In the video game’s latest sequel, Black Ops Cold War, players are tasked with committing “highly illegal” atrocities.

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.

  • kitonthenet@kbin.social
    1·
    11 months ago

    Certainly we already had this conversation like ten years ago right? Call of duty has never been anything but that, you really can’t make a war game that is both fun and anything but pro war

    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      I don’t think this is a conversation we can have once ten years ago and forget about it, as long as the franchise is still going.

    • Perfide@reddthat.com
      2·
      11 months ago

      Yeah well, the propaganda has gotten even more blatant and it’s still the worlds best selling game every year. So I think it’s totally reasonable to continue having this conversation.