Comments on: Everyone knows you can’t make a World War I game

By: Paul M. Mosher

Paul M. Mosher — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:41:17 +0000

Just reading all the comments about the impossibility of making a war game based on WW1. Above someone talks about an FPS about a character trying to desert from the trenches, and oddly enough there is a possibility for a cinematic tie-on. Let’s get working on a pc game of “King of Hearts” before someone else does.

By: Charley Best

Charley Best — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:40:00 +0000

Thank you for creating your website. It is very informative. The WW1 environment is extremely rich in game-oriented material. Imagine working as a sapper and digging a tunnel under Hill 60 and having to deal with counter sapping. Imagine a raiding party making its way across no man’s land and into enemy trenches. Imagine infantry marching behind a creeping barrage. Sniper warfare ….. Logistics supply through 3rd Ypres and Hell’s Corner. How are you going to get supplies forward through the swamps of Passchendale. Consider all the different nationalities and ethnic groups associated with the conflict and the potential for multiple roles. How about the ability to vary tactics and see if you could beat the machine gun nests in an innovative manner. Set up the Advanced Dressing Stations and Casualty Clearing Stations to most effectively support your wounded troops. Then lump all of these components together. Wow, it is sad to say but it would be an unbelievable game! God knows the war was unbelievable.

By: Richard J

Richard J — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:22:40 +0000

Jutland

There’s this forthcoming game. (Norm Kroger is a chap I’ve had time for for ages - Age of Rifles hasn’t left my hard drive for the past eight years or so, even though it doesn’t work on NTFS drives without buggering about with DOSBox)

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:27:06 +0000

That’s a very good point - the old “cinematic realism” oxymoron. The number of levels in MOHAA and CoD which revolve around vehicle chases probably comes from Where Eagles Dare, The Great Escape, Escape To Athena etc.

Whenever US airborne forces appear in a WWII game it’s always 101st Division, never 82nd. I think that’s entirely down to Band of Brothers. It wasn’t always like this. Growing up as a war nerd I always considered the 82nd and 101st to be equally famous. They were both featured in The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far. Battleground focused on the 101st at Bastogne but that was relatively obscure. I don’t think it was until BoB that the 101st came to be the famous one and 82nd started to get forgotten.

One exception to WWI films is Zeppelin, which you mentioned recently. I think there’s enough in that to inspire a suitably fantastic and cinematic FPS, but it’s obviously not as influential as All Quiet (when I was at school we were shown the remake in a history lesson, and not as a critique of representations of war).

And now a totally random thought that has just occurred to me: if you wanted to make a game which conforms to the genre conventions of cinematic FPS and popular myths of WWI, how about making the central character a deserter who’s trying to escape from the trenches? Then the “enemy” could be evil British officers/NCOs/MPs who are trying to stop you escaping from the futile slaughter. Of course it would be hugely controversial, but I think any WWI game is going to offend someone however you do it. It’s interesting that CoD did have that kind of gameplay, but only in the Stalingrad mission (commissars herding unwilling and ill-equipped conscripts into battle, shooting anyone who takes cover for too long; the sergeant shooting a commissar so you can take cover). That raises a lot of questions about representing the Russians as an Other, but maybe another time…

By: Brett

Brett — Sat, 26 May 2007 02:50:49 +0000

Good stuff. But I don’t think it’s only that it’s easy for gamers and game designers to confuse the history with its representations — it’s more that the games are explicitly designed to mimic the movies about WWII, and not WWII itself. They’re games of WWII movies, not games about WWII itself. Hence all the “filmic” touches: the cut scenes, the shaking of the “camera” in explosions, the goal-oriented narrative, the over-the-top Alistair Maclean-style scenarios, and of course the naff narrations. Every WII FPS set in the ETO has to have a D-Day scenario, because of Saving Private Ryan … and so on. With WWI, there are far fewer movies to draw upon, and the ones that are out there (that is, of the ones which might inspire FPS designers) all conform to the stalemate/mud/futility myths, eg Paths of Glory, Gallipoli, which isn’t promising material — even though it’s absolutely true, as Gavin says, that there’s plenty of interesting possibilities from the real WWI.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:25:29 +0000

I nearly made the title even more sarcastic but “Everyone knows you can’t make a World War I game (and even if you could girls wouldn’t play it)” was a bit too long. ;)

It’s easy enough to confuse media representations with reality. In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I caught myself judging the “realism” of WWII FPS games by comparing them to Band Of Brothers!

Also I’ve just remembered gas: popularly associated with WWI and not WWII (although correctly for once), but in MOHAA there’s a level where you have to put a gas mask on to protect you from the poison gas in the factory that you have to blow up. It’s terrifyingly atmospheric, but nothing much like the reality of WWII.

By: Esther

Esther — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:58:39 +0000

*applause!*

I didn’t touch that comment simply because I knew someone could make a far better job of it than me… and worse - this is the Guardian’s games blog that made these comments!

The thing is, I think that the poster does know about WWII games, it’s just that when history starts to appear, somehow this causes some sort of collective brain drain (sucked into the myth chasm!) which makes people forget what they know. Ask people ‘normally’ about any of these elements, and as soon as the myth starts getting in the way, they also start forgetting the detail. so a perfectly sensible conversation about war games can be effectively knocked flat by ‘but what was it really like’, when of course, people start spouting off about Saving Private Ryan…