as villians in the forst mission, I have to disagree. There are multiple German soldiers seen retreating or frozen by trauma. We're given the allied perspective where it's easy to mow them down without even noticing, which I find to be pretty powerful.
Distasteful is the nicest word you can use for it. Even as an American with literally no Jewish background, it is such a flagrant slap in the face and “American Patriotism washing” to appeal to an audience and the American military (who helps advise these games) that it’s genuinely upsetting to me that it’s allowed.
What I don't understand is why did they have to make a "bad guy/good guy" thing with BF1 when WWI was literally just a bunch of people fighting each other because they were pretty much forced to? It would've been much more interesting to see a distinctly morally grey war than what we got. It's so infuriating.
That scarf isn't a Sadam thing, it predates him by decades. It's a super common traditional piece of clothing throughout the Arab world. I forget it's exact origin but you'll see the entite Saudi family wearing it today, and it's not some reference to Sadam
It doesn't even predate Saddam by decades. It predates him by centuries. This is an incredibly old headdress, initially worn by Bedouin nomads. It has nothing to do with Saddam or Palestine.
@@occam7382 The black and white design he showed with the fishnet pattern is specifically Palestinian, but yeah keffiyehs themselves don't pertain to any one country or person. It's silly how he concluded that keffiyehs are a Saddam Hussein thing - that's like seeing pictures of George Bush wearing ties and thinking that ties are a Bush thing.
0:10 tbf Verdun doesn't have that aspect Battlefield WW1 has, the "good vs. evil" aspect. You don't see them act like they're saving the world but fighting a war of Empires. It's all there in Verdun, Izonzo, and Tannenberg, you're just another Soldier in the conflict fighting a war of two powers. No "feel good" aspect of the conflict. No narrowing down good vs. evil plot Just pain, war, and destruction. A war where one destroys the other. They are proud of their country sure, but it's just that. Nationalism and patriotism for their soil. They're willing to sacrifice themselves for their country, to hell with saving people in the crossfire. To hell with it being a good vs evil story.
Because wars are inherently immoral. There will always be this disconnect in media that makes war out to be associated with positive morality. That's just not how the world works. Wars are not fought for moral reasons.
The important part is that only the allies get humanised. The British prepare for tea, the Americans talk to each other, the Italian wonders about his mum, etc. While the Central powers intros all talk solely about strategic objectives and warfare.
@@codylegoThat’s not even true. Even in the example given in, say, the Meuse-Argonne Operation both the Americans and Germans are displayed as overconfident, with an element of apprehension from one of them. They both underestimate each other but for different reasons. It makes even less sense with the Italian campaign example considering both soldiers are expressing the exact same sentiment. They’re both very patriotic, with the Italian wishing to avenge the humiliation faced at Caporetto. You even have a British officer being racist towards Turks in an arrogant fashion with Al-Faw Fortress before expressing great respect for them in Suez. I’d say the operations monologues are a fantastic way of contextualizing the map being played
@@rockmycd1319 the British soldier being racist is more character than the ottoman soldier saying oil will fought over for centuries to come. I agree that the intros don’t particularly favour the nations/empires which comprise the allies but they do humanise them far more than they do the central powers
@@codylego What? How is being conscious about the future of the Middle East in terms of resources less character than stereotypically arrogant racist British officer? both sides are humanized and it’s done well, especially with Verdun.
The German narration is not a glorifing but rather disgusted by industrialiesed warfare like gas etc. Its easy to miss when you're not a German speaker but it's obvious he is horrified and not anything else. Also the kaiserschlacht narration include lines about food shortages in Germany during the end of the war.
i went back and listened to the voicelines from those cutscenes and i feel like they try to humanize both sides. I really dont get how he could missinterperet it like this.
@@cerovec123I mean the lines are literally cherry picked. In the first example he picks the only American who’s a bit apprehensive about the war and ignores the other overconfident ones
@@cerovec123 Because it would, ironically, hurt his narrative if he interpeted it in good faith. The dude has some good points, but his overall tone and message comes as moralistic and from a high horse. I got the impression he's very upset that anyone should want to make a war time game that doesn't delve deep into the politics of why historical wars start. His take on 6 Days of Fallujah is just hot garbage.
As a german, you guys are so full of shit. Talking about, and quote the game here “I saw an eagle high above the mountain, I couldnt help but think about our Reichsadler and how it exasperates our great ideals” is being scared? And, of course, this Occam guy is here to yap further, but never actually say anything worth discussing.
Not only does Khaled al-Assad bear a strong physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein, he's named for the ruling family of Syria. He's an Arab-flavoured "Adolf Mussolini".
And? Fictional stories regularly take inspiration of real-life historical figures, both for heroes and villains. Would you be complaining if a military shooter had an antagonist based on Omar al-Bashir, or Ayatollah Khomeini, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Hideki Tojo, or Bashar al-Assad?
@@occam7382 as far as I know the problem with Assad is him being secular and not Is1s, since the west armed them against him. Anti communism and anti left made Mandela a t3rr0r1st.
@@occam7382no but it’s hilarious when you realize they did that and the us invasion of iraq was based on a bunch of lies and propaganda and the US broke the security regulations of the UN which set the precedent to russia to use that as one of the many justifications of its invasion of Ukraine… Saddam and Bashir are and were probably huge assholes but it’s not like the US is the good guy in every scenario
@@occam7382 did u watch the video lol. His point, which I agree with, is that it is ok to have characters in games inspired by real world events, even down to the scarfs and glasses etc, but there's something deeply wrong with the way that they manipulate history, and people who play the games, with false/partially true realities presented as truthful and accurate. " Fictional stories regularly take inspiration of real-life historical figures, both for heroes and villains" Yes. "Would you be complaining if a military shooter had an antagonist..." no. the comment you are responding to is not complaining, he's simply making an observation in line with the content of the video
Fantastic vid. In a TTRPG podcast I listen to they've discussed there being a difference between "fun" and "enjoyable in gaming. A game can be very fun but when you're done you get nothing out of it, and another can be miserable to experience but that misery carries depth and importance. A good example in videogaming would be Hellblade. That game is an emotional and mental meat-grinder but it's so engaging that you stick with it and then get an amazing catharsis at the end. If Battlefield 1 had been solely a single player game they could have successfully nailed the "war is hell" angle (Enjoyable, but not necessarily fun) but as a multi-player game they have to focus on making it fun so people keep playing that it self-sabotages any poignancy it was going for. TL;DR, games can be excellent vehicles for poignant storytelling but it's almost impossible for a multi-player focused game to pull it off.
32:26 just wanted to point out, later cutscene “sector scans” don’t just zoom in on Iraq every time. This is what each Middle East mission shows: 1. The Coup: Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Coast (Around Jeddah) 2. Charlie Don’t Surf: Iraq (As you show around Basra) 3. The Bog: Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Coast (same as The Coup) 4. Warpig: Central Saudi Arabia (around Riyadh) 5. Shock and Awe: Iraq (Around Basra) It’s basically all over the place and doesn’t actually pin point a single country. Looking back, it’s quite disjointed with its apparent locations. So basically, the Marines invade Iraq, then leave and invade Saudi Arabia, then in the matter of 48 hours advance over 1600 km back to Basra.
Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as a teenager with pacifist sympathies, what especially struck me as ghoulish with that scene you describe is the way it portrays the US as uniquely good and their opponent as uniquely evil because the latter detonates a nuclear bomb in a civilian populated area... Something the US is the only country to have ever done in a military context. It adds another layer of quasi revisionism here.
The nuke is a symbolic representation of the fallout from the Iraq War (no pun intended) and sets up the chauvinistic attitude of General Shepherd in the sequel. It’s not revisionist at all,
first and foremost, calling the plot of a fictional video game revisionism is insane, but whatever. i know youre a pacifist so ur working with limited resources, but put ur thinking cap on and try ur hardest to understand this. the nuking of Japan was far better choice that resulted in far less death than a mainland invasion, which would have killed millions easily. the Japanese werent willing to cooperate or surrender, even after Germany and Italy surrendered, even after all the crimes against humanity and war crimes the Japanese did in China and Southeast Asia. The population at that time very much were willing to fight and die for their god-emperor, not just the military, seeing as it took 2 nukes. they gave them time to surrender after the 1st nuke, and they didnt. also take into consideration that everyone was sick and tired of the war, it had been dragging on for years and everyone just wanted it to end already. furthermore, for years the U.S had pretty much uncontested power over the whole world since they were the only ones with nukes, but instead of going around and abusing that power, they actually helped Japan and Europe rebuild after the war. the only person engaging in revisionism is you.
@@adindrecaj the Japanese we‘re literally about to surrender before the US dropped not one but TWO fucking Suns on civilian targets. Your comment is as ghoulish as it gets.
The bombs were we only dropped because we had them and wanted Russia to know and to see the rffect against a civilian population. Japan was going to surrender regardless to us so they didn't have to surrender to the Russians@@adindrecaj
@@rightinthedome9973 no ur literally just wrong, they werent going to surrender, they didnt even surrender after the first bomb. stop being ahistorical and do the fucking research.
@@amittaizero born in 91 in baghdad, came to the states around 6 or so. I was prime pickings for the "mustard" jokes, the 5v1s(aka jum9ing me) even when being raised around other Arabic countries' families (Lebanese, Jordanians, yemeni families) though all those "divide and conquer" games don't work on people who regularly party and squabble, back and forth with their brothers 🤣👌
@@moe3235 games like Call of Duty, movies like "Saving Private Ryan," all that stuff had me primed once 9/11 happened. I was born in '85, so I was military age the year we invaded Iraq. I should have known better than to join the Army but damn. Propaganda worked really well on me.
I am German and I never felt like "we" were painted as the baddies in BF1. But then again, Germany has been the bad guy in so many products of modern culture, that I just might have got deaf to it. 😅
I was going to reply that I got those vibes (Germany as villainized) from Bf1 continuing a tradition of very loudly lacking the ability to have a campaign playing as a German, Austro-Hungarian or even Ottoman soldier especially in a position where it already mentions stuff like the Bedouins who themselves are a casualty of historical revisionism in formerly Entente countries and the media they produce - because I never touched the multiplayer. Once the video got to mention things such as multiplayer mission monologues it kinda feels unambiguous that there was some intentional framing by those monologues getting written by one person & then approved to be implemented into the game by a second person.
That’s probably because it didn’t. The central powers should have gotten their own campaign but the operations cutscenes do an excellent job at humanizing both sides
Hey Mann, ich würde gerne ein bisschen mit der deutschen Perspektive auf die beiden Kriege spielen (ich wünschte auch, mein Land würde das mit unseren Konflikten tun, zumal wir keine verloren haben). Ich würde auf jeden Fall Geld dafür ausgeben, wenn ich welche hätte 😅
ty any austin for showing me this channel, name + topic combo of this video gives me good vibes for me enjoying it I will be back after I finish austins video
If they wanted diversity in world war games they could have at least made it realistic. Like Indians in the British forces, Asians in the Soviet Union, Turks/slavs in the German army
Of course, however, these games are completely unrealistic anyway. Sliding across the floor, running and gunning like a maniac, awful ahistorical weapons (really? a holographic sight in a WW2 shooter?) etc. etc.. The skin colour of some characters is really just the cherry on top. But for some reason, a lot of people only complain about the latter (I guess due to the culture war), but they never care about the other inaccuracies that I mentioned. In the sense of "running and gunning mindlessly with rifles that never existed and wearing uniforms that never looked like that is completely fine, but having a skin color or gender that never participate in the war like that, that's were I draw the line". It's arbitrary and pretty stupid.
@@wolis7178 Yeah the stuff that triggers the outrage is really telling at times. Take Battlefield 5 for example. So much of the focus of discussion was on how having female characters or weird costumes in multiplayer was 'disrespectful'... yet the Last Tiger campaign, which at its core is a story about Nazis being sad that they lost and being all emotional about the decision to surrender (and zero discussion of why they were there to start with), is lauded as a standout highlight of the game. Depiction of history in games is just super frustrating to discuss, especially online. It becomes super clear that a large swathe of self-appointed historical gaming fans really only care about superficial aesthetics and not about the actual subject matter. If a game looks like a famous history movie, it gets the 'authentic' seal of approval... even if vital historical context is missing.
That is his contradiction. He was saying that most of the troops were belonging to their own countries, which is why they are represented as such. @@cass7448
Even when an American was unimpeachably heroic, it has to be "reimagined" to purposefully downplay that the mass genocide of Jews was about antisemitism. European Jews were only labelled "white" when an Axis power attacked them. Open antisemitism was not taboo until Hitler became an enemy. That's why the true story of non-Jews, raised in an antisemitic country, claiming themselves to be Jews to protect their comrades turned into a gentile soldier heroically refusing to acknowledge that Jewishness exists. He does not put his own privilege into question, he doesn't have to lie, and he will not face antisemitism. This shit is insidious.
Something I should have clarified a bit better in the game is that Zussman actually IS Jewish, but I don't think that excuses this game's poor portrayal of Edmonds' heroism. Instead of a gentile man standing up for his friends simply because it's the right thing to do, Zussman instead has to separate himself from his Jewishness by reiterating his american identity in its place, as though to say that THAT'S what's more impactful to his identity in that moment. The Jewish character is instead left to fend for himself and prove his own identity and worthiness of survival, rather than anyone coming to his aid in that moment. It's the same reason the line "These were our guys", when you first discover the aftermath of the camp, bothers me so much. It's not the horrors of the holocaust that shock the characters, but the fact that these atrocities were committed on Americans.
@@datamale Wow, that definitely makes the scene even more...oof... There's a lot to unpack there and I am not at all qualified to get into it, but man, this might take the cake for being exceedingly politically- and socially-loaded purely because it was unthinkingly attempting to be as "apolitical" as possible.
Excellent video, really glad I subscribed to you after Thought Slime's shoutout. I haven't thought much about Modern Warfare's story much since I last played it over 10 years ago (oof, I'm getting old). I remembered the gist of it, random middle eastern country with bad dictator, we are the good guys and kill him, the russians start ww3 with a wmd. Now that you highlighted the parallels between it and the invasion of Iraq I'm kinda of appalled how I didn't see it before. Back then I assumed it was supposed to be similar to the invasion of Iraq (probably because I was pretty geopolitically illiterate back than and that was one of the few middle eastern countries I knew) but I didn't think much of it. The part that surprises me is that I never realized how fucked up it is that they made it so that "totally not Iraq" actually had WMDs in this reality, even though that was one of the parts of the game I remembered most clearly. I guess the fact they blame Russia and Makarov for it made me never think that deeply about it. The Military-entertainment complex is scary stuff.
It's awful, right? When I put the pieces together during my research it blew me away how blatant it was, I thought I had to for sure be imagining things. But no, they really were that blatant about things (and still are apparently).
About Operation Paperclip and Osoaviakhim: The scientists in Paperclip was basically integrated in the society, treated mostly like war heroes because the need that US had in terms of competing with USSR. Hello, Wernher von Braun! In operation Osoaviakhim, most of them were constantly watched by the NKVD/KGB. Many of them were returned to previously occupied Germany after Stalin death. Some went to labor camps (Gulags) and many others were taken to special cities to work exclusively to the governmental projects, without much freedom to go anywhere. The ideological behind Nazi was shared by Henry Ford, who was carefully put in a portrait on Hitler's room. So ideological bias matters in that case. Most of the western world in WW2 era was expecting that the Nazi army would end the communist USSR, waging war against them. But when the Germans started to tread Europeans like the entire Western world treated the whole Africa, indigenous people and black people around the world... THEN it started to be an issue.
Like rockmycd, I’m a bit confused about your concluding paragraph. The Germans were treading the majority of Western Europe *before* even preparing for an invasion on the Soviet territories. And, of course, there was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which was a secret alliance that made any pre-westward expansion to the east a non-issue, meaning that the Goths were riding west and earning the ire of the rest of the Western European powers before even being considered something akin to the champions of the western world, as your comment seems to suggest. Likewise, the Lend-Lease act made it certain that the Nazi army was not considered an ideological ally to the west, as supplying your bitter enemy against your ideological champion is best compared to sawing off your leg to win a race. And do note the times in which things occurred. Nazi Germany invaded Poland, an ally of the western powers, in 1939, two whole years before the invasion of the Soviet Union took place. Likewise, the expansion of political power into Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Rhineland, acts that flew directly in the face of the docility the western powers wished to incur into Germany after the Great War, already soured many opinions of the Nazis before the invasion of Poland. None of these things make Germany look much like a champion of western ideology, so much as instead making the Nazis seem like a rabid wildcard that is likely to bite either side. Besides, appeasement was an attempt, however futile it was, to keep the peace of post-war Europe. Few, if any, nations in Europe directly involved in the conflict had fully recovered, and many nations had a public still too weary of war since the 1910s, meaning that appeasement was the easiest choice when it came to methods in dealing with such a wildcard. War was the Ultima Ratio once again, and few politician worth their salt back then would jump at the chance to kickstart the end to their careers.
