Burke's Joystick

Lately, I've been pretty harsh on the world of PC gaming, even to the point of labeling the industry as being  downright disreputable . I still stand behind those sentiments. And little, if anything, has changed in the intervening months. Things are still pretty rotten around these here parts, perhaps more so as we now can add disreputable indie developers - who hype projects, pocket lots of crowd-sourced cash, and ultimately release  mediocre  products - to the mix. It's all enough to make a man want to take up chess again....  Be that as it may, there is one aspect of the shameful record of modern gaming that I do feel I need to revisit in the interest of fairness, and that would be EA/DICE's Battlefield 4 . As I have pointed out time and again over the last few months (most notably  here  &  here , amongst other threads ), BF4 was a good poster child for everything that is ailing the modern games industry: it was a title that seemed to be...

One of the things I have tried to show via this blog is how modern video games, like a good book or a good movie, can shed light on geopolitical events.  This is not that startling: military and political scientists have been using "games theory" for a very long time to simulate the world of realpolitik.   Games are very good at this because they can smartly abstract the salient military and political principles that are operative in our world, thereby making them easier to digest.  So, for example, in my last post I showed how DICE's first-person shooter Battlefield 3 captures an essentially correct vision of high-intensity warfare in the Persian Gulf, making it a game I believe every politician should play at least once before glibly voting for another Gulf war (especially in light of the fact that a mere 21.8% of congress have actual military experience).  In the specifics, it might not come close to real combat, but it does capture the fundamental...

Did you hear?!?  American troops have engaged Russian forces in combat in Syria!  It's true!  Here's the footage: Darn intro text got cut off!  I am still not good at video editing! Okay, okay, that wasn't actual combat footage, but footage from one of my recent sessions in DICE's Battlefield 3, a first person shooter that revolves around American and Russian troops fighting it out in the Middle East.   So that wasn't real...but I find it a strangely compelling vision of just what a larger international conflict might look like in Syria.

[WARNING 1: Image heavy blog posting follows!] [WARNING 2: BF3 fans should be prepared to have their minds blown!]  When I had moved on from the tried and true Battlefield: Bad Company 2 to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 , something immediately struck me about the difference in maps: those in MW3 were so much more vibrant than those in BC2. MW3's maps were not only more colorful, but the locations had a "lived in" feeling. That is, the art design of the maps successfully communicated the idea that people had actually lived in these locations prior to the arrival of the bad tempered soldiers; that the terrain players merely saw as a good camping spot or a wonderful sniper's nest were much more than that: they were formerly homes and businesses of the now displaced citizenry. it just made everything seem much more believably tragic. Unfortunately, the maps is BC2 lacked similar depth to them. While they superficially resembled homes and ...