War and games, your opinion?

[Aculaud 0]

Ya know, a lot of this is just nature of the beast. This is just what makes a game be a game. And a fun one at that. You can only get so realistic. It just goes with how technology developes, and companies continually get a better understanding of what gamers look for in their choices.

What i found particularly interesting in that article was the mentioning of having a perspective on time over the course of day, or even two days, which OFP is actually set up to do. It would be completely possible in this game to do exactly what he was talking about, and make a mission designed to be played over an extended period of time. this would be incredably time consuming, and, depending on the mission, would require a very high end computer to support all the units, tiggers and Waypoints and such. Still, it can be done.

And then theres the whole gettin'-to-know-you issue. This would be a time consuming one as well to create whole back grounds for everyone, and deffinitely a challenge to be origional. We cant very well all have a squad including Bobby Bruning, James Pound, Jim Self, George Debak, etc. and expect to come up with something new unless we were all just creating alternate histories with the same people.

Back to realism. This is deffinitely something to be considered, making games increasingly realistic to the true rigors of war. The first time i saw Saving Private Ryan, i had to take breaks durring the d-day scene. I just couldnt take it at first, because i was never exposed to anything that realistic before. it took me a while before i could get through the scene without averting my eyes, And iv been playing violent games for a WHILE. All the way back to the days of woolfenstien3D and DooM. And then of coarse was the quake trilogy, unreal, half-life. etc. Games have just never done it to such a full extent as far as what it feels like to be in combat. And its my opinion that games just cant do that. Not from an everyday computer setup at least. Games can show you how war sounds (generally), and how it looks (pretty much), but feelings are something a human being can really only get from being there.

[Gaswell 1]

I find that it is possible to quickly build player attachment to digital identities by treating these identities as advantages for the player. For example, I can get somewhat attached to units that perform beyond my expectations, perhaps against all odds. These digital men I want to keep alive, not because they are my dear "friends" (a sad thought if they were...) but because I know I'll need their skills later on.

However, in the OFP campaigns the squad is not persistent between missions. It could be, but it isn't. If I lose them all I get a new batch for my next mission, so why try very hard to keep them alive?

Personally I think that OFP would benefit from a squad development system like in the X-COM games. Your initial squad members and every replacement have an initial random skill level. By surviving missions their skill level increase. You'll be sorry when a valuable team member gets himself killed, and that's at least some form of attachment.

[InRange 1]

Still, I think one of the major differences between games and real life is this: In a real war, you fear for your life. In a game, your main fear is that you have to play the mission all over again when you die. In real life there is no second chance.

[Guest]

It was an interesting article, but it kind of shot it self in the foot praising Black Hawk Down as similar to the real thing.

Some comments:

To get to know your co-soldiers is not a question of time, I think. You can feel sympathy for a character in a movie without even having the character introduced. In computer games the characters resemble more "The Amazing Man Made of Boxes â„¢" then a human being. It's a question of identifying the character as a human being.

So, as I see it, it is a question of graphics and visual quality.

As for learning something about the horrors of war through computer games, I am highly sceptical. Computer games are interactive as opposed to TV and books.

From the other media the approach is "look what some other guys did", and what the horrific results were.

What do you wish in a computer game? Commit war crimes?

Naw, I don't think so. The average computer player wants to feel like the all-american-hero Captain America, kicking the shit out of the bad guys and marrying a  Hollywood superstar in the end. Ok, I admit, I overdid it, but you get the point. The player doesn't want to be labeled as a bad guy.

What I find kind of interesting how people (including me) want realistic wounds on their opponents. Soldier of Fortune was very popular for a while basically because of the possibility of mutilating your opponent in a highly detailed way.

This is not a question of that people want realism in the computer games. We want graphic wounds much more then we want, say, detailed plant life in the game. And it sure as hell that we don't want detailed wounds so we could be taught about the horrors of war. We want explicit wound because we want to see the opponents brain splattered on the ground when *we* shoot him in the head. This has existed in hollywood for many years, it is only getting an interactive form now in computer games.

Going even more offtopic i can say that this raises some other issues. I am pretty sure that none of us would want, say killing and mutilating children in a computer game. Killing the enemy is on the other hand ok and morally correct. Who is the enemy then? Or even better, who decides who the enemy is? In the computer games it is the developers of the games. If trust them that they can select who the bad guy is, we sure as hell will believe our governments when they tell  us. So we get people who are not backed off by seing another human being mutilated and think that it's ok to kill and mutilate whoever is the enemy. That gives the government a huge resposibility to be careful who they say is the enemy. History has shown that all governments are not capable of such a descision.

