Polygon Article - The problem with Battlefield Hardline

You know, I wish it was closely related. I think if designers try to make games inspired by real events, the result can be a more careful and thoughtful experience than, say, base it in some random, invented location, with random, invented factions. I believe the Call of Duty games lost some of its heart when they stopped being about real conflicts and started being about modern, Clancy-like world conspiracies...

I wish it were, but clearly the author of the article is over-analyzing it. As others have noted, the game borrows a lot more from heist movies like Heat and games like Payday than any real world commentary.

@brodehouse: Well said.

I think this article is pretty good. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw Battlefield: Hardline and it's my main issue with the game.

The game just looks like propaganda.

Man, I'm kind of taken aback at how furious people are over this article. It struck me as perfectly reasonable criticism, even if I don't agree with every point Chris Plante makes. Polygon can do no right, I guess.

Controversy for Clicks...

I actually reread this statement and it's revealing how full of shit Chris Plante really is.

A cop game can't hide under the already prejudiced notion of previous Battlefield games: that the enemy is an international terrorists motivated by pure evil.

Every Battlefield game that I have played to date has been about nation states engaged in total war scenarios against other nation states. Every round of Battlefield is US versus Russia, or China versus US, or UK versus Germany and so on and so on. Even their future war game involved total war scenarios between the European Union and the Pan-Asian Coalition. I have never played a Battlefield game where the enemy was Al-Qaeda, or Boko Haram, or the Tamils, or any other major terrorist organization. Chris Plante, however, wants to tell you that Battlefield has been putting across an 'already prejudiced notion that the enemy is an international terrorists' (sic). He is modifying reality to fit his narrative. He is full of the fanciest monkeyshit legally available for purchase.

edit: I thought about it even more, and players do not even choose a side when they launch into a game. In a China-US battle scenario, you are randomly placed on either the Chinese or American side and sent to combat the opposing force. According to his bugfuck logic, players placed in Chinese squads would be learning that America is pure evil.

I'm no longer sure if this article is spawned purely from Chris Plante being a dumbshit, or if it's part of the nature of having to write something. He's a 'video game journalist', whatever that means anymore, and thus he has to talk about something, regardless of analytic skill or how well-read he is on the subject.

Really not into this article at all. Awful. Super awful.

For me it's just that basically all of us have heard all of the variations of this argument before. "____ is contributing to a culture of ____ that is causing ____!" Rock music is causing drug use to skyrocket! Comic books are corrupting the youth! Dungeons & Dragons is turning innocent kids into Satan-worshipers! Rap music is causing rape and civil disobedience! Video games are making us violent and detached from reality!

As has been mentioned numerous times by this point, the gun culture, the war mindset, all of these things have been ingrained in American society since before the existence of video games and perhaps even before the country was founded. The literally named "military industrial complex" that affects law enforcement and political discourse has been a popular issue for over half of a century. These things aren't new. These things aren't being caused by video games. This is just another example of correlation =/= causation. Chris Plante sees something he doesn't like, creates the most shallow, surface-level examination of American military culture he could whip up for an article, and blasts shooters as a chief contributing factor because that's the easy, knee-jerk response we've seen over innumerable other social ills, toward the popular trends of the time, going back for generations.

A few years ago I felt like video games had finally gotten to the point where we were able to safely look back on the 90's and 00's and think "Man, can you believe people fucking thought video games were causing violence and crime? How fucking crazy, right? Good thing those people are gone!" Instead it seems like the stuffy old white guys who were roundly ridiculed and laughed out of professional life by consumers, and eventually courts, have just been supplanted by young 20-somethings with legions of social media followers and a pet cause, and all the arguments have come full circle, just with prettier faces.

Years after accusations of games corrupting people psychologically have fallen flat, years after empirical crime data still has everything on a downward slide, here we are again arguing about how video games are creating a culture of violence, or infecting our youth with evil thoughts about sex. Only now the call is coming from inside the house.

