I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I've previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning your mind off and enjoying the set pieces. However, Cold War has a section in Vietnam and I suddenly started feeling really uncomfortable and just turned the game off.
In WWII you can easily feel like the "defender", and even Modern Warfare felt like fighting a very specific organisation that wanted to kill millions. Here however it just becomes so hard to explain why I'm happily mowing down hundreds of clearly Vietnamese locals that I was unable to turn my mind off and just enjoy the spectacle.
I turned to the internet and started browsing and found this article and I really agree with what the author is saying.
I don't know if I will be continuing the campaign or not, but I just feel that I don't want to support these kinds of minimizations of military interventions.
I just wish there were more high budget / setpiece games that don't glorify real life wars. Spec Ops The Line was amazing in that sense, but it's also quite old already.
I would love to hear your opinions on this subject.
Every movie and game depicting american guns needs clearance from the DOD and is therefore war propaganda. Often that is very obvious. It's the reason I had to stop watching marvel movies. Too much pro military shit
Im going to correct and elaborate here.
Just taken at face value this claim is wrong. What you're thinking of is that you can often get military hardware in media, as in tanks, soldiers as extras, uniforms, 3d models of vehicles, etc. Directly from the military/dod. These are things which often cost millions of dollars, you can occasionally get them for free in your movie. The caveat is generally that then the dod is allowed to vet and veto scenes and uses, the expectation being that they can kick out anything that depicts the military in a bad lens, more or less.