For whatever it's worth on a YouTube channel as small as mine, my LP of Silent Hunter III is probably my "flagship" series (har har, it's a submarine game, and then it's my flagship, and then... I hate myself.) It definitely comprises the majority of my videos and views. I'm glad that people seem to like it because I like playing it, most of the time. Sometimes it devolves into a grudge match where I feel like I need to finish a patrol simply because it needs to be finished, not because I'm having fun. Silent Hunter generally reminds me of fishing. I sit for a while, sometimes a long while, before I get a bite. The time between bites can really drag and I can get a little cranky waiting.
In those long moments of quiet, a fisherman often finds himself in idle introspection. I did most of my fishing as a teenager and thus my thoughts generally involved video games, warrantless self-pity, and boobs. My tastes have since become more refined, and while I still pay due consideration to the odd boob now and then, I can say that I've become a thinker-gamer. Between sinking ships and infiltrating ports, I have to consider the fact that I'm playing a game that casts you in the role of a German naval officer in World War II, and that I'm most definitely fighting for the bad guys.
I should mention that nobody raised this point to me other than one of the many voices inside my head. Nobody sent me some sappy jeremiad about how I'm corrupting the minds of 50-some YouTubers (an achievement which I'm really happy about, by the way!) If I allow myself to think about it, I feel... well, I don't feel BAD about it, I just feel odd. It's a video game, after all. It's pixels and switches.
So why have I tallied the number of people my digital kaleun has killed with his boat? It's 2,937 so far, according to SH3 Commander. 1,449 of those were civilians. I've sunk 266,193 tons of merchant shipping, most of it vital materiel for the Allied war effort. 103,338 tons of naval wreckage sit on the bottom of the ocean too.
These numbers have no meaning whatsoever since it's a god damn video game. Yet there's something irreverent to me about quantifying human misery and using it as the "score" in a game. It reminds me of Robert MacNamara's statisticization of war, an extension of Stalin's infamous remark about a man's death being a tragedy, while a million deaths is a statistic. It's probably an undeserved association that I'm drawing because, again, it's a silly-assed game. It's also a historical fact that a u-boat captain's success was measured in tons. If you're going to make a game about it, there's nothing else you can really use.
I'd probably be okay with all of this if I didn't feel an irrational tinge of guilt by association. World War II video games seem to attract a small but highly vocal cadre of what I'll call revisionists. Not necessarily Nazis, mind you, but some people whose "what-if" scenarios are frankly kind of sick to consider in the level of detail that they go into, and they seem to dwell on them. I'd cite examples but it's naturally kind of a touchy thing; I'm not really interested in calling random Internet people Nazis. I do feel safe saying that a few minutes spent on a wargame forum, especially ones that specifically deal with WWII, will show you that there are people with a strange sort of Wehrmacht fanboyism. They talk about how great German tanks were and muse about the results of a successful German campaign in Russia, and so on. I'm sensitive to that kind of talk; not hostile, mind you, I just feel like it's sort of an inane effort that becomes ethically suspect when it's repeated often enough. In order to find the merits of Nazi Germany's technological advances, you have to do a hell of a lot of surgery to detach it all from the fact that we're still talking about Nazi Germany. Some people seem to dispense with that easily. I don't. And I don't know what good it does to make a habit of envisioning Nazi successes where there were historical failures. Barring some sick fantasies, I don't think there's much of a result to that line of thinking other than "well, that's fucking terrible to consider. Glad it didn't work out that way, hope it doesn't again in the future."
Video games invite us to project our own preconceived notions upon them. Interactive as they may be, games can't answer for themselves. Any statement we make about a video game's social value is going to reflect our own social values because the game obviously can't answer for itself. When someone like Jack Thompson sees a game like Counter-Strike, they see a path down the rabbit hole that leads to a fat legal settlement. Others see nothing but the pixels. Others can't stop screaming "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" Maybe some people see an outlet for their violent fantasies. I'll admit some guilt on the last count. I cackled like a banshee when I blew up an ammunition ship in the game not too long ago.
When I have this little moral quandary about Silent Hunter III, I'm speaking as someone who has the unfortunate distinction of having a bachelor's degree in History. I can't help but feel a little queasy about the Nazis. I'm also probably just an oversensitive guy; after all, I have a blog. There's my bias, and there's my game.
Don't worry though, I'm still going to play the game and laugh like a woman whenever I do something cool.
I think, if the Allies had've lost, we'd be doing the same thing, only about the Allies' equipment and Operations ("That Operation Market Garden was such a bold move"), and it'd all be in German. It's easy for me to admit, Germany outclassed the Allies in terms of technology. If they hadn't have been such, well, Nazi's, maybe things would be different these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd, although I don't side with the Nazi's often, I must admit that the Jagdpanther is one sexy-looking piece of equipment.
See, the way that you've made your point is fair and accurate, and I agree with it. The Germans made some fearsome weapons in World War II, but they're still Nazis. Can you win the war with some of the best weapons and some of the worst social policies? Maybe, in the short-term, probably not in the long-term.
DeleteWhat mostly prompted this post was a thread I've been reading elsewhere about an ongoing LP of a WWII turn-based strategy game. In the posts between turns, people have been talking about German weapons, leaders, and doctrine, with some of them getting a little bit too wrapped up in their own arguments to have a respectful conversation. It's the Internet. I need to get over it.
In fairness to them, German weapons lend themselves to spirited discussion in part because of how god damned ridiculous they were. The Maus comes to mind, as does that flying wing thing they were working on, not to mention the other stuff that they were designing like the Amerika bomber and the Ratte. These were utterly retarded fantasies, though they do have that 8-year-old-sketching-in-his-notebook appeal. As a source of intelligent discussion about World War II though, I think they leave a lot to be desired.
What I find even more admirable about the German production capabilities is how they managed it despite having to deal with stringent restrictions imposed on them after the Treaty of Versailles.
DeleteThe most jaw-dropping of the German's weapons has to be the Schwerer Gustav. That thing is so god-damned BIG, and it could fling an 800mm shell almost 40km.
Not to say that anyone else had and did some crazy stuff. The Japanese had their submarine-aircraft carrier, which was the only plane to drop any bomb on mainland America. They tried to cause a massive forest fire by using incendiary rounds, but it turned into the proverbial damp squib.
Also, the British Operation Frankton is also pretty crazy, where several commandos paddled into the port of Bordeaux, attached limpet mines to some German shipping and fucked off, damaging 6 ships.
Then, of course, D-Day was, by and far, the largest and most unexpected thing to happen in WW2, and also the biggest gamble. Had the assault been beaten back into the sea, we could very well be speaking German right now.