Zero Punctuation: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

[TAdamson]

Second, I've never seen so many people get so defensive over almost nothing. Yahtzee calls white people privileged, and then there's this whole backlash of white guilt nonsense. Anyone that felt the need to comment negatively about that is probably the exact kind of person he's assuming this game is for.

I would not be quite so upset with Yahtzee if I thought for just one damn second that he actually gave two bits of a shit about the depiction of beige-colored foreigners in modern FPS games. I'm not exactly sure what brought the issue to a boil but I've noticed that sometime in the last six months all the British gamers must have decided to get together for tea, crumpets and setting their agenda to, 'Fuck anything to do with American jingoism.'

You see I've always been a little suspect of British people suddenly discovering their inner humanitarian whenever a game kicks them out to the curb so that it can rub out thirty shades of red, white and blue all over itself. It's like a guy suddenly discovering his inner feminist because when he and a male friend decided to a brothel together to preform some sort of creepy male bonding ritual with a prostitute, but the working girl happened to be really into his friend and he ended up being left with a case of blue balls.

Not to be racist against smurfs or anything.

I don't particularly understand that analogy in your second paragraph but anyhoo.

It's not just the British actually (It's also not all British... and I'm sure that some in the land of the free get a little tired of the zealous nationalism some Americans exhibit.) Some of us Australians get a little tired by American Exceptionalism.

While I personally think that American foreign interventionist policy have been, on balance, a net positive for the planet the way that it gets portrayed in Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, etc etc is fucking moronic.

Which is weird. Why does it even need to do this? Most of the people playing couldn't give two cropulant evacuations about the story of these games and it wouldn't be hard to write something that wasn't as demented as BlOps.

There are plenty of American news journals, books, TV shows and movies that have had thoughtful writing on the subject of war. Why not games? Why must it seem like the insane gibbering of a Fox News correspondent who's read too much Tom Clancy?

 

[impocalyptic]

I don't have any real problem with this game, but I'll admit that I'm just sick of it at this point. The supposed racism seems to be mostly due to the fact that the last time we fought anyone white, it was the nazis. We've been fighting minorities in every other war. Maybe it's conditioned into us at this point, that all bad guys are non-white because that's the only enemy we've fought directly for the past 60 years.

 

[1nfinite_Cros5]

It was surprisingly well-executed for his point as well. Never thought he'd find a way to use it as an example.

What reference was that, again?

The spider. There's a point in the game where, after you outrun it, it's in a state where

Spoiler

it has only one leg left and is a minimal threat

 

[Gaianus]

I realize I'm a bit late coming to the party, but I'm getting a bit tired of Yahtzee inserting his political commentary into reviews, and the rant in this one just really killed the review for me. Personally, I don't like these modern military FPS's, or spunkgargleweewee as he's keen on calling them, so I was looking forward to this. I mean, talking about the main characters being entitled and the bad guys coming off as more sympathetic, that's fine, I get how that would be annoying. But lately, the man has shoe-horned his political beliefs into everything he can these days. He made a rant about conservative financial policy when talking about the storyline to Guild Wars 2, a fantasy MMORPG, for Christ's sake. This would be like me going on a tangent about Campaign Finance reform in the last election in the middle of a review for the new Hobbit movie.

I love Yahtzee's comedy; I've watched Zero Punctuation for years. But this is just getting annoying. He's a game reviewer, not a political pundit.

 

[TAdamson]

You know, I really loathe playing this card, but I can't imagine anyone else being allowed to get away with as much bigotry and ignorance on world affairs as Croshow does. Even discounting the "White people and Americans all suck" lines (which are bad enough), his ignorance about Nicaraguan resistence groups and the shit they do TO THEIR OWN PEOPLE is pathetic.

But hey, I guess you can still get called insightful and funny when you're a funny talker with a British accent despite displaying such ignorance.

What? Were you expecting an essay on the Iran-Contra affair in the middle of a cartoon video game review?

Oh no wait. You just want to point out that Nicaraguan narco-terrorists are bad guys despite the fact the game glosses over the fact that the US has a less than stellar record on that subject.

Forfuckssake. It features Colonel Oliver North in a cutscene and is partially set in Nicaragua in 1986 but nope... The fact that that year North was giving money to the Contras (Anti-Communist Nicaraguan Drug Terrorists) gets no playtime....

AND THEN, Activision has the balls to use North in their advertising. Awesome.

The game even has the Contras "rape and murder" Menendez's people.... And then the CIA assassinates his father and later some of the game's protagonists fuck up and kill his sister. But no, he's totally the bad guy not the product of botched American interventions.

 

[TAdamson]

I you can't tell the difference between white people being subtly or overtly mocked for the way that white people act and actual discrimination then you deserve to mocked for the way you act.

Keep your backwards racist bullcrap to yourself please.

You see, black guys they drive like this:

"Dooditidoodoodoodeedoodoo!"


But white guys, they drive like this:

"Digideedigdiggitydigdig!"


Seriously though just accept that you're privileged. Just be humble enough to do that and don't get touchy when people point it out. It's not about guilt. It's about being self-aware.

Everybody lucky enough to be born in a first world country is privileged and in general ethnically European people are luckier than most.

 

[DataSnake]

Yahtzee really needs to stop reviewing FPSs because it's really getting embarrassing for him.

I think you mean he needs to stop reviewing spunkgargleweewee [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6492-Medal-of-Honor-Warfighter-Doom-3-BFG-Edition] games. And I disagree, I love the fact that someone is taking the time to point out exactly why inexplicably popular trends aren't necessarily worth following.

 

[tifa77]

Seriously though just accept that you're privileged. Just be humble enough to do that and don't get touchy when people point it out. It's not about guilt. It's about being self-aware.

