Is gaming culture too fargone to ever divest itself from war culture?

Billion dollar acquisitions to acquire rights to guns, arenas, and the term “killing spree.” When does it stop? How? Anybody else have a problem booting up pubg?

Maybe you should grab a cup of camomile tea?

Gaming culture is a subset of the broader societal culture, and society has been steeped in war fetishism and normalization for centuries longer than video games have existed. Gaming culture was too far gone the moment chess was invented.

I think a better question might be "why are humans so likely to express violence in their art?"

And I don't mean to approach that from a sophomore literature studies perspective, I mean, is there something about us that makes us enjoy violent things? An incredible number of stories involve someone or something getting killed, so are we just naturally bent towards that in ways we can't help? If you take a group of infants and raise them in the most sanitized, sheltered way possible, free of all news and media that depict any sort of violence whatsoever and then let them play Call of Duty, will any of them enjoy it or will they reject it as barbaric and awful? Or will they have discovered violence in playing around as children?

I don't think those are bad questions to ask, but also I obviously think it's a much broader topic than "gaming culture sure has a lot of war in it".

When you see the US Army peddling e-sports to try to get recruitment numbers up, you have my permission to troll the shit out of them. If they get defensive, tell them it's okay; a veteran said you could.

It's all around us. Movies, books, music, games. It's been like this for decades. Here's the thing: games are art. Art reflects culture. Games embrace war culture because that's the world we live in. If you want to argue that certain games about war are crass or insensitive or exploitative, I'm right there with you.

Art reflects culture. And culture is never just one thing. There are countless games that aren't about war, too. There are some games, like This War of Mine or Valiant Hearts, that explicitly seek to show war in a way that doesn't glorify it.

To answer your specific question: PUBG is the kind of game I don't take issue with because I tend to accepting games about modern war thar DON'T have a story.

Yeah, it's definitely not excusive to video games. Fortunately, there are a billion video games out there now, and plenty of them that aren't gamifying very real wars. It's easy for me to just ignore that stuff and bury myself in games that I want to engage with instead.

Most video games are violent at their core with the exception of, I suppose, puzzle games, racing games and aircraft/truck simulators. I'd rather people knock skulls to get their frustations out in the virtual world than in the real one thank you very much.

I don't know that games are that steeped in war culture, with some exceptions. I think it's more the other direction - that is, violent conflict is a naturally game-y and fun thing, particularly shooting guns, and so war makes a good milieu for a story that revolves around that kind of gameplay. In a hypothetical alien culture that was similar to ours but much more peaceful and without war, I imagine shooting games would still be popular, because, well, it's fun to shoot things. Just like other non-violent activities like skiing or tennis are fun. All that said, the war fetishization in games like Call of Duty etc makes me feel a bit icky at times.

@brian_: thought you were going to say bury your head in the sand.

Microsoft has been making a big deal about grandstanding for cause A and cause B. Don't see them doing anything signficant on the guns front. About as likely as the NRA to change stances.

This topic always reminds me of this video of Yoko Taro waxing philosophically about video games as a hand puppet in order to promote Drakengard 3. It also serves as a reminder that that dude has always been a weido.

When people stop buying them.

@finaldasa: can I get banned for one word? Simple

Just the fact that posts like these exist make me crack up.

This isn't a serious answer to the question, war should never happen again, but i do enjoy it as a backdrop for entertainment.

If I may I like this topic, but I think I have an alternative perspective that does not take away from this being “an” issue, but perhaps one that has been skewed by our media and it biases. Just hear me out….

If older Boomer have a "Fox News" problem, then gamers have an IGN, Kotuku, Reddit, and Digital Trends problem. These outlets push constant about PUBG, Fortnight, Apex, GTA Online, etc. shows such flawed analysis of what is actually being played every day. Also the games media tend to watch what is being played through the filter of Steam whereas older gamers don't play through that portal. I own Sims 4 I don't play is by starting Value Steam...so steam has no clue how often that game is played and thereby the games media has no clue either!

If older Boomer have a "Fox News" problem, then gamers have an IGN, Kotuku, Reddit, and Digital Trends problem. These too common news stories about Fortnight, PUBG, Apex, GTA Online, etc. shows such flawed analysis of what is actually being played every day. What is being played is not shown by watching Steam statistics...like that should be obvious...but seemingly is not.

I would guess 90% of the game industry is not making war games. And such games only appear to be popular because we only look at the stats coming out of a very tilted and biased aggregator of games that appears to younger male game players. So, guess what the most popular games are likely Roblox, Rust, Pac-Man Google Doodle, Minecraft: Dungeons, Ark, Forza Horizon 4 , Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes; and older games you can get form any places like Tetris, Animal Jam, Words with Friend, Wordle, Sudoku, Scrabble, Candy Crush, etc.

