Brothers In Arms: Hells Highway: War Games: How Serious is Too Serious ?

Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway

War Games: How Serious Is Too Serious?

by dkpatriarch:

©2008 David Hilton:

War often isn't about Victory - but about loss and grief.

I can still remember how sick I felt when I first watched Saving Private Ryan in the cinema. The D-Day scene and later when the German hushes as he slowly plunges the knife into the U.S. soldier shocked me like no other film before it. I had seen plenty of war movies and even later movies with more visceral gore like Gladiator, but there was something that made me hate this movie for making me feel so weak in the stomach.

War as glorious, war as adventurous, war as tragedy, war as a bonding experience, war as necessity, war as patriotic: I had seen and understood all this. War as pure, unadulterated, horrifying hell, where basic survival is the only prize, and sometimes even that prize comes at a cost to humanity or sanity, was something too uncomfortably shown in that film for me. There had been glimpses in Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but to me this was the most disturbing side of war; the visuals and sound made me feel like I was there suffering with them.

Now Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway is seeking to similarly grab the game player by the guts, showing the rapid descent into hell, both physically and emotionally, that war brings. It too uses World War II as its backdrop, but unlike the victories we have grown used to in previous war shooters (with the exception of parts of COD4), it shows what happens when all is lost and soldiers buckle under the pressure. It will also show an unprecedented amount of gore for a World War II game, a genre traditionally used to restraint.

Men buckle in war - Gearbox attempt to show the grim reality of it in this iteration

This is an intentional part of getting the gamer to identify with more ‘real’ characters and what really happened to people in the failed Operation Market Garden. And this World War II shooter isn’t alone, with Call of Duty 5: World At War showing realistic decapitations by Japanese soldiers and the focus on the use and effects of the flamethrower in war.

Rumours also are that the next Medal of Honor will leave World War II behind, but recreate a more recent historical event: the initial war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Will EA try to realistically show the horrors of war in this still active war-zone? Is this trend toward realism educational analysis of the nature of war in game form, or tasteless exploitation of it?

Previous historical war shooter games tended toward the ridiculous but fun (Return To Wolfenstein) or tried to be authentic and dramatic but without too deep an emotional attachment (Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series). Today’s focus on modern or near-future shooters, like Call of Duty 4 or the Ghost Recon games, do not touch historical scenarios, instead making up plausible possibilities to fight in and so empathy with past reality is not called on.

Nevertheless, Call Of Duty 4 was linked to the disappearance and later suicide of a traumatised U.S. Marine veteran who is said to have “experienced a flashback of some sort” of one of his combat experiences, which included “seeing his best friend decapitated at Fallujah”.

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Perhaps he should not have seen the game in his condition, but with new technology in gaming making portrayals of war ever more realistic and the desire to strive toward authentic more cinematic mature content growing, we can more than ever before experience war as more than a shooting ‘deathmatch’ contest.

Victory in Brothers In Arms: Hells Highway is not what it seems

It makes sense that Brothers In Arms is the series to really push into more mature story-driven World War II territory. It has always been more about strategic thinking than run and gunning as you strive to keep enemy soldiers pinned down with your squad while you flank them.

With World War II games suddenly less popular partly due to their repetitive environments, developers Gearbox are risking a return to Holland and Operation Market Garden (also in Medal of Honor: Frontline) because they want to tell the story of one of modern history’s biggest defeats in depth.

With partially destructible environments and a focus on authenticity, they believe the more mature approach and genuine feelings for the game characters (Matt Baker, Joe Hartsock and the rest of the 101st Airborne group) will bring more to the historical shooter genre than any previous game.

They will force you to ‘experience’ the war. As Colonel John Antal, their military expert, says: “Blood and death is part of war and is also part of telling the story of war. We do not add gratuitous violence to our games, but we do want the true-to-life nature of combat to be revealed…without this, the sacrifice that the real soldiers of Hell’s Highway endured would be meaningless and the telling of a dramatic historical event would be trivialized.” (Australian 360, Issue 4)

In this game Matt Baker is a haunted man, rapidly losing it. Like the marine veteran described above, he is having flashbacks, seeing his dead comrades. The weight of responsibility is heavy on his shoulders as he loses men and battles. The game uses these flashbacks and slow motion dismemberment to create the unsettling effect that true war is horrific.

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With Brother’s In Arms: Hell’s Highway striving even closer toward historical authenticity of a failed campaign and its effects on soldiers, the question is will this make the gamer uncomfortable, empathetic, or blasé? Will it be a better experience because it is more mature and confronting, will it cheapen the very real trauma of soldiers who have experienced these sorts of terrible situations, or will it take the fun out of the shooter, which, after all, is about the gamer killing?

Can a video game actually succeed in making me feel as uncomfortable as I did with Saving Private Ryan? And while I applaud games that strive for historic authenticity, do I really want it to take me that far?

Baptism Of Fire: Hell’s Highway – you be the judge.

©2008 David Hilton: