Poll: can a game be propaganda?

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Singing Gremlin

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Khell_Sennet said:
LIFE is propaganda. Games, movies, clothing, books... Any medium you can think of can be used to push a message, viewpoint, or opinion. Games in specific, yes many of them out now are VERY rich in propaganda. Battlefield 2 pitting the US against Iraq and China, Crysis being against Koreans, both push the idea that "THESE are the bad guys, kill them". If tomorrow the US went to war with Canada, I'm sure the next year's Medal of Honor would be "MoH: Northern Strike" and we'd probably see Battlefield Moosejockeys soon too.
Interestingly, if you put both of the games you just made up together, you get a real game. Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike.

Amused me, anyway.
 

The Lawn

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Apr 11, 2008
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Technically everything propaganda of some form, every thing you read, see, hear conveys the opinion of the creator imposing his or her beliefs onto you.

Unless its something you are free to do anything in with no constraints, and then your just building your own propaganda.

I find propaganda to be a very... well... misunderstood word. Not all propaganda is bad, just some is.


And as to stop myself digging a bigger hole than I've already dug... I'm shutting up cuz I have no clue where I'm taking this.
 

Rolling Thunder

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ElArabDeMagnifico said:
-and WWII shooters, GO AMERICA (Britain and Russia is cool too and all, but clearly, America did most of the work
I will eb quite frank with you sir, that is the biggest pile of steaming horseshit I have ever seen since the Kentucky derby was ended midrace to allow a slow and ugly old lady to cross the racetrack. Which is to say to the Americans out there:

1) I love your country. Seriosuly, you're TV is the only one that can hope to match the British, you all own guns, speak english and are based around the ideas of a true Englishman (Tom Paine) Your nation has been (despite what the closet communists say) a net exporterof good things vitually since it's inception. And good work for that to.

But my main point is this- you did not do most of the work in WW2. No, I don't care what your history teachers told you. And you poms at the back can shut up as well, because you weren't the coup de maine either. IT WAS THE RUSSIANS. The russians were the nation whose bold resistance and unflagging determination broke the backs of the Wehrmacht. They won world war two.

And anyhow, the number of Commonwealth and American soldiers who disembarked at Normandy were apporximately equal, and remained so for most of the Normandy campaign.

So- to summarise

Britian- 25%
Russia- 40%
USA- 30%
Resistance- 5%
 

ShyWinter

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Apr 25, 2008
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fsanch said:
Without a doubt games can have propaganda in them. The more interesting question is, knowing a game has that kind of propaganda, would you still be playing, or would it either turn you off to the point of not purchasing?
I actually can attest to both. There's a PS2 game called Urban Chaos: Riot Response that's more right wing than Charlton Heston would be at a gun barbecue. However, the game's actually a lot of fun. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, conversely, almost offended me by making the Pearl Harbor attack and every other battle seem like a Saturday morning cartoon. I almost don't want to play any other Medal of Honor game because of it. A pity, considering how good MOH: Allied Assault was.
 
Feb 13, 2008
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Fondant said:
So- to summarise

Britian- 25%
Russia- 40%
USA- 30%
Resistance- 5%
I'd like to multiply that by their prospective armies; given that the US and the USSR had around 50 times the troops. I think we did quite well.
 

fix-the-spade

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War Monger of Yabucua said:
Your dollar aint doing well either asshat, in casev you havent noticed it's as unstable as ours, example: last Friday it became worth as much as ours you titty britty!
You should do your research mate. Its not a dollar, it's the Pound Sterling. The Sterling is still worth $2 and has been for some time now, our economy is doing fine regardless of the media and Northern Rock.

Back on topic: Of course games are propaganda, they're a mass media. Just about every shooter has some kind of political agenda. Usually along the lines of Americans/Nato/UN rocks, Russians/arabs/asians must all die. Although outside of fps' it tends to be less prevelant/blatant.

I liked Cod 4 for making the protagonists a bunch of unlikeable douches. The relative lack of we are perfect, they are evil made the characters more believable. But seeing as its going back to ww2 for number 5, I expect apple pie to be making a flag waving return...
 

TheMadDoctorsCat

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Alright... the old strategy games I used to play on the Amiga/C64... you could play both sides. In the WW2 games, they didn't have any problem letting you play the Germans. in "Johnny Reb", you could play the Unionists or the Confederates.