@@isaacpresley717And the west gave in everytime, and both the german and western populations had significant sympathies for each other, if Germany hadnt threatened british hegemony, they would've been best friends, the point is that their beliefs were not so different. If you recall, years before the molotov ribbentrop pact, there were the annexation of Austria, completely looked over by the west, and the Munich diktat and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia, supported by the west and then weakly condemned, respectively.
On the black ops 1 topic, I think the one sideness isnt as extreme as it seems. The entire game is full of "dont trust your own government" themes. Reznov is just used as an example. We are on the side of americans in the game obviously, but we are given a look into the russian perspective of the germans and US as well. It comes around full circle so that complaint is a little shallow. Especially considering how you're literally being interrogated by your own CIA in the game for the entire campaign. It's alright to not touch on every aspect of the history with a story. The story of Black Ops isnt about operation paperclip from the americans, its about vietnam, brainwashing, secretive russian cooperation with the germans (same as paperclip but theres no need to go into that when its well known and shown here, and implied by reznov). Sure it's a story full of historical nods, with some fictional elements, but primarily its a character focused story. It's about the guys in the situations and their perspectives.
"The entire game is full of "dont trust your own government" themes."" But you literally saved the world by trusting your government, it says don't trust THEIR government.
@@armeniangenocide5778 You can't really trust the government, no, but you only have those you trust. That was a recurring theme in Black Ops. "Who do you trust?"
In COD WW2, did anybody else laugh at how ridiculous the scene where Zussman is captured? The Germans go to great lengths to capture him as you try and chase them, any other NPC would have just been shot and the firefight continues. But for some reason they need to take this guy alive as if he's a 4-star general or something.
@analien5251 You're no different from the BF1 writer that sees the Germans as faceless hordes. Was every Wehrmacht soldier poetically waxing on about the glory of the Reich and the trimuph of fascism? Of course not. They were human too. WW2 wasn't a war between clearly bad people and clearly good people.
@@DaParoleOfficeryeah they were human but due to propaganda they all supported the Nazi government and fought for the Nazis, and you are correct, the other powers were not that good, France and Britain had many colonies and the US regularly terrorized and murdered African Americans, but the Nazis were clearly extremely evil
Damn... this video should not have been the way I learned about the Kunduz hospital airstrikes. Then again, maybe that's a perfect example of what you're saying in the video - I've played a lot of games with AC-130 sections, and always just thought of it as a fun time blasting bad guys. Then I read the wikipedia article on Kunduz. "Anonymous sources alleged that cockpit recordings showed the AC-130 crew questioned the strike's legality." I don't remember THAT dialogue in Call of Duty 4...
I would argue that the original Modern Warfare does more than you give it credit for in subverting the typical jingoistic pro-military video game (that it ironically mostly predated). If you take a look about it, the executed president "Al-Fulani" is implied to be the head of a oil-rich US puppet state, the marines invade with little intel and fail in their objective to capture him, and get thirty thousand soldiers plus an unknown amount of civilians killed by a nuclear bomb, they come off as imperialist bullies who shoot first and think later. The SAS (who you didnt touch on) also are portrayed as callous and indifferent to murdering innocent cargo ship crew members and leveling an entire village by way of requesting an AC130. It's not perfect as you pointed out, but it's quite different from the rest of the games, and even they have their moments (such as General Shepherd allowing tens of thousands of his countrymen to be murdered for the sake of 'inspiring patriotism')
I hate how mw3 ended the story. “Alright we’re suddenly friends, let’s take down Makarov now, yeah now he’s bad” it was so abrupt but the game seems pretty unfinished.
I do find that Call of Duty prefers to depict a fight against individual "bad actors" within the soviet union than a fight against the soviet union as a whole. Similarly, the series doesnt shy away from depicting bad actors in the US too. Theres the whole sheperd thing and the recent Cold War does have a negative depiction of MKultra. Similarly, Battlefield 5 does portray the german side in quite an honest way, so there are counter examples. I think the problem is, these games just have nothing to say overall. On one hand, you have the games need to be a spectacle to sell to the masses, the need for a dramatic story line, the writers and artists intention to "say something" while also not wanting to say anything "controversial" or "unpopular". Really, these games are just so confusing and meaningless that you can basically read anything into them.
For the first remark you had, video games, much like cinema can be for fun but they're also an art. And like every art, they can be used to convey meaning. Especially with video games who can use direct "spectator" action as part of the experience. Spec Ops the Line was a great game because of this, so was Far Cry 3, they conveyed meaning and a commentary on the use of violence/war and that commentary would have worked much less if the player didn't take a direct impact on this. Most of the horrible choices the main characters made, were the player choices. It makes it much more impactful than any painting, movie or piece of music. I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about the stupid advertisement though. EDIT : I think your issue with historical games, is that the one you played used history as a pretext to make a fun game, not as the main topic of the game. These were products, not art. Both companies that make both Battlefield and COD games wants to make as much money as possible, and are very certainly used as a mean of soft power by the US. At 50:14 even if Winters is becoming more and more insane as the game goes on, the rest of the squad never does, and yet, they all end up accepting his orders, agreeing with him, and in the end *ask* him if they can go and kill civilians. The commentary still works, especially since the 33rd who perpetrated at least as much horrors as Winters never went insane. They were sent here, took power and abused it. As a perfect metaphor of the US military forces as a whole. I agree with your conclusion, but your way of getting into it is... flawed as best. (as other commenters put out)
Amazing job! Between picking out thin points from obvious promotion, creative license with history, attempts at inclusivity, and the avoidance of symbolism, you've managed to stretch and twist the narrative to fit your needs so perfectly that you should most definitely get an award for it! I have a strong feeling that you'll excel in a career in sensationalist journalism. Simply amazing!
14:50 I recall a game called Mortyr II, a cheap polish WW2 FPS (that had cool ragdoll for the time and wounds modelled on the enemy corpses), obviously inspired by Wolfenstein. You start the game with rescuing your friend, an undercover agent serving as a tank commander. After that you spend some time helping him, and then, in the middle of the game you are separated, you see him getting caught, rush to help him, but it's too late. I played it as a kid and it hit me in the feels, I wondered if it was possible to actually save the guy (it wasn't possible, he gets killed and player character buries the man). Just imagine, a simplistic and janky polish FPS writer knows more about emotional impact than the entire creative team of a major international game developing company.
The nuke scene is actually one of the more politically correct scenes in all of CoD. Showing that if Saddam actually had nukes it would have been an even worse idea to invade.
unfortunately right wing bastards have fried our brains now, but there was a time where "politically correct" could mean many different things, and "politically accurate" was one of them @@MinkStolle
hey, what you're talking about in your first point has a name: ludonarrative dissonance! it is exactly those moments when the game's narrative clashes with it's mechanics, creating a disonnance that ends up undermining both the story and the gameplay! really cool (uncool?) phenomenon
I don't think ludonarrative dissonance matters, I don't think it undermines the story or gameplay at all. The perceived hypocrisy is meaningless. Videogames are meant to have fun gameplay, the story should never tread on this concept. If you don't want fun gameplay, don't make a game, simply write a book or make a movie. Forcing your players to endure boring gameplay for your message is childish and pointless. Just enjoy the gameplay for what it is, and focus on what the story is trying to tell you. Some games might have gameplay that compliments the story, and that's a fun gimmick, but it's not necessary, demanding this would be a chokehold on storytelling.
@@famulanrevengeance3044 oh you have absolutely no idea what the medium of video games consists of and means... cute, i was also like this when i was 10
The one thing that always bothered me about Battlefield 1 was how they did not have a single Imperial German campaign story, or any central powers story. But they ended up making a German story in Battlefield V. And its like wait youll have a story for Nazi Germany and yet not have one for Imperial Germany. Imperial Germany was not like nazi Germany, they were not great but i mean, they were just as bad as all the major empires at that time during the Great War. All the empires kind of equaled each other, except the ottomans, i feel like the ottomans were the worst of them all because of the armenian genocide. But i mean, all the leaders were inept, and world war 1 was the most pointless waste of human life ever. At least world war 2 was a justified war against fascism. I do wish they had a german BF1 story though. Would have loved to see one around the kaiserschlact maybe. Or the initial schleiffen plan rush and battle of the frontiers at the very beginning of the war.
COD has weirdly gotten away from doing this in some of the recent titles. The last two I played, Cold War and MW2 were actually much more accurate and critical of the American policy. In Cold War for example, you play as a character that the CIA is torturing for information and the whole goal of the campaign is to prevent someone else from setting off the American bombs that were placed in European cities. The American supplied the bombs that detonate in the bad ending. In the “good ending” you literally get assassinated to tie up loose ends and cover up for the CIA. In MW2 the campaign revolves around the terror threat that’s happens because of CIA and private military contractors dealing weapons to overseas organizations. It also showcases the atrocities that could happen if the Mexican and American governments decided to label Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and use the American military to fight them. Private military contractors operating without oversight is also a central issue in the campaign and the “bad villain reveal” is once again Shepherd, an American general. The most violent “bad guys” are American backed contractors committing war crimes in another country, not the Mexican cartel or the Iranian terrorists. Hell the American contractors literally overthrow the local Mexican federal authorities. The terror threat isn’t just that the Iranians gave the Mexican cartel weapons, the terror threat is that stupid America warmongering policy resulted in the weapons being available in the first place. Of course at the end of the day it’s a video game for an American audience so they never come outright and say that the Americans were the bad guys, but I genuinely think/hope that just as more and more Americans and westerners have become critical of violent interventionist foreign policy, the games have reflected some of that shifting public sentiment.
That's the thing tho, you can criticize the modern military industrial complex until you are blue in the face. Games like Spec Ops the line are cheered....but you can NEVER touch the Sacred myth of WWII and how the virtuous allies "saved the Jews and fought against fascism"
@@MALICEM12 You _can..._ But there's no reason to. Not unless you want to justify and white-wash the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese. Besides, the Allies literally "saved the Jews and fought against fascism". That's true. It's a historical fact. It's objectively correct.
I feel like this take utterly misses any nuance presented in the games discussed. CoD 4 especially. The entire CoD franchise loves to play with the interpretation of the individual player. For example in “Death From Above” you can view it as a fun on the rails section or you can feel uneasy at the idea of it. Black Ops 1 has the US government torturing you the whole game. If you want to talk about them being propaganda, you can certainly make that argument, but you’d be missing a lot of nuance the games present.
Not the video I expected to be offered by RUclips today, but I am so grateful that it was. Thanks for creating this video and for taking the time to present your argument this way- it made me think and consider some things I have felt but haven’t been able to articulate before
Edit: overall, loved your analysis, and you put in to words a frustration with military shooters I've had for a long time. I'll leave this comment up in case it's a useful critique of the intro; I know you delved into that eventually. 1:10 If we take video games to be art, then I don't necessarily think that video games are only meant to be "entertaining". Some have challenging or frustrating aspects to make a point. It all depends on the intent of the game imo
The "dice making central powers evil" claim is untrue since there are plenty of humanoid german moments like on rupture operations a guy narrating seems like he's almost gonna cry ranting about tanks being like monsters and scary
@@ano_nym yea you're right oopsie lol but still even in war stories they made the germans be on the same side of the flip coin as the allies so I don't see a point in this claim about germans being portrayed as bad
There’s a German operations intro where he talks about wanting to break his leg so he can go back home and out of the war. That kind of makes the beginning portion misinforming :/
A fantastic video that I’m so glad I stumbled upon. Great commentary. I’d just add that allied servicemen might have been forced to keep certain things about the camps quiet because of the allies’ own actions on arriving. Those Germans who did surrender at the concentration camps were often dealt with in ways we perhaps would suggest were justified. Look up the dachau liberation reprisals for the story but it included soldiers looking away as former prisoners beat guards to death with a shovel. I’d think they wouldn’t want some of that known in case people thought poorly of the allies.
Glad the algorithm brought me here, This video was sublime! You gave me a lot to think this night, when I was a young lad all I wanted to do was point and click action, never took this things in a deeper lenses, now I'm mostly disturbed by all the agenda that was behind one of the greatest industries of these days...
I wish you had given more credit to SOME of the Call of Duty games because the way they were framed here is that there is no attempt to vilify the United States or allies. The grander point you made about the COD games being hypocritical is difficult to disagree with, because it is likely true that the publishers / developers are under some kind of contractual obligations that are responsible for repeated tropes in their stories (a.k.a keeping the Russians as "the bad guys" or keeping the U.S-based fighting forces always looking strong), but in some of the stories there are major plotlines that aren't afraid to call out the United States as a producer of evil people, or people who do vicious things, almost as if they are tip-toeing what they can do against what they can't. There are examples in installments both old and new as well: In MW2 (2009), one of the major antagonists is literally a power-hungry U.S general who gets around regulations with the usage of a U.S-based PMC, and betrays foreign allies to further his cause. In Black Ops 1, you play as a U.S government operative who is captured and tortured repeatedly by your own employer because of the suspicion that you were compromised and possibly have information on the enemy, with that same employer, the CIA, being depicted as complicit, ignorant, or sloppy in protecting the POTUS by allowing who you play as to play a role in his assassination. In Black Ops 2, your fellow U.S government operative compromises a highly important mission to capture a Nicaraguan drug-lord by blowing up an innocent sibling to him due to a past history with that operator and the kingpin. In MW2019, the British Special Forces partake in a brutal torture scene where they kidnap a target's family and leverage their lives for info and a U.S general is quick to label rebel forces that aid in the fight against the Russians as "terrorists." In Black Ops Cold War, the CIA is explained to have employed nukes all over Europe to detonate by Eisenhower as a "just-in-case" countermeasure to a USSR invasion, on top of manipulating the protagonist (you) into working for the CIA via brainwashing and torture tactics learned from the infamous Project MK Ultra. Yes, the COD games are morally flawed by what appears to be some contract or demand to keep the U.S military up to a certain standard, but it is disingenuous to not mention their attempts to do this under the aforementioned barrier. Treyarch games do it the most as well.
You are saying that COD keeping Russians as the bad guys is propoganda, so the Russians being the bad guys from 1947 - 1991 was all propoganda? All fake? All under "Contractual Obligations" was it?
@@Shad_man1 A majority of the COD mainline games are outside the WW2-End Of Soviet Union era... and even then some of those don't stick to Russians, half times Germans cus, yk, WW2...
@@ishmael6397 no actually, they don't, COD follows a different story entirely, where the cold War technically started, and the Russians maintained a threat, before you say that's bad, the Russians IRL in 2024 are still a great threat and have been since the Soviet Union was founded
@@Shad_man1 I see your point- Russian government and military are quite brutal and oppressive. But the guy that made this video will call you brainwashed, he will say you're spitting propaganda, even though neither of us make the claim that America is innocent. It's pure whataboutism. You can't criticize one side without having to criticize every side, it's just a cheap way to bloat the conversation and deflect arguments.
I usually hate saying this or seeing people comment this. But this time I'll make the exception since this is such an important topic and most people are so blind to the topic discussed in this video. You are criminally underrated, underwatched and undersubscribed. For some reason your videos were giving me 20k vibes. The way you present the video and explain yourself is very good. I also like the way the video is structured very coherently (unlike my videos which a roundabouts and go nowhere lol). I'm hoping you hit the algorithm lottery and get up there. Especially these 2 videos
I haven’t researched it fully but a lot of the consultants for cod are us military officials. It’s an effective way to advertise the military to young kids, so they’re not going to say anything negative about the us.
DUDE FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT when BF1 came out I was soo excited to try it, and when I booted it and started with the campaign I got goosebumps from how realistic and gloomy it felt, it was the first game I played that showcased the effect of wars on individuals. But all that hype died when I went to the campaign menu and saw that all the stories were about the allies. At that moment I knew that its just another good guys vs bad guys type of game. It's really sad since this game had the potential to explore the effect of war and humanize both sides instead of just one.
WW1 was a meaningless war that ended up achieving fuck all for anyone but some empires dissolving and killing a couple million people. Dont get why they basically portrayed it as WW2 but with silly hats. but like they never ever say or give any examples of why the germans or the austro-hungarians or the ottomans were bad, youd think they would atleast show them killing civilians or something but civilians just arent present in the game at all. its kinda just inferred well they were the ones the state killed 100 years ago so they must be bad right?
@@MarxistMogger the Germans, Austrians and Ottomans aren't bad in the game, it's just they are YOUR enemy, you are the ones fighting them so in your POV, they are bad, however they wouldn't just murder innocent civilians either, the only reason they are the enemies in BF1 is because... Well, they were the enemies to most of the Countries
@@Shad_man1hell they aren't even explicitly shown to be evil, they have plenty of humanizing scenes, that are just left out in this video, and the allies have scenes that show them to be not good as well. Like when the allied announcer calls them "Savages"
What does it matter? Both sides were fighting a pointless war with bolt action rifles in trenches. A German or Ottoman uniform wouldn't change a fucking thing, it would just be a gimmick, their experiences are pretty much identical to every other country that participated in the war. And you can play as them in the multiplayer, and the pre-battle speeches are neutral, sometimes patriotic, sometimes fearful, sometimes sympathetic to their enemies.
