That's easy to say when your perspective and experiences don't fall in line with those of people who have negative reactions to this stuff. Though I'm not sure what your perspective is, I'm definitely interested in hearing it.
Idle Thumbs Megathread | Indepth discussion inbetween horsebags and birdsounds
- Thread starter Lijik
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That's easy to say when your perspective and experiences don't fall in line with those of people who have negative reactions to this stuff. Though I'm not sure what your perspective is, I'm definitely interested in hearing it.
Freedom = $1.05
Banned
Yeah, it really feels like a nonissue to me. No one cried out when you would play the nazis in call of duty world war 2 based games and you actually play as nazis in those games. I mean, if you want to get technical I can have a good run as a nazi in world at war and actually send dogs out to kill and maim allied forces. Yet this game doesn't let you play as nazis and it's suddenly glorifying them? I dunno, what I get is that they're playing off of the Germanic stylings the same way papers please is playing off of Cold War era soviet fascist bureaucracies and no one gave that game any guff over it. Meh.
MehsterChief
Member
Yeah, it seems strange to me, too. As a German, I'm normally hyper-sensitive to this stuff, but even I didn't think of this. A dog-fighting game's art style is almost bound to be influenced by the World Wars unless it's sci-fi. Even the Thumbs didn't realize it until someone else pointed it out. It's really a non-issue, I think. That blog post from the developer, however, was clearly not the smartest reaction.
In other news: you really have that robot? I demand footage!
Freedom = $1.05
Banned
Does that actually happen outside of multiplayer?
Freedom = $1.05
Banned
It doesn't but I'm not sure if it's any better. The campaign is your typical WW2 affair but mostly from the western side, with a bit of russian mixed in.
Some people thought it was weird and a bold choice to have you play as the Nazis first in Red Orchestra 2's campaign. That's the only other time I remember people being kind of skeeved out by a game's treatment of that imagery.
If you want to brave the back alleys of Deviantart you'll find lots and lots of Nazi chic there as well.
If you want to brave the back alleys of Deviantart you'll find lots and lots of Nazi chic there as well.
MiniBossBattle
Member
Is it possible to detach the Luftwaffe / Red Baron mechanical design from Nazi-ism? I think people are sophisticated enough to understand a design aesthetic of war machines/uniforms vs a brutal regime.
I really feel IdleThumbs strengths come from discussing mechanics and using the system/rules to create a narrative vs interpreting a twitter interpreting an interpreted ww1/ww2 design and interpreting the designers blog post interpretation of an interpreted ww1/ww2 design.
I really feel IdleThumbs strengths come from discussing mechanics and using the system/rules to create a narrative vs interpreting a twitter interpreting an interpreted ww1/ww2 design and interpreting the designers blog post interpretation of an interpreted ww1/ww2 design.
I'm not exactly sure why, but doing something like this in a single player game seems way more impactful. Imagine if Counter Strike had a campaign where you played both sides.
swazzyswess
Member
I have to say I agree. Idle Thumbs was the first game podcast I ever regularly listened to back when it started, and lately I find myself skipping half the episodes or not listening to them at all. I also think the inside talk/jokes have increased and it's generally less entertaining than it used to be.
I don't think it's possible, no. You could make the same argument about "fag", in that it doesn't necesarily imply homophobia, but the association is there and doesn't really disappear.
RadarScope1
Member
I dunno. I love the academic design stuff. If I want to listen to a bunch of 30 something white guys being silly and jokey and just give their latest impressions on new titles, I'll listen to another gaming podcast ... like, any other podcast, basically. They're all the same to my ears. Thumbs is the only one that's different for me.
Freedom = $1.05
Banned
If handled well it could very really interesting. Not everything is black and white. The terrorist could very well be freedom fighters or guerillas trying to defend their homelands or something. Counter-terrorists could be misinformed as to their mission, or maybe the terrorists took it too far. I mean, there are ways to do that so that the player can have some empathy or understanding when it comes to whomever they're playing.
However, as in the example i made earlier, when i'm playing as nazis in CODWAW and i'm sending dogs out to tear the living shit out of the enemy (a reward i gained for being an efficient killer) there's really no black or white in that scenario. If my team wins, they play a musical track that's appropriate for the nazi forces and congratulate us for whooping the opposition. Sorta messed up when you think about it but no one wrote a thing against it, probably because it was a big AAA production and not an indie darling, which tend to be played and enjoyed more by the enthusiast press.
