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.
The most stark example against this is the original MW2 - in addition to the anti-war quotes everyone loves to talk about every time you die, the main antagonist is literally a US Army General (admittedly he is distanced from the actual Army by the end, using a PMC instead).
The black ops games have some twist that often provoke the the thought of whether the ends justify the means. ::: In Cold War, the main character, Bell, is actually a captured Russian soldier that they have brainwashed to fight for the US as part of an experimental program. When this is revealed, you have the option to betray your “team” and lead them into a Russian trap :::
That being said, I haven’t played all of the cod campaigns, especially some of the more “historical” entries. It’s more fun to play this type of game when it makes you feel like what you’re doing is justified. It’s important to remember it’s all fiction, but hey, it’s not going to be for everyone. If you feel like the game you’re playing goes against your morals, no shame in switching it off for something else.
As Reggie from Nintendo once said, “If it isn’t fun, why bother.”
I haven’t played enough to make a judgment about COD in particular, but like you said, this is from Nintendo, a company whose main franchise is a game for kids about a funny little man stomping evil turtles in a fantasy world. It doesn’t even have the trappings of something that you can take seriously and use to inform your real life. Nobody would mistake it for anything close to a realistic historical account, unlike COD.
Is Schindler’s List fun?
There is more to media and art than whether its fun. Art can be engaging and intriguing without being “fun”. I wouldn’t call Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice “fun” per se, but it’s definitely a good game.
I would say Hellblade was indeed not fun and that’s precisely why it’s not a good game.
We definitely disagree on the latter. It was harrowing, but the way it handled its themes was fascinating and the gaming culture would be lesser without it.
We don’t expect all books and movies to be “fun”, why should games all be? We can see other forms of engagement and value in other media.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing when we say “fun”. When I say fun, I mean entertaining. I find horror games distressing but that’s part of the entertainment. I find grand strategy games confusing for hours but the process of learning is part of the entertainment. I find competitive games often anxiety-inducing but that’s part of the entertainment.
I don’t think all games need to be games of entertainment, though. I often argue as much. However, that argument is intended to include things like the stock market and serious games.
Hellblade is clearly meant to be a game of entertainment. My issue with it is that it puts its message first and puts the player experience second.
I have no problem with games having messages they wish to bring to light. But, at the end of the day, it’s still a game. The message needs to be presented in the context of a gaming experience. I found Hellblade hamfisted. Strip the message away and all you have is a poor action game. I think something that makes gaming such an interesting artistic medium is that you can present your ideas by way of interactions. I think that’s largely what made Spec Ops: The Line so poignant. It was a solid action game first and foremost. You, as a player, were having a blast. Then, the game decides to ask you, by way of a big reveal, why you were having so much fun. I feel that’s a much better approach to delivering a message.
If you define fun by “having a blast” then we are talking about the same thing. Why wouldn’t a game be valid if it’s about delivering a message above moment to moment action? Strip the message away and obviously it’s lesser for it. Because it’s not a message plus an entirely separate mechanical system, it’s about what everything means in context. Rather than focusing on making flashy combos, it’s more interesting to ponder over what is it supposed to represent and what is actually happening.
It’s a little funny though that I did consider Spec Ops as another example, and that I have seen people judging it the same way that you are doing to Hellblade, that it was a mediocre military FPS, but many rebutted that even its lackluster gameplay is supposed to contribute the commentary. In the same way you praise of Spec Ops, I don’t think Hellblade is nearly as bad in that aspect as you say, As an action game it is serviceable, but the action is not the point.
If you argue for serious games but only in the context of the gamification of business and education, you are still glossing over a whole multitude of media that is more about exploring ideas than moment-to-moment thrills, something other media have in plenty, and something which games have incredible potential for. You are thinking of typical games solely in terms of pop culture. There is a lot more to a medium than pop culture and strictly functional tools, and you are making that to be a massive abyss where nothing has worth.
Except they kinda are separate. It doesn’t matter how good your story is, if it’s a total slog of mediocre boring gameplay to get that story I’m just not gonna bother. If the actual game part of your game is bad, it’s a bad game; if only the story is good, you may as well make it a movie,book or something else like that.
Telltale games were also really bad games for basically the same reasons, should’ve just been direct-to-video/streaming movies. Fight me.
You can come at me however much you want. It doesn’t change that Hellblade is a acclaimed, beloved game, and so were many of the Telltale games until they oversaturated the market, really. You can not like them but insisting that they are bad doesn’t make them universally bad.
What makes Hellblade good is putting the player in the shoes of the protagonist, and for that it’s better as a game. A movie wouldn’t cut it for this. Frankly to me it doesn’t matter as much if the combat is not as fleshed out as God of War. The point is not doing sick combos at the enemies that we don’t even know for sure if they are real. But the struggle matters.
There is no point in making a fuss about how extensive the gameplay aspects of a game should be, unless you are writing game design theory that uses these concepts in a helpful practical manner. I wouldn’t really call “the game is bad if the game part is bad, make it a movie” a very helpful one. Even as a critique it’s pretty lacking.
Comes to mind that something like Phoenix Wright has very minimal game elements in a story-centric format. Would you call that bad?
You argue that Hellblade needs to be interpreted in context. I argue that Hellblade felt like opening a book only to find it full of thumbtacks and being asked to appreciate the context as to why it contains nothing but thumbtacks. If my definition of a “good book” requires a narrative told through words, I’m clearly not going to consider Thumbtacks: A Story of Bleeding Fingers a good book (Note: I am being a bit disingenuous here as Hellblade is very clearly a game but I hope my point gets across none-the-less)
Is the issue one of my expectations not being met? Sure. Is my definition of gaming too narrow? Perhaps so. But really, I think we likely agree about the definition of games in broad strokes and are in disagreement simply in the case of Hellblade. I suspect the biggest hurdle between us is not so much in our definitions of what a game is but rather in our definitions of what art is. If that’s the case, then I politely defer to you. I’m not much interested in debating what art is nor its value. You seem like a better spokesperson than I on that front.
I define a “good game” as one with a set of rules where the players have to make interesting decisions. I feel Hellblade focused more on its message than in meeting that definition. You seem to have gotten more mileage out of the game. Fair enough.
I find it difficult to discuss productively when you come up with such overblown analogies like that. I could even argue that artistically there could be merit to the equivalent a book full of thumbtacks, and Fear & Hunger comes to mind as a game to be described like that, One where a myriad ways to suffer is central to the experience and themes. But to say that Hellblade is like that is so uncalled for it makes that whole angle of discussion pointless.
You may have written about what a game is and if it has to be fun, but you are not staying true to what you preach. You can’t even seem to acknowledge merits in games that you are not personally entertained by.
To judge Hellblade for being linear is several decades too late to start that argument, and there is no reason to single it out. Loosely half of all games today are games where you perform as expected in a predefined context where your choices don’t matter, but most people still think of them as games. What was the benefit of that semantic argument then?
And even if you were to say that Hellblade, like Spec Ops The Line, is more like a “theme park ride” than a “game”, to compare it to “a book full of thumbtacks” says absolutely nothing about how it’s constructed and what may be issues in that. It just says that you really, really don’t like it. If that’s what you have to say, then there is no point in even talking about it. I can acknowledge that you don’t like it and that’s it.