Wrong, Data Male forgot to show quite a bit more Operations intro cutscene from the German side that has them saying they want to go home and it doesn't matter if they win or lose. They just want to go back to Berlin. Soisson has the German narrator commenting on the French tanks saying they are ready to devour men and steel alike hence the comment "in a bloodbath of flesh and steel" and "What has become of humanity if he creates only to destroy." Pretty sure the Ottoman in Sinai Desert were terrified of the British tanks, calling them demons. The Ottoman fighting ANZAC mentioned they had to take applied bandages from dead men to use for the living and a white flag was raised to retrieve the dead while an Ottoman and an Anzac shares a cigar humanised both sides.
Some of my favorite little ways at looking at geopolitics and military history, I picked up in the US Army, were "It's only a warcrime when the other team does it", "If they wanted to look better in the history books, they should have simply been better at war", and "The difference between the terrorists and friendly rebels is that DoD wants us to play nice with the friendly rebels today. Until they are 'terrorists' next week". Nothing undoes decades of US military propaganda quite like being in the US military. Go in with a love of country and a sense of adventure, come out with a "I hope our team loses, actually" worldview.
7:30 - I think the moment my enjoyment of COD started to wane was when I was playing the Black Ops campaign in front of my grandfather (a D-Day vet) and he, completely bewildered, said to my mom "they do this for fun?"
And yet, many veterans enjoy shooter games with their vet buddies and find them cathartic. To imply we shouldn't use fictional violence as entertainment is ridiculous.
I understand the criticism of the first two games, but Black Ops and Modern Warfare are basically interactive Holywood action movies. Black Ops isn't a real story about some CIA soldiers, it's a fabricated story influenced by some factual information. I understood your point, but I must say that the game doesn't care about Operation Paperclip or Agent Orange because it is not about that. It's a simple FPS with a story that has one single purpose - To entertain the player. I don't think anybody takes it as source of real information, but rather a dramatization of a what-if event. And once again, COD4 isn't about Iraq war or justifying the invasion. It's just inspired by the real life events, and once again, it uses that inspiration to dramatize it into a gaming story. Of course it is a nod to the real war, but that doesn't mean it can't be portrayed in its own style, especially when it needs to fit the lore. You need to analyze it with additional context from MW2 and 3.
It seems like you fail to understand that fictionalized stories have been used in propaganda since the dawn of time. Top Gun also wasn't about any specific war, but it was sponsored by US NAVY and was used drive recruitment numbers up. Every time you see non-CGI military hardware in Hollywood, it means it was sponsored with US military. In short, they provide equipment for free and in exchange you give them the right of the last cut. They can demand ANY changes. This is the military entertainment complex. The best kind of propaganda is the one that you don't notice.
@@somedud1140 That's what lowbrow school of youtube media criticism would love you to believe. It's easier to tell a bunch of teenagers about invisible propaganda, rather than to highlight nuance, literacy, and critical thinking. Show them something like Generation Kill and they don't know what to think because it shows horrible and disgusting parts of war while also showing that nothing is as simple as "military bad."
@@TheRadioSquare "But whatabout muh generation kill" Whatabout it? It waters down the bad things "that happen" in the war with heavy military humor. Nathaniel Fick wrote about his inner struggles when the chain of command refused to evacuate the kids his platoon shot, to the point he was thinking about turning his rifle against his superiors. Can you remind us all, did this scene make the cut? Oh right, "military not bad", so lets water it down to the point it misses the original message. Nathaniel Fick also wrote about the time he thought he found one the fabled "mobile laboratories", spoiler, it turned out to be a mobile kitchen. That one also for some odd reason wasn't in the series. But why not, it did happen to the protagonist, it was the official reason why they were sent there. The book was published in 2005, when there was still hope that whole thing wasn't purely fabricated. Was the reality "too political" for the series? And after that you accuse someone else of media illiteracy and lack of critical thinking? There's huge difference between something YOU don't see and the "invisible" one.
@@armeniangenocide5778 as expected, you have no media literacy. As soon as something is not black and white your brain needs to make things up. Pathetic.
@@armeniangenocide5778 It's insane how you try to display "uhh no, I actually understand it really well" and your answer to that is "hey this soldier later on wrote about his subjective experience which wasn't reflected in the book made by another person and might by all accounts not be credible. But let's assume you actually weren't handicapped and it was all true, you'd still be distilling a series that shows the reality of the conflict as pro-military due to several scenes? Do even have a slight understanding of how intelectually dishonest that is? I don't think you do. People who interpret things this way are more into politics than history, you're an embarassment.
On Al-Assad, he is a proponent of pan-Arabism who apparently, in connection with other militaries brought together multiple Arab-majority states, deposing, exiling or killing many regimes, influential figures and reasons. This is why he speaks in MS Arabic, which is a rather interesting detail. It should be noted, Gadhafi also has a deeper connection to Al-Assad, whilst Saddam provides the physical aspect. Some of this is from the original games, tie-in materials and details from the newer remakes.
New to your channel absolutely excellent vid. I read generation kill recently and wanted to make a similar video but you’ve articulated a lot of it better than I could really interesting analysis!
To anyone wanting a genuine portration of a war's experience, including: confusion, fear, gritty mood and chaos, play Red Orchestra, especially the mod "Darkest Hour Europe 44' 45".
Yeah, the dissonance between making a fun FPS and having an anti-war message has changed my own plans for the FPS I'm working on- what was originally supposed to be an anti-war FPS now has to focus on more specific themes, assuming I don't cut the story altogether- I'm planning on having the player's goal be to prevent the usage of nuclear weapons in a war in the distant future.
But why is that dissonance such a bad thing? Why should the perceived hypocrisy of fun gameplay get in the way of fun gameplay? If you don't want fun gameplay, don't make a game. If your gameplay isn't fun and doesn't add anything to the story, then just write a book or make a movie.
Your video essay reminds me very loosely of an article I read ages ago about the cognitive dissonance video game developers are increasingly running into as they (sometimes) get more sophisticated and try to tell more somber/serious/moving/gritty/consequential stories but are ultimately constrained by the games industry's expectations for creating a "fun" game loop. That article focused on Naughty Dog and its games, Last of Us and Uncharted. The author touched on both issues of gameified grim themes and misrepresenting historical issues of conflict, persecution, or race. And I don't mean any of that in a "reeeee muh sacred cow cognitive biases" way. It's entirely in agreement with your point leading up to 12:30 and onward. Though you develop the idea much further with your discussion of how the "Red, take the shot!" and POW camp rescue etc reframe huge events as a trivial backdrop for (in my words) a "buddy GI" movie. Messages like "Killing is bad, human life is scarce and precious after the zombie apocalypse, combat and a life and death struggle build up a lifetime's worth of trauma and coping mechanisms" turn hollow when the message in a cut scene (re: Joel's internal struggles) leads the player into repeated sequences of shooting or brutally silently taking down an endless string of NPC humans and zombies. The average player character in a video game typically racks up an entire small country's (or US state's) annual homicide body count in the span of 10-20 hours of gameplay. How precious was that human life or protagonist's mental stability, again? :D Your discussion and examples of how video games sanitize and trivialize historical events out of a mixture of marketing necessity, avoiding controversy, misguided inclusivity, and possibly plain old developer ignorance (e.g. your discussion of the keffiyeh's significance) absolutely apply to entertainment media. These issues balloon outward when I think about ANY distorted representation of violence in all entertainment media, ranging from the procedural crime TV genre to this year's Liam Neeson/Denzel Washington revenge pr0n fantasy sequel. Sure, the audience may be able to tell the difference between movie fiction and reality on an itemized scene-by-scene basis... but 10-15 years of watching a modest 30-50 action movies exposes the viewer's mind to maybe 10,000 brutal and overwhelmingly justified onscreen depictions of murders by the good guys. I think this absolutely does influence people's subconscious minds, shaping their cognitive biases -- I speculate that it's a major driving factor for the decades long trend for American patriotism-turned-fringe-zealotry to morph into a prepper's fantasy about surviving TEOTWAWKI ("the end of the world as we know it"). Many wanna-be preppers suffer main character syndrome, thinking that they'll be the plucky hero who survives the apocalypse. If anyone's going to be racking up a body count of any bad guys (bandits, looters, corrupt/coopted cops or military personnel, wicked politicians), it's gonna be them, they think. But they don't realize that developing a mindset of being willing to do whatever it takes to survive has the potential to make them the bad guy NPCs in someone else's story arc. Or rather, they bury that cognitive dissonance b/c they don't want to acknowledge the possibility of becoming the bad guy through the survival values and apocalyptic survivor identity they've cultivated. IRL there isn't any scriptwriter backing up a given person's chances of survival or inherent righteousness over any other person. And the vast majority of IRL disaster events aren't going to be anywhere nearly as cinematically dramatic, abrupt, complete, or clear cut as it is in, well, the movies. And if you're going to survive a disaster in the medium to long term, you're going to need to join or build a team or community, not be a lone wolf. But my criticism of a particular subculture group here applies to all of humanity. All of us think we're the main character, there's no avoiding that. Movies feed on our desire for escapism, thus very few blockbuster movies depict main characters who go through the entire story with a lack of agency in the face of overwhelming odds. That feeds every viewer's cognitive biases and misconceptions about their own chances in any life endeavor depicted. Making it big and getting rich. Getting away with a crime. Being the one to singlehandedly solve a mystery and/or catch a criminal. Finding love in a fortuitous meet-cute.
I think you mean Ludonarrative Dissonance? Where the story and gameplay tell 'separate stories'? I don't think it's a problem at all. Gaming is entertainment. If your story is so important, yet you can't make it entertaining or interesting, then nobody will listen to your story. I think hyperfocussing on the perceived hypocrisy of it is a waste of time- the story doesn't change if you fight 100 enemies or none. Making a game not fun to play to ''send a message'' is childish and undermines your story. If you don't want to make fun gameplay, don't make a game, write a book, make a movie.
I wish, even one of these games, would depict the Christmas Truce of 1914. Could have really highlighted one of the most hopeful yet tragic moments of war.
3:10 I disagree that the germans are depicted as faceless badguys. There are several examples of humanization of german soldiers in the BF1 prologue e.g. being shell shocked or crying out of fear.
Exactly what I was thinking there was details obviously they are the "bad guys" when they are your enemy but the first mission showed that they were human too like the crying soldier or the shell shocked soldier and then don't forget the entire point of the mission at the end where the German and herlem hellfighter hold fire on one another cuz what's the point it's like bro did you even finish the mission 🙄
@@game_boyd1644 Sure it would have been great to have had a german war story. However I still think DICE did an good job in humanizing both sides. Just play the "Fall from grace" mission and you can hear german soldiers joking and there's even one german who's writing a story.
The allies had ~20 milion casualties is ww1 (KIA and WIA) if the central powers lost that many troops they wouldn't have less than a million troops left. My Grandfather (who fought for New Zealand) said that the English would treat them like cattle. If anyone should be depicted as a mindless hoard it should be the British. Also Germany may have pulled the trigger on the war but they did not start the cavalcade of mistakes that led to the war.
This video was amazing! As someone who isn't familiar with these games, but heard a lot about the problematic elements in them, it was interesting to see you point out the root of the problem.
The only thing I would criticize about the video is that you only mentioned the highway of death thing in passing, even though to me at least it seems like the most heinous thing they've done in terms of blatant propaganda.
@@pinkcheese917 Yeah, that was the one example I only really found out about whilst editing the final video together. I added it in because it's outrageous how bold-faced it was compared to the rest of the games, and is important to highlight how they're still up to the same tricks
However I have some disagreement with how you viewed the cod 4 campaign as strictly pro war or even pro Iraq war for that matter. The nuclear bomb, for me, is not a case of the developers trying to rewrite history but rather as a grand gesture towards the folly of the Iraq war as a whole. The good and bad people on both sides of the conflict died in such a scale aswell just slowly, more painfully. The young American troops far away from home sent off to fight a war which they believed was necessary to protect there country from a dangerous and hostile enemy, and the many displaced citizens killed unjustly for a conflict in which they had no stake. Cod 4 shows the bomb going off in the unnamed stereotypicaly Middle Eastern country for a reason (rather than the US) its to subtly critique the Bush administration and US foreign policy in the most bombastic way a piece of media can, and making you play through the devastation and control the soldier actions was a stroke of brilliance in my book. Another example of this that often draws criticism is the AC-130 mission in which you cynically mow down hundreds of enemies complete with maniacal praise from the others onboard the plane but I feel that mission has been unfairly panned as pro-war and is instead another subtle criticism of those in the military who will gleefully ignore the innocents on the ground impacted by such a ugly and frankly inhuman way of separating American soldiers from the reality of taking another humans life. There are other elements in that game that strike me as pro war as-well as pro US colonialism that you pointed out (in particular the pro Palestine scarf that Al Assad in similar fashion to Sadam Hussien)but goddamn I have to to give the game credit where it’s due.
Highly appreciate this piece of media analysis. The mixes of war and entertainment are always interesting to analyze. Not sure if you are familiar with the channel “Like Stories of Old” but he has done some really good analysis but with movies and war. In one of them he reflects on whether it is even possible to make a genuinely anti-war movie. Whether it’s concern for making people think their loved ones died for something noble or a full on propaganda film it would seem pretty hard to actually do.
i haven’t gotten very far into the video yet, so its quite possible aspects of this are mentioned later, but this subject (in my opinion) lends itself well to a in-depth journalistic look at why line changes and differences in direction in these games took place in specific instances, like the tone-deaf dubstep trailer you mentioned in the beginning. of course, the profit motive is at fault, but the specific reasons why marketing teams and executives water down messages or change them entirely being put under a microscope would make for a great endeavor.
The really insulting part of the MW2019 Highway of Death thing is that it's like the Devs couldn't even be bothered to whip out a Russian Warcrime to use as a basis. I've noticed that in a lot of 'Western' (Usually US and UK) circles regardless of their politics with the exception of WW1, WW2 and I guess now the War in Ukraine nobody actually knows anything about wars and conflicts beyond whatever the USA directly gets up to. So now instead of mentioning anything from Afghanistan (The Soviet one), Georgia, Chechnya (Twice) or you know Syria which is clearly what the friendly insurgent forces are actually based on (Aka a mix of the Kurds and the Free Syrian Army with nearly all the messiness of the a real life freedom fighting group sandblasted off.) The Russian Forces are given something mostly perpetrated by the US in Kuwait. It's so bad I genuinely believe it's not even malicious propaganda anymore I just think the IW devs just went to a major event and just threw it in and now it just becomes a self perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
The Highway of Death wasn't a war crime though. Retreating troops are still considered a valid target. Surrendering and retreating are two different things.
@@AsymmetricalCrimes True, but in some cases, shooting a retreating person in the back can be seen as at the least dubious in terms of the conduct of war
Highway of death is not a warcrime no matter how much these circle jerks love to mald about it. Retreating troops that are still armed are a valid target, especially ones that were regrouping to be a threat again at a later point. The fact that those same retreating troops decided to use civilians as shields _is_ a war crime though, but that never gets brought up now does it? And now this video is doubly fucking stupid because Russians are in fact bombing hospitals, and schools, and suburbs and anything else with a large civilian populations. These "fuck amrica" anti west breadtubers never ever discuss the conduct of nations like Russia or China in _their_ wars because if they did so they have to reconcile with the fact that for as bad as America's mistakes are, at least they own up theo them and try to do better to minimize the damage in the future. Meanwhile Russia is making a game out of to see how many civilians they can kill in a single strike.
The Russians did do almost exactly what was shown in MW2019. In Chechnya they repeatedly bombed and strafed the supposedly safe roads with planes and attack helicopters, killing an unknown amount of civilians. It even looks visually more similar to Chechnya than the Iraqi highway of death (the vehicles are much less dense and it doesn't look like a massive traffic jam), the location is just switched to a desert. The articles at the time even refer to it as "roads of death."
I feel this video is 10 years late to the discussion of anti-war war pro-war games. While i could, a lot of time, editting, and effort went into this 1 hour video. It still comes off as a newcomer scratching the surface of the topic, for there had been other conten creators that go far deeper into the anti-war war messenge. Spec ops the line and the another deep dive into Cod 4 is something to look into. Edit: oh I just realized what this channel was. Jesus
This video feels like it was just regurgitating points that people have been saying for years. I felt like I wasted 1 hour to learn what I already knew
Only showing one side of the conflict in Battlefield 1 kinda ruined the whole anti-war message. It made one side look like heroes and the other look like a ceaseless unfeeling horde. In reality both sides were victims of war. Only covering one side also halves the potential it had. There could have been a sturmtruppen themed story during the Kaiserschacht to show how much strategy and conflict had shifted towards terror and brutality in only 4 years. Also it could serve as a contrast to Avanti Savoia where both were elite units, just on opposite sides of the conflict. An Austro-Hungarian story could have shown how its soldiers were so varied that language became an issue. It would give them both actual personality and cultural personality. A lot of stuff from this game was an actual learning experience for several people because not a lot of people care much about the first World War. So showing the other side would also teach them a whole lot that they never would have known. It would be able to show how every side had a reason for fighting instead of having the one side bad, one side good approach. The entire story honestly just felt like an argument where you only get to hear one side and its version of it while never getting the other side.