The hubbub over Luftrausers just kinda stinks of making something out of nothing to me, stirring up controversy for the sake of it. It's an arcadey shooter in which you pilot a customizable plane that is trying to survive an onslaught of attacks from blimps and ships and planes all at the same time and almost always fails. If anything, it's fatalistic in the sense that your fictitious air force is fucking doomed to failure because there's just no way you can overcome those odds.
So if you really want to compare it to the german forces of WWII to the forces in Luftrausers then, fine, you're right, the comparison pretty much holds up: it's jingoistic, it's menacing, and it's doomed to never win the war because they're getting destroyed from all sides.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
It's worse than MGS4 because it comes off as bad fan fiction on the scale of people trying to explain how Star Trek and Star Wars take place in the same universe.
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The designers talked about liking the aesthetic of the regime and it reminded me of Leigh Alexander saying that Hugo Boss' Nazi uniform designs were really aesthetically appealing on a Bombcast ages ago. Of course, she got pilloried for that comment, but it's really the same thing, isn't it?
Is the Red Baron a Nazi? I know he's a German fighter pilot in WW1, but didn't the Nazi regime rise past WW1? (History is not my strong point)
Red Baron doesn't connect to Nazi imagery in my mind.
I feel the exact same. I've grown to like the cast more for not always talking about how awesome level 3 is in whatever video game, but more about what it meant to them. Obviously they still talk about the mechanics of the game. Also, the podcast is still plenty silly, like last week's "gazoo" bit.
Freedom = $1.05
Banned
Drawing inspiration from a certain aesthetic because you believe it will make your game stand out more is a bit different than gushing over nazi uniforms because you think they're sexy. Luftrausers is drawing inspiration from it; Leigh was just kinda fetishizing it for the sake of conversation (im giving her the benefit of the doubt with that, tbh).
In the end, this controversy doesn't really seem to hold up. The only reason it's gained any traction is because one of the devs did a terrible job explaining their reasoning behind this design choice. Luftrauser has been around since 2011 so, yeah, i don't get why now it's become a big deal when it wasn't like they we're hiding this game from the public for 3-4 years.
There are more egregious cases of games using nazis before this one and i think it kinda stinks that a very solid and enjoyable game is getting hammered suddenly because the gaming press smells blood in the water.
Chris Remo
Member
Yes, all three of us liked the gameplay and visual style of Monument Valley a lot, and I really enjoyed playing Burial at Sea Episode 2 until the weird retcon-spoiler explosion. Also we made positive reference to Shadow of the Colossus and Broken Age, as well as Doge 2048 and Threes.
At this point, it's implied Doge 2048 is the best game ever that can do no wrong.
BlastProcessing
Member
It's a nuanced issue. The difference between Lustrausers and WW2 games or even Papers Please is the context. The WW2 games are obviously about Nazi Germany they depict the Nazi-esque imagery in the actual context of history. They attach at least some of the weight of history to the experience. Papers Please, even though it is set in a fictional country, uses it's aesthetic as a vehicle to examine a facist, communist state.
Lustrausers doesn't do this. It's aesthetics are hanging in the wind, not really attached to a theme or context. In an odd irony, the fact that the subject matter has been sort of sanitized of any direct Nazi implication works to it's detriment here. To some, it can make the game feel like it is trying to romanticise an era and a people in a way that ignores the vital part of what that era and those people were.
As we move further away from WW2 and the last few people who actually lived through it are passing away, we should probably be very careful about how we present and think about it. We are at the transition period where history can become mythologized into something very different from what it was. For example, Genghis Kahn terrorized a continent and was at the center of massive bloodshed. Now his image is used to sling beef bowls at the mall. I suppose such things are inevitable over a long enough time span, but I would like to avoid as much of that sort of historical entropy for as long as possible.
I thought the podcast did the best job discussing the issue out of everything I have heard/read. Really enjoyed this episode.
You should probably add this something like this to your episode descriptions from now on.
