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Having played the game, it's just a shoot em up with a goofy story to justify shooting things. Nobody is going to care about it in 10 years. The only reason any

Having played the game, it's just a shoot em up with a goofy story to justify shooting things. Nobody is going to care about it in 10 years. The only reason anyone cares about it now is cause everything is a culture war and complaining on the Internet about games you aren't gonna buy is a great way of fighting it, apparently. I ran into some Holocaust deniers on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. Those people are so far gone that BBC video of bodies in concentration camps is seen as propaganda. If people don't understand the evils of the Nazis within the context of history, the videogame equivalent of Transformers isn't going to change minds.

MBCook 9y ago
I heard someone on a podcast make a VERY passionate defense of the game. Not only was it well made and presented a good story (for a shooter) but a main character (THE main character?) was Jewish and as a Jew that was a huge thing for him. There was a Jewish character who wasn't tokenized or just a stereotype but a well written and critical to the plot. Helpful and not inept but strong and self directed. Representation like that can be a very powerful thing.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Similar to the bit in "Knocked Up" about how "Munich" is a great movie because the Jewish characters are all bad-asses, not victims.
SamUK96 9y ago
Well, branding them all as Holocaust deniers and essentially insane may not be the most accurate or productive term. One camp of them seems to believe that the true scale was smaller than what we believe now. Given the ever-sensationalist media and the motive they had to heavily dramatise the war to pull in more soldiers and war funding that they definitely desparately needed, it's not a completely bonkers idea. It's just likely wrong and there's never any hard evidence for it. The other more hardline camp seems to believe that the scale was correct but that the Germans had legitimate justification. These seem to be the more unfounded and racially charged opinions. I disagree with both, especially the justification idea (nothing justifies the tragedies they caused), but bundling everyone and calling them all insane - although your prerogative and right to do so and I respect that indeed - doesn't help anybody and actually perpetuates them and the whole thing. It just creates more alienation, division, and hate. Some of them are just questioning the media coverage and if it was reliable and if our current view is 100% true. I'de say that's pretty reasonable, although i'm not sure since i'm certainly no historian. What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. Once you take what the media tells you as universal truth and denounce any dissenting people as insane is the day we slip into abject despotism.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I ran across this article later on, but it captured my impression of the people I interacted with. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspiracy-theories-feed-holocaust-denial https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspir... “They are people who have reached their 40s or 50s and have embraced the internet as it has grown and new platforms have come along. They have moved away from quality newspaper-reading mentality; maybe they’re professionals, some may have degrees, but they are not skilled in assessing sources in history. When you interact with them, you realise that they have no clue as to how we know anything about the past, about how history works, what information is available. They are willing to go along with certain ideas that are summarised for them and simplified in web articles or videos.”
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. That's highly questionable. Anyone who has doubts about the historical record is free to research it in depth and engage in scholarship of their own, and even try to make a case to other historians that an error has occurred, as revisionist historian David Irving did for years. There's a big difference between asking questions like 'how do historians calculate the number of casualties in the Holocaust (or any other historical genocide)?' in good faith, for the purposes of gathering information, and asking questions for the purposes of disputation, a practice commonly known as sealioning although it has its antecedents in forensic debate and the Socratic method. Rhetorical question whose purpose is to undermine existing historical consensus rather than to gather information is implicitly rehabilitative, and the idea that Nazism is just a regular philosophy that happens to have gotten a bad rap because of being on the losing end of a war is not a legitimate position. I support the German approach of criminalizing Holocaust denial. It doesn't limit free speech, as claimed; for example, Mein Kampf can be and has been republished in Germany, but in a scholarly edition with abundant notes on historical context so that the eliminationist rhetoric can't be peddled without mention of the verifiable consequences that resulted from its implementation.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I don't think litigating Holocaust denial is a good use of Hacker News.
anigbrowl 9y ago
The point is not to change minds; people who want to deny, excuse, or revive the holocaust have made their decision to be horrible people and while deradicalization programs should be available to assist people who want to reintegrate into society, you can lead a person to education but you can't make them think. The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. A secondary purpose is to remind would-be Nazis that being a Nazi is hazardous to their health and that any attempts to implement their ideological views in practice will meet with opposition.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. We've failed at a fundamental level if the grandkids of the victims and survivors of that war don't understand what happened is evil and wrong. It's just hard for me to contextualize a violent game which core purpose is to gun down waves of people as an effective teaching tool. Is it like after the fifth headshot the kid is gonna sit back and say...I get it...Nazis are bad?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I wrote in the very first sentence that the point is not to change minds, which you inexplicably ignored. The point is to motivate people to fight against Nazism. The game is not about gunning down waves of random in an enjoyable spree of virtual destruction, but about gunning down Nazis qua proponents of genocide.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I wasn't really trying to pick a fight with you. I've played games for a long time and based on my biased experience with gamers, you don't play first person shooters because you're trying to learn something. You play them because it's entertainment with big explosions and escapism. Some people will learn something from it, sure. Hopefully they get through high school understanding that, though.

