Instead, think of them as arcade rail shooters, and therefore solely about popping out from behind cover, popping heads, and occasionally popping a new clip into your gun. The trick to enjoying the mainstream singleplayer military shooter, which includes Modern Warfare and Battlefield, is to remove them from the broader first-person shooter genre. Let's move away from the moral quandaries and tonal contradictions, just for a moment. In fact, isn't it both dishonest and ethically abhorrent to do anything else? If your videogame is set in the real world and its characters kill hundreds of people without feels or personal injury, and then your videogame unthinkingly applauds those characters, you've created a multi-million dollar celebration not of heroism, but of violence and killing.Īnd the shooting is shit, too. But when your story is told with stony-faced seriousness, a little critical distance might be a good thing. You can portray war like a silly, globe-trotting disaster movie, as Modern Warfare does, and you can scrape by without questioning your character's relentless killing. Medal of Honor: Warfighter never gets near the “authenticity” it promised pre-release, but it has plenty to say about soldiers, and about war, and all of it is hateful.
Instead ee should criticise a game for the messages it communicates while we play. It can be unfair to criticise a videogame for failing to live up to its marketing, when developers so rarely control their own. #8: A lot of types of beard make you look like a bell-end. Your wife and child should probably just learn to accept both that and your inevitable death. #7: It is totally justifiable to repeatedly abandon your wife and child to go fight in a war.
#6: War is super-fun, and is a passion for some people, kind of like water skiing or samba dancing. #5: Tier One operators are total badasses and can kill hundreds of people on their own. #4: Bullets won't kill you if you're in the middle of a melee attack animation. #3: If you run far enough ahead of your squad, you might see the moment your enemies blink into existence. #2: A soldier's sidearm, whether a pistol or a machinegun, has infinite ammo. Things I have learned about war from the wholly authentic Medal of Honor: Warfighter: #1: Door opening privileges are granted with seniority.