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[PATV] Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 3, Ep. 12: Propaganda Games
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we consider the unfortunate potential games have as tools for propaganda.<br /> Come discuss the topic with us in the <a href="http://extra-credits.net" target="_blank">forums</a>!
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To begin with, "the Chinese-Japanese war of 1937-45" is generally considered to be the same conflict as the contemporaneous dust-up between Germany and everyone in torpedo range (1939-45), in which the Japanese killed more civilians than a certain German leader who is generally thought poorly of. A little vengefulness on the Chinese side is probably pardonable -- although it does sound like this game's developers think that (a) they're on the side that believed in racial supremacism and (b) it's 1942. (Let me also observe that "the mobs you grind" are probably not Japanese _civilians_, and a sufficiently ambitious war-crimes court might see fit to start grinding the same mobs.)
_1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus_ has the latest research on colonial views of the Indians; they weren't simple antipathy. That the US constitution derives from the Iroquois one is pretty universally accepted, except in certain circles who seem to think that it was a Divine revelation seventeen centuries too late. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" is a sentiment first uttered by Sheridan, but it was last uttered sometime before the filming of the first Western; even the classic ones look on the Indians relatively fondly, and cast Americans and Mexicans as villains.
The Muslim world is currently the object of American hostility and contempt, but I can't say that it's completely unearned; this is the only part of the world which is regressing rather than developing over time, and its military skills seem to be limited to riots, hijacking, and hand-me-down versions of Japanese- and Vietnamese-style guerrilla warfare.
If three or four years of endless waves of impersonal Muslims is reprehensible, what about twenty-five years of endless waves of impersonal Nazis? Is dehumanization always wrong, or is it acceptable under certain circumstances? If you think the latter -- and I'm not saying you shouldn't -- then say it.
The difference is, EVERY Nazi was a terrible human being who helped perpetuate atrocities. Not every Muslim is a terrorist, despite what the Republicans claim.
Claiming Nazis are evil is a fact. Claiming Muslims are evil is bigotry. THAT'S why it's reprehensible.
Not all Nazis were perpetrators of atrocities (although Hitler certainly was), and not all Germans were Nazis; games and other media which present all WWII Germans as evil are comparable to those which present all citizens of, say, Iran as evil.
The perpetrators of an evil act, those who connive at that act, and those who willfully fail to stop that act, are culpable for it; other people who are associated with them in one or another way are not. Organizations can be criminal as a whole, but individuals within this organization are culpable for this criminality only if they're aware (or willfully unaware?) of it, and especially if they're responsible for or conniving at it.
Further questions:
* Who falls into the category "Nazi" and who does not?
* Is dehumanizing people OK if you really, really don't like them?
(I've edited this message a number of times to express what I say effectively, but when and if you respond, I'll make no further edits.)
I disagree with this. And before anyone jumps down my throat and calls me a skinhead or whatever, I'm not. I find what the Nazis did deplorable and vile and I think the idea of racial superiority for any race to be stupid, and I'm thankful my grandfather's generation won that war against the Axis. WITH THAT SAID... not every person in the Nazi party was some horrible monster who should have been gunned down. Just because someone identified as a Nazi does not dehumanize them into some kind of Lawful Evil beast. Saying that it's cool to gun down Nazis because they're Nazis but killing Muslims because they're Muslims is bad... that just makes no sense.
In both cases you're dehumanizing someone and completely ignoring the totality of who they are in favor of simplifying them down. You can't have your cake and eat it too. There were actually a lot of rational, positive ideologies within the Nazi platform. Of course those are no excuse for the vast array of HORRIBLE ideologies that were also within the Nazi party. And then there were some just outright dumb ones. But remember that a Nazi was not just "KILL JEWS, ARYAN = BEST". It was an economic, social, and political engine, and not ALL of it was Pure Evil.
I'm not excusing Nazi war crimes. I'm saying you need to think about what you're saying, and why your comparison made no sense. You're being hypocritical.
You probably wear clothes made in sweatshops using child slave labor. You use technology manufactured under horrific and dangerous conditions for pathetic wages. And that's just for starters. Your tax dollars have funded black ops where innocents have been blown into bloody chunks. You actively support such practices, like it or not, because it makes your life comfier.
Does that make you evil? Think about that.
And as a final note I loves killin' me some Natzees in my vidya. Wolfenstein was great.
Now, I think first we should sync up our definition of evil.
I found this one definition, which I think hits on it quite well, "By moral evil are understood the deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation. Such action, when it proceeds solely from ignorance, is not to be classed as moral evil, which is properly restricted to the motions of will towards ends of which the conscience disapproves." (you can google that if you want the source)
The problem with evil is perspective. Moral perspective. But who's moral perspective? This could start a whole line of philosophical I don't really want to get into, but I'm just noting on this to maybe broaden perspectives, as the world revolves around no one perspective. And there is no one correct perspective, though there are more than a few questionable perspectives.
Now, my definition of evil. Someone who does harm to his/her fellow human being with the intention of doing harm, and continues to do so without deviation. This can also apply to animals, especially the kind who are innocents in our world. By that definition, not all Nazis are evil. Some of them are just bad, some are ignorant, but many of them did not commit atrocities that we're all familiar with. Many of them did.
