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heybeardo

The Ethics of Battlefield: Hardline

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The specific themes of this game (police militarization, etc) may strike a personal nerve with someone that the more war oriented shooters do not, which could then provoke more of a reaction.  That's not to say the other games are totally okey-dokely fine, but their existence doesn't preclude someone having a problem here. 

Right, but [insert everything SAM said in his last post]. I'm not saying anyone shouldn't be bothered. I just don't get why this is the first time I've heard such outrage about a game like it.

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It's just in the air. The militarization of police is a big topic, and this game (from the name and pedigree) naturally invites people to make connections.

 

That said, it wouldn't stop me from enjoying it. They didn't make a game about SWAT teams with no-knock warrants shooting your dog and throwing a flash bang into your baby's crib. It's all just movie violence from what I've seen.

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I mentioned some of that in my post Cine! Also, to go a step further, if we're talking about actual criminal behavior, more innocent money has been stolen and blown up by the banks than by theft. In Colorado, legal pot growers can't get bank accounts out of the banks stated fear of prosecution in a future regime change, but HSBC has ADMITTED (and paid 2 billion in fines) to willingly laundering billions of narco cartel money.

 

In my fantasy version of the game the robbers say "we're going to stick it to these rich fucks" and the cops say the same thing and steal the money as well, just more cynically. 

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I'm going to have to just accept that some people find this offensive when I don't in the slightest. 

 

Sometimes it's OK for things to just be fun. I sincerely doubt that there will be civilians in this game that as a cop you can beat and earn points towards your goal. 

Anyway, I think I'm just going to bow out of this thread, I probably can't add anything more to the discussion other than "I like things that are fun."

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I'm going to have to just accept that some people find this offensive when I don't in the slightest.

Yeah, story of the internet, though.

For me, I find it a little uncomfortable for this game about cops and robbers murdering each other by the dozens to exist in a country where a single shooting is a national scandal and police were used to put down the Occupy movement with brutal force. It seems to me to be a level of ridiculous and ridiculously tone-deaf fantasy beyond your typical hyperreal military shooter, so I feel awkward, but not really angry.

Call me a hypocrite if you want, it's how I feel when I see a game about police and criminals shooting each other in the streets for money.

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Yeah, story of the internet, though.

For me, I find it a little uncomfortable for this game about cops and robbers murdering each other by the dozens to exist in a country where a single shooting is a national scandal and police were used to put down the Occupy movement with brutal force. It seems to me to be a level of ridiculous and ridiculously tone-deaf fantasy beyond your typical hyperreal military shooter, so I feel awkward, but not really angry.

Call me a hypocrite if you want, it's how I feel when I see a game about police and criminals shooting each other in the streets for money.

 

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This is what I don't get. Why is this the game that brings everyone to the edge? Why are the many years of glorifying war not just as terrible? We can all agree that killing is bad, right? So why don't people get up in arms every time we get another Modern Warfare? (Or, as is the case more often today, Near-Future Warfare.)

 

I think the issue is more that the setting has been (seemingly) applied simply on top of mechanics that really make more sense in a ground war.  For example a true cops and robbers game would probably involve some kind of sneaking/stealth while the criminals infiltrate, making arrests on the part of the police, etc.  However the mechanics of a battlefield style game only really focus on the application of deadly force and ignore, or simply don't respond to, everything else.  It essentially puts the police in the role of an occupying or conquering force rather than a peacekeeping one.  It asks the player to participate in the abandonment of due process and rewards you for doing so.  This isn't to say Military shooters don't do this kind of thing, but I believe in this instance it hits closer to home for people.  The comparison I keep making in my head is between my desire to play a game like Papers, Please vs someone who actually grew up or lived in a place where that kind of situation was the reality.  For me that game is fantasy, but for them it might be obscenity.

On a side note, if anyone is really interested in this kind of a topic check out Continuum.  A good portion of the show is about how the police force becomes more and more militaristic.

 

Edit: I haven't played the game yet, I have only seen some gameplay footage, so it is entirely possible I am misreading the game's intentions.

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I mentioned some of that in my post Cine! Also, to go a step further, if we're talking about actual criminal behavior, more innocent money has been stolen and blown up by the banks than by theft. In Colorado, legal pot growers can't get bank accounts out of the banks stated fear of prosecution in a future regime change, but HSBC has ADMITTED (and paid 2 billion in fines) to willingly laundering billions of narco cartel money.

