Is World War 1 Too Hot to Touch for Gaming?
By William Hicks
HEATSTREET.com, May 12, 2016
The new trailer for Battlefield 1 (the counterintuitive sequel to Battlefield 4) was released this week to overwhelmingly positive reviews. It was so well liked, in fact, that it garnered the distinction of being the most popular trailer in YouTube history.
But while players were stoked for a game set in World War 1, a setting rarely touched by the genre, culture critics in the media and on Twitter found it in poor taste. After decades of ultra-violent video games depicting all sorts of travesties, apparently WW1 is the line in the sand for some critics.
Guardian writer Alex Hern asks if it’s wrong to set a war game in the trenches of WW1, before answering it with an implied yes. “Asking whether the first world war is an appropriate topic for a first-person shooter may reveal a more pressing question: why do we think any war is?” Hern says.
“A game set in the Great War will necessarily whitewash the horrors of trench warfare. Even when games do tenderly address these subjects, they rarely do so through the medium of 64v64 class-based combat.”
Hern seems to let on that he does not actually like war games, a genre people usually play not to learn the nuances of war but for entertainment. Yes, it will be impossible to realistically portray trench warfare in a multiplayer game. There’s not the player density to pin each side down in their trench, with certain death for those stuck in no man’s land. The players will not be able to organize coordinated charges without a leadership structure. Twenty-minute match times aren’t enough to develop trench foot.
But that doesn’t mean some version of the war should not be translated into a game.
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