Everywhere I look, I only see modern era or futuristic games. Why aren't there anymore Vietnam War games? Also guys, can you please vote? Thanks if you guys do!
Last edited:
Why aren't there many Vietnam War games?
- Thread starter parahell18
- Start date
ThinClient
Diamond Member
- Jan 28, 2013
- 3,977
- 4
- 0
It's a distasteful conflict fueled by blatant BS from the White House resulting in troops who were just doing their duty being treated like scum when they came home during a time of national turmoil and ch ange. Nobody wants to play a game that's that distasteful I guess.
jungle combat is one of the most graphically intense/complicated games you can make.
There "were" a lot of vietnam games at one point, but back then the graphical horsepower we had was nothing like we have now. Also, many were not tastefully done.
I do have a ton of nostalgia for BF: Vietnam! though.....I liked BF before the whole "Squad spawn" thing came in....the V.C. tunnel spawn was a much better system IMO
There "were" a lot of vietnam games at one point, but back then the graphical horsepower we had was nothing like we have now. Also, many were not tastefully done.
I do have a ton of nostalgia for BF: Vietnam! though.....I liked BF before the whole "Squad spawn" thing came in....the V.C. tunnel spawn was a much better system IMO
Same reason why we don't have a Gulf game where you can shoot unlimited Arabs. Or Manhunt 3. AAA developers have no balls anymore. There are subjects that are untouchable. Play Shellshock again though. Baller game.
That was the "Good" war! In which the US so didn't do anything naughty or kinky behind the lines fighting those evil Germans.
Actually where is the WW2 game where you play as a German?
Sulaco
Diamond Member
- Mar 28, 2003
- 3,825
- 46
- 91
There were.
There were around a dozen or more about 10 years ago....2004-2007ish...when everyone was still moaning about WWII games but hadn't yet settled in to the onslaught of "modern warfare" games.
Needless to say, they all sold relatively poorly and were little more than Hollywoodized versions of CoD, save for more cursing, moral ambiguity, and Hendrix guitar riffs.
There were around a dozen or more about 10 years ago....2004-2007ish...when everyone was still moaning about WWII games but hadn't yet settled in to the onslaught of "modern warfare" games.
Needless to say, they all sold relatively poorly and were little more than Hollywoodized versions of CoD, save for more cursing, moral ambiguity, and Hendrix guitar riffs.
pcgeek11
Lifer
- Jun 12, 2005
- 22,350
- 4,973
- 136
blastingcap
Diamond Member
- Sep 16, 2010
- 6,654
- 5
- 76
There's at least this game that has Vietnam on the title, not sure how realistic it was:
http://www.ea.com/battlefield-bad-company-2-vietnam
Generally speaking, there aren't many Vietnam games because wars of attrition are kinda not fun. How fun would a game like WWI: Trench Warfare be?
War Games always have an issue between the fact that war is horrible against the fact that you are playing it for entertainment.
There's always something of a conflict between the two.
In real life, I remember the story of how a US soldier was faced with a German soldier who was going to try to bayonet him, and he killed the German soldier in self defense. After, he held the German, crying, the soldier appear to be about a 15 year old boy, at the horror of what he had had to do. That's real life.
And that's 'fun' in a game, to get a kill. There's a conflict.
There's an issue of dehumanization. In war, we do it to make it easier to kill the human beings on the other side, who in fact are human beings as we are, but to help kill them, they're turned into monsters and given nasty names - those Krauts, and similar words for any group of enemy. Games try to remove any issue of the human being enemy and they have the advantage that 'it's just pixels'. Nazis are the accepted 'ok to kill and enjoy killing' group of people, and zombies or aliens make it even easier.
But something like Vietnam can touch too many 'real issues' - we for good reason have some qualms about killing two million peasants for not especially good reasons, to where more decent people might have some mixed feelings about just treating that as entertainment even though it is 'just pixels'.
I don't know how much weight this carries in game making, but it might be an issue.
To explore this issue of the conflict between 'real' issues turned into entertainment, just how much 'it's just a computer game' can carry to justify a game, I've sometimes had a desire to see games made that push that limit, and get people to think about it - the first two that come to mind are 'SimHolocaust', where you're in charge of the efficient running of a Nazi death camp and score points for efficiency - which absolutely fits games in terms of the gameplay - or some sort of first person rape simulator.
'But it's just a game'. 'It's just pixels'. Yes, but it helps make clear for people the conflict between real issues and entertainment made of them.
Of course, one problem with that project would be the people who really like them.
We have enough of a real problem with people who don't appreciate the horror war demanding it in the name of national arrogance or hate or whatever.