[Gaswell 1]

denoir, you raise some good questions about how to define the heroes and the bad guys. Personally I prefer a balanced view, and I'm not too sure I necessarily want to play the good guys. In the setting of OFP I'd rather just be a squad leader trying to keep myself and my men alive while doing whatever I'm told to do. (Guess that would be make me Neutral Lawful.)

I remember playing the ol' classic Hind, and in that sim you sure weren't some knight in shining armor. Especially not in those missions where you dropped anti-personnel mines over suspected Mujaheddin villages. That really got me thinking.

I guess what I'm saying is that the most efficient anti-war games (or movies, or books, or whatever) are usually those that doesn't shy away from politically incorrect content, or tries to justify killing by anonymizing or demonizing your victim. I find it disturbing that I can nuke millions of faceless people in CivIII to an ESRB rating of "Mild Violence".

[Espectro (DayZ) 0]

I can only put it as simply as this:

I feal sorry for those who draw emotional lines between war and computer games/simlulators.

[Gaswell 1]

Not sure I understand what you mean about "emotional lines".

[hbk 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (denoir @ Mar. 15 2002,13:43)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">It was an interesting article, but it kind of shot it self in the foot praising Black Hawk Down as similar to the real thing.<span id='postcolor'>

Damn right.

[hbk 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (denoir @ Mar. 15 2002,13:43)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">To get to know your co-soldiers is not a question of time, I think. You can feel sympathy for a character in a movie without even having the character introduced. In computer games the characters resemble more "The Amazing Man Made of Boxes â„¢" then a human being. It's a question of identifying the character as a human being.

So, as I see it, it is a question of graphics and visual quality.<span id='postcolor'>

Not sure i can feel emotions for a computerized human being as i can feel emotions for actors/actresses.

Something to do with the polygon thing, even if damn well done.

Strange that i can feel some things from drawn cartoons/mangas, and not from computer graphics, maybe it's just me ...

[hbk 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Gaswell @ Mar. 15 2002,14:38)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I find it disturbing that I can nuke millions of faceless people in CivIII to an ESRB rating of "Mild Violence".<span id='postcolor'>

I remember (a long time ago) we were watching DieHard2 and my aunt was shocked by the violence of shootings. It was remarkable that later in the show, when the plane crashed, she was not shocked, there were about 200 people in the plane, but we only saw the plane crash, no "inside view".

The problem is the way we understand the events behind the show.

[hbk 0]

Speaking of realistic wounds, they are (hopefully) barely present in movies and video games.

I'm fine with this, if you want to see realistic wounds, go sneak in the nearest hospital and take a look.

[Aculaud 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Gaswell @ Mar. 15 2002,14:38)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I find it disturbing that I can nuke millions of faceless people in CivIII to an ESRB rating of "Mild Violence".<span id='postcolor'>

I guess perspective on who your nuking can play a part too. In starcraft, i was dropping up to six nukes sequencially on enemy locations, and, in the case of the zerg, blood was flying everywhere. But of coarse games like this, real-time strategy games, are from a perspective that doesnt capture it as well as a First Person Shooter would.

As i said, games can give you a general idea about what war sounds like, and they can give you a pretty good idea of what war looks like, but the feeling is far different. Feelings come from life, not electronics.

[morbid 0]

What I would like to see in mores games is the chance for the player to make important, perhaps moral, decisions.

I think there was an exmaple of this in one of the wing commander games (maybe, my memory is a bit hazy).

Your ordered to kill a defecter (wing commander 4?), and if you kill him the campaign brached one way (you fight for the rebels or something like that) and if you didn't it went another way (you didn't defect and ended up fighting for the wrong side).

Anyway, maybe that isn't the best example.

One of the cutscenes in red hammer shows an attack on a convey.

You (the players character) realises its full of civilians and tries to stop it but is too late.

it would have been better to make this an actual mission and then give the player the decision - do I obey my orders and kill these civilians, or do i let them go and face serious repercussions?

Forcing the player to make these decisions themselves rather than making it for them, would possibly allow them to be more emotionally involved than a plain cutscene does.

[Aculaud 0]

agreed. A storyline can only be made better by putting the outcome in the players hands as much as possible. You see this a lot in Role Playing Games, and it really helps the storyline and the re-play value. It would be cool to start seeing this in games like OFP

[Sith 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Espectro @ Mar. 15 2002,15:32)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I can only put it as simply as this:

I feal sorry for those who draw emotional lines between war and computer games/simlulators.<span id='postcolor'>

Espectro: FYI, computergames are totally based on human emotions. Fear, anger, happiness, sadness, excitement...those are the buildingblocks of what we refer to as immersion. OFP wouldnt be 1/10th of the game it is right now, if it didnt involve the player being emotionally drawn into it.

