From 1936 to 1939, a deadly war feuded in Spain between fascist dictator Francisco Franco and a group of rebel guerrilla republicans. This, the Spanish Civil war, is still a tragedy that the Spanish people struggle with. Being that the war ended only 68 years ago, most of the children of war victims are still alive. Only recently have actions been made to sympathize with those families. For example, a Historical Memory Law has just been passed this month to recognize the disputed deaths of Franco's opposition. Franco still has surviving followers who hail him on the day of his death yearly and rejoice in his victory of the war. As you can see, this, as I said, is still very alive and has not been rendered to a mere memory yet.
Despite the controversy and pain surrounding this historical event, a new video game depicting this time period is being released. Shadows of War: the Spanish Civil War is being released on the thirty-second year anniversary of Francisco Franco's death. It is a game where players can choose to either play on the Spanish Military's or the Rebel's side. Game play includes covert missions, airborne attacks, hand to hand combat and all that comes with a revolution.
Families of war victims and many other people are highly offended by the release of this game. The people feel (based on the nature of other video games) that killing characters will be a routine part of game play and thus will become trivial and meaningless. The game is fairly historically accurate (besides options changed for more challenging play), so it mentions real names of people who were involved and depicts some of them in animated form. Seeing how the war is only just recently being worked through, it is easy to see the lack of appropriateness in the release of this game.
I think that the game should not be released. It is sacrificing the sensitivity of families who lost loved ones for the sake of entertainment. Al though creators of the game claim that it teaches people about the event, really its all for fun. The game will have players enjoying shooting people and dropping bombs from an airplane on people who's kids are still in mourning. How would we feel if a video game came out about recent terrorist attacks or of this war came out? Would the fact that it came out in 2069 (68 years later) change the fact that players could either chose to be the side that blows up houses in Iraq, or the side that crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center based on play preferance? What has pop culture come to these days where people can be so insensitive to each other just to please ourselves?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I agree that releasing this type of videogame would be highly insensitive all around. I've never been a fan of violent video games and the argument that this game is supposed to be "educational" or serve as some sort of reminder to not repeat past events (http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,,2212614,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront) is pretty weak, in my opinion. Sure, learning through a video game would be potentially more interesting than learning from a textbook but exactly how accurate would the game be? And coming at the cost of first and foremost teaching kids to kill people in order to win? It seems ludicrous to try and justify this.
I am kind of on the fence for this issue. On one hand, it is a little insensitive to be releasing a violent video game that depicts a true event which haunts so many people. But on the other hand, there have been tons of games that simulate the events of World War I and World War II. So how is this any different? All of these events are in a 30 year time period. I mean, there have been Desert Storm games and such that depict the Gulf War, which was very recent. There were no complaints about those games as far as I'm concerned. So, I don't really have a problem with this new game. Entertainment is to entertain people, not to insult or offend anybody.
I too took Paul's opinion under consideration. There has been games depicting other wars. The difference is this: the Spanish government just this month finally recognized these deaths. This means that in October, many people could still deny the deaths of nearly 500,000 people. This isn't WWI or WWII that were public, these people still are fighting just to get their families remembered.
i agree that there has been alot of games released based on wars that happened, but i think the creators chose the wrong time to publish their game. the war is viewed differently by the people who were directly affected by it than us, so it is the wrong time to release this game when the government had only just recognized that they had suffered.
Post a Comment