Also the Luftrausers thing is interesting because I thought it wasn't a big deal until I remembered my first reaction to the aesthetic was "Woah, Nazi imagery! Punk rawk man." Just totally detached from the history of it, and just thinking it was just somewhat edgy.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
I guess it's a question of whether or not you can use aesthetics that have a very specific cultural context and remove them from that context.
I know anime is for losers, but I watched and liked a show called Girls und Panzer last year and I had a really hard time dealing with the aesthetics that they chose for their character designs:
A year later and I still don't know if I can square my enjoyment of the show with the fact that they are using iconic German uniforms for their characters. Given that it's a Japanese text, and suddenly it just gets even weirder and way out of the scope of this conversation.
I do think there's a discussion to be had and that if someone finds it offputting, their reaction is equally as valid as someone who thinks it's not a big deal. But you know that 50 years from now, the image of two towers burning in a background is going to be used in a video game and we'll be (or presumably our grandchildren) having the same conversation.
Oh yeah, what about this kickstarter?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1662858658/barbarossa-anime-card-game-from-japan
My take away from this is that there might be a future mall with a Hitler's Sausage Shack 600 years from now.
BlastProcessing
Member
There is a follow up joke here that I am not brave enough to make.
Cool; I'll check it out. Thank you!
There's a Hitler themed milk-tea shop in Taiwan I went to a few times. Can't find a picture, but apparently there's a Hitler themed fried chicken KFC knockoff restaurant in Thailand.
If you don't have/aren't aware of the context I can see how the imagery can be evocative. I'm sure it will be awhile before it happens in the US or Europe, but it'll happen at some point. Humanity likes to use the pain of its past as the punchline of its future.
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
this was your takeaway after their conversation?
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Well, to be fair, you can't really say Japanese nerds are representative of Japan. Otherwise you'd assume that Americans are all sexless but violent psychopaths. lol
And I never know how "anime" will get received in Gaming GAF. Let alone an Idle Thumbs thread. lol
The weird thing about the controversy to me was that I heard Patrick Klepek on Monday saying that the people who were originally bothered by the game were satisfied with the dev's blogpost , and that this was a good example of intelligent discourse on the internet. So hearing the thumbs saying it was bad explanation when the people who were originally upset were happy is strange, especially when none of them were bothered by it in the first place.
I just think it's funny that the people who were legitimately uncomfortable came out of the whole thing feeling better than people who didn't even notice anything wrong in first place.
But why would you think it was edgy if not for the likelihood of it offending someone? Nazi imagery's intrinsic ties to the real world fascist and genocidal actions of their regime are what make it's purely aesthetic use "punk rawk" and "edgy". "Detached from the history of it", it might as well be plaid; more importantly, detaching from the history is a luxury that is not afford to some.
More apropos to last week's South Park and Colbert discussion --
I'm not Jewish but I grew up with very close friends who were. I attended their bar mitzvahs, tagged along to temple the morning after a sleep-over, etc. I can't claim to have their life experiences, but I was near them in school and saw how other school kids treated them. It felt like they were no different. Antisemitism felt like a thing of the past.
South Park came out when I was a senior in high school, and it was fantastic. I loved it, my friends loved it, everyone in school loved it. And none of us were dummies, we all knew that Cartman Was Wrong. He's the buffoon. But playing up his provocative racism and antisemitism as jokes means that he gets all the best lines. Suddenly, classmates were jokingly calling each other "Jew". No offense meant, we all knew we were referencing a cartoon. But I can't imagine how my friends felt, having part of their identity used as a pejorative. Even though the intent was to act the fool, the very real world consequence in my community was that an epithet I had rarely been exposed to was being casually tossed around.
None of that ever occurred to me at the time. But in hindsight... that's pretty fucked up.
Sweet. I actually posted about Monument Valley a day or two ago in this very thread:
Visualante2
Member
Sorry if posted but the Lustrausers discussion was very interesting and I was reminded of this comedy sketch http://youtu.be/qv2XGQBcvxQ
Yeah, that's why I said "until". I acknowledged I was viewing the aesthetic from a detached perspective. And the edginess came from "WW2 Nazis are evil", as in, ARE, not were, not "they were an evil fascist group." But just a out of historical context, pop-evil thing like werewolves or vampires and, I was viewing it as edgy in a way I would view some film or game or book has the protagonist as a werewolf as edgy.