As for the emotion part towards NPCs: I personally think it's more of a matter of AI than looks. Of the many games I've played, the ones where you get the feeling the AI is more than a bunch of polygons, are not the good looking ones, but the games where the AI surprises you with actual intelligent actions.

If you can make the AI perform an action, like saving the player's ass in a non-scripted way (happened to me alot in OFP), this gives the player a feeling of those AI characters actually trying to make a difference in the virtual world.

If you're lying injured somewhere on the virtual battlefield, and an AI medic manages to save yer ass just in time, you WILL look with some respect at this computer controlled "friend" for at least the rest of the mission.

Now if you add NPCs with names and recognizable faces/characters, who stay with you through the campaign, till they get killed....we have ourselves one very interesting game, where 99% of the players will find them much more "connected" to their AI teammates than in any other game!

[Aculaud 0]

good call, Sith

[IceFire 0]

I DO NOT FEEL THAT GAMES SHOULD BE USED TO TEACH PEOPLE TO RESPECT PAST WARS OR THE SOLDIERS THAT DIED IN THEM.

If you need a game to find a way to respect them, then there is something seriously wrong with that.

We NEVER NEVER forget our dead. If you want to learn to respect the soldiers that died defending our country, read a history book.

A game is a game. It has a DIFFERENT purpose from a book or movie. It is meant as entertainment purely.

It is a great dishonor to the soldiers who died for us to compare them to ANY game. They died and will NEVER come back.

Don't ever think that a game will ever give you a feeling of war because I think that none of us who have never experienced it can ever know what it is like.

We do not need to know what it was like to respect them. We just need to know what they did, and learn about history and understand.

I certainly hope that I never learn "what it was like". Games are not legitimate "history teachers" no matter how realistic or emotionally charged they are. That is just to make them sell.

[Sith 0]

IceFire: Then please explain to me...

Why shouldnt games be used for such a purpose, but is it alright for movies to do so? 99% of the warmovies (including alot of good/realistic ones) have been made bij people who have never actually been in any war.

Then how can those directors know what the war was like? Well, you're right...they'll never know. But, by reading, watching and hearing alot of the stories from war veterans, you do get a much clearer image of what the war was like.

Now imagine a game telling you the same stuff you'd see in a really good war movie, but this time from a point of view where you're actually a walking, breathing, living creature in that war. Wouldn't that make it an even better way of telling a soldier's story than a movie?

And in what way would such a game dishonour the ones that fought and died in a war? Why would it be worse than most current games, that show a glorified picture of war, where a life has no face or value at all?

[IceFire 0]

Sith, Because games are not meant as proper vehicles for education.

That is why movies/books and games are different.

Games appeal to a different audience. Games allow the user to make their own decisions.

The reason this would be worse than games that already depict war in a more "quake" sort of way is the intent. They are not intending the game to be a tool for learning. Is is purely for fun. Very simple.

I know that there are some games that do teach, that is not what I mean.

I am talking about a war game in FPS.

A FPS game is not a good vehicle for learning about history because it is a GAME, it is FUN. That is why. Books that teach about history are not meant to be for a "thrill". Some of them may even be very boring.

A game cannot portray all the psychological effects and tones that a book or movie can. I am talking about the actual game, not the cut scenes.

The only way to learn about some past war experiences is to read the words of veterans. A game could not produce the same thing that words and imagination can.

To try to make a game to do so would be to trivialise the experiences that soldiers went through. To expect that you can even remotely make a game to simulate it is an insult to their experience.

Sorry, but I am very sleepy right now as it is 4 am. So if I am not that articulate or good at explaining something, reply and I will reply also tomorrow.

