I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning your mind off and enjoying the set pieces. However, Cold War has a section in Vietnam and I suddenly started feeling really uncomfortable and just turned the game off.

In WWII you can easily feel like the “defender”, and even Modern Warfare felt like fighting a very specific organisation that wanted to kill millions. Here however it just becomes so hard to explain why I’m happily mowing down hundreds of clearly Vietnamese locals that I was unable to turn my mind off and just enjoy the spectacle.

I turned to the internet and started browsing and found this article and I really agree with what the author is saying.

I don’t know if I will be continuing the campaign or not, but I just feel that I don’t want to support these kinds of minimizations of military interventions.

I just wish there were more high budget / setpiece games that don’t glorify real life wars. Spec Ops The Line was amazing in that sense, but it’s also quite old already.

I would love to hear your opinions on this subject.

    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This sort of response shows that even some people who care a lot about games, think little of them. Like they are all inconsequential playthings.

      Can you imagine anyone saying “it’s a book” to try to say that they don’t matter?

      • eltimablo@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Can you imagine anyone saying “it’s a book” to try to say that they don’t matter?

        Atheists do it all the time when talking about the Bible

        • NaN@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          In comparison to “the inspired, living word of God”, only the edgiest would argue it hasn’t been an important piece of literature.

            • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Sure, but that is a whole different argument. When atheists say that that the Bible is “just a book” it’s not a dismissal of the value of literature, it’s saying that they don’t need to be bound to what it says, that to them it’s no more than any other book.