I'm intrigued by games (or movies) that are based on real life events such as wars. My main question is what is held sacred? As in, when is it okay to make a game about an event where horrible things happened? Is it all in the presentation? Movies can be argued as being enlightening or honoring towards something that happened, like the movies based on 911 or war movies that cast a very serious and realistic light on a war. Games, however, would be a lot harder to reason that it honors the memory of the fallen.
For games that already exist. Does playing through a simulation of real life events ever move you to think about the weight of what really happened? In the comfort of your own home, but sitting in a PT boat, storming the beaches of Normandy, do you think about what it must have felt like for your Grandfather or his brothers?
I'm curious what the rest of the gaming community thinks about this topic.
elmertheowl
It's tricky. There are no rules where taste and tact are concerned (as there shouldn't be), but we're all bound to have loose personal standards for what's entertainment-worthy and what's not.
The catch is this: video-gaming is, by its nature, a "light" excercize. Where a book or even a movie can be accepted, culturally, as a serious or respectful reflection of a real-life event, video games don't fill a particulaly meditative slot in our society. Any form of entertainment which puts a virtual gun in a teenager's hands and permits him to re-enact a true-life event is, in my opinion, approaching the subject lightly. It is, as we ourselves say, "all in fun."
So while I reject the idea of rules or fixed standards for what's tasteful, I find myself thinking that time (in a historical sense) is a key factor for me. The less time elapsed since the actual event, the less likely I am to find the game personally tasteful. Time gives the nasty wrinkles of a contemporary event--political heat, personal losses, bad feelings and animosity, public debate--a chance to cool and gives us a chance to explore what might be interesting, or fun, about a conflict. The older an event is, the easier it is to take it lightly.
But again, for me, personally, there are no set equations governing how this works. Some events will never sit lightly in my stomach during my lifetime--the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, for one, or the Holocaust, or the Rwandan conflict. I think that even 50 years from now, I'll be personally uncomfortable finding the "lighter" side of those events. Other events slip more easily into game-able territory. I feel more or less ready for a game inspired by the '91 Gulf War, for instance. Vietnam can be handled, if with care. The general fighting of WWII is fair game to me.
There's a lot of variablilty. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.
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