A lot of video games are more or less murder simulators.
They let you do things that you cannot in real life and that includes unloading
hundreds of bullets into a crowd of enemies.
One thing that ruins a story of a game for me is when the main character
talks about how they are tired of killing people. How they want to end this
battle once and for all so no one else has to get hurt. Then we make our way to
our mission checkpoint… and kill about ninety people on the way.
Years ago many games were based on World War II, or space
battles. World War II because Nazis have always been painted as pure evil and
many people seem to agree that since the Japanese bombed the US at one point,
they could be killed as well. This doesn’t work in 2014. EA would like to sell
its games to Americans as well as Germans, the Japanese, Russians, the Chinese,
and anyone else. So who can we murder in the thousands that are at least Earth
creatures. Zombies.
The Half-Life and Halo series both let you rampage against
aliens and zombies in the same games. It’s a winning combination but a little
dated and doesn’t help the war culture all that much. Nazi Zombies in some of
the newer Call of Duty games are a hilariously obvious way to dodge some
bullets in these instances. This of
course doesn’t always include Germans to whom this may still be a little too
real, at least according to the game developers’ legal departments.
Image from Bionic Commando German version on the right. http://www.destructoid.com/censorship-in-germany-how-they-changed-your-fav-games-268854.phtml
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