Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Kim Jong Il is dead, according to the AP.
Posts
I am fairly certain demons and shark people have already conquered Detroit. I mean, it would explain, you know, Detroit.
[Wayyy off topic]
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say American consumers--through their popular mass culture--have a complex on this subject. Guess what: most countries don't have fantasies about other countries conquering them in their media. It's actually fairly rare, and responded with considerable hostility (see the Georgia TV hoax about a Russian invasion a year after the the South Ossetian War, and the responding outcry).
America just happens to. It's a popular thematic idea, right up there with "Zombie outbreak" and "Alien invasion", with perhaps a bit more staying power. The idea of a Eurasian invasion--whether it be from the historic Soviet Union (Red Dawn, Amerika, a shitload of other productions), contemporary Russia/CIS (Battlefield, Modern Warfare, games that have made more money than God), or a new angle like North Korea--is extremely tantalizing to media producers, and a similar degree, media consumers. Lots of other gaming communities prefer a type of game that is significantly less popular in other countries. 2012: Russian gamers like flight simulators, American gamers like Red Dawn-simulators. And they do play eachothers games to a extent.
This is not a inherently bad thing. It's an inherently weird thing, because of America's historic position in the world: for example, the Soviet Union has never invaded the United States, but, surprise surprise, the United States has invaded Soviet Russia. Sure, American soldiers stomped around North Korea during the Korean War, and you can make...one game about it in a contemporary setting (Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, which was great), but that's not really a memorable setting. Now the North Koreans invading America on their way to the moon and the southern hemisphere of Mars? That's where the big money lies, apparently. It might have been the high-profile writer backing the game, because it got way more promotion than Mercenaries did.
And as Override pointed out--the treatment of the topic is just as fascinating as the topic itself. Tongue and cheek like something out of a Monty Python sketch? No, you take it as seriously as you take any war game. You're not going to have a deconstruction of it, you're going to treat it as if it were deadly serious because that's what people want. To be fair, most war games are treated as such--it's just that invasions are super duper serious. I kind of wonder how a strictly comical deconstruction of such a plot trope would work (Freedom Fighters seemed like it might try that, but ultimately, was just playing it straight). I'm inclined to say poorly, since comical deconstructions of war games tend to be rocky and rare, and can only hope to be about as successful as Worms and, veering towards the more purely fantastical rather than contemporary, Warhammer and Warcraft at varying times. Put more simply, compare a (fun, and perfectly acceptable) Toy Soldiers: Cold War, a lone spinoff, to juggernauts series like Modern Warfare, Battlefield/bad Company.
People just like the idea, it's attractive and speaks to sort of things people find exciting. So naturally, the big talent goes to it. Fast cars? Exciting. Killing aliens? Exciting. Fighting off communist invasion? Exciting. It's part of the national entertainment psyche, and it's not an exaggeration to say it's a rather uniquely American one. You'd have a trickier time marketing a game depicting a Chinese invasion of Japan or South Korea (though not flat out impossible--the impossibility would come if your game was simply censored/banned as happens in South Korea with games concerning the North, etc.). You could just as easily make the claim that the chilling factor of the threat of censorship is the real culprit, I suppose. Personally, I find the fixation weird and creepy, but I've been subject to a very different media acculturation/upbringing than most American consumers (for starers, with probably much stronger of an anti-war bent to it), so I obviously I'm not going to see it the same way. Red Dawn is just a particularly hammy fantasy war epic with frequently weak writing, not a subgenre-defining fictional epic and cultural cornerstone.
[/wayyy off topic]
It's why this post is off topic too.
naziblackshirtI think it relates to why the majority of Americans don't think we should cut defense, or that our security would be impacted. People have no conception that America has, for example, something like the military equivilent of every navy on earth put together. See I know that, then I play MW3, a game supposedly set on Earth, and the Russian navy is parked outside of new york city (oddly within range of man-portable weapons systems, which seems ill advised) and I just say "this is fucking stupid".
What I find much more interesting are invasion stories of fictional powers: Final Fantasy 12, Valkyria Chronicles (honestly wish it stayed a straight war story and didn't become an anime magicfest, but whatever), etc
Eh, I'm inclined to agree. Part of the attraction is the setting--current audiences want to see Abrams tanks, Apache helicopters, guys with M-16s, etc. Sometimes, they even want to see Fulcrums and T-80s. But in the same way, they want to see fictional Washington in flames, not fictional Moscow (though they're okay killing a bunch of fictional unarmed people in an airport in Moscow)--foreign, but not too foreign in a sense. It's a powerful setting, one that people worldwide have absorbed extensively through the modern media.
Still, seeing how a war is treated in a fictional environment is impressive--one of the reasons I enjoy the Halo setting far more than those of BC or MW (even before considering the writing).
I'm no psychologist but it sounds almost like America is getting it off their chest in the only way that isn't laughable (after all, those who genuinely believe America could be invaded are made fun of, and rightly so).
The interesting thing politically is how absurd the scenarios have to get before you get modern nations duking it out. Even the people whose job it is to play act global war are having a hard time envisioning legitimate reasons for the big powers to fight.
There's a lot of nostalgia for the days when we all pulled together against foreign enemies. We certainly didn't fight as viciously internally.
Of course, the more skeptical among us know that this was the result of a lot of propaganda, political fear-mongering and low-level persecution of naysayers and doubters. And that one of the reasons that we're fighting so much now is that a large part of the population has maintained that constant sense of fear from the Cold War and have been flailing around trying to find a new outlet for it since the Berlin Wall fell.
I should point out that we did have a Foreign enemy knocking on our door. Then they burnt the door down. Along with our Capitol. The Canadians.
I'm pretty sure it's this.
Americans really want a reason to use their military hardware and in a way that doesn't make them feel bad and actually justifies it's power. They want a fight you'd need those tanks for and a reason to fight that leaves no room for doubt.
And given America's complete lack of actual invasion ever occurring, an invasion scenario ticks all those boxes pretty well without stirring up any bad feelings.
Who actually knows that happened though?
To which the American replies, "Propaganda, my friend. You can't really believe that."
The German responds, "No. It's not. I learned about it as a child, well before the war."
Wish I could remember what movie that was.
Apparently a decent number of those have been destroyed in Afghanistan and Iraq (it's no Battle of Kursk or anything, but still a bunch of them). Military hardware is being disabled/destroyed/forced to be replaced at our expense, but it's not being done in a glorious enough fashion.
A realistic modern tank warfare game would involve driving around for a few hours seeing nothing, unless you drive down the wrong street and suddenly blow up. It'd be like on of those Japanese truck driving sims with explosions.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing with tanks. Don't export our semi-trailer driving simulator production.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Britain used to fantasize about the same:
On the burning of the capitol, those Americans who know about it know what happened immediately after. The Canadians bragging about the burning is like a guy bragging about the bruises he gave someone when he pushed said someone out of the way of a car and took the hit himself. The British military was more effective at evacuating an American city before a hurricane than FEMA.
Do the British learn about the time the American Navy, under the command of John Paul Jones, invaded London and set fire to the British Navy?
EDIT: @Bagginses: No, because they didn't set fire to the Palace of Westminster (the British did that later). And because Jones quit, and went to work for....yup, you guessed, the Russians. Specifically, the Imperial Russian Navy.
There are a lot of places in the USA where guerrilla militia would be pretty effective against an occupying military.
This neo-feudalism would be more tolerable if our betters had fancy titles.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.