I don't see how anyone could deny that the nazi's had an eye for design and fashion. Hell, their uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss.
"If, and when, we are ever able to stand back dispassionately from the horrors of the Nazi regime, we might well see inklings of artistic virtues in some of their works. We are allowed, for example, to say that, from a purely technical point of view, some Nazi designs were pretty impressive. Who could doubt that Kurt Tank's Focke-Wulf Fw190 was one of the most effective fighter aircraft of its time (certainly not the RAF pilots who flew against them), or that the KdF-Wagen [Volkswagen Beetle] was one of the most successful and even best loved of all cars? In jest, we can just get away with saying that the "Germans had the best uniforms"
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/apr/18/whynaziartisadangerous
There seem to be a lot of talk of this in the art community. Should we ignore beauty in evil?
"If, and when, we are ever able to stand back dispassionately from the horrors of the Nazi regime, we might well see inklings of artistic virtues in some of their works. We are allowed, for example, to say that, from a purely technical point of view, some Nazi designs were pretty impressive. Who could doubt that Kurt Tank's Focke-Wulf Fw190 was one of the most effective fighter aircraft of its time (certainly not the RAF pilots who flew against them), or that the KdF-Wagen [Volkswagen Beetle] was one of the most successful and even best loved of all cars? In jest, we can just get away with saying that the "Germans had the best uniforms"
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2007/apr/18/whynaziartisadangerous
There seem to be a lot of talk of this in the art community. Should we ignore beauty in evil?
Good episode this week! I'm glad I checked it out. Gonna have to pick up that Monument Valley when I get home.
Regarding the Luftrausers discussion, I felt that the Thumbs take was not only fair, but also really interesting. It didn't seek to make any determinations as to the intentions or ethics of the guys at Vlambeer, and it examined the issue from the perspective of game developers who know that they could one day be in that same position and aren't sure how they would (or should) respond.
When you spend a lot of time online discussing things like this, you end up having these discussions with different kinds of people, and you get a variety of perspectives. Some of them could be from folks that are genuinely uncomfortable playing a game like Luftrausers, Papers Please, or Dear Leader. They play games for the same reasons that I do-- to be taken to a different place for awhile-- but the place they end up going is, for them, very different than it is for me. If I play that game and I love it, then I'm heartbroken hearing about experiences like that, because I want those folks to have the same experience that I had.
But there are also folks who only participate in the conversation because they view shame as a weapon they can use against other people and they see the conversation as an opportunity to do so. Encounters with folks like that are very unpleasant. If you've had such an encounter, then when something like this Luftrausers fiasco comes around, your first reaction might be, "I don't care if people are offended". The truth is usually somewhere in the middle: It isn't that you don't care if people are offended; it's that you don't care about the opinion of that asshole that you ran into the last time something like this came up.
How do we get past that? Well, I don't know. I guess all we can do is to keep having these conversations until it becomes obvious whose intentions are genuine, and then we can consider the perspectives of those people with the same degree of thoughtfulness that Sean showed on this week's episode. In any case, this post has just become a self-reflective stream of consciousness, so I'll end it here.
Regarding the Luftrausers discussion, I felt that the Thumbs take was not only fair, but also really interesting. It didn't seek to make any determinations as to the intentions or ethics of the guys at Vlambeer, and it examined the issue from the perspective of game developers who know that they could one day be in that same position and aren't sure how they would (or should) respond.
When you spend a lot of time online discussing things like this, you end up having these discussions with different kinds of people, and you get a variety of perspectives. Some of them could be from folks that are genuinely uncomfortable playing a game like Luftrausers, Papers Please, or Dear Leader. They play games for the same reasons that I do-- to be taken to a different place for awhile-- but the place they end up going is, for them, very different than it is for me. If I play that game and I love it, then I'm heartbroken hearing about experiences like that, because I want those folks to have the same experience that I had.
But there are also folks who only participate in the conversation because they view shame as a weapon they can use against other people and they see the conversation as an opportunity to do so. Encounters with folks like that are very unpleasant. If you've had such an encounter, then when something like this Luftrausers fiasco comes around, your first reaction might be, "I don't care if people are offended". The truth is usually somewhere in the middle: It isn't that you don't care if people are offended; it's that you don't care about the opinion of that asshole that you ran into the last time something like this came up.