It's possible to play a wargame and simply treat it as some fun, try to get that shot, try to build those tank factories to wipe out the enemy base, but at some point, there's that conflict that those things are based on actual war that is a lot worse than a lot of people appreciate. It's hard to put mercy into a wargame and give points for it and have it be 'fun'. Dropping a nuke on a base, that's fun. I'm kind of glad to see restraint about something like Vietnam, but there will always be providers after profit.
If someone was allowed to put executions on pay per view for entertainment, someone would, and they'd have customers.
There's a natural human inhibition against aiming a gun at another person and shooting them. Earlier wars saw most soldiers unable to do it, at least at first. A study of WWII found 90% of GI's did not shoot at the enemy when they were supposed to. Computer games somewhat reduce that inhibition. Because it's 'just pixels', it gets a person to more easily aim that gun at a 'person' and shoot and watch them get killed, to the point that there are no moral qualms - it's just all good fun.
That doesn't mean game players lose the ability to distinguish shooting people in games and real life - but it does have some corrosive effect on that aversion to violence.
Military training was changed, based on understanding that the brain has a function that gets in the way of shooting people, to condition people to shoot so fast they bypass the brain's restraint. It's been very effective - now soldiers shoot about 100% of the time they're wanted to - but some think it's caused a lot of PTSD.
Did we as a nation have the appropriate moral concerns over war in Vietnam? Did we respect the value of human life? Did we have concern over the two million killed? If we fell short on that moral responsibility, why, and how do we not repeat the same sort of mistake?
Does turning the war that really killed so many into entertainment help or hurt the effort for people to appreciate and not want the horror of war?
If there was a dog-torturing 'game' - you cut it, you pull its limbs, you cause it horrible pain while it yelps in agony - we'd say that's sick. But it's just pixels. But at some point questions are raised about turning what should be horrible into entertainment and how it affects people. Not the simplistic reaction of 'shooters make people go kill people' - they almost never do - but they do have an effect on people.
This is nothing new - the genocide of native Americans was a real tragedy, yet children played 'cowboys and Indians' for a long time, because the fantasy was fun, hiding and pretending to shoot, without thinking of it in real terms. But doesn't it seem, after we finally came to appreciate more the wrong of all that killing, that that game had a certain 'insensitivity' to it, that always shooting Indians as the bad guy for fun didn't seem all that good an idea when we better appreciated the actual history?
Isn't a bit of blindness to the harm something that actually fed the support for the real killing? Doesn't that happen a lot in war?
When the Japanese brutally treated Chinese under occupation, they had a view of them that made that somehow ok to do. How do you help avoid that?
Wouldn't a game that dehumanizes the Chinese, allowing for their abuse or killing, in Japan somehow possibly help fuel that view?
Does a wargame in Vietnam encourage players to accept rather than question the real killing that happened in that war?
Imagine a game of whale hunting. The Japanese are all for whale hunting; others are against it being allowed by the Japanese. Wouldn't such a game be likely to be enjoyed in Japan? The argument goes beyond 'free choice - if you don't like it, don't play it'. There could be a concern that such a game reinforces the support for whale hunting among the Japanese. Instead of their being sensitized to the wrong of it, it would encourage them not to think about that and view it as just fine, and enjoyable.
There are people who take the side of 'anything goes' in games, who could happily play the rape simulator trying for a high score, and those who have more concerns about the content in games (and those who overreact to the issue, treating games as the direct cause of mass murder and such).
We don't have games I know of about parts of US history, where you go in and wipe out an Indian tribe, where you run a slave trading operation.
Where do we draw that line on what's 'not in good taste' or whatever you call the objection?
It might have something to do with our understanding of the event in question - and there are plenty who don't have a problem with the killing in Vietnam.
Games could be even more political about current events. Imagine where you operate a drone and civilians are killed. Imagine running the nation's healthcare policy, with Obamacare expanding care, with Republican governors refusing the expanded care, your score showing how many get care, and so on. And there's actually value to games like that, in many cases - but objections to those on 'the other side' from however the issue is portrayed.
Does the drone game score you only on the number of harmful acts by the terrorists you didn't kill, with no price for killing civilians? Or does it penalize you for killing civilians and show the suffering the attack caused? Big difference in the message people learn from the game.
We have enough problems with game culture with what's not 'just pixels'. I've seen people who happily lie and steal real money in games from other players with the thinking 'it's just the internet, so it's ok', not appreciating the people they are doing that to are real people.
Games can desensitize people to violence, build support for violence, or they can do the opposite - it depends how they're made.
Usually they don't have an 'agenda', but that doesn't mean they don't have an effect.
Cowboys and Indians didn't have an agenda, but it did reinforce one view of the history, that asked no question about the assumption that killing Indians was good and justified.
tl;dr: Wanna play SimAuschwitz? It's just pixels.
