\Your missions are as unpredictable as they are dangerous: from vital scud-hunting missions deep within enemy territory to highly secretive rescue and assassination operations in Baghdad itself. As the first line of defense, your objective is clear: Protect Freedom.""
This quote is from a review on the Web site XBOX Addicts. It describes a new video game, ""Conflict: Desert Storm,"" which is published by Gotham Games. This is not the first video game to be based on war.
Another is ""Medal of Honor: Frontline,"" which simulates World War II: ""Set during the most trying years of the war, 1942-'45, Medal of Honor: Frontline gives players a sense of the courage it took to survive the landings at Normandy, the assault at Arzew, a rendezvous with the Resistance."" I'm not one to go on about things like patriotism but this trivializes war--these games are placing World War II and the Gulf War with Mario Kart and James Bond.
This raises the question of what isn't a game to American society? Thousands of people fought and died in these conflicts and now they're being used to amuse children. How would veterans feel about that? The description of ""Medal of Honor"" implies that the games can give the player a sense of the courage it took to fight in these wars. That can't be simulated.
These games minimize the terror and gore of battle--kids who play go away thinking that war wouldn't be so bad. People talk about how video games desensitize children to violence but this is about more than that--it desensitizes them to the concept of war. It is farfetched to assume they'd join the army but maybe they wouldn't be as afraid as they should be to see the country fight one. They would look at the fun they'd had playing the games and not at history.
A problem that occurs when games about history become purely entertaining instead of informative is that the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred. They become a way to interpret history. Right now, who won a certain battle and who died where are static facts. In the games, they are things that can be changed over and over, as though the power to change what really happened is, in an abstract way, possible.
If someone does not know much about the history of World War II, they will see it here in an inaccurate way. Sometimes the player wins and sometimes the enemy wins, and what actually happened historically is glossed over. Reality becomes unimportant and subjective. No one stops to ask about what really happened, what can be learned from history or the reasons why the conflict happened in the first place.
The games are like propaganda. During World War II, Germans were dehumanized and viewed strictly as the enemy. Since the games are American, they will be played from the American point of view, which is a biased interpretation. Any one side of a conflict is. Games such as these prove that the victors do indeed write history.