I don't think it would've changed much. You get to play both sides in BF5 and it's not like the message of that game is any stronger for it, it's just a gimmick. It's cool, it's entertaining, sure, but not more than that, soldiers are soldiers, regardless of what side you're on. I don't know why they chose not to do it. But as you said, both sides were victims of the war, so nothing would really change besides the uniform.
Blackadder having that last scene of going over the top was a result of all the previous seasons, getting really familiar with the characters and half of the fun was expecting the flow of conversation, the other half was actual written lines that were funny. You knew Blackadder will have an issue, Baldrick would present a stupid solution, then Blackadder would tell him that he's an idiot in a witty way. Just like your familiy or friends, you know their ways, you even say the same words sometimes. You never expect them to die, though. And it's permanent. This is something that no game really has, or else it would not be commercially viable. Imagine a 5 year long round of Among us, or something, where nobody really knows that there is supposed to be a bad guy, basically just a chatroom, until someday it all unravels. Now that would be a plot twist that isn't even a part of the plot. On average, gamers like the "This was cool, do it again!" repetition, like a toddler playing peek-a-boo and laughing histerycally everytime, so any real depth in a videogame is nigh impossible.
You don't need perma death in gameplay to have characters permanently die, you don't need death tell a deep story either. Mortality is only a small part of life.
The story was focused on the cold war in general. Apparently there were actually two world superpowers involved in the cold war, but i cant seem to think of the second one off the top of my head!
(AUTHOR'S NOTE AND CHARITY LINKS)
I've realised that my comments at 10:52 could be taken along the same lines as the "Why are there black people in my medieval history" crowd, which wasn't what I was aiming for.
My main issue with this game is that it ignores the racialised history and causes of WW2 and the Holocaust, and I feel that the customized player avatars contribute to that erasure, by cynically using identity politics for mass appeal whilst also minimizing those same identity politics that caused such atrocities in the first place.
I have no issue with "unrealistic representation" when it helps people feel seen in media, but I dislike when the significance of race across history is lost in that process.
CHARITIES TO DONATE TO:
Save the Children in Iraq: www.savethechildren.org/us/where-we-work/iraq
Aid to Iraq Refugees: donate.unhcr.org/int/en/iraq-emergency
Vietnam Friendship Village: www.vietnamfriendship.org/wordpress/get-involved/support
Agent Orange Record: agentorangerecord.com/donate/
Thank you for this video.
One thing you overlooked was that you described the German army as "The Nazis" at the start of your segment on cod ww2 which is an inaccurate way to frame it. It's not that one dimensional. The SS divisions would be, but it's not correct to imply basically anyone in the wehrmacht were party members. A significant portion were people conscripted, or regular army members without those political views. You can read diaries from stalingrad which highlights the relative normality of many caught up there (not that it means they were "good guys") - similarly to what you were saying in your world war 1 segment about the german side, they weren't all faceless nazis.
None of the above refutes the good points you make though.
@@Fampini The German army during WW2 might not have individually been card carrying NSDAP members to the man, but I don't think it's inaccurate to call them 'the Nazis' as they were in fact part of the fighting force of the entity known as 'Nazi Germany' (the German state between 1933 and 1945). It's a pretty standard naming convention in the context of WW2, both contemporaneously and up to the present day and I don't think it implies that literally ever soldier was a Nazi party member (which itself isn't even a particularly ironclad guarantee of someone's individual politics given the social advantages of party membership in Germany at the time). Not at all to say this is what you were implying, but I am generally wary of efforts to differentiate the SS and the Wehrmacht in terms of culpability for Nazi crimes because it's a common tactic of people espousing the 'clean Wehrmacht myth', the suggestion that all/the vast majority of German atrocities were committed by the SS alone and not the Wehrmacht, which is completely false.
@@Fampinifactually speaking, the German army was the Nazis. They represented the interests of and acted on behalf of the Nazi party. That some held reservations is true, not strong enough to defect but it’s absolutely true. It’s also absolutely true many rank and file soldiers did support their government and weren’t simply caught up or innocent bystanders.
This desire to separate the Nazi government from the German army isn’t really done for any other group. The Japanese soldiers by and large aren’t considered separate from the whims of the Imperialist government.
Describing Germany in WW2 as the Nazis isn’t inaccurate. Its your opinion that they should be separate, it’s not what really happened
"Manufacturing Consent" is not a smart way to say "convince you of", it refers to when a Problem is created solely to promote it's solution.
Dice could've fixed your complaints of Battlefield 1's opening scene so easily: when the player dies as a frenchman, he respawns as a german and so on. Would've made the scene way more impactful
There should have been a campaign where you played as a German
@@staidenofanarchy Yes but the layman can’t differentiate between the Nazis and Imperial Germans. Though the “Last Tiger” campaign of V happened.
Even sniper elite gives some humanifying blurbs of targets you scope out scattered among the evil/comedic/embarassing ones. Not saying the game isn't as propogandistic as the others.. but it's something, I guess
There showed a crying German soldier and several shell-shocked German soldiers, in Steel Storms. If this is not an attempt to show that the Germans are not just NPC mobs, then I don't even know.
I immediately had the same thought.
Instead the Germans are effectively orcs.
16:57 I think it should be pointed out that the original sentence was "We are all Jews here", while in the game its "We're americans. Period". So its not only using a real story in a bland action scene to make a hero out of this character, it also changes the identity that that character values and is willing to defend. It kind of paints the event as in germans attacking americans. For a lack of a better term, it "whitewashes" the event
Absolutely correct, I think I outlined that in a response to another comment.
This is further reinforced by the first line uttered by your friend when you stumble across them: "These were our guys".
It's less of an attack on an ethnic group, but an attack on "our guys" instead.
I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason this game set its ending in Berga is to further highlight the victimization of American troops over other groups.
The point is Americans want to project fascist hatred onto Nazis because of their insecurity about their own fascist state. Activision Blizzard was probably pushed by the NSA, CIA, or some other federal agency to rewrite the script. The original story is one of camaraderie unification, and protection of the oppressed. But that doesn’t fit with modern American politics. Those are ‘liberal’ values now. So it appeals better with the audience (American conservative Nazis) to claim nationalist ideals rather than communal ideals. And what do you know, it works. Fuck Nazis, fuck fascists
Only one comment lol.
@@apocolypse11 Three now
@@vinicius99157 what do you mean for a luck of a better word? That's exactly what it is.
15:30
The Holocaust killed 17 million people, not 6.
For some reason, most Americans (including the Holocaust Memorial Museum) only ever seem to count the Jewish victims, but the Romani and various Slavs were victims too. As were disabled people, homosexuals, and fringe Christian groups. They deserve to be remembered and respected too.
took them 6 years to do that and then hide all the mass graves that still cant be found? crazy
how dare you deny the 6 million. you can't deny the 7 million. you're a nazi if you deny the 8 million
@@thug588 ???
@@thug588uh those graves have been found…..and not all were buried…..
Exactly
I lost it at the 360 no scope to save Zussman lmfao
15:57 For those who're wondering
I remember when I first played Call of Duty WW2 and how I felt about it's ending. Going through the concentration camp, taking photos, I was so confident that I knew exactly how it was going to end: the protagonists would find where they were dumping all the bodies, all of them disfigured from being burned, and with very few words the protagonists would realize that Zussman was somewhere in the pile. The protagonists would finally understand that Zussman was just one of millions that were murdered, and that they couldn't save any of them. I was dismayed when I watched the actual ending unfold, and my brain checked out for the entire end credits. What a waste of potential.
But you do gotta remember that some poor modelers, texterers, and devs would have to have spent time making that and implementing it into the environment, wich is why i give that a pass. Game dev mental health is already bad enough.
You managed to write a better ending in a Singular RUclips comment than an entire AAA studio
@@planetmaker3472 if you can't handle a ww2 game then don't make one.
@Casian291 Or they can just not show that, and still make a ww2 game.
@@diamond_tango ohh yeah make a ww2 game but remove crucial parts of ww2, makes sense
I swear if they actually portrayed the CIA accurately then half the developers would suddenly go missing
Did you play Cold War?
@@mrusername3438In Cold War, they justify it as it being "neccesary" or shit like that, in every Black Ops, really, the enemy gouging weaver's eye out is monstrous and inhuman but you putting glass on a dudes mouth and punching him for information is justified because "It's what needs to be done", the double standard is palpable
*Makes a fictionalized CIA clone to do that lmao*
@@moonshine6304 Never once did they justify what Adler did to Bell. You're just making stuff up.
Yeah, because having a game where the CIA actively betrays your main character (twice, I might add), is so inaccurate.
Man, get the f*ck out of here.
The dissonance between ‘war is hell’ and ‘war is glorious’ has always been an integral part of military propaganda. Going through the spiritual hell of war is what makes the heroes glorious and ending war (with more war) essential.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a great treatment of this, as these optimistic propagandised boys are very quickly traumatised by war. And oh look, it's a WWI fiction set in Germany!
Thing is there's no way for a game to depict war accurately, because it would be boring and after playing it you would be devastated and diagnosed with severe PTSD.
Wrong. Spec ops the line, mgs3/mgsv, and COD WAW all do an excellent job showing the brutality of war and remind you that there are victims on all sides of a conflict. COD WAW probably does the best job of being a brutal and accurate war game in my opinion, but spec ops does the best at showing how a warzone affects the mental state of soldiers and how PTSD can ruin some people if they even make it out alive.
@@princetchalla2441yeah but as a player I am still enjoying the diss associated killing of faceless and nameless pixels, Video games can have anti war themes and tones but, it’s not a real experience or depiction of war, that’s why I treat games as either a sport(multiplayer) or a action movie(character driven fictional narratives to entertain me). Trying to make Video-games into the premiere or any art for that matter, anti-war propaganda is a joke to me, I don’t need art to tell me war is bad or war is hell, And I don’t know why others do.
It should be pretty self evident.
Yeah, this guy doesn’t get it.
Funnily enough al assad's Arabic speech somehow had a few lines that are clearly anti imperialist (لنحرر اخوتنا من الإحتلال الأجنبي) "to liberate our brethren from foreign occupation/reliance" and (كما اتحدث انهم يتفسدون جيوشنا بما سنحارب لاستقلال شعبنا؟) " As i speak they approach our armies how will we fight for our people's independence ?" Which makes sense since his country is litterally being invaded.Don't get me started on the fact that al Asad and all Iraqis are speaking modern standard arabic(which is only mainly used for paperwork,news and professional documents and not speakers in day to day life not even politicians use it during war time for they still use each country's respective dialect (which are radically different). I always found that odd/funny as an arab myself
I'm not really surprised they would miss a detail like that, with all the other shit they get wrong
I Think The Arabic Nation In Modern Warfare Is Not Iraq Persay Its The Collective of Nations From Saudi Arabia Iran And Afaghanistan And The Other Arabic Muslim Nations Why So The First Invasion Happend Atound Saudi Arabia Like Missions Like War Pig And Raid On That TV Station And The Mission Shock And Awe Happens At An Area Around Iran And In MW2 In The Team Player The Rebels Are Bieng Rooted Out In The Area Inside Modern Day Afghanistan I Think Its Not The Nation Of Iraq In Tge Game But A Collective Federation Of Nations Of Muslim And Arabs
100% they hire a translator/consulting company from LA/California or whatever is closest to them and just hire some local actors who speak arabic to voice it and call it a day. They do that with more languages that are not as "common" in the English speaking market.
ولد بلادي 🇹🇳
They made the country "generic middle eastern" so I'm not duprised they used MSA.
"Previous game's budget" - Shows Battlefield 4.
Man, Hardline was *that* bad, huh?
I thought it was fun, too bad folks let gaming journalists run their opinions 😕
@@vault1021 It was amazing, and everyone I've ever talked to about it agrees. I think a lot of the battlefield playerbase was just butthurt that they couldn't use a rocket launcher or grenade launcher as a primary weapon. Hardline would have done much better if it wasn't a battlefield game.
Nah, it's a good game, fanbase is just full of retarded faggots
@@notme5844Hardline was straight broken and unplayable for months on launch and everyone just went back to bf4. By the time hardline was fixed it was too late.
Hardline was good. Don't let "journalists" and youtubers control what you think.
This is so complex and reaching, you can really write entire theses on individual games, let alone the entire industry. Portrayals of war in games before Modern Warfare, the relationships to other war media like movies, even just the specific impact of Spec Ops: The Line - a game so influential that white phosphorus instantly became synonymous with "war crimes in video games" - are all well worth looking into if this video grabbed your attention as a viewer. I've got a few video essays to start you off:
Jacob Geller's analysis "Does Call Of Duty Believe in Anything?" and Innuendo Studios' "Blood Is Compulsory: How We Talk About Advanced Warfare" are other medium-length essays about particular games. For short, more game design-focused perspectives, Extra Credits' "Call of Juarez: The Cartel", "Spec Ops: The Line" parts 1 & 2, and "The Division" - though not their 6 Days in Fallujah video, which was made long before the game was actually developed and is generally bad. "Rationalizing Brutality: The Cultural Legacy of the Headshot", also by Geller, and "Anti-War War Games" by Super Bunnyhop are starting points for the wider context, also on the shorter side.
This is a very...homogenous list, just the first that come to mind, I'll come back and add to it. If anyone else wants to drop recs I'll add them to the list.
I really like the extra credits video, i miss those types of videos they used to make, some really good exploration on topics that are still relevant today were discussed MANY years ago by them
Maybe reading an actual anti-war book would be a good start? Lord of the Flies maybe? Or at the very least watching Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket as opposed to video essays about video games
Wow, this is such a good video! I love that when you talk about anything, you provide concrete, visual examples - it's super helpful and I can't imagine how much time it must have taken you to collect all of the footage... Also, love the additional refernces and sources, like the Blackadder Goes Forth, controversy surrounding CoD WW2 and how many stories were changed into an action-forward propaganda and many more. The editing and the script are top-tier, there is enough comedic relief from time to time to keep me watching, while it doesn't take away from the topic at hand and the seriousness of it. AND you posted an author's note clarifying the only point in the video that I was a bit unsure about, charity links and a doc with sources??? God, you are really good at what you do 👏Massive respect!
Personally, I view Spec Ops: The Line as a more accurate view of being a soldier in Iraq. Even if it takes place in Dubai, it doesn’t shy away from fucked up shit that the US actually did in Iraq. It shows the use of white phosphorus, needless death of civilians, oppression by an AMERICAN occupation of a country. All the things that MW and other games inspired by Iraq didn’t.
That's why I like the Arab Soldier Mod that's in a Modded Cod 4 Campaign. It feel like we are playing as the Good Guys
@@hurricane7727 COD 4 Arab mod, yeah, I play that too and probably more than anyone did, I feel nothing and no emotion which is the same as playing vanilla/base/original version, I just think No one is a good person except all wankers in this cursed world.
@@Mechanized85 🤣
personally i think This War of Mine is the best example of an 'anti-war' video game
The west never really civilised out of the dark ages.
I think it also bears mentioning on the topic of Operation Paperclip that none of the nazis who joined the west after WW2 had any ideological qualms about it - the nazis were against communists, who were among the first groups of people to be put into concentration camps during the holocaust, while their (the nazis) ideas about the world were pretty normal in places like the US at the time including hatred of jews. For many of them the Cold War period was merely a continuation of their already ongoing war "against communism".
Not just Germans and nazi collaborators from Europe, but also war criminals from Asia including infamous Japanese Unit 731, saved and even hired by Americans.
Communist revisionism
Besides it’s not like the soviets didn’t do tgeir own version of paper lip or have any qualms or partnering with Nono Germans prewar
Paperclip was only the tip of the iceberg. Western Germany was basically handed back to spicy Germans and worst offenders were hired by US alphabet soup agencies and sent out to terrorise basically the entire global south
@@AlexC-ou4ju the Soviets had ex Nazi scientists in scientific labour camps, the Americans gave them comfortable lives in the us and sometimes put the ex Nazis in positions of power in NASA and NATO, this is the fundamental difference between Soviet "partnership" with ex Nazis and the Americans fraternization with them.
The stuff discussed in this video is how I felt playing CoD, particularly the Modern Warfare series, from the beginning. Even as a young teen, I could clearly sense that they were "USA good, every other opposing state bad" pro-US propaganda. Yet I played them anyway because those were the games all the cool kids at school played, albeit the campaign and multiplayer experience was enjoyable.
So thank you for expressing what I've felt from the beginning.
You think MW2 was doing that when the arguably villain is a caricature of American chauvinism?