I sometimes wonder how these people would've reacted to all the other incidents of mass violence, often, like Ferguson, unfortunately racially inspired, throughout the country's past. Maybe Contra contributed to the Tampa Riots of 1987.

My problem isn't the storyline. Obviously that's going to be pulpy Battlefield nonsense that doesn't resemble reality in the slightest. It more has to do with the glorification of equipment and weapons these kind of games do and the disconnect I feel that happens when it changes from military to cops.

So, I'm not trying to tell people not to get upset over police actions during this whole thing, but one thing to note about riots and all of that mall ninja gear and lrad usage, is that modern riots in the U.S. have been less dangerous compared to how they've been handled in the past. There is an infographic floating around of how cops were equipped at Democratic National Convention Riot in 1968, the million man march in 1995 (which actually seems like a really shitty stretch all things considered) and the 2011 Oakland occupy eviction. What you see is a guy armed with a gas mask and a wooden club (which is pretty damn dangerous) in 68, a officer in regular uniform in 95, and full on high speed low drag swat operator in 2011. #somuchgear I'm pretty sure that at no point so far has anyone been beaten with night sticks, wooden clubs, or rifle butts, sprayed with a fire hose, mauled by dogs, or, and this is a fun one for history buffs, bombed by the Army Air Corp. The police have shot one person so far during the protest who was allegedly wielding a knife. I guess this is because Patton isn't alive anymore. The people being detained here aren't building bridges to the Florida Keys.

You should probably be bothered by these tweets, if I had to guess they were up and about because Holder was in town.

This story will make great fodder for polygon/kotaku tier publications to wax on and on about the importance of gaming and awareness and whatever else, but

"The problem is media — with games at its center — fetishizes that violence, machismo and "pretty awesome gear" of our law enforcement.

And because of that, cops have militarized with minimal resistance. And because of that, Visceral and Electronic Arts are making a mainstream, multi-million dollar game in which a cop who kills hundreds of people is the fucking hero."

come on. This guy is trying so hard and all he's really doing is demonstrating a bad attempt at capitalizing on recent events to sound thoughtful.

That is what I think. No matter how you slice about cops vs criminals, it sure comes across as overkill that comes to close to home lately. I think some of the fantasy of it is lost when real cops in riot gear are shooting real people in teeshirts a few states away.

I'm going to call a spade a spade. Battlefield: Hardline is propaganda.

Alright, I'm checkin' back in on this conversation.

I feel like you could've written the same article Plante did but about Max Payne 1 and 2, in as much as they're video games where a police officer shoots hundreds of alleged criminals without making any attempt at detaining them for due process. There isn't the "militarization of the police" angle, but a lot of the same points hold true. That doesn't excuse Hardline, which seems like a random cash grab after EA saw how consistently Payday 1 and 2 sold, but plenty of games misrepresent the roles of police officers and soldiers, and Hardline is far from the first.

The fact that DICE just re-skinned Battlefield 4 with cops and people didn't immediately say "wtf that's just military combat -- not cops and robbers," is sort of telling about how police are viewed today. In that way, maybe Hardline is more of a reflection of the current culture rather than somehow promoting it or doing something heinous.

Also, just because they renamed the flag to "Money," doesn't make it a cops and robbers game and it's really not comparable to Payday at all. Hardline is a massive city with a population of 32, half of which are cops and half criminals. There's no subtlety, no grand schemes, no civilians. It's just more straightforward Battlefield military combat.

Can someone explain to me in what way Hard line is propaganda? Granted, I haven't played it, but isn't it typical cops and robbers type stuff?

it's a silly opinion piece, for sure. and if DICE want to make a game that romanticizes law enforcement, that's their prerogative.

but i do agree with the writer's general sentiment that perhaps we should be examining how art imitates life, and vice versa.

and besides- i can't think of anything less cool than playing as law enforcement individual. might as well call it BATTLEFIELD: THE MAN, MAN

edit: i also sincerely hope people aren't getting their blood up about this. it does say 'OPINION' in bold letters, and i generally avoid that sort of 'journalism' (i'd argue it's not in fact, but rather simply 'writing') as it is almost hyperbolic by definition- no matter the field.

