Why are there no war games that let you play the bad guys?

Although it's not campaign/story based, an FPS game I play (Project Reality, a mod of BF2) has a very interesting multiplayer game mode called insurgency. If you get placed on the taliban/insurgent side it's your job to be as devious towards the Americans or British as possible. Placing IEDs, ambushing convoys with suicide bomb cars etc.

 

Why don't I get to firebomb 150k+ Dresden civilians into cinders? Or have a minigame where I shove ballpoint pens up Palestinian urethrae?

Gamers, Americans, and society in general are on a cartoonish Sunday-school level of historical and political understanding of past events. Everything must be painted in black and white. Everyone who fought for Germany was an oven-building anti-Semite and everyone who has fought for the USA in any conflict was a freedom-defending martyr who never did any wrong.

Well, except for the Americans fighting for the Confederate States. They belong in the dung heap slightly above the Germans.

Other than maybe an occasional strategy title or as a story-less opponent side in a multi-player mode you'll never see anything other than what we've already got. Which is both sad and discouraging; as people have mentioned there's an unlimited amount of interesting stories to be told.

 

Does this count, in Company of Heroes there are missions where you are on Germany's side. :/

=hugh

 

I was talking about this the other day with some friends and one came up with a good explanation.

His point was political correctness: picture a COD from the Nazis' side, first of all the game would be banned in Germany because they have anti-nazi laws there, and its the biggest market in Europe so thats a big no-no from the execs.

Then theres the catch-22: its easy to ignore the shit the Allies did because we are "the good guys", you didnt get to play "let's burn the village of Mai Lai and rape the women and children" in BF:Vietnam, or "lets firebomb Dresden". But in COD:Nazis? if you have a level where you have to execute jews like that airport in MW2 you are gonna get all kinds of shit from the press, parents and yes, jews. But if you dont all the Nazi campaign will be the same than the Allies campaign and people will give you shit for making the nazis look good.

After all if you take the holocaust, the famines and the executions the nazis did the same shit everybody else does, and the player will wonder why they were the "bad guys"

 

I'd like to restate that everyone should play Spec Ops: The Line.

 

That was a fictional war and look at the shitstorm it created.