Some of the games steal scenes directly from the film, such as the Omaha Beach landing sequence in MoH: Allied Assault (2002).įigure 3. The influence of Saving Private Ryan can be found in the desaturated colors, mournful music, and similar scenarios played out in the Medal of Honor games. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) 2 The first Medal of Honor ( MoH) game was developed simultaneously with Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg and his Dreamworks Entertainment in 1998, and additional games have followed in the franchise every one or two years since then.įigure 2. Both of these game series have been released in various formats for different gaming platforms, including Playstation (as well as Playstation 2 and 3), Xbox (and Xbox 360), personal computer, GameCube, Wii, GameBoy Advance, Playstation Portable, and mobile phone. Two extremely popular video game series have cemented the association of World War II and the first-person shooter genre: Medal of Honor (1999- ) and Call of Duty (2003- ). 1 This genre of game uses 3D graphics to simulate the point of view of the primary character moving through space, usually with only the character’s hand and/or a weapon visible at the bottom center of the screen. The video game genre that has most fully embraced World War II is the first-person shooter. World War II and the First-Person Shooter However, I will make the case that this simulation of history actually better reflects contemporary warfare, providing a representation of the present disguised as the past. Thus, World War II video games combine the moral and narrative associations of the war with the physical activity of shooting, creating a sense of mastery and control. This repetition reflects not only an obsession with certain aspects of the war, but an emphasis on manual activity-particularly the simulation of shooting. The victory of the Allied powers is literally played over and over again-both in various games, which recycle the same scenarios, as well as within gameplay, in which levels and campaigns are repeated over and over again until they are beaten. I contend that World War II video games reflect contemporary fantasies of the war as evidence for the assured triumph of the West (and particularly the United States). The interactivity of the video game appears to promise a different relation to the narrative and experience of the game, as well as a different relation to history. The fact that in the case of the video game the “viewer” becomes a “player” means that the relationship between the user and the media changes. In this essay, I explore how contemporary video games adapt the World War II combat film genre for their own cultural work. In sharing some of these nostalgic ideologies of the war, contemporary World War II video games draw explicitly from cinema. By the 1990s, the World War II video game had established itself as a resilient formula and an important way that the cultural memory of the war was activated for a growing segment of the population. The war era is still often seen as a time of moral authority and consensus, in which the whole nation united for a common cause. These texts and events rewrote World War II as the last “good war” in which military force was justified and the United States played the role of world savior. The nostalgic zeitgeist of the 1990s manifested itself in Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw’s books on the “Greatest Generation,” the release of a number of World War II-themed films, and the construction of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. World War II video games-which are some of the most popular games featuring military combat-participate in the cultural nostalgia for the war to which recent films like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001) contributed. Increasingly, however, this task has also been taken up by new media-video games, in particular-resulting in new perspectives on the social and political meanings of the war in contemporary America. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: LFA 2009įrom Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) to Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), the cinema has taken on the cultural task of visualizing World War II. × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University The World War II Video Game, Adaptation, and Postmodern History Tanine Allison (Emory University)
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