Golly, I'm just so irate that someone has an opinion that doesn't match mine. Next they'll be taking my games away!

@officermeatbeef: Fuck, I adored Swat 4. I wonder if it holds up still....

And here I thought it was just a game about cops and robbers.

I guess I missed the part where the civilians in Ferguson shot at the cops and drove around in stolen vehicles, trying to run people over.

Also, no, this is not the problem with Battlefield Hardline. Please tell me the difference between shooting guys that shoot at you but they are american citizens with american rights, and shooting at guys that shoot at you but aren't american citizens.

I've been playing it recently and it does. The controls are a bit obtuse but once you get that down it's still a pretty great game.

pretty much. maybe we should hold judgement until the game is out.

It's funny, no one attacked the BattleField games for not following the Geneva Convention. Opening fire with a crew-served weapon into soft targets (read humans) is against the rules.

I liked the hardline playthrough until he just started a shootout. I liked the idea of showing the badge and handcuff them. In games where I can play non lethal I will, (i.e. MGS, Deus Ex). They could offer more non lethal game tropes like a tazer, tranqualizer, and takedowns. I don't think I can expect that from a Battlefield game tough. As for the article they should be better than comparing these tragic events to a battlefield game.

Chris Plante wrote a review of Payday 2,http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/16/4628602/payday-2-review. He seemed fine with cops having all those toys when he got to kill them. He's taking advantage of the current tragedy. As to Brandon Friedman's comment of the weaponry of police officerscompared to soldiers in the Iraq invasion, that was in 2003. DOD spending has more than double since 2000. My platoon in Afghanistan alone was better armed than the LA police department quoted in his article.

It's a video game. Holy shit, Polygon. C'mon. Nobody is thinking that deep about Battlefield. I get what they're saying on the surface (it's weird that cops have rocket launchers ), but they're making up some deep political message where there is none. Yeah, game developers should be conscious of what they're putting out there, but I don't see how there is anything bad about what they're doing here.

Well, Battlefield 2's story involved the terrorist organization MEC (Middle East Coalition if I recall correctly), which seemed pretty Al-Queda-like and which played China and NATO out against each other. They also appeared in Battlefield: Bad Company and used the ba'athist flag. But, yeah, Battlefield 3 and 4 didn't have that.

@fisk0: Thank you for informing me. I've played 1942, 2142, Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 and I had not seen anything approaching ideological combat. It had always been nation states versus nation states.

Even then, I'd wager this MEC faction behaves exactly like the traditional military organizations that combat it, from a gameplay balance standpoint. From that standpoint, It behaves like a nation state with a traditional military rather than a terrorist organization united through ideology, and the events on the screen play out like total war scenarios rather than counter-terrorist scenarios.

Barf. At best this piece is a whiny, reactionary, politically correct garbage. At worst it is trying to cash in the tragic events of Ferguson.

Polygon will always find something to be offended by, if not for the sake of somebody else, then for some pet issue they are championing, like apparently the militarization of modern police forces. But it's just supposed to be dumb fun. Nobody takes it seriously, nor should you. If the A-Team was around today Polygon would be busy writing articles about how they are glorifying the use of Automatic weapons. We get it guys, it's a very real issue that deserves addressing. But maybe it should be addressed by a source that doesn't have an entire section devoted to pokemon...

Yeah, they played exactly the same, they didn't even go for the differences that Battlefield Vietnam did, where the Vietcong side focused much more on guerrilla combat such being able to use underground tunnel networks (often even starting in tunnels, whereas the US side started out in bases).

I think I do.

Hardline refers to the doctrine, policy, and posturing of a government or political body as being absolutist and sometimes authoritarian.

If it's not propaganda it's built around an idea that the US seems to be creeping towards and I personally despise. It's at least a very convenient game to be coming out during this time in history.

If you ride alone you ride with Origin.

But he's right, that's not the same thing as propaganda.