 

In my fantasy version of the game the robbers say "we're going to stick it to these rich fucks" and the cops say the same thing and steal the money as well, just more cynically. 

 

I just want to point out that legal in Colorado does not mean legal federally. Any one of those pot growers could be arrested at any time by the FBI. Since the banks are national (and most likely headquartered in another state) they could be held to those standards rather than what Colorado says.

 

The whole state/fedral law thing is dumb, banks are dumb, and none of this invalidates your underlying point, but I'd hesitate to hold up one set of criminals to blame another.

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I think the issue is more that the setting has been (seemingly) applied simply on top of mechanics that really make more sense in a ground war.  For example a true cops and robbers game would probably involve some kind of sneaking/stealth while the criminals infiltrate, making arrests on the part of the police, etc.  However the mechanics of a battlefield style game only really focus on the application of deadly force and ignore, or simply don't respond to, everything else.  It essentially puts the police in the role of an occupying or conquering force rather than a peacekeeping one.  It asks the player to participate in the abandonment of due process and rewards you for doing so.  This isn't to say Military shooters don't do this kind of thing, but I believe in this instance it hits closer to home for people.  The comparison I keep making in my head is between my desire to play a game like Papers, Please vs someone who actually grew up or lived in a place where that kind of situation was the reality.  For me that game is fantasy, but for them it might be obscenity.

On a side note, if anyone is really interested in this kind of a topic check out Continuum.  A good portion of the show is about how the police force becomes more and more militaristic.

 

Edit: I haven't played the game yet, I have only seen some gameplay footage, so it is entirely possible I am misreading the game's intentions.

Right but that also just makes it all the more ridiculous and over-the-top like some dumb Hollywood action movie. Bad Boys was doing this a million years ago! This is Bad Boys the video game. If Bad Boys came out now would it get the same reaction? Is it just because this is a video game, and inherently more hands-on and cringe-worthy because of it?

 

Anyway, I don't think you're misreading the game's intentions. It is literally a hard conflict between cops and robbers. There is no solution that isn't blow each other right the fuck up.

 

Haha it's fun name-dropping Bad Boys. PCE I'M OUTTA HERE. (Also I haven't actually seen Bad Boys in a very long time, so I might be completely misremembering the movie's actual plot.)

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Maybe more like Lethal Weapon? I still wish that they hadn't used the Battlefield name for this.

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I played some of the beta.  It's surprisingly fun.  It's not different enough from battlefield proper to my liking though.  I wish there was a mode where the cops just had pistols and the robbers weren't flying helicopters and using parachutes.  It's a more focused battlefield right now but everything they're doing could easily work with the soldier vs soldier theme.  It's just a bit smaller.  I was hoping they'd take more advantage of the idea of cops and robbers.  But hey, maybe they're big work is going to be in the single player.  We saw in the trailer a copy arresting someone, you can't do that in multi at all.  Imagine if you could?  If the cops had to try super hard to not kill anyone that'd be kind of neat.  But nope.

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One thing I like about the game was the mechanic where the teams are taking percentages of the victory-conditions from a central source and then from each other's goals.

It's an interesting take on capture-the-flag.

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For the most part my thoughts here are arguing devil's advocate but I do think it's problematic to start expanding this stuff out. I was already vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that war was being painted in such a flagrant way by the ubiquitous soldier shooters, the fact that it could theoretically happen in other areas does bother me.

 

To take a thought from an old Thumb's episode. They once discussed the inclusion of torture as a plot point in the Splinter Cell games, and they weren't happy with the idea that it essentially implied a narrative that torture is a necessary evil to get important information. But in reality torture is not a method that always gets results. If people thought about it, sure they'd probably realise it's not going to always work. But in media you see it solve the problem every time, and your subconscious just absorbs that solution. Similarly if you just have it that police and criminals are in a war against each other and people just play it for 40 hours then they've been slightly more entrenched in the idea that it is an outright adversarial relationship.

 

Also about why this matters in games but not films/other mediums. Games are overly represented in the less serious end of the spectrum. It's quite rare to find serious treatment of themes in games (as in... actually serious. Not 'our game is serious and gritty') unlike in films where there's a wider range from silly actiony stuff to taking the art seriously. And also the fact that game involves real participation where you're enacting things rather than just observing them.

