There’s nothing wrong with being Libertarian and playing War games. Video Games are just to entertain, I even play CoD MW2, and the MGS series is one of my favorite.
The point is, Games are Games, they are fiction, and just meant to entertain. They aren’t supposed to arouse a taste for the military,guns, statism, ect.
The militaristic and guns in games, is to appeal to the masses. The little kids that rage on Xbox Live COD need cool explosions, guns, and war like in Gi-Joe and Halo.
Ha, I remember seeing something like this before (probably something about military training actually). I was thinking more of the person who plays Call of Duty all day, eating junkfood, and avoiding sunlight. To a greater extent the South Park WoW episode hits what I mean.
I love video games, I can’t wait for Mass Effect 2, Dante’s Inferno and FF13. I’m pretty sure there’s something else awesome coming out this year, I’m just forgetting.
I also can’t wait to see Wolfman.
As far as some favorite violent movies of mine: Kill Bill, Legend of Drunken Master, Inglourious Basterds, Clint Eastood movies, Saw I-IV…
Multiplayer first shooter games really have nothing to do with glorifying war. It’s all about tactics, skill and fun, and nothing about ideology. It’s like playing chess or mariokart.
Single player missions are something that does carry ideology, and I personally loathed at the single player mode of COD4 because it was clear a lot of it had nothing to do with self-defense.
I enjoy strategy and stealth based games, with a bit of first person shooter and role playing on the side. My favorite games include: Civilization IV, Alpha Centauri, SimCity’s 3000 and 4, Oddworld, Splinter Cell, Freedom Fighters, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, all of the CSI games, Law and Order: Dead On The Money, Rome Total War, Empire Total War, Hearts of Iron, Company of Heroes, Aquaria and Dwarf Fortress.
As for film, I tend to enjoy comedy and action. Some of my favorites, both animated and live action, are: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars sextology, Watchmen, 300, the Batman series, Iron Man, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, Hot Fuzz, the Aladdin trilogy, The Longest Day, Sherlock Holmes and Ratatouille.
I’m not much of one for the written word (more one for the typed word), but I have enjoyed the Harry Potter series and what material I do read tends to be encyclopedic and fictional.
Make of that what you will.
I had insight today in the narrow field on video game praxeology, which is basically that 99% of theorems do not work. Self defense does not work often (one exception being tower defense games on flash) as a theme, and people want to live the fantasy of escaping the real world to a place with different laws and ethics. In fact, to look at video games and say they do not portray economics correctly is to entirely miss the point.
Video games can have parts that are usually decided by subjective intermingling in an objective way. For example, in Final Fantasy, you will not go to a store and find that better weapons are cheaper because there is more of that mineral lying around. The price to create that weapon for the game world is actually ziltch, so the price has to be determined objectively based on ability to perform in comparison to other items of the same type. This is true for all single player interactions. The interactions have an objective value in comparison to all other possible actions. These values were decided upon by the designers.
Only an intelligent designer can create such an objective world, so an intelligent designer made it. It is not only praxeology that can be thrown out because of this fact, but also any other system other than mathematics and sensual output.
Oh i love my video games. The street fighter and virtua fighter series are very high on my list- the quick thinking and dexterity required is thrilling. Games like that aren’t just pretty to look at- they can get pretty deep and there are large gaps of skill- some so large that highly skilled players of games like Street Fighter such as Justin Wong charge people money to get a chance to play them and get advice on how to improve.
RPG’s like Final Fantasy or Fallout are also great fun- games can be an experience of getting better at something and being the “best” at it- or getting into a completely new world and enjoying its story, or just having fun with friends.
Then there are games like Metal Gear Solid - which start out as you being a simple cog in the war machine doing their bidding- then of course things change- and the protaganist ends up finding out the truth about the constant struggle for control over the lives of individuals. . Japanese made games in general seem to have more of a theme that war is hell and nothing to be proud of. The Final Fantasy series has had a bunch of games where all powerful empires were antagonists.
That’s a sweeping statement. What is America’s Army? It is a recruiting tool commissioned by the military. Jet when you look at a number of other games they are not that different.
It is not a conspiracy but the fact is that there exists a constituency that worships the armed forces from afar and thinks war is some usually hi-tech affair where the bad guys get rightfully slaughtered by their hundreds and certain games tap into that. And by doing this and offering new products of the type they perpetuate and enlarge this constituency.
Explain to me why did Reagan love the Rambo series? Obviously he saw that it was doing something useful for him.