How do we get past that? Well, I don't know. I guess all we can do is to keep having these conversations until it becomes obvious whose intentions are genuine, and then we can consider the perspectives of those people with the same degree of thoughtfulness that Sean showed on this week's episode. In any case, this post has just become a self-reflective stream of consciousness, so I'll end it here.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Well, Riefenstahl has been debated to death. I think there's a difference between objets d'art created at the time and recreating those aesthetics now though. I think there's a difference between appreciating old Nazi uniforms and say, the US Army deciding to redesign their uniforms with a Nazi aesthetic today.
But a video game is a piece of art in itself isn't it?
I couldn't paint a modern painting of nazi imagery? How is a videogame different than that?
I guess it is a more interesting topic than i first gave it credit. And clearly there is no easy answer. I just don't like the idea that we can't occasionally play the bad guy.
it's interesting because Luftrausers has an incredibly bare-bones aesthetic in any case. It's those three guys on the menu that REALLY speaks to me of being teutonic of anything. Everything else just feels... like that time period as opposed to that specific group of people. Even the three second cutscenes spoke more to me of X-COM and of pulp war novels (well... okay, I guess that's partially teutonic?) than any nazi regalia.
BlastProcessing
Member
The issue isn't about whether or not we should ignore beauty. It's about whether or not we can ignore it's context. Finding Hugo Boss' designs pleasing is one thing, but you can appreciate them without divorcing them from who wore them.
The critique of Luftrausers is that it is taking powerful, iconic imagery from the past and presenting it in a sort of parallel universe with no context and, in doing so, creates this weird sanitized version of the Nazi military. You can absolutely disagree with that, but that is the heart of the argument; not that Nazis can't be in games or that we can't acknowledge the aesthetic merits of Nazi iconography.
I really want to stress that, yes Luftrausers is art and of course it has every right to be made and sold as such. I am not advocating any sort of censorship at all. But, just as any art is debated and discussed by viewers and critics, this game can be as well.
I also like the idea that we can play as the "bad guy", but that isn't really what Luftrausers is about. It doesn't really touch on the morality of war at all. (It is a very good game though.)
I see this now (honestly i thought the guys on the podcast did a poor job of setting it up, it was lots of fumbling over themselves and deciding who should talk first, i kind of lost the plot).
The only thing I would say is that the game has you playing as the badguys. So of course it is going to be sanitized. Do the villains ever see themselves that way?
firehawk12
Subete no aware
It's not really playing the bad guy, it's using the aesthetic to evoke a certain period. As far as I know, they just wanted to evoke a time period and didn't really think about what they wanted to say with that evocation.
I'm not sure where I stand, of course, because as I pointed out above there's an anime that I like featuring a girl named Erwin who likes to dress like Rommel because she's a WW2 fangirl. Of course, that's supposed to play into the audience's knowledge and perhaps fetishization of WW2 history as well.
The line also seems fluid, because if you look at the reaction to the Operation Barbarossa kickstarter in the GAF thread, most people seem to laugh at the absurdity of the project more than talk about its evocation of Nazi imagery by putting anime girls in Nazi uniforms.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=785256
D
Deleted member 22576
Unconfirmed Member
The theme of the conversation has been that they're not just bad guys, they're Nazis. Which carries a completely unique connotation.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
They actually state that you don't play as any one in history, that their text is ahistorical and set in a different universe, so they are evoking the imagery but trying to avoid evoking any of the political baggage that comes with it.
I guess that is the crux of the whole thing.
When you use nazi imagery (the one scientist with the glasses looks exactly like one of the villains from the Captain America movies) I am going to assume you are the villain. Perhaps if they had gone even further, it would have helped match the aesthetic.
But at this point you have a game that looks like you are playing a nazi, but never really acknowledges the fact. And i understand they are not NAZIS as planned by the game developers. But really...we all know they are. You put someone in what looks like a nazi uniform, i am going to assume nazi.
I don't want to say the game had to have a point. But i think it would have at least been interesting if some of the bits of story better matched the tone of the art