[Pete 1]

earlier games..such as cannon fodder (i loved that game) had enemies in masses, to kill was fun...

later games as for example doom...igi...and more, its just more detail, but the killing in masses is still there, to kill stupid enemies, targets...

ofp follows the same route, but its realism in terms of your own character takes it to a new level..you can die so fast and suddenly, unexpected..you value your life.

games evolve..in a few years from now, we are playing games that makes ofp look like cannon fodder, games where you feel a loss when a buddy dies, games where killing some enemy is a difficult task...games where enemies feel more alive, and show pain when shot/hurt...

to compare games to movies and books...id say games has the most potential to be made "anti-war"...they can leave a deeper impression in you.

i remember deus ex, where i had to decide whether to shoot my boss or a prisoner...its a game, but it forced me to make a moralic decision..a book or a movie never lets you do that...so the potential in games is extreme, if well done.

imagine a scene where a paniced enemy soldier takes a hostage, a child..knowing that the game is programmed to punish you for your actions would you do wrong..if a witness can report it..what you do?...is killing the enemy so important, do you dare to lower your gun after a 4 hour game without any saves?..decisions.....

what if a soldier that you had with you since the start and who did a lot for you and has got to be a important part in your team gets shot and hurt...like full metal jacket scene?

potential is huge.

to make a anti-war game is very possible..but it demands a LOT from the teams.

[Sith 0]

That's exactly what I meant Pete! The future of (war)gaming lies in the emotional immersion of the player.

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">A game cannot portray all the psychological effects and tones that a book or movie can. I am talking about the actual game, not the cut scenes.

The only way to learn about some past war experiences is to read the words of veterans. A game could not produce the same thing that words and imagination can.

To try to make a game to do so would be to trivialise the experiences that soldiers went through. To expect that you can even remotely make a game to simulate it is an insult to their experience.<span id='postcolor'>

Why shouldnt a game be able to do this? Why cant a game confront you with the psychological side of war? What is it movies can do but games cant?

Give me some solid arguments on why you think it's not possible. You seem to think it cant be done simply because it has never been done before!

As Pete said, there are already alot of games out there that require you to make moral and other psychological decisions. If movies are able to portray the horrors of war to some extend, why shouldnt their interactive counterparts be able to do the same?

Please dont be so narrow minded when it comes to the 'purpose' of games. Indeed, 10 years ago they were all about having a good blast, simple fun whitout any worries of the consequences. But things have changed since then....alot. These days games are more than just amusement for the simple-minded. Modern games confront you with a wide variety of emotions, like happiness, fear, anger, sadness (like I said before)...something people back in the days of CannonFodder would have laughed about if you told em it'd all become part of computer games.

[IceFire 0]

You say that there already ARE games in which the player becomes emotionally connected.

I find that hard to believe since I have never played one like that. I'll admit, the last games I played before OPF was Duke3d and Tribes2. I havn't played many. But I cannot imagine it.

Games also take a slight learning curb. Which means you need to play it over and over to sometimes learn it. Which reduces the realism greatly.

When someone goes to the theatre. Everything is already done, the viewer doesn't affect the movie. It's a story being told. The viewer is seeing the world through the eyes of an independent character.

When playing a game, the player is seeing the game world through his own eyes. When watching a movie, if it wasn't for the screen, it would almost be real. It's like watching real life through a window. You empathize with the characters. Because it's in 3rd person. You are viewing it from a distance and becoming attached to the characters.

When playing a game, you ARE the character. It' s a bit difficiult to empathize with a character that is YOURSELF when you know you can stop and get a drink or go to take a piss. It's unrealistic to expect a player to become emotionally enthralled in a game that he himself is participating in.

Therfore, there is noone to empathize with in a game, because you are the character. In "Shaw shank redemption", I felt bad for the guy, (the white guy who was a rock carver, I forget his name) because he IS NOT YOU. So you feel bad for him.

In a game, how could you feel bad when your character dies, when YOU are the character. You may feel pissed because you just got through a damn difficult and suspensful level, and you don't want to have to go through the same thing again, but you don't feel like you would in a movie. Which is why people don't cry when playing games, hmm?

[Gaswell 1]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (IceFire @ Mar. 23 2002,21:40)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">You say that there already ARE games in which the player becomes emotionally connected.  

I find that hard to believe since I have never played one like that.<span id='postcolor'>

I have. I think you're wrong and I think you should try other games besides Duke 3D and Tribes 2.

It's almost like judging the film industry based on having seen the Pokémon movies. Like dismissing comics because you didn't connect emotionally to Garfield.

[Placebo 29]

Excellent analogies

[Guest]

Games are entertainment and should be played by well balanced people.

Simulations are usually educational.

OFP is neither, yet sits some where in between.

None of the above should be used to remember soldiers that fought in previous wars, people should do that instinctively. Films should never be used as educational material. Documentaries yes, steven spielberg action movies, no.

Basically I think games should be seen as entertainment, escapism etc. The last thing most people need when they turn on their PC to play a game is the feeling of guilt from shooting a soldier.