MBCook 9y ago

I heard someone on a podcast make a VERY passionate defense of the game. Not only was it well made and presented a good story (for a shooter) but a main character (THE main character?) was Jewish and as a Jew that was a huge thing for him. There was a Jewish character who wasn't tokenized or just a stereotype but a well written and critical to the plot. Helpful and not inept but strong and self directed. Representation like that can be a very powerful thing.

tptacek 9y ago
Similar to the bit in "Knocked Up" about how "Munich" is a great movie because the Jewish characters are all bad-asses, not victims.

SamUK96 9y ago

Well, branding them all as Holocaust deniers and essentially insane may not be the most accurate or productive term. One camp of them seems to believe that the true scale was smaller than what we believe now. Given the ever-sensationalist media and the motive they had to heavily dramatise the war to pull in more soldiers and war funding that they definitely desparately needed, it's not a completely bonkers idea. It's just likely wrong and there's never any hard evidence for it. The other more hardline camp seems to believe that the scale was correct but that the Germans had legitimate justification. These seem to be the more unfounded and racially charged opinions. I disagree with both, especially the justification idea (nothing justifies the tragedies they caused), but bundling everyone and calling them all insane - although your prerogative and right to do so and I respect that indeed - doesn't help anybody and actually perpetuates them and the whole thing. It just creates more alienation, division, and hate. Some of them are just questioning the media coverage and if it was reliable and if our current view is 100% true. I'de say that's pretty reasonable, although i'm not sure since i'm certainly no historian. What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. Once you take what the media tells you as universal truth and denounce any dissenting people as insane is the day we slip into abject despotism.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
I ran across this article later on, but it captured my impression of the people I interacted with. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspiracy-theories-feed-holocaust-denial https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspir... “They are people who have reached their 40s or 50s and have embraced the internet as it has grown and new platforms have come along. They have moved away from quality newspaper-reading mentality; maybe they’re professionals, some may have degrees, but they are not skilled in assessing sources in history. When you interact with them, you realise that they have no clue as to how we know anything about the past, about how history works, what information is available. They are willing to go along with certain ideas that are summarised for them and simplified in web articles or videos.”
anigbrowl 9y ago
What is unquestionable is that it is their right to do so, and you should also respect that. That's highly questionable. Anyone who has doubts about the historical record is free to research it in depth and engage in scholarship of their own, and even try to make a case to other historians that an error has occurred, as revisionist historian David Irving did for years. There's a big difference between asking questions like 'how do historians calculate the number of casualties in the Holocaust (or any other historical genocide)?' in good faith, for the purposes of gathering information, and asking questions for the purposes of disputation, a practice commonly known as sealioning although it has its antecedents in forensic debate and the Socratic method. Rhetorical question whose purpose is to undermine existing historical consensus rather than to gather information is implicitly rehabilitative, and the idea that Nazism is just a regular philosophy that happens to have gotten a bad rap because of being on the losing end of a war is not a legitimate position. I support the German approach of criminalizing Holocaust denial. It doesn't limit free speech, as claimed; for example, Mein Kampf can be and has been republished in Germany, but in a scholarly edition with abundant notes on historical context so that the eliminationist rhetoric can't be peddled without mention of the verifiable consequences that resulted from its implementation.
tptacek 9y ago
I don't think litigating Holocaust denial is a good use of Hacker News.

anigbrowl 9y ago

The point is not to change minds; people who want to deny, excuse, or revive the holocaust have made their decision to be horrible people and while deradicalization programs should be available to assist people who want to reintegrate into society, you can lead a person to education but you can't make them think. The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. A secondary purpose is to remind would-be Nazis that being a Nazi is hazardous to their health and that any attempts to implement their ideological views in practice will meet with opposition.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The point of media like this is to activate and motivate people who are ideologically uncommitted and assure of them the facts that Nazism is a dangerous ideology and that it's OK and indeed necessary to oppose it with violence if and when other means are insufficient. We've failed at a fundamental level if the grandkids of the victims and survivors of that war don't understand what happened is evil and wrong. It's just hard for me to contextualize a violent game which core purpose is to gun down waves of people as an effective teaching tool. Is it like after the fifth headshot the kid is gonna sit back and say...I get it...Nazis are bad?
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I wrote in the very first sentence that the point is not to change minds, which you inexplicably ignored. The point is to motivate people to fight against Nazism. The game is not about gunning down waves of random in an enjoyable spree of virtual destruction, but about gunning down Nazis qua proponents of genocide.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I wasn't really trying to pick a fight with you. I've played games for a long time and based on my biased experience with gamers, you don't play first person shooters because you're trying to learn something. You play them because it's entertainment with big explosions and escapism. Some people will learn something from it, sure. Hopefully they get through high school understanding that, though.