Then you realize that the main characters aren’t even american amd that the bad guy in MW2 IS american
Yeah that's not always the case, but in the MW reboot, they made a US war crime into a Russian one.
@@LordOfTheJizz*People forget that WW3 in that trilogy is caused by an American General cooperating with a Russian Terrorist so that he can become a war hero after being in charge of a complete disaster in the middle east.*
@@rockmycd1319, shhhh, we can't have his narrative being challenged by facts.
Quick note. The use of game controllers in war to remotely pilot unmanned vehicles isn't because of it's association with video games, that's just an unintended bonus.
They're used because they're compact, can be deployed in the field with extreme ease, can connect to any computer with USB and very simple drivers, cost practically nothing, and they have everything needed to control the movement and some other functions of any kind of unmanned vehicle.
It's almost entirely a cost saving measure chosen over developing their own controls that'd likely be so much more expensive to make.
British tank controls are explicately based off of game consol controlers
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Really?
There are a lot of very different games out there, and you can control all of them with a video game controller, that shows the controller design is practical
@@matthiuskoenig3378Source? Challenger 2 first deployed before modern game controllers, so which vehicles and which systems on those vehicles are based on game controllers?
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Game controllers are designed to be extremely ergonomic and easy to use, and most of the population are at least familiar with game controllers. The US based a line of hand grenades on Baseballs for these exact reasons.
I HEAVILY disagree with your take on BF1.
You cherrypicked a couple of instances of the Central Powers being patriotic and painted those as being all over the game. Whereas the same can be found in Allied power cutscenes. The British talk about fighting tooth and nail to the death in the Amiens cut scene. The British Oil of Empires announcer displays instances of racism against the opposing Ottoman Forces and how the coming battle will be a breeze. You are hypocritical in this respect by generalizing the central powers faction by discussing a few instances of them being "blood thirsty".
You even brush over the instances of humanity in the very operations you discussed. Here's a list of humanized Central Power soldier instances below
Conquer Hell operation, German cut scene. The speaker discusses how desensitized he and his comrades have become to war, and how they barely remember the outside world. If you lose the operation as the Germans, the announcer discusses how they must remember the fallen to prevent such a war from happening again.
Kaiserschlact operation cutscenes. The announcer discusses how he feels pity for the British getting shelled, in the Amiens cut scene he discusses sending food home to his starving family.
Brusilov offensive operation. The Austrians discuss how awful the Eastern Front is and how they fear for the Austro Hungarian army collapsing.
Gallipoli operation cut scene. The Turk speaker discuss their childhood and how he detests this memory being tarnished by the British presence.
Beyond the Marne Operation. The German speaker in the cut scenes is actual the same speaker as the person in the Devils Anvil operation cutscenes. In those, he was bloodthirsty and wanted to bleed France white. In the Marne operation, he is broken and terrified of dying at this point in the war. He discusses not caring if Germany wins the war, only that he sees his family again.
Furthermore in the campaign the random conversations you can hear between Central Powers soldiers makes them feel almost like real people with thoughts and experiences, rather than being cardboard cutout people to kill.
In MP, the intense battle reaction voicelines paint a picture of the Central Power soldiers as being real and vulnerable people who are terrified by war. Same as the Entente soldiers. They cry for their mothers, and go insane from the shell and gunfire.
Could have DICE done a better job by having a dedicated Central Powers campaign? Of course, it would've gone a long ways.
But to overgeneralize the entirety of the game by discussing a few cherrypicked instances is incredibly disingenuous and not professional when discussing BF1's approach and respect to WW1 history.
i agree 100%. Dice could have done a lot better with central powers (their own singleplayer, campaign, more languages spoken in the austro-hungarian army, perspective switching to german troops in the intro) but saying that germans are portrayed as an bloodthirsty horde while the entente is portrayed as heroic is just completely wrong, especially with the dlc operations being accounted for.
@@ralsei66 yea, it’s just a stupid and baseless claim. Is it wrong to include instances of bloodthirstyness? I would say no because beliefs such as that were present in the war.
But to say that’s the way across all of the game is just plain wrong and stupid.
DICE did take shortcuts that I find to be annoying, ex the Ottomans and Austrians being a German reskin and the US being a British reskin. But to downplay the historical value of BF1 by discussing only the faults and not mentioning the details and substance is again, stupid.
Well done comment, Oil of Empires has the Triple Entente as the most antagonistic of the operations at launch. Which is funny when the "protagonists" is the most genocidal empire of the war, and he just... ignores it?
@@NoImNotJonsAltWhatDoYouMean Yea, the British speaker in the Fao Fortress literally calls the Ottomans "savages". How can the creator of this video complain about the supposed "blood thirsty" Central powers and "good guys" Entente when something such as this exists in game?
I seriously think that this guy has not played more than a couple of hours, because if you actually played/watched all the operations and their cut scenes, then he would realize his claims are completely false.
He also Ignores that in “blood and steel” and “mud and blood” that he definitely played because his whole point is dedicated to it, and they’re not hard to miss, they’re right in your face
you see shell shocked german soldiers, one with his face in his hands Crying, another walking away slowly, clearly traumatised and unable to process his surroundings, which the player has to make the choice to shoot even though they’re clearly not a threat
made the whole video invalid in my eyes tbh
The question who actually started WWI is still a highly debated topic. There are actually good reeasons to blame the French, Russians or British, just as much as there are arguments to blame the Germans or Austrians.
Also the 1980s idea of incompetent officers who willingly and coldly sent soldiers who didn't want to fight to their death has also been challenged a long time ago. Reality was much more complex than that.
I think no one’s to blame. Every big European country at that time was highly industrialized and everyone wanted to show and use their power and conquer land. The youth was brainwashed into thinking war is a glorious, fun, honorable act. It was just a matter of time until they all started going at it.
No specific country is to blame, it’s a plethora of socio-economic conditions coupled with militarization, the prominence of alliances in Europe, and a series of Nationalist movements.
No one is really to blame, I feel like if Germany gets to be depicted as the bad guys in WW1 video games and movies is because they first declared war and invaded their two neighbors France and Russia.
Also because with WW2 it’s easy to put Germany in the bad guy role every time, even if it doesn’t even make sense for WW1
@@A410-f1o Pretty sure Russia went on the offensive against the Central Powers first. The Germans wanted to focus on France in the beginning, and Austria on Serbia.
Russia was Serbia's ally, this revision of history is crazy Germany/Austria are the clear aggressors.
I always knew call of duty was always a power trip fantasy with some serious implications caused by the need to make a fun game out of the atrocities of war, but Jesus I never realized how disrespectful and the amount of willful negligence and rewriting of history.
Like when the pinned a famous American war crime on the Russians in modern warfare.
I think the most shocking part of the Highway of Death parallel is how lazy it is above anything else. Like they couldn't even be bothered to make an alternate name for it, it's such a middle finger to people who know the actual history.
@@datamale The actual history of it being a legitimate military airstrike on a armed military convoy? It was lazy asf to use the same name, shoulda just based it off one of the numerous real Russian warcrimes.
@connorbranscombe6819 Sure you could say it was a legitimate target but it was also needlessly cruel. Striking soldiers pulling out of the country you're defending is pretty iffy to say the least. It was clear that command wanted to strike Saddam for any reason they could grasp.
@@clinicallyarsonistic Why is bombing an armed, combative, actively retreating enemy force cruel?
To be clear, they should have just let them retreat and set up new defensive position right? Do you have the same opinion during WW2? Was it rude of us to attack the Nazis as they retreated across France and back to Germany?
@@connorbranscombe6819 attacking a beaten and retreating enemy is fucked up. like if i won a sword fight and then stabbed my opponent in the back when they limped off to lick their wounds.
On your point of Germans being portrayed as villians in the forst mission, I have to disagree. There are multiple German soldiers seen retreating or frozen by trauma. We're given the allied perspective where it's easy to mow them down without even noticing, which I find to be pretty powerful.
COD changing from historic 'we are all Jews here', to 'we're Americans. Period,' seems... distasteful.
Distasteful is the nicest word you can use for it. Even as an American with literally no Jewish background, it is such a flagrant slap in the face and “American Patriotism washing” to appeal to an audience and the American military (who helps advise these games) that it’s genuinely upsetting to me that it’s allowed.
What I don't understand is why did they have to make a "bad guy/good guy" thing with BF1 when WWI was literally just a bunch of people fighting each other because they were pretty much forced to? It would've been much more interesting to see a distinctly morally grey war than what we got. It's so infuriating.
FR!!!
Every other guy has an smg, it’s like DICE didn’t even want to make a WW1 game
That scarf isn't a Sadam thing, it predates him by decades. It's a super common traditional piece of clothing throughout the Arab world. I forget it's exact origin but you'll see the entite Saudi family wearing it today, and it's not some reference to Sadam
It doesn't even predate Saddam by decades. It predates him by centuries. This is an incredibly old headdress, initially worn by Bedouin nomads. It has nothing to do with Saddam or Palestine.
I think for uneducated players of that game it is still more seen with a connection to sadam, as he was often seen with it? :/
Even wit math at being said you can’t deny that the depiction is so close that you’re going to have a hard time not associated the scarf with suddam
@@occam7382 The black and white design he showed with the fishnet pattern is specifically Palestinian, but yeah keffiyehs themselves don't pertain to any one country or person. It's silly how he concluded that keffiyehs are a Saddam Hussein thing - that's like seeing pictures of George Bush wearing ties and thinking that ties are a Bush thing.
It gives very strong Arafat vibes, though...
0:10 tbf Verdun doesn't have that aspect Battlefield WW1 has, the "good vs. evil" aspect. You don't see them act like they're saving the world but fighting a war of Empires. It's all there in Verdun, Izonzo, and Tannenberg, you're just another Soldier in the conflict fighting a war of two powers. No "feel good" aspect of the conflict. No narrowing down good vs. evil plot Just pain, war, and destruction. A war where one destroys the other. They are proud of their country sure, but it's just that. Nationalism and patriotism for their soil. They're willing to sacrifice themselves for their country, to hell with saving people in the crossfire. To hell with it being a good vs evil story.
Because wars are inherently immoral. There will always be this disconnect in media that makes war out to be associated with positive morality. That's just not how the world works. Wars are not fought for moral reasons.
The important part is that only the allies get humanised. The British prepare for tea, the Americans talk to each other, the Italian wonders about his mum, etc. While the Central powers intros all talk solely about strategic objectives and warfare.
@@codylegoThat’s not even true. Even in the example given in, say, the Meuse-Argonne Operation both the Americans and Germans are displayed as overconfident, with an element of apprehension from one of them. They both underestimate each other but for different reasons.
It makes even less sense with the Italian campaign example considering both soldiers are expressing the exact same sentiment. They’re both very patriotic, with the Italian wishing to avenge the humiliation faced at Caporetto.
You even have a British officer being racist towards Turks in an arrogant fashion with Al-Faw Fortress before expressing great respect for them in Suez. I’d say the operations monologues are a fantastic way of contextualizing the map being played
@@rockmycd1319 the British soldier being racist is more character than the ottoman soldier saying oil will fought over for centuries to come. I agree that the intros don’t particularly favour the nations/empires which comprise the allies but they do humanise them far more than they do the central powers
@@codylego What? How is being conscious about the future of the Middle East in terms of resources less character than stereotypically arrogant racist British officer? both sides are humanized and it’s done well, especially with Verdun.
The German narration is not a glorifing but rather disgusted by industrialiesed warfare like gas etc. Its easy to miss when you're not a German speaker but it's obvious he is horrified and not anything else. Also the kaiserschlacht narration include lines about food shortages in Germany during the end of the war.
i went back and listened to the voicelines from those cutscenes and i feel like they try to humanize both sides. I really dont get how he could missinterperet it like this.
@@cerovec123I mean the lines are literally cherry picked. In the first example he picks the only American who’s a bit apprehensive about the war and ignores the other overconfident ones
@@cerovec123, he didn't misinterpret it. He actively lied about it to sell his narrative. It's disgusting.
@@cerovec123 Because it would, ironically, hurt his narrative if he interpeted it in good faith. The dude has some good points, but his overall tone and message comes as moralistic and from a high horse. I got the impression he's very upset that anyone should want to make a war time game that doesn't delve deep into the politics of why historical wars start. His take on 6 Days of Fallujah is just hot garbage.
As a german, you guys are so full of shit. Talking about, and quote the game here “I saw an eagle high above the mountain, I couldnt help but think about our Reichsadler and how it exasperates our great ideals” is being scared?
And, of course, this Occam guy is here to yap further, but never actually say anything worth discussing.
Not only does Khaled al-Assad bear a strong physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein, he's named for the ruling family of Syria.
He's an Arab-flavoured "Adolf Mussolini".
It's eve worse because if you look at the map the US is invading Saudi Arabia.
And? Fictional stories regularly take inspiration of real-life historical figures, both for heroes and villains.
Would you be complaining if a military shooter had an antagonist based on Omar al-Bashir, or Ayatollah Khomeini, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Hideki Tojo, or Bashar al-Assad?
@@occam7382 as far as I know the problem with Assad is him being secular and not Is1s, since the west armed them against him. Anti communism and anti left made Mandela a t3rr0r1st.
@@occam7382no but it’s hilarious when you realize they did that and the us invasion of iraq was based on a bunch of lies and propaganda and the US broke the security regulations of the UN which set the precedent to russia to use that as one of the many justifications of its invasion of Ukraine… Saddam and Bashir are and were probably huge assholes but it’s not like the US is the good guy in every scenario
@@occam7382 did u watch the video lol. His point, which I agree with, is that it is ok to have characters in games inspired by real world events, even down to the scarfs and glasses etc, but there's something deeply wrong with the way that they manipulate history, and people who play the games, with false/partially true realities presented as truthful and accurate.
" Fictional stories regularly take inspiration of real-life historical figures, both for heroes and villains" Yes.
"Would you be complaining if a military shooter had an antagonist..." no. the comment you are responding to is not complaining, he's simply making an observation in line with the content of the video
Fantastic vid. In a TTRPG podcast I listen to they've discussed there being a difference between "fun" and "enjoyable in gaming. A game can be very fun but when you're done you get nothing out of it, and another can be miserable to experience but that misery carries depth and importance. A good example in videogaming would be Hellblade. That game is an emotional and mental meat-grinder but it's so engaging that you stick with it and then get an amazing catharsis at the end.
If Battlefield 1 had been solely a single player game they could have successfully nailed the "war is hell" angle (Enjoyable, but not necessarily fun) but as a multi-player game they have to focus on making it fun so people keep playing that it self-sabotages any poignancy it was going for.
TL;DR, games can be excellent vehicles for poignant storytelling but it's almost impossible for a multi-player focused game to pull it off.
32:26 just wanted to point out, later cutscene “sector scans” don’t just zoom in on Iraq every time. This is what each Middle East mission shows:
1. The Coup: Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Coast (Around Jeddah)
2. Charlie Don’t Surf: Iraq (As you show around Basra)
3. The Bog: Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Coast (same as The Coup)
4. Warpig: Central Saudi Arabia (around Riyadh)
5. Shock and Awe: Iraq (Around Basra)
It’s basically all over the place and doesn’t actually pin point a single country. Looking back, it’s quite disjointed with its apparent locations. So basically, the Marines invade Iraq, then leave and invade Saudi Arabia, then in the matter of 48 hours advance over 1600 km back to Basra.
This is the version of reality where Pan-Arabism succeeded and the Middle East in one big country :)
Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as a teenager with pacifist sympathies, what especially struck me as ghoulish with that scene you describe is the way it portrays the US as uniquely good and their opponent as uniquely evil because the latter detonates a nuclear bomb in a civilian populated area... Something the US is the only country to have ever done in a military context. It adds another layer of quasi revisionism here.
The nuke is a symbolic representation of the fallout from the Iraq War (no pun intended) and sets up the chauvinistic attitude of General Shepherd in the sequel. It’s not revisionist at all,
first and foremost, calling the plot of a fictional video game revisionism is insane, but whatever.
i know youre a pacifist so ur working with limited resources, but put ur thinking cap on and try ur hardest to understand this.
the nuking of Japan was far better choice that resulted in far less death than a mainland invasion, which would have killed millions easily. the Japanese werent willing to cooperate or surrender, even after Germany and Italy surrendered, even after all the crimes against humanity and war crimes the Japanese did in China and Southeast Asia. The population at that time very much were willing to fight and die for their god-emperor, not just the military, seeing as it took 2 nukes. they gave them time to surrender after the 1st nuke, and they didnt. also take into consideration that everyone was sick and tired of the war, it had been dragging on for years and everyone just wanted it to end already. furthermore, for years the U.S had pretty much uncontested power over the whole world since they were the only ones with nukes, but instead of going around and abusing that power, they actually helped Japan and Europe rebuild after the war.
the only person engaging in revisionism is you.
@@adindrecaj the Japanese we‘re literally about to surrender before the US dropped not one but TWO fucking Suns on civilian targets. Your comment is as ghoulish as it gets.