What TAdamson really means = Its about being self aware of your guilt.

 

[Markunator]

There's a theme that's become more and more apparent lately in Yahtzee's work--mean-spirit towards the US, hatred of all things particularly associated with the US, false association of guns with gun-nuts.

Anyways, I got bored and had to do something else.

In fairness, when America stops making midless racist pro-imperlist America Fuck Yeah games where the main goal is to protect America from any arab or russian that looks at the US funny, he'll probably stop complaning about them.

They're usually doing much more than just "looking at the US funny" in these games - so your point is kind of nonsensical, to be honest.

 

[Alma Mare]

In this thread: people don't know the difference between white guilt pandering and a factual observation.

As for the review itself, I'm surprised at the lack of mentioning Oliver North. "This game endorses and is endorsed by Oliver North" would drive his point home just as well.

 

[TAdamson]

Seriously though just accept that you're privileged. Just be humble enough to do that and don't get touchy when people point it out. It's not about guilt. It's about being self-aware.

What TAdamson really means = Its about being self aware of your guilt.

Well that's a mature line of argument. I guess tifa77 means attributing bullshit to people that they in no way said or mean.

I don't feel guilty about being Australian/UK dual citizen, white, male, university educated, and middle class. I just acknowledge that I'm lucky to have all these opportunities that 95% on the planet don't have.

I'm lucky I'm not Native-Australian because I have better options. I'm lucky I'm not a Dalit Indian, Afghan Peasant, Iranian, Palestinian, Israeli,.... Fuck it I'm lucky to live in Australia and not Britain, the weather and economy is crap in the UK.

Why is that so hard for comparatively rich wealthy people living as part of the ethnic majority in peaceful liberal democracies to admit how lucky they are? Why is calling them out on it when they can't racism?

Now if you're homeless or truly poor in America then you have my sympathies because then you are unlucky no matter your skin colour. It sucks that your government blows so much of its budget on foreign intervention and corporate welfare and then tells its poor that they're on their own.

But if you can't recognise that you, probably because you're white European, were born into a reasonably free, reasonably democratic, reasonably wealthy nation, and that you are lucky to have those opportunities then....

 

[tifa77]

TAdamson its a wider issue. We all know the western world experiences a higher quality of life then most other areas but there's no need to attribute that to 'whiteness'. Checking your white privilege lumps all whites into a super rich elite group that all laugh down at the poor minorities attempts to break even with the institutionalized racism that they face everyday. In reality there is an underclass and the rich. Most people live in the underclass including most whites and most of the minorities.

This goes hand in hand with the guilt complex that many white people in the public eye have adopted because its the populist mindset at the moment. The fact that white history is solely made up of us oppressing everyone and being the demons of the world when white history is responsible for much of the advancement of the human race. Name me one race that hasn't waged war against another people in the past?

The white privilege buzz word is just the latest attempt to guilt whites for simply existing. As an Australian you should remember this on your national sorry day.

 

[Firebert]

He's right, it was pretty weird how the Admiral seemed to say "cocksuckers" in every one of his appearances. And how Woods felt it necessary to use "fuck" or one of its derivatives in every single line.

 

[TAdamson]

TAdamson its a wider issue. We all know the western world experiences a higher quality of life then most other areas but there's no need to attribute that to 'whiteness'. Checking your white privilege lumps all whites into a super rich elite group that all laugh down at the poor minorities attempts to break even with the institutionalized racism that they face everyday. In reality there is an underclass and the rich. Most people live in the underclass including most whites and most of the minorities.

This goes hand in hand with the guilt complex that many white people in the public eye have adopted because its the populist mindset at the moment. The fact that white history is solely made up of us oppressing everyone and being the demons of the world when white history is responsible for much of the advancement of the human race. Name me one race that hasn't waged war against another people in the past?

The white privilege buzz word is just the latest attempt to guilt whites for simply existing. As an Australian you should remember this on your national sorry day.

National Sorry Day? When we acknowledge things done by my ancestors to Natives Australians?

Should I not acknowledge the things that were done? Should they never be mentioned because it makes some Anglo-Celtic Australians uncomfortable? Sorry. No. That would be shameful, as denying the holocaust is shameful. But when people talk to Germans about World War 2 they don't get all touchy about us guilting them "for simply existing".

There is no reason to deny that Australian Colonisation involved the dispossession of a Native people from their land, sometimes murders and massacres, and later the removal of native children from their families leaving a legacy that still bears living witnesses.

The idea that there is some agenda to guilt whites for simply existing is preposterous. You should be ashamed of making such a weak argument.

If someone is trying to make you feel bad then you have the option of not feeling bad. It's not hard. Its not like they're killing or enslaving you.


Checking your white privilege just means the

 

[Markunator]

That's not fair Ben, I only play this for the multi player pfttt, this is no longer valid argument. Oh I miss the old days of playing shooter game while having fun.

Hmm, didn't even mention Zombies or Multiplayer.

When that is all ANYONE ELSE is talking about and pretty much the entire reason for the series success. Seriously, hardly anyone gives a shit about the single player.

Serious now: did I miss the memo when he said he categorically refuses to consider multiplayer, because he didn't state anything like that since he reviewed the ONLINE GAME of DayZ only 2 months ago.

you must have missed yatzee's memo about multiplayer in games. If your only selling point is just multiplayer then you are doing it wrong. A fps game needs a strong single player campaign to stand on it's and engage you with a compelling story.

Yeah? Tell that to the entire Battlefield franchise prior to Bad Company.

 

[Jhooud]

Wow. Quite the thread this week.

Maybe next week he could cover something a little less incendiary. Like Pong. Or maybe Asteroids.