I agree with the essence of this post. I think some of the other posters might have it backwards, in that these kinds of games and movies are created because people enjoy them… they’re not created to make people enjoy them and start to love the military or what-have-you.
I also like the anecdote from Walter Block on Rothbard: “In other ways, however, Murray seemed to be just the sort of person my parents had always warned me about. He kept odd hours, and soon had me staying up to 5:00 a.m., playing, of all things, the game Risk, and cackling on about how only anarchists could really enjoy the game, since they were the only ones who really didn’t want to take over the whole world.”
What?! Seriously guys, I’ll never again experience the thrill that this gave me…
…until I witness the actual rise of anarchy. While I suspect that Mises himself, judging form his aggressive tone in Omnipotent Government would have wasted hours with this:
I find ironic these claims of games becoming military propoganda.
Games are too tame these days. They are becoming progressively more peaceful. To the point that it is ridiculous.
For example: The first computer roleplaying games were wargames. Actually, pen and paper roleplaying games were also based on wargames (see: Chainmail). They were just about killing and destroying as effectively as one can. The “roleplaying” term did not refer to story/drama re-enactment. It referred to the specialised roles to be played by each customised unit in battle. Wizardry, Might and Magic, Wasteland, The Bard’s Tale, and others were all full fledged combat games. Suddenly, 20 years down the road started coming all these games like Fallout, Torment, and all the BioWare games. Suddenly, these games weren’t even about fighting at all. In fact, large portions of these games were without fighting, and often allowed you to skip them. They instead had everything else - the filler dialogue, the filler puzzles, the filler story, the filler minigames. These were now less about the wargaming and more about LARPing. In the past few years, computer roleplaying games have been entirely interactive movie drama than actual wargames which they have historically meant to be.
Then, first-person shooters. They used to be bloody. They used to have hundreds of enemies rushing at you at the speed of lightning. Now, first-person shooters are more cinematic than game. They are more about experiencing drama and story in first-person. This was a ridiculous trend started by Half-Life, which resembles more a platformer than a shooter. More about jumping from platform to platform and solving puzzles in different areas than the good old Doom/Quake style shooting and killing. And this CoD series, which you just called military propoganda are all tame and peaceful cinematic fests that are more passive than active. Hell, CoD4 had a mission called All Ghillied Up, where you simply do a Simon Says and follow the other guy in the ghillie suit and do what he does.
Games in general are more peaceful. Strategy games used to have massive armies clashing each other. Nowadays, they just have a few odd units attacking each other in petty skirmishes, with strict unit caps preventing you from making more. Look at Company of Heroes or Dawn of War. You can count the number of people you see on the screen on your hands.
Videogames have now been emasculated and feminized to the point that girly men who are too afraid to actually play a game now have games that play themselves for them. Not the real games of the past which would grind your nose in dirt, kick you in the teeth, and laugh at your face.
Alas, gone are those days!
What a bizarre post!
This reminds me of an appropriate mash-up of war propaganda.
I stopped watching movies last year when I realized there have not been any good films this past decade (except There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men) and I was wasting my time and money. The only new movie I want to see is Inception by ChrisNolan.
Video games have me asking myself do humans want freedom or just a representation of it?
I typically take entertainment for what it is and don’t let it alone influence my world view. This is not to say I do not, for instance, recognize or consider a message which might be delivered by way of a good movie–but I’m going to rely on much more than entertainment media to shape my opinions. I don’t read many novels, most of the literature I read is non-fiction. I thoroughly enjoy all kinds of movies. And I’m very interested in many types of games, including military shooters and the like, which makes sense considering I’m pursuing a career in game development from the art side.
I’m against censorship.
+10,000.
Much more entertaining and a higher replay value.
Which then leads to shooting the arm off a Russian mobster, killing your way to an evac point and then killing wave after wave of Russian soldiers for a solid minute while you wait for the chopper.
Which games are those? Pong? Newspaper boy?
I love the Wolfenstein series. Because you just can’t go wrong if you make a game about killing nazis–especially zombie nazis. And for the nostalgia of playing Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple ][e.
And I enjoy Dale Brown/Tom Clancy/Larry Bond technothrillers.
^This^
I enjoyed the crap out of the Bourne trilogy.
I think it is naive and idealistic to believe that war of any sort would not exist if the state were to go away, and condemning media with militaristic motifs is a bit silly (or rather, pointless). It is obvious that the state certainly facilitates the practice of war (or one could say even glorifies it), but to pretend that it is solely responsible for the phenomenon of organized violence and such is absurd. Personally, I think that even if the world became a stateless society, ceteris parabis, war and militaries would still exist in some form or another.