Propaganda - information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

If we agree that video games can be considered information I think this fits perfectly with what Hardline is.

If I was EA I would seriously be rethinking about releasing a game where cops carry RPGs. It doesn't help that the beta was bad and that Hardline felt like a fanmade BF4 mod.

Sorry, how is Hard Line biased or misleading exactly? And what evidence do you have that EA have the intent to publicize a particular political cause? And what cause is that exactly? You have to do a lot more than establish that video games can be considered information to prove your point.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence blow shit up and shoot people in the Bad Boys movies. Are dumb those propaganda now too? Or Lethal Weapon? Or every other cop movie ever? It feels like we're playing a little fast and loose with definitions here to fit grind a political ax. And if that sort of thing is your bag there are sites for that sort of thing.

@fisk0 said:

The MEC was a military alliance of Nation-States, not a terrorist organization. Terrorists generally do not have the official, full and unconditional support of PLA forces. Any Terrorism angles were introduced in Battlefield 3's stunningly average campaign. Battlefield has largely done an OKAY job of representing the aggressors as modern, fully capable, conventional forces - barring some very questionable choices taken in Battlefield 3's campaign concerning Iran, and even then, their gear was more modern than actual Iranian hardware.

I am interested to know Chris Plante's opinion on the modern iterations of Call of Duty, considering that up until Ghosts they largely concerned unilateral, covert actions conducted by Western forces - a topic which has been relevant for over a decade, now. I imagine he has none.

The title of the game is an authoritarian policy and one that seems to closely resemble a direction that law enforcement is going in the US. Why would Bad Boys or Lethal Weapon be propaganda? Those aren't about political ideas.

@spraynardtatum: they wouldn't be considered propaganda. Neither should Hardline. it's a dumb ass cops and robbers game. EA aren't pushing an agenda. Give it a rest already.

Alright. Let's agree to disagree.

They can still be portraying cultural notions while not pushing an agenda. Sort of how Call of Duty games don't have any explicit political message, but boy howdy are they rife with echoes of unilateralism and unconscious Cold War harkenings. If anything, Hardline at least shows how omnipresent the use of force and police militarization seem to have become in the American subconscious over the last decade and a half. I feel like any potential political agenda is somewhat offset by portraying the criminals as being in possession of gadgets and hoohaws that can only be described as James-Bondian in nature, though, and I for one will certainly be pretending that I am a Robin-Hood-esque revolutionary anarchist when/if I ever play the game.

Wow not really the kind of response I was expecting when I posted this article. I would have expected more discourse but instead it seems like everyone here just hates people who try and ruin their fun. Ill make sure I keep that in mind next time

I didn't want to start a new thread because Polygon doesn't deserve another one...but what the fuck is going on with all the Pokemon "stories" they have? It is crazy, feels like every third story is about Pokemon some how.

@siddarth0605 said:

I bet if this article had appeared on any other website than Polygon you would've gotten a way different reaction.

I'd say the term 'Bad Boys' could basically sum up the last 3 years of games journalism.

Those boys and their video games; they're bad.

"Discourse" and "conversation" are popular words these days, but it's difficult to have much of a soul-searching conversation around a piece that presents the debate as an open-and-shut case and implies those who would disagree are part of the problem. My issues with this article have less to do with it being from Polygon and more that it is written in a style of being talked down to rather than talked with. This sort of moralizing tone permeates a lot of games writing these days, and is often why we don't get much "conversation" and tend to just getting shouting matches from sides that have already made up their minds.

If this article was written in a more thoughtful, questioning style, ("Is glamorization of military grade weapons in games getting worse?" "Should games be more mindful of police violence?" Perhaps presenting a piece on Battlefield Hardline on this same topic, but with two opposing viewpoints.) I would be far more receptive. The quote(s) from the dude in the article about police weapons do make me unsettled, and I don't enjoy the glamorizing and fetishizing of military-grade stuff on police. But the article isn't written in an inviting tone that draws people in to participate in a conversation.