I think he makes a subtle but fairly critical mistake right out of the gate, in the third paragraph:
> I should note here that my intention isn’t to condemn those people whose tolerance for moral ambiguity allows them to enjoy Panzer General in the spirit which SSI no doubt intended
I know he's trying to come off as non-judgmental here, but he still makes an error in assuming that people who enjoy this game are "tolerating moral ambiguity." Imagining yourself in the shoes of an evil person is a fundamental part of fiction. Just read The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe. Engaging in such fantasies is in no way, shape, or form an act of tolerance towards moral ambiguity; it's one of the few ways one can safely explore the darker parts of their own psyche and wrestle with them.
> Imagining yourself in the shoes of an evil person is a fundamental part of fiction.
However, as mentioned, Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at all, it has been cleaned away from the final product.
>>>Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at all
What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? Every time one of your units takes a Victory Point on a town, a window pops up: "You captured $townname! Do you want to execute all of the civilians here? [Yes/No]" If you click YES, it shows you a real image of a mass execution from WW2? Can you imagine the uproar THAT would cause? I suspect that players would either click YES on all of them, or click NO on all of them, so as a mechanic it adds no meaningful choices. If you just want to force exposure to the brutality, you could throw in a random "You clicked 'NO' but your soldiers disobeyed orders and killed everyone anyway" and display some shocking content, but all that will accomplish is to turn off some segment of your customer base. The point was to sell a product, after all. If people really want to understand the nastiness that happens during a conflict, they'll find it via other mediums anyway (VHS snuff films before the Internet, BestGore et al. now).
Rome: Total War doesn't let me grapple with the moral issues of crucifying Christians and Jews. Is that omission also a problem? Why/why not?
And the actual panzer generals took great pains to ignore that very same evil. Evil people don't imagine themselves to be evil. You wouldn't really be imagining yourself in their shoes if the game forced you to act as a cartoon villain.
That's a good point. In the case of Poe's writing, the approach is at least thoughtful. In the Panzer case, it seems to just blithely throw players into the ranks of Nazism with no interest in exploring what that means. You could argue that games are more of a blank slate than literature, onto which people can project several experiences orthogonal to the authors/developers intent, but I think that's probably being too generous.
>>>he still makes an error in assuming that people who enjoy this game are "tolerating moral ambiguity."
That's a good catch that I skimmed over. One of the things taught at The Basic School is to "turn the map around"; in other words, to approach the tactical situation from your adversary's perspective, come up with a sensible plan for the enemy, and then use that to drive your own planning for how to defeat them. You have to know how they might solve THEIR tactical problems in order to solve YOUR tactical problems. Gaming out the bad guys' Courses of Action is an essential part of military planning and wargaming's role in planning. It has no moral endorsement attached to it at all. Why would the author even think otherwise? That's such a bizarre and huge leap in logic.
The author distinguishes the experience of playing Panzer General from traditional wargames later on:
> It’s a judgment call that’s personal to each of us. For my part, I can play the German side in a conventional wargame easily enough if I need to, although I would prefer to take the Allied side. But Panzer General, with its eagerness to embed me in the role of a German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer, is a bridge too far for me.
The "ethics" in the title seemed to me to be referring less to the personal ethics involved in playing the game than to the ethics of reinforcing the "clean Wehrmacht" myth.
I think this is an unrealistic expectation for a game. I've never played Panzer General, but I've played other strategies games and boardgames. When I choose to play the Axis, I play to understand the dynamics or limitations of the battalions/dynamics/offense/defense of the Germans in ww1 or ww2, not participate in the political realm
Imagine you ask your friend to play as the Axis so you can play the Allies, and they refuse saying "No, I don't want to play the Axis because the game rules require me to be berated with a history of evil". It's not something you expect in a boardgame, so why expect it in a computer game
To play the Devil's advocate here: what's the difference between Panzer General and KZ Manager? A valid answer is "no difference!" But if you think there is a difference, you need to articulate that.
>Imagining yourself in the shoes of an evil person is a fundamental part of fiction.
As long as it's fiction, and you know they're evil. While I've personally greatly enjoyed Panzer General and its sequels, on a moral level the game differs very little from questionable post-war spin and propaganda. There is particularly an entire genre of problematic, self-serving Nazi general memoirs with themes such as:
- Effectively promoting the myth of the superhuman Aryan soldier defeating vast hordes of subhumans. The original Panzer General takes this to a new extreme by making German units vastly superior throughout the war, down to the point where it's practically impossible to win the Battle of Berlin scenario as the Allies.