SO HOW COME, IN EVERY DAMN MODERN-DAY WAR GAME I CAN THINK OF AND MOST OF THE ONES I CAN'T, YOU CAN ONLY PLAY THE GODDAMN AMERICANS???!!!!

Look, I'm British. I'm neutral. For every day that I feel like whupping some Iraqi terrorist insurgent types into shape, there's at least half a day where I want to kick some American Imperialist Ass. I'm sorry, Americans. I have nothing against you (except occasionally your habit of choosing really, really bad people to elect as President. But then most Presidents nowadays don't seem to be elected by majority anyway so I suppose most of you can hardly be blamed for that. Anyways...) I have a lot of American friends. I talk to Americans online in what are generally civilised ways; although if they mention tea, crumpets or how they won WW2 for us (as a previous poster has pointed out, it was the Russians) I might have to machine-gun them down and loot the lightning guns and rocket launchers from their battered and bloodied corpses. But that's ok too, because, unlike some of my countrymen, I don't judge an entire nation on its forum trolls.

In short, generally speaking, the Americans and I get along just fine. My homicidal urges against them are no more frequent than - for example - my stepbrother, some of the people that I work with, or the French. (Come to think of it, I could happily shoot a few French people right now.) I just object to the notion that I can play a game with an assortment of twelve fully customisable weapons, and a far less varied assortment of stereotypical American jarheads voiced by out-of-work actors who couldn't care any more about this project than the nitwit paying them their twenty dollars per hour, and not be able to use the former to kill the latter in a legitimate game-approved manner. Doesn't seem fair somehow.
 

fix-the-spade

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The_root_of_all_evil said:
Hey, Comics used to be blatant propaganda.

If you are at all offended by racism, don't click here. [http://www.superdickery.com/propaganda/1.html]

This was sold to young kids with the Government's blessing.
Thats only offensive taken out of context.
Given that that was a couple of months after Pearl Harbour, I think the racism's justified.

Also, Mitchel & Webb = awesome distilled.
 

Cowtippers

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War Monger of Yabucua said:
Hey I'm American and don't hate the Fench( even though they never thanked us for freeing them fro the Nazi's) and I think that you Britts are just anry thhat you have no more clonies or power really and jealous at the fact that one of your rouge colonies beat you guys and became a bigger power in the world than you. Get over it!!! Now why don't you be a good litle Titty Britty and eat some crumpets, tea, and serve me Bacon on The Disney Cruise ship?
Then what about all the cheering and partying that happened when the soldiers arrived in the streets of Paris? I bet those soldiers left Paris with a smile on their lips.. And not because they only SAW the beautiful women too..... *wink wink nudge nudge*
Learn to spell English before you get on the cruise of life known as the internet, especially if English is your main language anyway! I´m not English nor American and I find it embarrasing that an American can´t spell properly. By the way, Stompy is from Australia, not England....

Propaganda is everywhere in videogames. Like Yahtzee said, WW2 is overdone so much in videogames because it´s the last war in which they actually won/did anything good. Other than that, the Americans have won nearly every fictional war in the world, and something war BETWEEN worlds... All because of the US (Independence Day for eksample Good movie, but of course it´s the US that finds the alien´s weakness).

I hope that the game developers learned something from making CoD4, yes the Americans and English are the "heroes" in the game, but they are also depicted as mortal... In the fact that you actually die, instead of just killing more nazis in one playthrough than there actually was killed during the war.

Oh yeah, and I´m still mad at THQ for putting Russia into the SECOND expansion of CoH instead of the first... And I´m also mad for having them put in three different German factions instead of the Japanese and Italians.... Having the British dogfight the Japanese would be a battle of epic proportions!
 

Rolling Thunder

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Though to be fair having the italiens would suck. Aminly because they would have such limited units you would want to cry.

And are you implying that somehow the British didn't deserve the first expansion?
 

Cowtippers

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Fondant said:
Though to be fair having the italiens would suck. Aminly because they would have such limited units you would want to cry.

And are you implying that somehow the British didn't deserve the first expansion?
Yeah, but then they could make up for it by... Throwing vases at people? Nah..

And I´m not implying that they don´t deserve the first expansion, I´m just angry because.... How long ago is it that a good rts game came out in which you could play as all four/five (counting the Japanese) factions in WW2? And I´m not counting Blitzkrieg... The 2D graphics does nothing for me >_>