These games have always been propaganda to recruit into the military. I have been playing Doom pretty much my whole life. It’s probably my favorite game of all time and a few years ago when talking about Doom with a friend, I realized something with how fucked FPS games have been since Call of Duty. My friend said “Doom is so great cause it puts you on Mars and you are blowing up demons and zombies. That’s better than murdering brown people overseas in some war simulation game”. I never thought of it like that and it hit me. Most early FPS games from the 90s like Doom, Quake, Turok and Duke Nukem 3D had you fighting demons, aliens, robots, zombies and in a more fantasy like setting. FPS games became military propaganda shit after 9/11.
WWII was also a big theme in FPS games going all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D. Shooting Nazis never gets old or morally complicated despite what reactionary gamer weirdos on Reddit might tell you
Wolfenstein 3D is where it all started. John Romero has said that back when they first began designing Wolfenstein 3D, they all agreed in the office that killing Nazis would not raise any moral questions at all cause any sane person hates Nazis and should.
You skipped Halo. That’s got plenty of military fetishism. And I don’t think it was conscious, but making the baddies an empire of suicidal religious zealots as the War on Terror was spinning up was sus.
Skipped Halo cause I really know nothing about those games. I remember when they first came out but didn’t have an XBox or any friends who had them. I lived with a roommate who played COD and I was able to witness that with a front row seat. He thought I was crazy wanting to play “old shit” FPS games rather than COD when it was newer at the time.
These games have always been propaganda to recruit into the military. I have been playing Doom pretty much my whole life. It’s probably my favorite game of all time and a few years ago when talking about Doom with a friend, I realized something with how fucked FPS games have been since Call of Duty. My friend said “Doom is so great cause it puts you on Mars and you are blowing up demons and zombies. That’s better than murdering brown people overseas in some war simulation game”. I never thought of it like that and it hit me. Most early FPS games from the 90s like Doom, Quake, Turok and Duke Nukem 3D had you fighting demons, aliens, robots, zombies and in a more fantasy like setting. FPS games became military propaganda shit after 9/11.
WWII was also a big theme in FPS games going all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D. Shooting Nazis never gets old or morally complicated despite what reactionary gamer weirdos on Reddit might tell you
Wolfenstein 3D is where it all started. John Romero has said that back when they first began designing Wolfenstein 3D, they all agreed in the office that killing Nazis would not raise any moral questions at all cause any sane person hates Nazis and should.
It’s funny that Wolfenstein has had distribution issues mainly not because of violence, but because of portrayals if Nazi imagery
You skipped Halo. That’s got plenty of military fetishism. And I don’t think it was conscious, but making the baddies an empire of suicidal religious zealots as the War on Terror was spinning up was sus.
Skipped Halo cause I really know nothing about those games. I remember when they first came out but didn’t have an XBox or any friends who had them. I lived with a roommate who played COD and I was able to witness that with a front row seat. He thought I was crazy wanting to play “old shit” FPS games rather than COD when it was newer at the time.