There’s a lot of buzz today around an article on 1UP that dissects the market for war games. The study, which 1UP calls a “casual census,” shows that developers focus heavily on WWII when they’re looking to make a war game, so much so that WWII games outnumber all the other wars combined by nearly 5 to 1 since 1980.
The article goes on to ask why. Why so many WWII shooters? To me the answer seems obvious enough, and the article does get to it at length. WWII is an easy choice because of the simple narrative of pure war. There is good, and there is evil, and we are pitted against the evil. That’s plain enough. What’s unfortunate, though, is that this type of game development, while fun and obviously lucrative, keeps war games from being the interesting social devices they could be.
More often than not, war just isn’t cut and dry. Even World War II, though it’s easy to vilify the Nazis (I’m not saying that wasn’t justified in most cases), was no simple war from psychological perspective. If you’ve read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse V you have a pretty basic perspective on what that means. The backdrop of WWII is such that we don’t get to see the secondary perspective. It just doesn’t make for good gaming.
But it could, with some effort. Unfortunately games that have made an attempt at this, like Six Days in Fallujah, have been met with so much criticism that they can’t even get off the ground. Publishers won’t even touch that game, mostly because of claims that the wounds from the war are still too fresh.
It seems to me that this is the perfect time to address the issues raised by a war like our most recent in Iraq. This is why films like Jarhead get released when they do. To be certain, that movie was not about this war, but its timing could not have been more perfect. People want a chance to understand, or at least experience, the nature of war in all its moral ambiguity. Reducing our world’s greatest conflicts to a fight against Nazi zombies pushes our ability to understand the concept of “other” right out the window.
