An antiwar masterpiece misunderstood… or was it? [video] | Hacker News Reader

An antiwar masterpiece misunderstood… or was it? [video]

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66 pointsdoener18 comments

Hmmm. I think the big problem with a game called Cannon Fodder that portrays soldiers being treated as disposable and thrown away in some ultimately pointless game is that it's perhaps a little too on the nose in the context of World War I, especially in the UK. So many lives were lost for so little that it's part of the reason appeasement had such support early in World War II. The Royal Legion (which is associated with the poppy emblem) also seems to have gotten increasingly jingoistic as old soldiers die off and old wars go from living memory to history.

An article talking a bit more about the game development side of this:

https://www.eurogamer.net/never-been-so-much-fun-the-making-...

I have a mild interest in anti-war/pacifist pop culture, things like the comic strip Charley's War, which considering it was published in "Battle Picture Weekly" you might expect corny, racist jingoistic nonsense rather than well researched horrors of war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley%27s_War

(Video talks about video game "Cannon Fodder", 1993)

I was too young to perceive the game like this, but I sure remember how many hours I spent playing it. One of my favourite, maybe I will give it another run someday.

I remember cracking the DOS version of that one with Turbo Debugger. Good times, the subject matter notwithstanding.

Hmm. I played the game back in the day. Didn't feel it to be antiwar at all. War has never been so much fun, you know. An the graveyard... I played a certain rogue-like called Ragnarok, you could find corpses of your previous heroes there, so it certainly wasn't some groundbreaking feature. More like high score list you can find in any Tetris game.

It's very much an anti-war game with civilians lining up on the way in and ending up as gravestones on boot hill on their way out. But it's not too in your face, which is part of the brilliance of the game. You can just play it as a fun action game.

Another excellent example of this was Starship Troopers. There were those that 'got it' and those that did not [1]. The one critical thing about subtlety versus overtness is that the former may be understood by a smaller chunk of your audience than the latter, but it will tend to leave a far greater impression. A point lost on much of contemporary Western media.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/11/11/...

>The one critical thing about subtlety versus overtness is that the former may be understood by a smaller chunk of your audience than the latter

Every time I read a paraphrase of this, I think for a second they're talking about Heinlein, and then I go oh...yeah...

Care to elaborate for the smaller chunk? ;-)

Verhoeven, who lived through Nazi occupation as a child, created the film. Initially it had nothing to do with Starship troopers, but gained branding rights later on at which point the original movie (Bug Hunt at Outpost 7) was merged. Might you ever, in a million years, want to live in the world he builds? No, nobody* would. Yet could you imagine reasonable people finding allure in the ideology that's represented? Absolutely.

Verhoeven doesn't really misrepresent that ideology, but instead also shows it leads to an absolutely horrific world without ever really appealing to any unimaginable scenarios. In other words he's not trying to show that the ideal is "evil", he's trying to show where it can lead. And this is far more compelling than modern satire of a similar nature which fails because it largely focuses on trying to make the ideals themselves so unimaginably evil that nobody could ever possibly be genuinely drawn to them without exceptional "otherizing", perhaps contributing to the ever widening perception gap. [1]

This issue is perhaps once of the many reasons history seems to just play on an endless loop. In an effort to emphasize how wrong the past was we demonize it ever more. Yet if one goes out seeking the Devil, a grizzly beast wielding a pitch fork, forked tongue, and flames lapping about him, then you'd certainly never to stop imagine that the otherwise normal looking man in front of you is one and the same. The more we demonize the past beyond recognition, the less there is to learn from it.

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/

"Starship Troopers" is clearly a propaganda film created in a future militaristic society, something like "Why we fight" of their time. Would you like to know more?

>gravestones on boot hill

"Here lies a programmer. Killed by a fatal error."

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Source:NetHack_3.6.1/dat/epitap...

I kinda feel like the line for "antiwar game" (or frequently movie too) is super low. You put in one small sad thing or one scene of someone in pain and it gets called antiwar. Even if overall players don't tend to come out with no conclusion like that and no understanding of what are the issues of War.

Go to your brother

Kill him with your gun

Leave him dying in his uniform

Dying in the sun

This was one of the best games on the Amiga.

The gameplay tells the message "War is fun"

Well, this message is not elaborate enough for a HN discussion, but isn't it true though? Even if the game makes you feel a little bad for what you did, you're still having fun playing at war, so I can't help but think it softens the message.

It makes me think of Spec Ops: The Line, a game I love. It even goes further by putting the most exhilarating fight just before shoving in your face the horrors of war. It works because you end up remembering the message of the game more than the fun you had. I'm not sure it applies to Cannon Fodder though. You play it to have fun, not for the anti-war message.

It's still interesting it was trying to do that, but you can still criticize how it was done.

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