There's always something of a conflict between the two.
In real life, I remember the story of how a US soldier was faced with a German soldier who was going to try to bayonet him, and he killed the German soldier in self defense. After, he held the German, crying, the soldier appear to be about a 15 year old boy, at the horror of what he had had to do. That's real life.
And that's 'fun' in a game, to get a kill. There's a conflict.
There's an issue of dehumanization. In war, we do it to make it easier to kill the human beings on the other side, who in fact are human beings as we are, but to help kill them, they're turned into monsters and given nasty names - those Krauts, and similar words for any group of enemy. Games try to remove any issue of the human being enemy and they have the advantage that 'it's just pixels'. Nazis are the accepted 'ok to kill and enjoy killing' group of people, and zombies or aliens make it even easier.
But something like Vietnam can touch too many 'real issues' - we for good reason have some qualms about killing two million peasants for not especially good reasons, to where more decent people might have some mixed feelings about just treating that as entertainment even though it is 'just pixels'.
I don't know how much weight this carries in game making, but it might be an issue.
To explore this issue of the conflict between 'real' issues turned into entertainment, just how much 'it's just a computer game' can carry to justify a game, I've sometimes had a desire to see games made that push that limit, and get people to think about it - the first two that come to mind are 'SimHolocaust', where you're in charge of the efficient running of a Nazi death camp and score points for efficiency - which absolutely fits games in terms of the gameplay - or some sort of first person rape simulator.
'But it's just a game'. 'It's just pixels'. Yes, but it helps make clear for people the conflict between real issues and entertainment made of them.
Of course, one problem with that project would be the people who really like them.
We have enough of a real problem with people who don't appreciate the horror war demanding it in the name of national arrogance or hate or whatever.
It's possible to play a wargame and simply treat it as some fun, try to get that shot, try to build those tank factories to wipe out the enemy base, but at some point, there's that conflict that those things are based on actual war that is a lot worse than a lot of people appreciate. It's hard to put mercy into a wargame and give points for it and have it be 'fun'. Dropping a nuke on a base, that's fun. I'm kind of glad to see restraint about something like Vietnam, but there will always be providers after profit.
If someone was allowed to put executions on pay per view for entertainment, someone would, and they'd have customers.
There's a natural human inhibition against aiming a gun at another person and shooting them. Earlier wars saw most soldiers unable to do it, at least at first. A study of WWII found 90% of GI's did not shoot at the enemy when they were supposed to. Computer games somewhat reduce that inhibition. Because it's 'just pixels', it gets a person to more easily aim that gun at a 'person' and shoot and watch them get killed, to the point that there are no moral qualms - it's just all good fun.
That doesn't mean game players lose the ability to distinguish shooting people in games and real life - but it does have some corrosive effect on that aversion to violence.
Military training was changed, based on understanding that the brain has a function that gets in the way of shooting people, to condition people to shoot so fast they bypass the brain's restraint. It's been very effective - now soldiers shoot about 100% of the time they're wanted to - but some think it's caused a lot of PTSD.
Did we as a nation have the appropriate moral concerns over war in Vietnam? Did we respect the value of human life? Did we have concern over the two million killed? If we fell short on that moral responsibility, why, and how do we not repeat the same sort of mistake?
Does turning the war that really killed so many into entertainment help or hurt the effort for people to appreciate and not want the horror of war?
If there was a dog-torturing 'game' - you cut it, you pull its limbs, you cause it horrible pain while it yelps in agony - we'd say that's sick. But it's just pixels. But at some point questions are raised about turning what should be horrible into entertainment and how it affects people. Not the simplistic reaction of 'shooters make people go kill people' - they almost never do - but they do have an effect on people.
This is nothing new - the genocide of native Americans was a real tragedy, yet children played 'cowboys and Indians' for a long time, because the fantasy was fun, hiding and pretending to shoot, without thinking of it in real terms. But doesn't it seem, after we finally came to appreciate more the wrong of all that killing, that that game had a certain 'insensitivity' to it, that always shooting Indians as the bad guy for fun didn't seem all that good an idea when we better appreciated the actual history?
Isn't a bit of blindness to the harm something that actually fed the support for the real killing? Doesn't that happen a lot in war?
When the Japanese brutally treated Chinese under occupation, they had a view of them that made that somehow ok to do. How do you help avoid that?
Wouldn't a game that dehumanizes the Chinese, allowing for their abuse or killing, in Japan somehow possibly help fuel that view?
Does a wargame in Vietnam encourage players to accept rather than question the real killing that happened in that war?
