War, we love it

In general though, war, as horrific as it is, holds a particular fascination for people. You need only look at our history, our reading material, our televisions, movie theaters and interactive entertainment to see that. War existed before video games and it will exist long after we stop playing.

Sports are fascinating because they're competitions. We always want to watch the best players play at their best, be at their most motivated. If money drives someone to compete, we give it to them. We don't care if coaches play mind games, if the best player on the team is benched or traded so long as the team wins. Cities identify with their teams the way nations identify with their armies. The degree of animosity is obviously much lower, but the base feeling is the same.

We love to gamble. Monaco, Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, and a whole lot of native american reservations can testify to that. One of the most popular forms of gambling is sports gambling - not only are you cheering for a team, not only are you betting money, but you're cheering for your team by betting money on it. There's a higher stake in that - not just of money, but of team pride.

War is the ultimate team game with the highest possible stakes. People die - by the dozen, hundreds, thousands, millions. Nations are created or cease to exist. The course of history is changed. Every bullet an elderly factory worker makes might be the one that kills the great general, every bomb could be the one that destroys the key factory or bridge. As horrific as it is, war brings us together. Yet, we do feel guilty about it. Missing loved ones, testimonies of soldiers sick of blood on their hands, or those consumed by their hatred of the enemy, the leaders who always wonder what they could have done to save their men or kill more of the enemy - this is all guilt in one way or another.

World War II is that war without guilt, except perhaps for members of the Axis. We won a noble war, despite the atrocities - because we don't think of the atrocities. They never penetrated our consciousness. When we think of Vietnam, we do think of soldiers forced to shoot at people who may or may not be civilians. When we think of World War II, we don't think of Hamburg or Dresden. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are swept away with the knowledge that a land war in Japan would be more horrific. We'd rather not know that our leadership deliberately marked Hiroshima and Nagasaki free of regular bombing in order to maximize the shock of a nuclear blast. That there were refugees in those cities because they seemed safe... well... not our problem. It saved lives in the end, right? We weren't the ones who started the war.

Such is our thinking. In our games, we don't even fight Germans any more - it's always Nazis. It's as if Nazis were a different breed, volunteers, a sort of oppressor race of the noble German people. It's easy to forget that Hitler was legally elected. It's good to forget this most of the time too - the last time we squeezed Germany after winning a war was in 1919 at Versailles, where Germany's humiliation eventually led it down a hostile path to regain its international pride.

Nazis, Zombies, Robots, Aliens, Ninjas and Pirates are our enemies. We can never feel guilt about killing hordes of them. Of course, Nazis are the most relevant, the most realistic. They put up a great fight and we love re-telling war stories where we win. As satisfying as it is to blast a monster's head off, it's better to compete with a known quantity - a human. It's our instinct. We'd feel guilty about it, but he's not real. Even if he was real, he'd just be the clear-cut, no bones about it bad guy - a Nazi.

It's not that World War II is the only politically correct safe ground for game developers. It's simply the setting we're most comfortable with. Or do you think that Custer's Revenge is due for a re-make?

That's my bag of hot air for the next little while. Post a topic in the Games forum to discuss.