isyourguy

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Posts posted by isyourguy

  1. Posted

    You're correct! I would contend however, that both a) Hogan's Heroes didn't depict Nazis (Klink was a lifelong military man who was decorated in the Great War, etc) and B) (my second point is way cool) that many of those sorts of comedies and sketches took place before people in the public at large were aware of the tremendous wartime atrocities that were committed under the Nazi party. I just put it forth as a thought, and it's also possible I should have said "American" rather than Western audience? But if I wanted to forge on with that line of thought regardless, you could say that sort of mocking was done when the Nazis were Bad Guys and not seen as the utter Evil they're now portrayed to be? I don't know if you had particular images in mind when you were thinking of this but my mind goes to Monty Python and various contemporaries or earlier. 

     

    I'd also say that mocking Hitler specifically is quite different from laughing at Nazism writ large. it's the mustache.

     

    Right, then you're getting in to what did it mean to be a Nazi during that period which is a whole different kettle of fish that I'm neither qualified or keen to get in to. I think it really does depend on how you were brought up and what you were taught. To me, Hitler is the personification of the Nazi party values. I can't really divorce the two. I don't believe you can mock Hitler as a person when the first thing we think is that he was the leader of one of the most disgusting political movements the Earth has ever seen. He *is* the Nazi party to a lot of people. That said, could mocking Hitler for his moustache without referencing the atrocities committed under his rule be considered insensitive? Isn't it minimizing the damage in its own way? To be honest, I'm really not sure. This whole topic feels super uncomfortable to talk about on the web so I might duck out here. It's been incredibly eye opening though. Thanks for the myriad of alternate perspectives!

  2. Posted

    ... Saying that Soviets are the bad guys but Nazis are evil is probably the best point that's been said thus far. I don't think it would even have been possible for Luftrausers to push their aesthetic into Red Alert territory (which is precisely what I was wondering in an earlier post) because bad guys can be made comical but true evil can only ever be evil...

     

    I don't know if that's strictly true. Hogan's Heroes springs to mind along with innumerable British comedy sketches. The Nazis have been mocked regularly and incessantly since the end of the war. To draw an arbitrary line between both ideologies/factions/time periods seems kinda weird. I totally agree with your point about the Vlambeer statement though. I'm really not sure why they gave this weird and nebulous response.

    In the end I'm just confused as to why Bugs vs. Tanks is problematic, but Stalin vs. Martians is a-okay. If you played as the bugs and were destroying the cartoonishly evil Nazis would it be any better?

  4. Posted

    The Cold War still isn't done as well as it should be in school. The professor with whom I work covers it reasonably well, but her colleague doesn't, because he assumes the students know all about it, even though none of them were alive at the same time as the USSR was around. I think the Cold War's only really beginning to be thought of as something distinct from our historical "now", which is part of what's giving us great new period films like Tinker, Tailor, so maybe I'm revising my initial statement to be that communism hasn't been digested that well either? There has to be a difference between two roughly similar ideologies of evil to account for their different places in our mental landscape, though. Maybe it is just that we fought a war with one and not the other? It can't be that simple, no.

    Yeah I don't think it can, and with that I really can't think of anything else to add. I think we've hit the wall. (More accurately, the limits of my knowledge on the topic)

    I don't know we'll ever be able to have any sort of satisfactory resolution until everyone who ever spoke to anyone who was there is dead

    ... Badass.

  5. Posted

    I think the fundamental difference between something like Luftrausers and something like Papers Please is that in the latter the aesthetic is used for a narrative purpose, to tell a story that wouldn't work the same way with a different aesthetic. The perceived danger (I don't necessarily know where I fall on the issue yet) is that by CASUALLY adopting the aesthetic you risk weakening the cultural sentiment somehow, or it seems like you're disregarding the horrible things it's associated with.

     

    I totally agree, but that just leaves me with more questions. It's easy to see Luftrausers taking a pretty cavalier approach to Nazism when they adopt the imagery and use it as a wrapper for a fun plane-shooty-boom game, but could you not say a similar thing for Papers Please? Doesn't reducing ANY issue down to a series of video game mechanics invariably leave you with something that could be perceived as insensitive by people with a much more intimate relationship with the issue? Are we giving these sort of games a pass because they're 'art games' and we're looking at them through the lense of video games instead of the lense of media in general? Am I turning too many of my thoughts into questions?

     

     

    I'm glad you decided to make such a great first post, isyourguy. It's close to the same one I wanted to post. I don't really understand why Papers Please and Dear Leader escape mention, just because their mechanics force you to act out the reprehensible ideology that their aesthetics evoke. Would Luftrausers be getting less guff if you were bombing villages and strafing refugees in Spain and Eastern Europe? I doubt it, because you'd still be playing a Nazi, which was why many people disliked Brenda Romero's Train on principle. Why does the Red Alert series get a pass for evoking Soviet aesthetics without having mechanics that own up to the equally horrific mass killings under Stalin? Probably because Soviet symbology is seen as quaint and even goofy, although probably not to the Poles and Hungarians and Ukrainians who suffered under it, while Nazi symbology is seen as menacing, with good reason.

     

    ...

     

    Thanks! I'm glad you decided to follow it up with such awesome posts! It's definitely a weird issue and seems to be applied totally unevenly. I can't really speak to the curriculum of other countries, but the atrocities in Russia didn't really get much of a look in here. If so, that might have something to do with the general lack of furore over things like Red Alert, Dear Leader, etc. I totally agree with you about the perception of Soviet symbology by the way! People have no qualms with wearing clothes or paraphernalia adorned with Soviet markings. I can't imagine anyone feeling the same way about Swastikas.

    I don't know. It's a weird, ambiguous and huge issue that hurts my head to think about. In the end I don't quite get how people can so easily level these accusations at Luftrausers with one hand and heap praise upon Papers Please with the other.

    Going a little off topic, but there's a TV series I've been meaning to watch and this thread reminded me of it. It's called Generation War and has been described as the "German Band of Brothers". Naturally the reception has been mixed.

  6. Posted

    (I want to preface this post by stating I'm not trying to derail or nullify anyone's position on this issue or the issue as a whole. I hope I don't come across that way.)

     

    Is the issue that Luftrausers appropriates the imagery of history's 'bad guys' and makes them playable? It's hardly the first game to do this, right? It seems like a really weird game to finally tip the scales too, especially since it's such an over-the-top caricature of Nazi Germany. To top it off it has little to no bearing on your actions in the game, you're just shooting planes and boats. You'd be shooting planes and boats if you were playing as jolly old tea-and-crumpets or the star-spangled turbo eagle factions. Do games like Dear Leader and Papers Please exploit the horrific actions of nations throughout history as a justification of their mechanics or to tell their stories? If so, it seems like it's only okay to reference horrible events in history if you've got a poignant message to get across that ultimately condemns those actions. Then there's Red Alert 1, where the Soviet campaign has you playing as Stalin's ultra-war-commander dude. I'm pretty sure one of the first missions involves you actually slaughtering unarmed civilians.

     

    Okay I've totally forgotten what I was talking about. That Red Alert thing is really fucked up. Am I actually remembering that correctly? They run and try to hide in their houses at which point you just blow those up and a bunch of tiny flaming bodies come streaming out. Jesus Christ. That's messed up...