The bombs were we only dropped because we had them and wanted Russia to know and to see the rffect against a civilian population. Japan was going to surrender regardless to us so they didn't have to surrender to the Russians@@adindrecaj
@@rightinthedome9973 no ur literally just wrong, they werent going to surrender, they didnt even surrender after the first bomb. stop being ahistorical and do the fucking research.
Iraqi raised in america ✋
I appreciate the topic& approach of this video
Were you alive during the time of the 2003 invasion? Just curious about your experience of all this.
@@amittaizero born in 91 in baghdad, came to the states around 6 or so. I was prime pickings for the "mustard" jokes, the 5v1s(aka jum9ing me) even when being raised around other Arabic countries' families (Lebanese, Jordanians, yemeni families) though all those "divide and conquer" games don't work on people who regularly party and squabble, back and forth with their brothers 🤣👌
@@moe3235 games like Call of Duty, movies like "Saving Private Ryan," all that stuff had me primed once 9/11 happened. I was born in '85, so I was military age the year we invaded Iraq. I should have known better than to join the Army but damn. Propaganda worked really well on me.
I am German and I never felt like "we" were painted as the baddies in BF1. But then again, Germany has been the bad guy in so many products of modern culture, that I just might have got deaf to it. 😅
I was going to reply that I got those vibes (Germany as villainized) from Bf1 continuing a tradition of very loudly lacking the ability to have a campaign playing as a German, Austro-Hungarian or even Ottoman soldier especially in a position where it already mentions stuff like the Bedouins who themselves are a casualty of historical revisionism in formerly Entente countries and the media they produce - because I never touched the multiplayer. Once the video got to mention things such as multiplayer mission monologues it kinda feels unambiguous that there was some intentional framing by those monologues getting written by one person & then approved to be implemented into the game by a second person.
You are probably just masochistic enough to like it.
That’s probably because it didn’t. The central powers should have gotten their own campaign but the operations cutscenes do an excellent job at humanizing both sides
@@rockmycd1319 I actually agree.
Hey Mann, ich würde gerne ein bisschen mit der deutschen Perspektive auf die beiden Kriege spielen (ich wünschte auch, mein Land würde das mit unseren Konflikten tun, zumal wir keine verloren haben). Ich würde auf jeden Fall Geld dafür ausgeben, wenn ich welche hätte 😅
Really great piece. Well researched and fascinating. Great way to spend nearly an hour!
ty any austin for showing me this channel, name + topic combo of this video gives me good vibes for me enjoying it
I will be back after I finish austins video
Did you come back? It's worth it!
hes why im here too !
If they wanted diversity in world war games they could have at least made it realistic. Like Indians in the British forces, Asians in the Soviet Union, Turks/slavs in the German army
Of course, however, these games are completely unrealistic anyway. Sliding across the floor, running and gunning like a maniac, awful ahistorical weapons (really? a holographic sight in a WW2 shooter?) etc. etc.. The skin colour of some characters is really just the cherry on top.
But for some reason, a lot of people only complain about the latter (I guess due to the culture war), but they never care about the other inaccuracies that I mentioned. In the sense of "running and gunning mindlessly with rifles that never existed and wearing uniforms that never looked like that is completely fine, but having a skin color or gender that never participate in the war like that, that's were I draw the line". It's arbitrary and pretty stupid.
@@wolis7178 Yeah the stuff that triggers the outrage is really telling at times.
Take Battlefield 5 for example. So much of the focus of discussion was on how having female characters or weird costumes in multiplayer was 'disrespectful'... yet the Last Tiger campaign, which at its core is a story about Nazis being sad that they lost and being all emotional about the decision to surrender (and zero discussion of why they were there to start with), is lauded as a standout highlight of the game.
Depiction of history in games is just super frustrating to discuss, especially online. It becomes super clear that a large swathe of self-appointed historical gaming fans really only care about superficial aesthetics and not about the actual subject matter. If a game looks like a famous history movie, it gets the 'authentic' seal of approval... even if vital historical context is missing.
But most British troops were British, most Soviet troops were Russian, and most German troops were German.
@@loganmanderfield1162 What do you mean "but"? Where's the contradiction?
That is his contradiction. He was saying that most of the troops were belonging to their own countries, which is why they are represented as such. @@cass7448
The scarf on saddam doesn’t mean anything. Those scarfs are a dime a dozen in that part of the world. My dad has one from when he was deployed
how this only got 5k views after a year? its such a good essay
Because this video is very, very bad. It cherry-picks and omits information to a staggering degree to sell this guy's narrative.
@occam7382 very true
Here cause of Any Austin, great video
Same!
now I know why it got recommended to me even though I didn't yet watch Any's CoD video
Sheep behavior
@@taylorpennington8126 yes total sheep behaviour when you watch a video someone recommends
@@taylorpennington8126 sheep go to bathroom. A real chad shits on the desk.
Even when an American was unimpeachably heroic, it has to be "reimagined" to purposefully downplay that the mass genocide of Jews was about antisemitism.
European Jews were only labelled "white" when an Axis power attacked them. Open antisemitism was not taboo until Hitler became an enemy. That's why the true story of non-Jews, raised in an antisemitic country, claiming themselves to be Jews to protect their comrades turned into a gentile soldier heroically refusing to acknowledge that Jewishness exists. He does not put his own privilege into question, he doesn't have to lie, and he will not face antisemitism.
This shit is insidious.
Something I should have clarified a bit better in the game is that Zussman actually IS Jewish, but I don't think that excuses this game's poor portrayal of Edmonds' heroism.
Instead of a gentile man standing up for his friends simply because it's the right thing to do, Zussman instead has to separate himself from his Jewishness by reiterating his american identity in its place, as though to say that THAT'S what's more impactful to his identity in that moment.
The Jewish character is instead left to fend for himself and prove his own identity and worthiness of survival, rather than anyone coming to his aid in that moment.
It's the same reason the line "These were our guys", when you first discover the aftermath of the camp, bothers me so much. It's not the horrors of the holocaust that shock the characters, but the fact that these atrocities were committed on Americans.
@@datamale Wow, that definitely makes the scene even more...oof...
There's a lot to unpack there and I am not at all qualified to get into it, but man, this might take the cake for being exceedingly politically- and socially-loaded purely because it was unthinkingly attempting to be as "apolitical" as possible.
You can't say the G word, that's OUR word. Cracka.
@@theMoporter forgot to add "yikes" among the lines
@@einfachignorieren6156 based
Excellent video, really glad I subscribed to you after Thought Slime's shoutout. I haven't thought much about Modern Warfare's story much since I last played it over 10 years ago (oof, I'm getting old). I remembered the gist of it, random middle eastern country with bad dictator, we are the good guys and kill him, the russians start ww3 with a wmd.
Now that you highlighted the parallels between it and the invasion of Iraq I'm kinda of appalled how I didn't see it before. Back then I assumed it was supposed to be similar to the invasion of Iraq (probably because I was pretty geopolitically illiterate back than and that was one of the few middle eastern countries I knew) but I didn't think much of it.
The part that surprises me is that I never realized how fucked up it is that they made it so that "totally not Iraq" actually had WMDs in this reality, even though that was one of the parts of the game I remembered most clearly. I guess the fact they blame Russia and Makarov for it made me never think that deeply about it. The Military-entertainment complex is scary stuff.
It's awful, right? When I put the pieces together during my research it blew me away how blatant it was, I thought I had to for sure be imagining things.
But no, they really were that blatant about things (and still are apparently).
@@datamale, what's awful is how much you lied in this video.
About Operation Paperclip and Osoaviakhim:
The scientists in Paperclip was basically integrated in the society, treated mostly like war heroes because the need that US had in terms of competing with USSR. Hello, Wernher von Braun!
In operation Osoaviakhim, most of them were constantly watched by the NKVD/KGB. Many of them were returned to previously occupied Germany after Stalin death. Some went to labor camps (Gulags) and many others were taken to special cities to work exclusively to the governmental projects, without much freedom to go anywhere.
The ideological behind Nazi was shared by Henry Ford, who was carefully put in a portrait on Hitler's room. So ideological bias matters in that case.
Most of the western world in WW2 era was expecting that the Nazi army would end the communist USSR, waging war against them. But when the Germans started to tread Europeans like the entire Western world treated the whole Africa, indigenous people and black people around the world... THEN it started to be an issue.
It's been two months since your comment but do you know where I can find info on this topic?
Well, every important scientist in the USSR was usually locked in a special research city/institue and/or was closely watched.
So how does the Soviets being allies with Germany from 1939-1941 fit into the last paragraph?
Like rockmycd, I’m a bit confused about your concluding paragraph. The Germans were treading the majority of Western Europe *before* even preparing for an invasion on the Soviet territories.
And, of course, there was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which was a secret alliance that made any pre-westward expansion to the east a non-issue, meaning that the Goths were riding west and earning the ire of the rest of the Western European powers before even being considered something akin to the champions of the western world, as your comment seems to suggest.
Likewise, the Lend-Lease act made it certain that the Nazi army was not considered an ideological ally to the west, as supplying your bitter enemy against your ideological champion is best compared to sawing off your leg to win a race.
And do note the times in which things occurred. Nazi Germany invaded Poland, an ally of the western powers, in 1939, two whole years before the invasion of the Soviet Union took place. Likewise, the expansion of political power into Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Rhineland, acts that flew directly in the face of the docility the western powers wished to incur into Germany after the Great War, already soured many opinions of the Nazis before the invasion of Poland. None of these things make Germany look much like a champion of western ideology, so much as instead making the Nazis seem like a rabid wildcard that is likely to bite either side.
Besides, appeasement was an attempt, however futile it was, to keep the peace of post-war Europe. Few, if any, nations in Europe directly involved in the conflict had fully recovered, and many nations had a public still too weary of war since the 1910s, meaning that appeasement was the easiest choice when it came to methods in dealing with such a wildcard. War was the Ultima Ratio once again, and few politician worth their salt back then would jump at the chance to kickstart the end to their careers.
@@isaacpresley717And the west gave in everytime, and both the german and western populations had significant sympathies for each other, if Germany hadnt threatened british hegemony, they would've been best friends, the point is that their beliefs were not so different.
If you recall, years before the molotov ribbentrop pact, there were the annexation of Austria, completely looked over by the west, and the Munich diktat and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia, supported by the west and then weakly condemned, respectively.
On the black ops 1 topic, I think the one sideness isnt as extreme as it seems. The entire game is full of "dont trust your own government" themes. Reznov is just used as an example. We are on the side of americans in the game obviously, but we are given a look into the russian perspective of the germans and US as well. It comes around full circle so that complaint is a little shallow. Especially considering how you're literally being interrogated by your own CIA in the game for the entire campaign. It's alright to not touch on every aspect of the history with a story. The story of Black Ops isnt about operation paperclip from the americans, its about vietnam, brainwashing, secretive russian cooperation with the germans (same as paperclip but theres no need to go into that when its well known and shown here, and implied by reznov). Sure it's a story full of historical nods, with some fictional elements, but primarily its a character focused story. It's about the guys in the situations and their perspectives.
"The entire game is full of "dont trust your own government" themes.""
But you literally saved the world by trusting your government, it says don't trust THEIR government.
@@armeniangenocide5778 You can't really trust the government, no, but you only have those you trust. That was a recurring theme in Black Ops. "Who do you trust?"
Just look at the final frame of the first Black Ops game and try to tell us again how it's a game that tells you to distrust the US government
@@simonriley4131 wasn't the last frame about jfk being assinated?
CIA agents who are supposed to be you friends
In COD WW2, did anybody else laugh at how ridiculous the scene where Zussman is captured? The Germans go to great lengths to capture him as you try and chase them, any other NPC would have just been shot and the firefight continues. But for some reason they need to take this guy alive as if he's a 4-star general or something.
That entire game was a clown show
I forgot how much everything about that game sucked compared to CoD2 or even CoD3 lol.
The funniest thing is that in bf5 the Germans who were the actual bad guys are humanized way more and even have an entire war story
@analien5251 You're no different from the BF1 writer that sees the Germans as faceless hordes. Was every Wehrmacht soldier poetically waxing on about the glory of the Reich and the trimuph of fascism? Of course not. They were human too. WW2 wasn't a war between clearly bad people and clearly good people.
True and i think at least one guy was an ss officer who are the worst or the worst
@@DaParoleOfficerIt actually was a war between bad and good lol. Just because the average German was a victim of it doesn’t change that
Liberals will try to humanize the fascist Wehrmacht and Imperial Japanese Army but think the central powers were the SS 🙄
@@DaParoleOfficeryeah they were human but due to propaganda they all supported the Nazi government and fought for the Nazis, and you are correct, the other powers were not that good, France and Britain had many colonies and the US regularly terrorized and murdered African Americans, but the Nazis were clearly extremely evil
Brilliant work. Can’t believe this doesn’t have more views
This was a very interesting video! Thank you for making it!
highway of death in mw2019 being blamed on Russians quite literally an American war crime
Have you considered, though, the rhetorical power of:
"Nuh uh"
@@datamale ah shit
A nasty event for sure, but not really a war crime
@@nikoozden7091 by every measure of war crime… it’s a war crime blatant civilian killing on a none military zone
Correct, the Russians would never open fire on a civilian convoy!
_looks away from the Ukraine humanitarian corridors_
Damn... this video should not have been the way I learned about the Kunduz hospital airstrikes. Then again, maybe that's a perfect example of what you're saying in the video - I've played a lot of games with AC-130 sections, and always just thought of it as a fun time blasting bad guys.
Then I read the wikipedia article on Kunduz.
"Anonymous sources alleged that cockpit recordings showed the AC-130 crew questioned the strike's legality."
I don't remember THAT dialogue in Call of Duty 4...
7 minutes in and I liked the video and subbed to your channel. Grateful that the algorithm led me here. Thank you for this video, man.
Criminally underviewed video, amazingly well-written and thoughtful analysis. Instant sub!
I would argue that the original Modern Warfare does more than you give it credit for in subverting the typical jingoistic pro-military video game (that it ironically mostly predated).
If you take a look about it, the executed president "Al-Fulani" is implied to be the head of a oil-rich US puppet state, the marines invade with little intel and fail in their objective to capture him, and get thirty thousand soldiers plus an unknown amount of civilians killed by a nuclear bomb, they come off as imperialist bullies who shoot first and think later.
The SAS (who you didnt touch on) also are portrayed as callous and indifferent to murdering innocent cargo ship crew members and leveling an entire village by way of requesting an AC130.
It's not perfect as you pointed out, but it's quite different from the rest of the games, and even they have their moments (such as General Shepherd allowing tens of thousands of his countrymen to be murdered for the sake of 'inspiring patriotism')
Also I think Thousands of Arabian Soldiers are Killed in the Nuke as well
Battlefield 3 Usmc Feels Smarter and Stronger than Cod 4 Usmc. They Invaded and Took Down Iran with less than 1k Soldiers
I hate how mw3 ended the story. “Alright we’re suddenly friends, let’s take down Makarov now, yeah now he’s bad” it was so abrupt but the game seems pretty unfinished.
@@CryptidBuddy The Creative Team Got Banished After The Success Of MW2
I do find that Call of Duty prefers to depict a fight against individual "bad actors" within the soviet union than a fight against the soviet union as a whole. Similarly, the series doesnt shy away from depicting bad actors in the US too. Theres the whole sheperd thing and the recent Cold War does have a negative depiction of MKultra. Similarly, Battlefield 5 does portray the german side in quite an honest way, so there are counter examples.
I think the problem is, these games just have nothing to say overall. On one hand, you have the games need to be a spectacle to sell to the masses, the need for a dramatic story line, the writers and artists intention to "say something" while also not wanting to say anything "controversial" or "unpopular". Really, these games are just so confusing and meaningless that you can basically read anything into them.
For the first remark you had, video games, much like cinema can be for fun but they're also an art. And like every art, they can be used to convey meaning. Especially with video games who can use direct "spectator" action as part of the experience. Spec Ops the Line was a great game because of this, so was Far Cry 3, they conveyed meaning and a commentary on the use of violence/war and that commentary would have worked much less if the player didn't take a direct impact on this. Most of the horrible choices the main characters made, were the player choices. It makes it much more impactful than any painting, movie or piece of music.
I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about the stupid advertisement though.
EDIT : I think your issue with historical games, is that the one you played used history as a pretext to make a fun game, not as the main topic of the game. These were products, not art. Both companies that make both Battlefield and COD games wants to make as much money as possible, and are very certainly used as a mean of soft power by the US.
At 50:14 even if Winters is becoming more and more insane as the game goes on, the rest of the squad never does, and yet, they all end up accepting his orders, agreeing with him, and in the end *ask* him if they can go and kill civilians. The commentary still works, especially since the 33rd who perpetrated at least as much horrors as Winters never went insane. They were sent here, took power and abused it. As a perfect metaphor of the US military forces as a whole.
I agree with your conclusion, but your way of getting into it is... flawed as best. (as other commenters put out)
Amazing job!