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So would you say it's pretty much the BF3 close quarters maps?

 

Pretty close to it, I'd say.  There are some really cool ideas, of course.  Buying grappling hooks and zip lines and stuff are super neat.  When I saw those things in the trailer I thought they'd be set up around the map somewhere and you could use them, but you can use them wherever you want.  It's super neat.

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Right but that also just makes it all the more ridiculous and over-the-top like some dumb Hollywood action movie. Bad Boys was doing this a million years ago! This is Bad Boys the video game. 

 

It would be Bad Boys the video game if the cowboy cops were white and fully supported by their superiors, and the bad guys used military tactics.

 

That is assuming that we're agreeing that Bad Boys doesn't have the same problems at smaller scale, which is possible. I haven't seen it recently either, but I'm reminded of how the 21 Jump Street movie had to deal with the TV show being a product of 80s-era drug paranoia. As our understanding of the world increases, we discover things that never seemed like they'd be problematic.

 

I think it's also a problem that both Cine and I had pretty horrified reactions to this, and the response from Griddle among others  was to dismiss those concerns as an overreaction without understanding where they're coming from, and whether they're rooted in cultures that are less blind to certain problems. It feels like an anime fan defending a harem show because it all makes sense in context and that girl's really 700 years old.

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It would be Bad Boys the video game if the cowboy cops were white and fully supported by their superiors, and the bad guys used military tactics.

I'm confused. Bad Boys stars two black guys. Or are you saying they should be white to compare to this game?

 

Either way, what.

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Yeah, wow, that's a hot mess of a sentence. Let's try again:

 

It would be Bad Boys the video game if they were black cowboy cops and not a white special response team with full support from their superiors, and the bad guys were just drug lords and not a bizarre paramilitary cell that is stooping to robbing banks.

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I said I wouldn't post here again, but that was when I had nothing useful to add. In an attempt to empathise with why people might find this offensive, I flipped it around in my head last night and I think I get it.

 

If this were Battlefield: Cowboys & Indians, I personally wouldn't find it offensive, but I could understand why someone would find it disgusting. It made me realise that it's probably because in my country there isn't the threat of gun crime and there certainly isn't something like militarization of the police. In the UK gun crime is pretty much non-existent, and the police have seen cut back after cut back that makes this setting of army cops vs paramilitary robbers seem about as realistic as Tolkien. 

 

I considered something similar that I might find offensive, that other people wouldn't. How about Battlefield: Colonialisation. I'm pretty sure that would put me on edge. Some people might think it's cool, there are plenty of movies about it but that doesn't necessarily make it OK to do again. 

 

I still think Cine and Merus reacted too strongly, but I definitely get why both are thinking like that. I don't think people are going to walk away after playing this game and think that a militarized police force is a good thing, nor do I think they'll want to become criminals. At worst people will think that shooting stuff is fun. I sometimes like dumb fun in games, I'm not ashamed of that, and I really don't want developers stopping ideas for dumb fun because it might offend some people, because in the end, this isn't about putting down black criminals, or shooting peaceful protesters. It's just a reskin of a war game. 

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Yeah, wow, that's a hot mess of a sentence. Let's try again:

 

It would be Bad Boys the video game if they were black cowboy cops and not a white special response team with full support from their superiors, and the bad guys were just drug lords and not a bizarre paramilitary cell that is stooping to robbing banks.

Haha okay. Yeah I see what you're saying, but... I dunno, is race/crime really relevant here? I mean, yes, I could totally see race being a factor if all of one side was white and all of another was non-white (not sure it'd matter which side was which), but (at least from what I could see in the demo I watched - please do correct me if I'm wrong) everyone was white (which is a completely different problem!). PARENTHESES. And as for the crime being committed, doesn't it being an utterly unrealistic type-of-crime-versus-type-of-criminal serve to put the game that much further in the realm of what-the-fuckery? 

