Quote Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF View Post
CoD4 was the most anti-war FPS I have ever played. These guys are clever and they know not only how to make a good game, but how subvert good game design and really smurf with you.
I don't think I could agree with you more MILF, but I'll ellaborate on some of my thoughts. I definitely agree that COD4 was very anti-war given that the closest we got to a bunch of good guys in the game were a team of SAS and Marines who stopped a bunch of nukes. Of course, these were the same Marines who went heavy handed into a nameless middle eastern country (and if anyone can't see the parallels then I pity them), and the same SAS who executed prisoners when they got the information they needed.

No side in that game was exactly standing on moral high ground; you just had evil bastards and less evil bastards who are on our side.

I imagine plenty of people will take the position that this is for sales and attention, and maybe it is. In my eyes though, games are going to be what Bolivar said, "There's a million and one mediums and methods to get that message across, but video games are probably the most juvenile and ineffective way to do it." unless and until they do do things like this.
I definitely agree with you here, and strongly disagree with Bolivar. In fact, that kind of attitude makes me glad that Bolivar isn't involved in developing games. The idea of games as a juvenile medium bothers me because many people are as mistaken in that regard as they are when they think that comic books are a juvenile medium that can't handle mature topics well. They've been doing it for literally decades and there is no reason that video games can't in this stage of their development as a medium. The idea that video games would be outright inneffective at conveying a message through some very mature themes and events is a joke. I think they're better able than any other medium to convey this kind of message given the immersive quality video games have. They don't have to just talk at you with some message, they can put you in the middle of it and let you see it for yourself.

And as far as doing this just for more sales; no one accused Saving Private Ryan of just trying to sit more butts in the theatre when it effectively conveyed how terrible D-Day was. Given Infinity Wards work on COD4, I definitely would not be one to write this off as a sales grab before seeing it in context. They're better than that.

This is kinda the reason why I've got sick of play FPS games altogether. The FPS genre has sought to glamorize war as of late & the COD are especially guilty of this. The better that graphics become the more these games games become like VR simulations. If your willing to pull the trigger on something that looks 99% real & feel no remorse then your type cast immediate for some proxy war. GTA is harmless cartoon Tom & Jerry type violence but FPS's like COD focus on realism i.e. making needless murder look glamorous.
Not sure quite where to start with this one. You're argument that people who can pull the trigger with no remorse in a realistic video game are suited to kill someone in an actual war is laughable. It assumes that people can't differentiate between reality and a video game which isn't true for the vast majority of the adult population. And if, somehow, a large segment of the population couldn't tell that what they were doing was just a game and not real, then they'd have the same problem with games like GTA, making the "cartoon Tom & Jerry type violence" anything but harmless.

Games like COD4 do anything but glamorize the violence if you ask me. Yes it is a large portion of the game, but they took great pains to show just how dirty a business war is. Like I said above, there were no heroes in that game, and they even included scenes like lining people up against walls and executing them at the beginning of the game. They went to great lengths to show that what was happening in the game wasn't good. It wasn't all necessarily evil since some of the things that happen are necessary just as they are in real life, but none of what you did was portrayed as being heroic exactly (with the possible exception of stopping the nukes, but given how reprehensible it is to even think about nukes being fired at another country I don't think anyone would say that all of the violence committed to stop them wouldn't be justified even in the real world).