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Comment by emiljbs | Hacker News Reader

You know "it's just a game" does have a lot of mileage left in it if you had to write an article on edge-online.com about the issue. I can promise you that none of those teenagers that play CoD ever even thought about that or even tried to interpret the story at all. In fact, the single-player campaign is just something you do when you get temporarily bored with multiplayer. If a teenage player did think of what the story implies then I am sure that he is also smart enough to think about it further and conclude that that's quite silly.

I wouldn't be bothered with what one source tells you (if you look really closely at it) when there are so many other sources of information out there. Especially when that source isn't considered serious by pretty much everyone who plays the game.

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While I agree, I do think this underestimates the power of a person's subconscious. The details outlined in the article might not be explicitly called out in the gamer's mind, but might set a subconscious expectation for it to be the case; that "America is a superpower". When this expectation isn't met in reality, then the user might find themselves defending the position that "America is great" without them ever realizing why they hold that position in the first place.

Very well said, thank you for posting this. It seems to me that humans in general have a hard realizing the powerful subtleties of the subconscious and how it can shape world views/thought patterns over time.

One could argue the same thing abut pejoratives and ethnic slurs on the Internet. None of people posting youtube comments ever think about the issue of using ethnic slurs, nor what they actually mean. If a person did think of what such words mean, they are surely smart enough to conclude in not using them.

Yet... I think it is good that people do point out the inappropriateness in using pejoratives and ethnic slurs. It marks a social standpoint, which instructs people in what is acceptable and not acceptable. Same goes for propaganda messages in games.

I think a better analogy would be someone accidently telling deaf kids that "saying <ethnic slur here> is awesome" while giving them candy. The deaf kids doesn't pick up on that and the person probably doesn't realise what he is saying anyway because he just wanted to give kids candy.

Activision doesn't care about sending out propaganda, they just want money and do so by bringing out action games with ridiculously bad storylines that a lot of players probably doesn't even play.

I remember playing Half-Life and finishing the game and only after I replayed the intro again did I bother to understand the premise of aliens teleported to us. I only wanted to wind the game. FPS are fun to me because of the speed I have to react and not because of the weapons detail. In fact weapons don't interest me if they don't have a sci-fi feel to them. So yeah, it's just a game.

> In fact, the single-player campaign is just something you do when you get temporarily bored with multiplayer. If a teenage player did think of what the story implies then I am sure that he is also smart enough to think about it further and conclude that that's quite silly.

By the same token, a campaign glorifying White Power would be perfectly fine. If developers are putting serious money into crafting a single-player story, and people are playing (in fact, I think I read some time ago a CoD developer expressing surprise at the number of people playing only the campaign and not the multiplayer), it's perfectly legitimate to criticize it.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

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