 

My point in bringing up Bad Boys wasn't to provide a perfect analogue. It was to point out that pop culture media has long had over-the-top cop movies with big explosions. Maybe Bad Boys isn't the best example, I'll grant you that, but someone else suggested Lethal Weapon (which I've never seen, so I can't bring it up in good conscience), and if that's not good enough, well, c'mon, you know there's at least a long-lasting precedent here. I'm not saying THAT makes it okay either. I'm just trying to figure out why this game, right here, right now, THIS is the line that we suddenly can't cross. Because I don't understand that at all. I'll accept that in cops vs military, the cops hit much closer to home (I don't think that's particularly fair - but then again when are feelings fair), and I'm not trying to downplay anyone's reaction to it, but it all just seems to sudden and out of the blue to me.

 

I'll just go back to my question in a previous post: Is it because it's a video game, and inherently more hands-on and immersive than a movie could ever be? Is that why it's so uncomfortable for some people?

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I brought up the race thing because it's an element of Bad Boys and it highlights how little DICE really thought about this kind of stuff, but the more important bit to me is that in these kinds of movies the cowboy cops don't have the resources and there's a movie's worth of context building up to the final transgressive action sequence. Hardline's cutting right to it, so it feels like a baseline instead of a climax.

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If you guys are in Europe it might be hard to see how in the U.S. things have fundamentally changed over the past 13 years. The idea of cops as this heavily armed and armored civilian military is new, and it has made them a more deadly force than police were 25 years ago. Bad Boys is 1995, and while people of color have always been harassed by the police, it has only grown more deadly and oppressive. For most of the past 10 years the New York police policy was that they could stop and frisk a person for "looking suspicious." You can guess who got to experience that. 

 

I could be on board with a sort of insane fictionalized version of ultra cops n robbers. Same for military stuff, though I do find the modern "realistic" glorifying military shooter to be unpleasant. 

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I brought up the race thing because it's an element of Bad Boys and it highlights how little DICE really thought about this kind of stuff

I don't think that's particularly relevant to the issue of Militarized Cops, though. At least not in the way DICE is doing it. Like I said, if they'd made all the robbers non-white, we'd have a real problem on our hands. But the fact that everyone is white, in my opinion, makes it a moot point as far as the crux of this discussion goes. It's not about racial profiling. It's just about white dudes fighting other white dudes. That is probably a problem, but an unrelated one to the issue of militarized police. Unless that's not what you were saying, in which case I apologize for misunderstanding!

 

but the more important bit to me is that in these kinds of movies the cowboy cops don't have the resources and there's a movie's worth of context building up to the final transgressive action sequence. Hardline's cutting right to it, so it feels like a baseline instead of a climax.

I have to be honest, this seems like a really nitpicky thing to get hung up on. I don't quite understand why that difference is relevant. It's a pretty minor thing, all said and done. Of course Hardline cuts right to it. It's a multiplayer video game. I also don't think anyone's going to look at this game and think "Oh, that's how cops fight robbers these days! I better not live in the city or a building might fall on my head!"
 
EDIT: It occurs to me this post is mostly meaningless. I'm nitpicking to counter what I think is nitpicking and that's just awkward for everyone involved. I think I've gotten all the answers I'm going to get at this point. It's all good!

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I think you're over-reacting just a little. To me it seems like you're reading a message that isn't there. It's just people wanting to make a cool game that's not about soldiers. They're not trying to push some ultra-conservative propaganda on how it's ok to have militarised police kill swathes of criminals. 

 

I'm not trying to be an asshole, but if you take the same argument and apply it to the other recent hot button topic in games representation:

 

I think you're over-reacting just a little. To me it seems like you're reading a message that isn't there. It's just people wanting to make a cool game that's not about gender representation. They're not trying to push some ultra-conservative propaganda on how women either don't exist or are represented as sexualized objects.

 

Otherwise, I'll just defer to Cine's post above, because it's very well-spoken. The point is that this re-skin is inherently political. The creeping militarization of the police in the US has been an absurd development and has had a concomitant waste of tax dollars and degradation of civil liberties.

 

As for "why get upset about this instead of about pre-existing thing X"?, that strikes me as a disingenuous question usually asked by somebody who just doesn't want to talk about it at all. Yes, if a topic is a pervasive problem, we need to start thinking about it eventually. It's like asking "Why talk about marriage equality _now_? Things have been going just fine without having that conversation?" It's only true unless you're somebody who's affected by it.

 

Why get upset about this but not upset about previous Battlefields? Because it means something when the skin is different. War and law enforcement SHOULD be different. They're governed by different rules. They're engaged in for different reasons. Even if those reasons are elided in most war games, they're implied to exist by context.

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