The problem with the majority of people is, they are sheep. Sheep follow a leader. A really charismatic person who rises up with a pride for his people, with the backdrop of that pride having previously been thrown aside because of the first world war... yes, there is a whole slew of things that led to Hitler rising to power being possible.
And the german people paid for the mistakes of those they let take charge. Many people were caught in the maelstrom, and had little choice but to conform. Not everyone is strong enough to say 'no, we have to leave'. Some became nazis, so that they could help others. To say all nazis are evil is a gross misjudgement of everyone thrown into the mix. But there were definitely evil nazis. Often, people really don't know their own worth until they find themselves faced with unreasonable circumstance.
I agree very much with the message of this video and the best way to address these kinds of dehumanizing, secretly propagandizing people, is to make sure you have balance and understanding. If you feature muslims as your enemy, show us that it is a select group of muslims and that there are also good muslims in the story. Make sure we fully understand why this group is bad, and not just say here is a gun, here is a target, go at it. Balance. That is the only real way, as a responsible designer, to handle these kinds of games without demonizing a whole people, regardless of who (muslim, nazi, etc).
That was rambling, but I hope some of it made since. I'm trying to put this together at work, while the message of the video is fresh. Thanks for listening.
Penny Arcade: Extra Credits, Season 3, Ep. 12 - Propaganda Games transcript - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qy-Cuq0Ao9FphG4fe_7afIy3ItogvC22lE38i2uygPU/edit
The term 'propaganda' on our side of the political tracks actually has a very specific and non-pejorative meaning. It's the systematic exposition of a defined position at some length - as opposed to agitation, which is the 'call to action', that states things baldly and as sharply as possible. So propaganda is not about misleading people, but rather educating them, on the basis of a certain assumption which is not shared with people in the 'political mainstream', that the truth - on the particular issue at hand - necessarily comes with a political charge. It's easy to come out with a certain liberal disdain for doing things this way, but examples abound: there is no way to even discuss the facts of the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, for example, without tacitly favouring the political claims of one or the other side.
So, propaganda games: in a certain sense, why not? Take film. Sergei Eisenstein made propaganda films. They attempted to dramatise the history of a movement to which he was absolutely and scrupulously loyal, but in a way which was not 'preachy', and rather engaged the viewer in some kind of conscious dialogue. This actually founded many of the filmic techniques put to work by Hollywood and elsewhere. While that Nazi game looks pretty terrible - and indeed most of them look like stale genre knockoffs - politically charged games might actually spur innovation in narrative form, mechanical aesthetics and so on in this art form. It's worked for many other art forms, so why shouldn't it work for games? (Indeed, given that you guys chose to read the Spec Ops game as a sort of meta-polemic on military shooters, I'd say it's hard not to call that a 'propaganda' move - in the best sense of the word.)
What's objectionable is doing these things dishonestly.
The term 'propaganda' on our side of the political tracks actually has a very specific and non-pejorative meaning. It's the systematic exposition of a defined position at some length - as opposed to agitation, which is the 'call to action', that states things baldly and as sharply as possible. So propaganda is not about misleading people, but rather educating them, on the basis of a certain assumption which is not shared with people in the 'political mainstream', that the truth - on the particular issue at hand - necessarily comes with a political charge. It's easy to come out with a certain liberal disdain for doing things this way, but examples abound: there is no way to even discuss the facts of the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, for example, without tacitly favouring the political claims of one or the other side.
So, propaganda games: in a certain sense, why not? Take film. Sergei Eisenstein made propaganda films. They attempted to dramatise the history of a movement to which he was absolutely and scrupulously loyal, but in a way which was not 'preachy', and rather engaged the viewer in some kind of conscious dialogue. This actually founded many of the filmic techniques put to work by Hollywood and elsewhere. While that Nazi game looks pretty terrible - and indeed most of them look like stale genre knockoffs - politically charged games might actually spur innovation in narrative form, mechanical aesthetics and so on in this art form. It's worked for many other art forms, so why shouldn't it work for games? (Indeed, given that you guys chose to read the Spec Ops game as a sort of meta-polemic on military shooters, I'd say it's hard not to call that a 'propaganda' move - in the best sense of the word.)
What's objectionable is doing these things dishonestly.
On the other hand, I haven't played much of Assassin's Creed III (as I told my friends, "Most of the fun in I and II was exploring a setting I kinda knew about but not really...I know all about the Revolution, being American) but I hear talk that the game does a good job of not demonizing the British, and makes sure that assassination targets are presented on both sides of the war.
@Piggie
So I know you will likely never read this Piggie, but I am going to respond anyways.
So the first few Assassin's Creed games could very easily be seen as anti-Christian, which is why they had to say at the beginning that they are a diverse, multi-faithed team with no intention of discriminating. The thing is, those games are very historically based (besides the conspiracies and sci-fi parts). In Brotherhood you are going after the family of the Pope which includes many religious and political leaders. However, they were real people and are considered through history to be evil, crooked people and a black mark on the Catholic church. So its not really offensive. Even Germans today are ashame of Hitler.