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.
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.