Now should gamers be concerned/thoughtful that games like Fortnight, PUBG, Apex, GTA Online makes tones of money and make tons of headlines about making the money? Sure. However, the biggest issue in gaming is likely not the military-industrial games complex; there are so many issues from sexism, racism, poor management, and crunch that matter a lot. The human resources/HR issues are dozens issues and military games is but one issue that is the sociology of games. I personally think the HUMAN issues of how games are made are far more numorous and far more pressing. JMO.

It's a very short and vague question that I'm not sure has a solid answer. I would say, in my own perspective, that yes, the largely mainstream understanding of "gamer culture" is awful. Toxic online harassment, exclusionary rhetoric and myopic love of a single thing a single way and that is shooters or madden and nothing else. Now, I don't think that is what games culture as a broader scope is, though that particular segment of it does exist and those people are pretty universally reviled by the rest it seems. Mainstream perception has latched onto that because it generate headlines that non-gamers can identify and deem glad they aren't gamers. I mean, hell, it's that perception that makes me not tell a date that I play video games until I'm fairly sure they like the rest of me first.

However, games are not just one thing, they are ten thousand things, and the amalgam of those things into one single greater culture is extremely hard to quantify. The person that loves shooters might also really dig visual novels, the puzzle gamer might also play RPGs, and yet another person my absolutely adore flight sims and hate every other video game they have ever touched. There are so many mixes that the combinations of tastes and how they influence any overall culture are astronomical.

Now, narrowing down to the use of war in games, yeah, there is an argument to be made that it's over-represented, but you would also have to say the same about just about all fictional mediums. Novels, movies, anything involving narrative is typically informed by conflict in the most popular examples. And the most identifiable, big expression of conflict is war. And war involves killing. It's were so many fictional stories go, especially when trying to tell big stories that involve lots of characters. I don't think games can be blames for promoting war any more than other mediums. The difference is that you act as a participant in them, and that old chestnut of a argument has been kicking since their invention. I'm not on the side of thinking there is a connection to games and violence, or even games and jingoism as has been expressed about games like call of duty. I think they exist because the jingoism was already there in the people that play them, and I think that comes from several very complicated places in the development of a person.

Looking at the wide variety of games out there, especially lately in the indie scene, that aren't about killing or war is proof that gamer culture isn't just ra-ra killing spree shit. I played Lake recently and loved it, same with Unpacking and and Dream Daddy and Tetris Effect. Now, I also like Mortal Kombat and Destiny 2, but they are not the majority of what I play. Things can be more than one thing and still be valid things. It's always been that way.

So to boil down your question to a yes or no answer: no. Gaming culture is not too far gone to divest itself from war culture because it has already done so in a lot of areas. Also, it doesn't really need to anymore than any other thing needs to, which is that they all don't need to. Fiction is fiction, it's fair game.

The real question (now that I’ve learned that I have to bait investment in my threads… wouldn’t it be nice if they all weren’t torn down prematurely) is. DOES ADVANCE WARS COME OUT FOR SWITCH?

@sometingbanuble:

Yes. But i do think that they might delay releasing it until a moment in time where the war is not on the front of our minds. That might sound hard to imagine right now, but we did mostly stop thinking about the war in the Donbass region that has been going on since 2014. If the war gets into a phase where it's no longer two armies clashing and cities being attacked, i think it will relatively quickly move to the back of the news pecking-order. Just like we don't hear news from the Gaza strip every other week anymore.

Naturally tensions will be very high and we'll hear a lot more about Russia vs NATO in the next years, and all sorts of skirmishes and cyberattacks, but that's far enough removed from the army vs army war that Advance Wars portrays.

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-advance-wars-release-delayed-russia-ukr-1848627652

Came here to see if there was discussion of this. I completely get why they did this, especially since the plot revolves around what is essentially a Russian invasion. Still, majorly disappointed as I was planning to buy this day 1 and put hundreds of hours into it. It seems so petty to complain about it when people are dying, but, well, I'm human and I wanted to play this. Now thinking I'll try to buy the original games on cartridge or figure out how to pirate them. The release is "delayed" but considering the political situation I doubt it will come out this year at all.

The lighthearted tone in these games was always funny to me - like, war is a fun adventure! But what really happens when you capture cities and such? Is there actually a major war happening in this universe with huge casualties? And yet somehow it is all so damn cute and charming. I kinda love it. But yeah... the tone is not going to sit well with a lot of people right now. Must be hugely disappointing for the dev team.