Between picking out thin points from obvious promotion, creative license with history, attempts at inclusivity, and the avoidance of symbolism, you've managed to stretch and twist the narrative to fit your needs so perfectly that you should most definitely get an award for it!
I have a strong feeling that you'll excel in a career in sensationalist journalism. Simply amazing!
14:50 I recall a game called Mortyr II, a cheap polish WW2 FPS (that had cool ragdoll for the time and wounds modelled on the enemy corpses), obviously inspired by Wolfenstein. You start the game with rescuing your friend, an undercover agent serving as a tank commander. After that you spend some time helping him, and then, in the middle of the game you are separated, you see him getting caught, rush to help him, but it's too late. I played it as a kid and it hit me in the feels, I wondered if it was possible to actually save the guy (it wasn't possible, he gets killed and player character buries the man).
Just imagine, a simplistic and janky polish FPS writer knows more about emotional impact than the entire creative team of a major international game developing company.
The nuke scene is actually one of the more politically correct scenes in all of CoD. Showing that if Saddam actually had nukes it would have been an even worse idea to invade.
that is the weirdest use of "politically correct" that I have ever seen. Do you mean "politically accurate?"
unfortunately right wing bastards have fried our brains now, but there was a time where "politically correct" could mean many different things, and "politically accurate" was one of them @@MinkStolle
@@MinkStolle no because by politically correct I mean inoffensive
@@MinkStolleYeah, that was weird.
No, it’s symbolism for the utter disaster that came out of the invasion of Iraq.
hey, what you're talking about in your first point has a name: ludonarrative dissonance! it is exactly those moments when the game's narrative clashes with it's mechanics, creating a disonnance that ends up undermining both the story and the gameplay! really cool (uncool?) phenomenon
I don't think ludonarrative dissonance matters, I don't think it undermines the story or gameplay at all. The perceived hypocrisy is meaningless.
Videogames are meant to have fun gameplay, the story should never tread on this concept. If you don't want fun gameplay, don't make a game, simply write a book or make a movie. Forcing your players to endure boring gameplay for your message is childish and pointless.
Just enjoy the gameplay for what it is, and focus on what the story is trying to tell you. Some games might have gameplay that compliments the story, and that's a fun gimmick, but it's not necessary, demanding this would be a chokehold on storytelling.
@@famulanrevengeance3044 oh you have absolutely no idea what the medium of video games consists of and means... cute, i was also like this when i was 10
The one thing that always bothered me about Battlefield 1 was how they did not have a single Imperial German campaign story, or any central powers story.
But they ended up making a German story in Battlefield V. And its like wait youll have a story for Nazi Germany and yet not have one for Imperial Germany. Imperial Germany was not like nazi Germany, they were not great but i mean, they were just as bad as all the major empires at that time during the Great War.
All the empires kind of equaled each other, except the ottomans, i feel like the ottomans were the worst of them all because of the armenian genocide. But i mean, all the leaders were inept, and world war 1 was the most pointless waste of human life ever. At least world war 2 was a justified war against fascism.
I do wish they had a german BF1 story though. Would have loved to see one around the kaiserschlact maybe. Or the initial schleiffen plan rush and battle of the frontiers at the very beginning of the war.
I just found a gem of a underrated channel 🤧✨
Very interesting and thoughtful video. You deserve more subscribers dude.
COD has weirdly gotten away from doing this in some of the recent titles. The last two I played, Cold War and MW2 were actually much more accurate and critical of the American policy. In Cold War for example, you play as a character that the CIA is torturing for information and the whole goal of the campaign is to prevent someone else from setting off the American bombs that were placed in European cities. The American supplied the bombs that detonate in the bad ending. In the “good ending” you literally get assassinated to tie up loose ends and cover up for the CIA. In MW2 the campaign revolves around the terror threat that’s happens because of CIA and private military contractors dealing weapons to overseas organizations. It also showcases the atrocities that could happen if the Mexican and American governments decided to label Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and use the American military to fight them. Private military contractors operating without oversight is also a central issue in the campaign and the “bad villain reveal” is once again Shepherd, an American general. The most violent “bad guys” are American backed contractors committing war crimes in another country, not the Mexican cartel or the Iranian terrorists. Hell the American contractors literally overthrow the local Mexican federal authorities. The terror threat isn’t just that the Iranians gave the Mexican cartel weapons, the terror threat is that stupid America warmongering policy resulted in the weapons being available in the first place. Of course at the end of the day it’s a video game for an American audience so they never come outright and say that the Americans were the bad guys, but I genuinely think/hope that just as more and more Americans and westerners have become critical of violent interventionist foreign policy, the games have reflected some of that shifting public sentiment.
That's the thing tho, you can criticize the modern military industrial complex until you are blue in the face. Games like Spec Ops the line are cheered....but you can NEVER touch the Sacred myth of WWII and how the virtuous allies "saved the Jews and fought against fascism"
@@MALICEM12 You _can..._ But there's no reason to. Not unless you want to justify and white-wash the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese.
Besides, the Allies literally "saved the Jews and fought against fascism". That's true. It's a historical fact. It's objectively correct.
I feel like this take utterly misses any nuance presented in the games discussed. CoD 4 especially. The entire CoD franchise loves to play with the interpretation of the individual player. For example in “Death From Above” you can view it as a fun on the rails section or you can feel uneasy at the idea of it. Black Ops 1 has the US government torturing you the whole game.
If you want to talk about them being propaganda, you can certainly make that argument, but you’d be missing a lot of nuance the games present.
Also Everytime you die in mw3 an anti war quote appears in the campaign
@@audreyharris7643 That’s a staple in most cod games
@@arcblooper2699 good to know
@@audreyharris7643Holy shit an anti war quote appears? Stop the fucking presses, that totally changes everything!
@@abhinavpatil759 no it doesn't change everything but it's nice
Not the video I expected to be offered by RUclips today, but I am so grateful that it was. Thanks for creating this video and for taking the time to present your argument this way- it made me think and consider some things I have felt but haven’t been able to articulate before
Edit: overall, loved your analysis, and you put in to words a frustration with military shooters I've had for a long time. I'll leave this comment up in case it's a useful critique of the intro; I know you delved into that eventually.
1:10 If we take video games to be art, then I don't necessarily think that video games are only meant to be "entertaining". Some have challenging or frustrating aspects to make a point. It all depends on the intent of the game imo
The "dice making central powers evil" claim is untrue since there are plenty of humanoid german moments like on rupture operations a guy narrating seems like he's almost gonna cry ranting about tanks being like monsters and scary
"humanoid german"
Was the word you looked for "humanizing"? Because this makes it sound the opposite.
@@ano_nymbro accidentally dehumanized the Germans while trying to humanize them lol
@@ano_nym yea you're right oopsie lol but still even in war stories they made the germans be on the same side of the flip coin as the allies so I don't see a point in this claim about germans being portrayed as bad
And also on amiens in the loading cutscene german soldier talks how his nephews would've been happier with food and that he'll try to send some home
The ottomans acting the way they did in the Lawrence of Arabia missions were stupid though lol. Stereotypical evil officer
There’s a German operations intro where he talks about wanting to break his leg so he can go back home and out of the war. That kind of makes the beginning portion misinforming :/
Really good video again, here before 100k subs!
I appreciate your faith in my channel haha. If it ever gets to that point I'll remember this comment.
A fantastic video that I’m so glad I stumbled upon. Great commentary. I’d just add that allied servicemen might have been forced to keep certain things about the camps quiet because of the allies’ own actions on arriving. Those Germans who did surrender at the concentration camps were often dealt with in ways we perhaps would suggest were justified. Look up the dachau liberation reprisals for the story but it included soldiers looking away as former prisoners beat guards to death with a shovel.
I’d think they wouldn’t want some of that known in case people thought poorly of the allies.
Glad the algorithm brought me here, This video was sublime! You gave me a lot to think this night, when I was a young lad all I wanted to do was point and click action, never took this things in a deeper lenses, now I'm mostly disturbed by all the agenda that was behind one of the greatest industries of these days...
Your opening critiques on Battlefield 1 are identical reasons why I don’t enjoy Saving Private Ryan
I wish you had given more credit to SOME of the Call of Duty games because the way they were framed here is that there is no attempt to vilify the United States or allies. The grander point you made about the COD games being hypocritical is difficult to disagree with, because it is likely true that the publishers / developers are under some kind of contractual obligations that are responsible for repeated tropes in their stories (a.k.a keeping the Russians as "the bad guys" or keeping the U.S-based fighting forces always looking strong), but in some of the stories there are major plotlines that aren't afraid to call out the United States as a producer of evil people, or people who do vicious things, almost as if they are tip-toeing what they can do against what they can't. There are examples in installments both old and new as well: In MW2 (2009), one of the major antagonists is literally a power-hungry U.S general who gets around regulations with the usage of a U.S-based PMC, and betrays foreign allies to further his cause. In Black Ops 1, you play as a U.S government operative who is captured and tortured repeatedly by your own employer because of the suspicion that you were compromised and possibly have information on the enemy, with that same employer, the CIA, being depicted as complicit, ignorant, or sloppy in protecting the POTUS by allowing who you play as to play a role in his assassination. In Black Ops 2, your fellow U.S government operative compromises a highly important mission to capture a Nicaraguan drug-lord by blowing up an innocent sibling to him due to a past history with that operator and the kingpin. In MW2019, the British Special Forces partake in a brutal torture scene where they kidnap a target's family and leverage their lives for info and a U.S general is quick to label rebel forces that aid in the fight against the Russians as "terrorists." In Black Ops Cold War, the CIA is explained to have employed nukes all over Europe to detonate by Eisenhower as a "just-in-case" countermeasure to a USSR invasion, on top of manipulating the protagonist (you) into working for the CIA via brainwashing and torture tactics learned from the infamous Project MK Ultra. Yes, the COD games are morally flawed by what appears to be some contract or demand to keep the U.S military up to a certain standard, but it is disingenuous to not mention their attempts to do this under the aforementioned barrier. Treyarch games do it the most as well.
You are saying that COD keeping Russians as the bad guys is propoganda, so the Russians being the bad guys from 1947 - 1991 was all propoganda? All fake? All under "Contractual Obligations" was it?
@@Shad_man1 A majority of the COD mainline games are outside the WW2-End Of Soviet Union era... and even then some of those don't stick to Russians, half times Germans cus, yk, WW2...
@@ishmael6397 no actually, they don't, COD follows a different story entirely, where the cold War technically started, and the Russians maintained a threat, before you say that's bad, the Russians IRL in 2024 are still a great threat and have been since the Soviet Union was founded
@@Shad_man1 I see your point- Russian government and military are quite brutal and oppressive. But the guy that made this video will call you brainwashed, he will say you're spitting propaganda, even though neither of us make the claim that America is innocent.
It's pure whataboutism. You can't criticize one side without having to criticize every side, it's just a cheap way to bloat the conversation and deflect arguments.
The last war game that didn't glorify war was "This War of Mine" back when it came out in 2014. I've since long lost my love for "realistic" shooters.
Youu may get this a lot due to this being your biggest video, but I am genuinely shocked at your subscriber count, this is fantastic.
Great video as always! Love the diverse content
I usually hate saying this or seeing people comment this.
But this time I'll make the exception since this is such an important topic and most people are so blind to the topic discussed in this video.
You are criminally underrated, underwatched and undersubscribed.
For some reason your videos were giving me 20k vibes. The way you present the video and explain yourself is very good. I also like the way the video is structured very coherently (unlike my videos which a roundabouts and go nowhere lol).
I'm hoping you hit the algorithm lottery and get up there. Especially these 2 videos
Awh thanks dude I really appreciate that!
If I ever get to that point I'll be sure to remember this comment.
So uh, 2 years later and this video kinda blew up.
You were right!
@@datamale hell yea. We love being right 👌🏽
Congrats bro
I haven’t researched it fully but a lot of the consultants for cod are us military officials. It’s an effective way to advertise the military to young kids, so they’re not going to say anything negative about the us.
DUDE FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT
when BF1 came out I was soo excited to try it, and when I booted it and started with the campaign I got goosebumps from how realistic and gloomy it felt, it was the first game I played that showcased the effect of wars on individuals. But all that hype died when I went to the campaign menu and saw that all the stories were about the allies. At that moment I knew that its just another good guys vs bad guys type of game.
It's really sad since this game had the potential to explore the effect of war and humanize both sides instead of just one.
WW1 was a meaningless war that ended up achieving fuck all for anyone but some empires dissolving and killing a couple million people. Dont get why they basically portrayed it as WW2 but with silly hats. but like they never ever say or give any examples of why the germans or the austro-hungarians or the ottomans were bad, youd think they would atleast show them killing civilians or something but civilians just arent present in the game at all. its kinda just inferred well they were the ones the state killed 100 years ago so they must be bad right?
@@MarxistMogger the Germans, Austrians and Ottomans aren't bad in the game, it's just they are YOUR enemy, you are the ones fighting them so in your POV, they are bad, however they wouldn't just murder innocent civilians either, the only reason they are the enemies in BF1 is because... Well, they were the enemies to most of the Countries
@@Shad_man1hell they aren't even explicitly shown to be evil, they have plenty of humanizing scenes, that are just left out in this video, and the allies have scenes that show them to be not good as well. Like when the allied announcer calls them "Savages"
What does it matter?
Both sides were fighting a pointless war with bolt action rifles in trenches.
A German or Ottoman uniform wouldn't change a fucking thing, it would just be a gimmick, their experiences are pretty much identical to every other country that participated in the war. And you can play as them in the multiplayer, and the pre-battle speeches are neutral, sometimes patriotic, sometimes fearful, sometimes sympathetic to their enemies.
Wrong, Data Male forgot to show quite a bit more Operations intro cutscene from the German side that has them saying they want to go home and it doesn't matter if they win or lose. They just want to go back to Berlin. Soisson has the German narrator commenting on the French tanks saying they are ready to devour men and steel alike hence the comment "in a bloodbath of flesh and steel" and "What has become of humanity if he creates only to destroy." Pretty sure the Ottoman in Sinai Desert were terrified of the British tanks, calling them demons. The Ottoman fighting ANZAC mentioned they had to take applied bandages from dead men to use for the living and a white flag was raised to retrieve the dead while an Ottoman and an Anzac shares a cigar humanised both sides.
Some of my favorite little ways at looking at geopolitics and military history, I picked up in the US Army, were "It's only a warcrime when the other team does it", "If they wanted to look better in the history books, they should have simply been better at war", and "The difference between the terrorists and friendly rebels is that DoD wants us to play nice with the friendly rebels today. Until they are 'terrorists' next week".
Nothing undoes decades of US military propaganda quite like being in the US military. Go in with a love of country and a sense of adventure, come out with a "I hope our team loses, actually" worldview.
7:30 - I think the moment my enjoyment of COD started to wane was when I was playing the Black Ops campaign in front of my grandfather (a D-Day vet) and he, completely bewildered, said to my mom "they do this for fun?"
And yet, many veterans enjoy shooter games with their vet buddies and find them cathartic. To imply we shouldn't use fictional violence as entertainment is ridiculous.
This video is CRIMINALLY under rated. Odd
I understand the criticism of the first two games, but Black Ops and Modern Warfare are basically interactive Holywood action movies.
Black Ops isn't a real story about some CIA soldiers, it's a fabricated story influenced by some factual information. I understood your point, but I must say that the game doesn't care about Operation Paperclip or Agent Orange because it is not about that. It's a simple FPS with a story that has one single purpose - To entertain the player. I don't think anybody takes it as source of real information, but rather a dramatization of a what-if event.
And once again, COD4 isn't about Iraq war or justifying the invasion. It's just inspired by the real life events, and once again, it uses that inspiration to dramatize it into a gaming story. Of course it is a nod to the real war, but that doesn't mean it can't be portrayed in its own style, especially when it needs to fit the lore. You need to analyze it with additional context from MW2 and 3.
It seems like you fail to understand that fictionalized stories have been used in propaganda since the dawn of time. Top Gun also wasn't about any specific war, but it was sponsored by US NAVY and was used drive recruitment numbers up.
Every time you see non-CGI military hardware in Hollywood, it means it was sponsored with US military. In short, they provide equipment for free and in exchange you give them the right of the last cut. They can demand ANY changes. This is the military entertainment complex.
The best kind of propaganda is the one that you don't notice.
@@somedud1140 That's what lowbrow school of youtube media criticism would love you to believe. It's easier to tell a bunch of teenagers about invisible propaganda, rather than to highlight nuance, literacy, and critical thinking. Show them something like Generation Kill and they don't know what to think because it shows horrible and disgusting parts of war while also showing that nothing is as simple as "military bad."
@@TheRadioSquare "But whatabout muh generation kill"
Whatabout it? It waters down the bad things "that happen" in the war with heavy military humor. Nathaniel Fick wrote about his inner struggles when the chain of command refused to evacuate the kids his platoon shot, to the point he was thinking about turning his rifle against his superiors. Can you remind us all, did this scene make the cut? Oh right, "military not bad", so lets water it down to the point it misses the original message.