Imagine a game of whale hunting. The Japanese are all for whale hunting; others are against it being allowed by the Japanese. Wouldn't such a game be likely to be enjoyed in Japan? The argument goes beyond 'free choice - if you don't like it, don't play it'. There could be a concern that such a game reinforces the support for whale hunting among the Japanese. Instead of their being sensitized to the wrong of it, it would encourage them not to think about that and view it as just fine, and enjoyable.
There are people who take the side of 'anything goes' in games, who could happily play the rape simulator trying for a high score, and those who have more concerns about the content in games (and those who overreact to the issue, treating games as the direct cause of mass murder and such).
We don't have games I know of about parts of US history, where you go in and wipe out an Indian tribe, where you run a slave trading operation.
Where do we draw that line on what's 'not in good taste' or whatever you call the objection?
It might have something to do with our understanding of the event in question - and there are plenty who don't have a problem with the killing in Vietnam.
Games could be even more political about current events. Imagine where you operate a drone and civilians are killed. Imagine running the nation's healthcare policy, with Obamacare expanding care, with Republican governors refusing the expanded care, your score showing how many get care, and so on. And there's actually value to games like that, in many cases - but objections to those on 'the other side' from however the issue is portrayed.
Does the drone game score you only on the number of harmful acts by the terrorists you didn't kill, with no price for killing civilians? Or does it penalize you for killing civilians and show the suffering the attack caused? Big difference in the message people learn from the game.
We have enough problems with game culture with what's not 'just pixels'. I've seen people who happily lie and steal real money in games from other players with the thinking 'it's just the internet, so it's ok', not appreciating the people they are doing that to are real people.
Games can desensitize people to violence, build support for violence, or they can do the opposite - it depends how they're made.
Usually they don't have an 'agenda', but that doesn't mean they don't have an effect.
Cowboys and Indians didn't have an agenda, but it did reinforce one view of the history, that asked no question about the assumption that killing Indians was good and justified.
tl;dr: Wanna play SimAuschwitz? It's just pixels.
Last edited:
Sulaco
Diamond Member
- Mar 28, 2003
- 3,825
- 46
- 91
Maybe it might not be so appealing as compared to WW 2 games because not many people are interested in the Vietnam war or really have anything connecting them to it, like some ancestor who fought in it, or their country been involved excluding Americans.
Yeah that's really the only Vietnam era game I put any time into. And that was just for the thrill of listening to Jefferson Airplane as I flew the huey at treetop level
.
Ha, has there ever been one? I don't know if the comment was serious, but it's an interesting one. Probably someone tried it and found that climbing up out of the trench and getting shot to pieces immediately wasn't as fun as they thought it would be, and adding some variety in the form of being torn apart by shells or rendered a gasping hulk by mustard gas didn't help the play much.
There's this: http://valianthearts.ubi.com/game/en-gb/home/ but it's a puzzle game.
Google search gave me this for a fps: http://www.verdungame.com/
Last Vietnam game was expansion for BF:BC2, but it was multiplayer only. Kind of a nasty conflict for a single player campaign. Although I wouldn't mind a grimey and bleak game, it would likely cause to much commotion.
same reason why you don't get german perspective ww2 games. You don't make a game about a war you lost.
I am with you,.. I have wanted a good vietnam game for a long time now.
Battlefield Vietnam was awesome,.. I loved it and spent countless hours flying a huey low to the ground and high speeds with CCR blasting on the radio. It was always a mad scramble to the jet, and you were always pissed when some A hole that can't fly gets in it and never crashes or kills anything. I was the napalm king with the plane,.. it was a blast.
The Bad Company expansion was pretty cool as well, but if memory serves didn't have choppers or planes, just tanks, boats and jeeps. I was super excited when it was announced, but the actual game was kind of a let down as I was hoping for more of what I was used to with BF Vietnam.
One of the Call of Duty games just barely touched on it, I don't remember which one it was now.
Battlefield Vietnam was awesome,.. I loved it and spent countless hours flying a huey low to the ground and high speeds with CCR blasting on the radio. It was always a mad scramble to the jet, and you were always pissed when some A hole that can't fly gets in it and never crashes or kills anything. I was the napalm king with the plane,.. it was a blast.
The Bad Company expansion was pretty cool as well, but if memory serves didn't have choppers or planes, just tanks, boats and jeeps. I was super excited when it was announced, but the actual game was kind of a let down as I was hoping for more of what I was used to with BF Vietnam.
One of the Call of Duty games just barely touched on it, I don't remember which one it was now.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 25K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes + WCL Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 22K
-
News NVIDIA and Intel to Develop AI Infrastructure and Personal Computing Products- Started by poke01
- Replies: 389
-
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread- Started by TheF34RChannel
- Replies: 23K
Facebook
Twitter