In Defense of World War II Games

There are a lot of World War II movies. There's also a lot of books on the subject, as well as tabletop strategy games, and video games, the list goes on. WWII was so massive, so important, that its influence and legacy lives on. Things happened in World War II that are directly and indirectly responsible for events happening now. It was the last big war on Western European soil, a landscape many of us have a connection to or are familiar with. It was a war that accellerated technology, firmly moving war out of the industrial age into the modern age. So it goes without saying that the biggest appeal of the genre comes with its drama, location, its combatants, the mythology surrounding it (particularly the Nazi fascination with the occult) and its justifications.

That said, there are a lot of people who complain that there are too many World War II games. While that's an understandable viewpoint, it is a bit shortsighted and unfortunately the genre itself propagates it. Every time a game comes out set in WWII some people complain, which in turn causes other people to complain, following suit like lemmings. But World War II isn't a specific genre of game, it's only a setting that many genres from FPS to strategy, even an MMO, utilize.

My question is, why all the complaints about there being too many games set in World War II when there are hundreds if not thousands of games taking place in some generic sci-fi or fantasy setting? You could argue that "generic space or fantasy setting" could be any universe at any point in time. But that doesn't hold water in the face of, ironically, lack of creativity. Sci-fi settings nearly all have the same things: lasers, aliens, hyperdrives, et cetera. They always go out of their way to make sure the evil looking ones really are evil. Fantasy? Same issue- swords and sorcery. Elves? Check. Orcs? Check. Magic? Check. Magic armour? Checkity check. At least World War II was a real world setting and therefore has some built-in restrictions, which excuses them from the lack of originality/creativity argument, and in addition, it's far back enough in time that it avoids political issues that a game set in the modern day, or even as far back as Vietnam, would not. Science fiction and fantasy settings don't have these restrictions yet by and large they're all basically knockoffs of Star Trek, Heinlein, and Tolkien. It's totally the developers' fault, of course. With a sci-fi or fantasy setting, they have the option of showing players something new, but more often than not, they don't take that option. That makes it hard to find something that does something different, and to have it be good on top of that is like finding a diamond in a sea of shit. Fallout was revolutionary because it stepped away from the saturation of fantasy in the cRPG genre, changed the way cRPGs were played, introduced the concept of retrofuturism into gaming as a whole, and either avoided most of the usual science fiction tropes or used them deliberately. There is a new space RTS coming out called StarCraft 2. Lasers? Check. Aliens? Check. Glowing bits? Checkchekchchhcclhekcehefkkikekekekekekekekeke

Second of all, the two biggest contributers to the conception of WWII games being ubiquitous has been Medal of Honor and Battlefield 1942. Medal of Honor has what, 10 games in the series? They're pretty much all crap, too, with the exception of Infiltrator and to some extent Airborne. BF1942 had a huge following for years and is largely responsible for there being a heavy multiplayer element in WWII games these days, though it's been reduced to a bunch of hardcore clan fags who scream cheater for doing stuff that's described in the manual. Granted, there are quite a few WWII series, but to be perfectly honest World War 2 has been a common theme in games since the days of tabletop wargaming. I had a history teacher who had so many wargames I suggested that he could basically re-enact every battle of World War II from the invasion of Poland in 1939 all the way to the battle of Berlin. This tradition continued into the strategy genre of PC gaming, and into the RTS subgenre.

I think the fascination these days with World War II- a fascination which seemed to die out in the 70s and 80s, in part because of Vietnam- is due to Saving Private Ryan, which was the first WWII film to truly portray the sheer brutality of the war. It used to be, if a character died, he would just fall over, no blood- thanks to the censors that controlled Hollywood. As the censors lost power and faded away, it's become much more realistic, culminating with Saving Private Ryan. The film was revolutionary in the war movie genre, and established a certain style that would be used in war movies since. This happened just as FPS games were beginning to come into their own and break away from the "Doom clone" label.Okay, granted, there was Castle Wolfenstein way back on the Apple II, and then Wolfenstein 3D, but they weren't really about famous battles- instead it played on the espionage and intrigue that took place behind enemy lines. The lack of realistic locations, too, was a result of the technology of the time. The first FPS to ever actually show some simile of WWII combat was actually a mod for Duke Nukem 3D that came out in 1997. The creators went on to make WW2GI, which sucked. The point is that Duke3D was one of the first games to portray a real-world setting as realistically as possible, proving that FPS games were more than just the same damn hallway over and over and over. This allowed for a level of detail that previous games could not reach- and thus the modern WWII shooter was born.

The truth is, there's nothing wrong with the genre itself. The problem isn't that there are a lot of games with that setting. It's that too many of them tend to share a lot of the same issues: an overreliance on the American viewpoint, lack of meaningful character development (something Brothers in Arms tries to fix, with very good results), overreliance on the most famous battles (Omaha Beach and Normandy come to mind), too much emphasis on the European front compared to the Pacific, very little plot (just because it's historical doesn't mean you can't expand on the story; this is made all the more apparent with the lack of characterization), and what plot there is tends to be the usual flag-waving "let's hear it for the grunts" trope that propagates the idea that America won World War II singlehandedly, a problem that afflicts most WWII films as well. If you're going to complain about WWII games, complain about the above issues. But there's no point in complaining about the whole of WWII- Europe, Africa, Asia- as a setting unless you're going to complain about fantasy as a setting or sci-fi as a setting.