Nathaniel Fick also wrote about the time he thought he found one the fabled "mobile laboratories", spoiler, it turned out to be a mobile kitchen. That one also for some odd reason wasn't in the series. But why not, it did happen to the protagonist, it was the official reason why they were sent there. The book was published in 2005, when there was still hope that whole thing wasn't purely fabricated. Was the reality "too political" for the series?
And after that you accuse someone else of media illiteracy and lack of critical thinking? There's huge difference between something YOU don't see and the "invisible" one.
@@armeniangenocide5778 as expected, you have no media literacy. As soon as something is not black and white your brain needs to make things up. Pathetic.
@@armeniangenocide5778 It's insane how you try to display "uhh no, I actually understand it really well" and your answer to that is "hey this soldier later on wrote about his subjective experience which wasn't reflected in the book made by another person and might by all accounts not be credible.
But let's assume you actually weren't handicapped and it was all true, you'd still be distilling a series that shows the reality of the conflict as pro-military due to several scenes? Do even have a slight understanding of how intelectually dishonest that is? I don't think you do. People who interpret things this way are more into politics than history, you're an embarassment.
On Al-Assad, he is a proponent of pan-Arabism who apparently, in connection with other militaries brought together multiple Arab-majority states, deposing, exiling or killing many regimes, influential figures and reasons. This is why he speaks in MS Arabic, which is a rather interesting detail. It should be noted, Gadhafi also has a deeper connection to Al-Assad, whilst Saddam provides the physical aspect.
Some of this is from the original games, tie-in materials and details from the newer remakes.
New to your channel absolutely excellent vid. I read generation kill recently and wanted to make a similar video but you’ve articulated a lot of it better than I could really interesting analysis!
To anyone wanting a genuine portration of a war's experience, including: confusion, fear, gritty mood and chaos, play Red Orchestra, especially the mod "Darkest Hour Europe 44' 45".
Using a 360 controller was a change because it’s cheaper to use and people are already familiar with it compared to proprietary military hardware.
Yeah, the dissonance between making a fun FPS and having an anti-war message has changed my own plans for the FPS I'm working on- what was originally supposed to be an anti-war FPS now has to focus on more specific themes, assuming I don't cut the story altogether- I'm planning on having the player's goal be to prevent the usage of nuclear weapons in a war in the distant future.
Let me guess, they have to prevent the enemy from using nukes. As usual.
But why is that dissonance such a bad thing? Why should the perceived hypocrisy of fun gameplay get in the way of fun gameplay?
If you don't want fun gameplay, don't make a game. If your gameplay isn't fun and doesn't add anything to the story, then just write a book or make a movie.
@@famulanrevengeance3044 I just want to make a fun FPS that has a better message than modern Call Of Duty.
Your video essay reminds me very loosely of an article I read ages ago about the cognitive dissonance video game developers are increasingly running into as they (sometimes) get more sophisticated and try to tell more somber/serious/moving/gritty/consequential stories but are ultimately constrained by the games industry's expectations for creating a "fun" game loop.
That article focused on Naughty Dog and its games, Last of Us and Uncharted. The author touched on both issues of gameified grim themes and misrepresenting historical issues of conflict, persecution, or race. And I don't mean any of that in a "reeeee muh sacred cow cognitive biases" way. It's entirely in agreement with your point leading up to 12:30 and onward. Though you develop the idea much further with your discussion of how the "Red, take the shot!" and POW camp rescue etc reframe huge events as a trivial backdrop for (in my words) a "buddy GI" movie.
Messages like "Killing is bad, human life is scarce and precious after the zombie apocalypse, combat and a life and death struggle build up a lifetime's worth of trauma and coping mechanisms" turn hollow when the message in a cut scene (re: Joel's internal struggles) leads the player into repeated sequences of shooting or brutally silently taking down an endless string of NPC humans and zombies. The average player character in a video game typically racks up an entire small country's (or US state's) annual homicide body count in the span of 10-20 hours of gameplay. How precious was that human life or protagonist's mental stability, again? :D
Your discussion and examples of how video games sanitize and trivialize historical events out of a mixture of marketing necessity, avoiding controversy, misguided inclusivity, and possibly plain old developer ignorance (e.g. your discussion of the keffiyeh's significance) absolutely apply to entertainment media.
These issues balloon outward when I think about ANY distorted representation of violence in all entertainment media, ranging from the procedural crime TV genre to this year's Liam Neeson/Denzel Washington revenge pr0n fantasy sequel. Sure, the audience may be able to tell the difference between movie fiction and reality on an itemized scene-by-scene basis... but 10-15 years of watching a modest 30-50 action movies exposes the viewer's mind to maybe 10,000 brutal and overwhelmingly justified onscreen depictions of murders by the good guys. I think this absolutely does influence people's subconscious minds, shaping their cognitive biases -- I speculate that it's a major driving factor for the decades long trend for American patriotism-turned-fringe-zealotry to morph into a prepper's fantasy about surviving TEOTWAWKI ("the end of the world as we know it").
Many wanna-be preppers suffer main character syndrome, thinking that they'll be the plucky hero who survives the apocalypse. If anyone's going to be racking up a body count of any bad guys (bandits, looters, corrupt/coopted cops or military personnel, wicked politicians), it's gonna be them, they think. But they don't realize that developing a mindset of being willing to do whatever it takes to survive has the potential to make them the bad guy NPCs in someone else's story arc. Or rather, they bury that cognitive dissonance b/c they don't want to acknowledge the possibility of becoming the bad guy through the survival values and apocalyptic survivor identity they've cultivated. IRL there isn't any scriptwriter backing up a given person's chances of survival or inherent righteousness over any other person. And the vast majority of IRL disaster events aren't going to be anywhere nearly as cinematically dramatic, abrupt, complete, or clear cut as it is in, well, the movies. And if you're going to survive a disaster in the medium to long term, you're going to need to join or build a team or community, not be a lone wolf.
But my criticism of a particular subculture group here applies to all of humanity. All of us think we're the main character, there's no avoiding that. Movies feed on our desire for escapism, thus very few blockbuster movies depict main characters who go through the entire story with a lack of agency in the face of overwhelming odds. That feeds every viewer's cognitive biases and misconceptions about their own chances in any life endeavor depicted. Making it big and getting rich. Getting away with a crime. Being the one to singlehandedly solve a mystery and/or catch a criminal. Finding love in a fortuitous meet-cute.
Well the problem is Naughty Dog is quite hacky
I think you mean Ludonarrative Dissonance? Where the story and gameplay tell 'separate stories'?
I don't think it's a problem at all. Gaming is entertainment. If your story is so important, yet you can't make it entertaining or interesting, then nobody will listen to your story. I think hyperfocussing on the perceived hypocrisy of it is a waste of time- the story doesn't change if you fight 100 enemies or none. Making a game not fun to play to ''send a message'' is childish and undermines your story. If you don't want to make fun gameplay, don't make a game, write a book, make a movie.
I wish, even one of these games, would depict the Christmas Truce of 1914. Could have really highlighted one of the most hopeful yet tragic moments of war.
3:10 I disagree that the germans are depicted as faceless badguys. There are several examples of humanization of german soldiers in the BF1 prologue e.g. being shell shocked or crying out of fear.
Yeah it’s a really bad critique being done by cherry picking quotes. You can form the opposite narrative by doing the same thing.
Exactly what I was thinking there was details obviously they are the "bad guys" when they are your enemy but the first mission showed that they were human too like the crying soldier or the shell shocked soldier and then don't forget the entire point of the mission at the end where the German and herlem hellfighter hold fire on one another cuz what's the point it's like bro did you even finish the mission 🙄
That's not on the same level as the Anglo side, and you know it. Would it have been so hard to give the Germans the same treatment?
@@game_boyd1644 Sure it would have been great to have had a german war story. However I still think DICE did an good job in humanizing both sides.
Just play the "Fall from grace" mission and you can hear german soldiers joking and there's even one german who's writing a story.
@@game_boyd1644No, see, Germany was very mean between 1933-1945 so we can never have sympathy for them ever again
The allies had ~20 milion casualties is ww1 (KIA and WIA) if the central powers lost that many troops they wouldn't have less than a million troops left. My Grandfather (who fought for New Zealand) said that the English would treat them like cattle. If anyone should be depicted as a mindless hoard it should be the British.
Also Germany may have pulled the trigger on the war but they did not start the cavalcade of mistakes that led to the war.
Germany didn't even pull the trigger.
It was literally protecting Austria Hungary because of a treaty
This video was amazing! As someone who isn't familiar with these games, but heard a lot about the problematic elements in them, it was interesting to see you point out the root of the problem.
The only thing I would criticize about the video is that you only mentioned the highway of death thing in passing, even though to me at least it seems like the most heinous thing they've done in terms of blatant propaganda.
@@pinkcheese917 Yeah, that was the one example I only really found out about whilst editing the final video together. I added it in because it's outrageous how bold-faced it was compared to the rest of the games, and is important to highlight how they're still up to the same tricks
@@datamale, so should we just act like Russia doesn't commit the same kind of war crimes as described in MW2019?
One of the most professional and well thought out essays I've watched on youtube
However I have some disagreement with how you viewed the cod 4 campaign as strictly pro war or even pro Iraq war for that matter. The nuclear bomb, for me, is not a case of the developers trying to rewrite history but rather as a grand gesture towards the folly of the Iraq war as a whole. The good and bad people on both sides of the conflict died in such a scale aswell just slowly, more painfully. The young American troops far away from home sent off to fight a war which they believed was necessary to protect there country from a dangerous and hostile enemy, and the many displaced citizens killed unjustly for a conflict in which they had no stake. Cod 4 shows the bomb going off in the unnamed stereotypicaly Middle Eastern country for a reason (rather than the US) its to subtly critique the Bush administration and US foreign policy in the most bombastic way a piece of media can, and making you play through the devastation and control the soldier actions was a stroke of brilliance in my book. Another example of this that often draws criticism is the AC-130 mission in which you cynically mow down hundreds of enemies complete with maniacal praise from the others onboard the plane but I feel that mission has been unfairly panned as pro-war and is instead another subtle criticism of those in the military who will gleefully ignore the innocents on the ground impacted by such a ugly and frankly inhuman way of separating American soldiers from the reality of taking another humans life. There are other elements in that game that strike me as pro war as-well as pro US colonialism that you pointed out (in particular the pro Palestine scarf that Al Assad in similar fashion to Sadam Hussien)but goddamn I have to to give the game credit where it’s due.
Highly appreciate this piece of media analysis. The mixes of war and entertainment are always interesting to analyze.
Not sure if you are familiar with the channel “Like Stories of Old” but he has done some really good analysis but with movies and war. In one of them he reflects on whether it is even possible to make a genuinely anti-war movie. Whether it’s concern for making people think their loved ones died for something noble or a full on propaganda film it would seem pretty hard to actually do.
i haven’t gotten very far into the video yet, so its quite possible aspects of this are mentioned later, but this subject (in my opinion) lends itself well to a in-depth journalistic look at why line changes and differences in direction in these games took place in specific instances, like the tone-deaf dubstep trailer you mentioned in the beginning. of course, the profit motive is at fault, but the specific reasons why marketing teams and executives water down messages or change them entirely being put under a microscope would make for a great endeavor.
The really insulting part of the MW2019 Highway of Death thing is that it's like the Devs couldn't even be bothered to whip out a Russian Warcrime to use as a basis. I've noticed that in a lot of 'Western' (Usually US and UK) circles regardless of their politics with the exception of WW1, WW2 and I guess now the War in Ukraine nobody actually knows anything about wars and conflicts beyond whatever the USA directly gets up to.
So now instead of mentioning anything from Afghanistan (The Soviet one), Georgia, Chechnya (Twice) or you know Syria which is clearly what the friendly insurgent forces are actually based on (Aka a mix of the Kurds and the Free Syrian Army with nearly all the messiness of the a real life freedom fighting group sandblasted off.) The Russian Forces are given something mostly perpetrated by the US in Kuwait.
It's so bad I genuinely believe it's not even malicious propaganda anymore I just think the IW devs just went to a major event and just threw it in and now it just becomes a self perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
Good point
The Highway of Death wasn't a war crime though. Retreating troops are still considered a valid target. Surrendering and retreating are two different things.
@@AsymmetricalCrimes True, but in some cases, shooting a retreating person in the back can be seen as at the least dubious in terms of the conduct of war
Highway of death is not a warcrime no matter how much these circle jerks love to mald about it. Retreating troops that are still armed are a valid target, especially ones that were regrouping to be a threat again at a later point. The fact that those same retreating troops decided to use civilians as shields _is_ a war crime though, but that never gets brought up now does it?
And now this video is doubly fucking stupid because Russians are in fact bombing hospitals, and schools, and suburbs and anything else with a large civilian populations.
These "fuck amrica" anti west breadtubers never ever discuss the conduct of nations like Russia or China in _their_ wars because if they did so they have to reconcile with the fact that for as bad as America's mistakes are, at least they own up theo them and try to do better to minimize the damage in the future. Meanwhile Russia is making a game out of to see how many civilians they can kill in a single strike.
The Russians did do almost exactly what was shown in MW2019.
In Chechnya they repeatedly bombed and strafed the supposedly safe roads with planes and attack helicopters, killing an unknown amount of civilians. It even looks visually more similar to Chechnya than the Iraqi highway of death (the vehicles are much less dense and it doesn't look like a massive traffic jam), the location is just switched to a desert.
The articles at the time even refer to it as "roads of death."
I feel this video is 10 years late to the discussion of anti-war war pro-war games.
While i could, a lot of time, editting, and effort went into this 1 hour video. It still comes off as a newcomer scratching the surface of the topic, for there had been other conten creators that go far deeper into the anti-war war messenge.
Spec ops the line and the another deep dive into Cod 4 is something to look into.
Edit: oh I just realized what this channel was. Jesus
This video feels like it was just regurgitating points that people have been saying for years. I felt like I wasted 1 hour to learn what I already knew
@@muke6473 so you can never say things that have been said before? Fat L
Only showing one side of the conflict in Battlefield 1 kinda ruined the whole anti-war message. It made one side look like heroes and the other look like a ceaseless unfeeling horde. In reality both sides were victims of war. Only covering one side also halves the potential it had. There could have been a sturmtruppen themed story during the Kaiserschacht to show how much strategy and conflict had shifted towards terror and brutality in only 4 years. Also it could serve as a contrast to Avanti Savoia where both were elite units, just on opposite sides of the conflict. An Austro-Hungarian story could have shown how its soldiers were so varied that language became an issue. It would give them both actual personality and cultural personality. A lot of stuff from this game was an actual learning experience for several people because not a lot of people care much about the first World War. So showing the other side would also teach them a whole lot that they never would have known. It would be able to show how every side had a reason for fighting instead of having the one side bad, one side good approach. The entire story honestly just felt like an argument where you only get to hear one side and its version of it while never getting the other side.
I don't think it would've changed much. You get to play both sides in BF5 and it's not like the message of that game is any stronger for it, it's just a gimmick. It's cool, it's entertaining, sure, but not more than that, soldiers are soldiers, regardless of what side you're on.
I don't know why they chose not to do it. But as you said, both sides were victims of the war, so nothing would really change besides the uniform.
Excellent video and fantastic analysis. Thank you :)
A very well-made video. I knew many mainstream FPS games were basically propaganda, but I didn't know the extent of the lies and manipulations.
Blackadder having that last scene of going over the top was a result of all the previous seasons, getting really familiar with the characters and half of the fun was expecting the flow of conversation, the other half was actual written lines that were funny. You knew Blackadder will have an issue, Baldrick would present a stupid solution, then Blackadder would tell him that he's an idiot in a witty way. Just like your familiy or friends, you know their ways, you even say the same words sometimes. You never expect them to die, though. And it's permanent. This is something that no game really has, or else it would not be commercially viable. Imagine a 5 year long round of Among us, or something, where nobody really knows that there is supposed to be a bad guy, basically just a chatroom, until someday it all unravels. Now that would be a plot twist that isn't even a part of the plot. On average, gamers like the "This was cool, do it again!" repetition, like a toddler playing peek-a-boo and laughing histerycally everytime, so any real depth in a videogame is nigh impossible.
You don't need perma death in gameplay to have characters permanently die, you don't need death tell a deep story either. Mortality is only a small part of life.
Nothing screams more Chomsky than this video
Naaah, Chomsky has some really stupid takes, this video was actually pretty based.
This video is yet to defend pol pot so I don't agree
Chomsky would find video essays about video games embarrassing
@@maydaymemer4660 he's like a million years old idk if he knows what youtube is
>Why is the story focused on Russia only focusing on the Russian side of operation paperclip.
Gee I wonder.
The story was focused on the cold war in general. Apparently there were actually two world superpowers involved in the cold war, but i cant seem to think of the second one off the top of my head!
Nigel garage supporter