suppliedFrançois Truffaut once said that there is “no such thing as an anti-war film,” mainly because film tends to glorify the spectacle of war and make it look exciting. The same can be said to a greater degree in video games, given the role of gamers in wasting hundreds of virtual soldiers. However, video games have evolved enough in their 50-year history to yield some interesting perspectives and insights into the nature of warfare. Here are my top five war-themed video games that make an effort to look beyond the gunfire.
Call of Duty (2003)
With the general opinion of Call of Duty nowadays as the creative equivalent of Michael Bay’s Transformers, it’s hard to imagine that the original Call of Duty was once a revolution in first-person shooters. Its predecessor, Medal of Honor, usually placed you as a lone wolf fighting off against hundreds of enemies, enabling the kind of power fantasy typical of video games. However, Call of Duty made a conscious choice to show a more realistic and honest scenario of World War II. Throughout the global campaign of American, British, and Russian forces, it placed the player amongst AI comrades, fighting together rather than apart and assisting each other in combat.
Battlefield 1
Using the rarely portrayed setting of World War I in popular culture, Battlefield 1 takes a welcome turn to showcase the war that solved nothing but changed everything. The opening level astonishingly captures the brutal horror of frontline combat, where every player death displays the name and date of death of the soldier they just inhabited and it passes control to another soldier until everyone on the battlefield is dead. Needless to say, the game has a killer opening, no pun intended.
Spec Ops: The Line
This game came at just the right time, releasing right after the unironic military spectacle and violence of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Instead of repeating that, Spec Ops: The Line confronts the complex morality of modern war and the implications of violent power fantasies in video games. The game often considers the indiscriminate brutality and immorality of war, especially the infamous level where the player unwittingly fires white phosphorus on innocent civilians and forces the player to walk through their carnage. It makes for incredible meditations on morality and war and a biting critique of modern military shooter games.
This War of Mine
Instead of playing as an all-powerful supersoldier, the strategy game puts you as the leader of a group of civilians in a war-torn city district, going out on scavenging missions and avoiding raiders and snipers. The strategy game asks you to manage your resources and the physical and psychological well-being of your survivors. Random encounters force you to decide whether to help other survivors by giving food or medicine, or to rob and kill them to better your chances of survival. Overall, This War of Mine empathetically explores the human cost of war for those caught in the crossfire.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
While many of its descendants would twist and abuse the modern war setting to ludicrous and problematic extents, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare effectively captures the aesthetic and tone of the War on Terror and offers thoughtful meditations on modern warfare. One noteworthy level among many is “Death from Above,” based on real-life footage, which captures the casual detachment and dehumanization that has lately become emblematic of drone warfare. While the campaign is undoubtedly enjoyable and exciting, its moments of powerlessness are also strangely provocative, namely in one level placing you as a first-hand victim of a nuclear bomb and demonstrating its indiscriminate and absolute destruction.
