Next week the highly anticipated Battlefield 3 will be released. And yesterday they released a Launch-Trailer. Probably best to watch it first:
I have to say, I wasn't that impressed. Battlefield 3 looks really good but in my opinion it still comes off second compared to real images. Additionaly I knew almost every gameplay-sequence from watching other trailers or videos.
And somehow I even thought it was a bit disgusting to mix those two worlds like that. I don't want the things happening in the game to be real! Those life-action-sequences force me to think about how war is in real life. And I don't want to do that when I play a game. Those drips of sweat that run down that guys cheek could be mixed with drips of blood seeping out of a headshot wound within seconds. Then he would be dead. Those things happen, every day, somewhere. And I think that's really fucked up.
When I play a shooter, it has nothing to do with war for me. Of course real war is what those kinds of games try to emulate. And of course the Battlefield-Series most notably prides itself in being closest to reality in regards of graphics and gameplay. But even so those games are abstractions that completely block out something like the suffering that is part of the real war. When you are killed in multiplayer you have to wait a few seconds at the most and can then proceed to kill or be killed again. And I haven't stumbled upon a singleplayer-campaign that adressed this in any way either.
I think this is the case because it is important to to blank out that part. If you were forced to again and again think about the fact that what you are playing right now in your living room is at this moment lethal reality for another person somewhere in the world, you (or at least I) would probably feel kind of bad.
You (or at least I) neatly block this kind of stuff out. And then all we see in those games are great "shooters" (not "war games") that provide us with the opportunity to compete with other players or solve difficult tasks. Opponents of those kinds of games probably will argue that they make war appear harmless. But in my opinion they just don't - they are something completely different. It doesn't matter how many hours, days, weeks I spend playing shooters, I still can't bring myself to watch the "Collateral Murder"-Video and it still makes me sick to look at the pictures of Gaddafis corpse.
That's why I don't think it's a smart move by EA to mix game and reality like this. We all know that Battlefield 3 is more realistic "than anything before". But those kinds of games do ONLY work because they won't ever be fully realistic in certain aspects - fortunately! Because of their nature those life-action images associate all the real aspects of war - even those that normally are being completely left aside. In a way they bypass the gap that normally exists - and should exist - between game and reality. Perhaps it even is an easy bait for those die-hard "violent video game"-adversaries: After watching this trailer, no one can claim that the game doesn't have anything to do with reality, they might say.
All in all there are two things I have an issue with regarding this trailer: On the one hand the shooter-gamer-me doesn't want to be reminded of what "shoot" means in real life. I want to relax - and if I like I can still donate money to Amnesty International independent of my gaming habits. On the other hand I think the way "real" and "virtual" are connected here is at least a bit problematic. A shooter is a shooter and precisely not "real war". To cross the border that separates them is probably the main fear of opponents of the shooter-genre. A trailer that blurs this line could be just what they have been waiting for in order to make their point.
I do realize that the trailer is above all focussing on the fancy graphics. But as soon as life-action-images are involved, everything that is connected to them also gets part of the deal.
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