Expected behavior. Practically every country has been leveraging videogames and social media for the past two decades.
Yeah as if CoD hasn’t been literal propaganda for at least a decade. I mean, they literally present revisionist history as actual history in the games with no disclaimer or mention of it being entirely false. And no, I don’t mean when they make up events, I mean, they tell complete fabrications about real historical events designed to portray the US Military in a positive, or at least less negative than they deserve, way.
The Highway of Death being the cause of Russians in Modern Warfare (2019) is a good relatively recent example.
The whole thing is just chalked full of jingoism and nationalism. I genuinely believe it is harmful to peoples psyche.
Probably. But I think the intention is to attract customers, not to push some kind of agenda. So instead of toning it down, I think it would be better to make it explicit and make games from different perspectives.
For example, make a WW2 game from the Soviet. Or perhaps Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s. Those could be as biased as they want because they’re telling the story from a certain perspective.
We know that the US Military contributes directly to Cll of Duty, both financially and through assets and non-tangibles. Whether or not the developers push an agenda purposefully, and I’m inclined to side with you that they aren’t trying to do so, that money and those assets come with strings attached that take the decisions out of the developers hands.
Hell, they put fucking Oliver North in their game, and made him look like a good guy. You can’t get any less contrary to reality if you tried.
The Wikipedia article on Oliver North says he advised on the Black OPs game, so it absolutely makes sense for them to throw him in the game in a positive light.
That said, I wonder how the US military would feel about Activision making a game set from another country’s perspective. It would probably have a similar appeal as a recruiting tool since it’s still a war game.