- Generally treating the entire war as an abstract Kriegsspiel that they'd have won through superior strength of intellect - if it wasn't for that bumbling incompetent at the top. PG is an ultimate fantasy in this regard, with Hitler being hardly mentioned and almost inconsequential (spend a little prestige and you'll easily get over his "bad" decisions at Kiev and Gibraltar).
It is actually possible to do better in a computer game. For instance, I've heard good things about Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa. Apparently it lets you stand up to Hitler about war crimes at risk of losing essential resources and/or being dismissed, or choose to be complicit; and, at the end, runs you through the Nuremberg trials accordingly.
"For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best."
No, my actions won't lead to a single death, no matter how many degrees you move away. It's just moving bits around in a computer.
"Or am I hopelessly overthinking it? Is Panzer General just a piece of harmless entertainment that happens to play with a subset of the stuff of history?"
The answer is an emphatic yes, you are really overthinking this.
I feel like you have taken that argument out of context. This appears just before it:
"What sorts of subject matter are appropriate for a game? Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die."
If one feels completely comfortable with that, then the argument afterward can be disregarded. However, the author makes that argument on the assumption that you will feel uncomfortable with the above (as I'm sure a lot of us would) and posits that Panzer General should make you equally uncomfortable.
Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful.
That previous section doesn't alter the context and doesn't change the fact that nothing I or the author or any other player does in a game like this leads to a single death, let alone millions.
If the author is uncomfortable taking on the role of a "German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer" then he should feel equally uncomfortable acting as a Soviet general goose-stepping for a dictator who imprisoned, tortured and starved millions of his own citizens. Or for that matter the U.S. or Britain. Forget anything based on ancient Greece or Rome as well. Might as well stick to Farmville or Mario Kart if you're going to continue down that road.
"Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful."
I did not brush it aside, I read the entire rambling article, most of which had very little to do with any potential harmful effects and gave it a lot more consideration than it truly deserved. It was in no way compelling, nor did it contain any real insights. I stand by my earlier statement, he is really overthinking this.
No offense but this is only a slightly refurbished version the "videogames make us murderers" type of argument. Those are extraordinary claims, and as such require extraordinary proof, when in fact no correlation (let alone causation) exists.
It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.
There's an argument that some themes might be less palatable to some people, but that effectively comes down to personal preferences. For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?
> "Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die.""
Most people here have played Master of Orion. Recall that you can take over planets by either bombarding them with your ships, resulting in the death of the entire planetary population, or sending in troopships carrying your own population, resulting in the death of the some or all planetary population and/or some or all your own population committed to the assault.
I'd be surprised if more than a handful of players ever even gave the act a moment's thought before ordering the attack and I don't recall the ethics ever being brought up in any review or analysis.
>Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful.
I think we should have learned our lesson and first gather some data before we ban war games, RPGs or Sims because some person has an hypothesis that maybe somewhere, someone would be "transformed" by the media into a criminal. I really don'w want some government or american christian dominated companies to start banning stuff.
The fact that the consequences are cleansed away makes it not remotely historical. You aren't playing a subset of history, you are playing a subset of propaganda.
For the sake of discussion:
> It's just moving bits around in a computer.
Once it's dressed up as making Nazi Germany win the 2nd World War with as little tact as the author makes it out to have, it's no longer "just" moving bits around in a computer. It's also about the story we're telling about and through these bits. Are you claiming that a raw output of memory along with the concrete mathematical operations you can apply to it would suffice in satisfying your urge to play [Panzer General]? Does the visual & narrative dressing not play a role in your interest (or others') in the game?
It's probably not harmful for most "well-adjusted" individuals (whatever that can mean); nonetheless I think it's important to talk about how much the piece of media encourages (or fails to encourage) mindfulness towards what it represents. Even more so for interactive media like video games.
I further agree with the author that we can't look at an instance of this in the void; it is important to consider what's happening in the world at large. With all that has been said on the "Clean Wehrmact", consider what role this game might have had in further propagating that narrative in, for example, kids looking for a fun wargame to play without yet having knowledge of what happened in WW2.
'Hart befriended many of the surviving German generals — often by visiting them in their prison cells — and bolstered his case via a tacit quid pro quo that would have gone something like this if anyone had dared to speak it aloud: “Say that you developed Blitzkrieg warfare by reading my old texts, and I’ll use my influence to promote the position that you were only a soldier following orders and don’t deserve to die in prison.”'
IIRC, little things like German generals, in their autobiographies, saying things like "if the Brits and French had listened to Liddell Hart, they wouldn't have lost to us in 1940" or "our tactics were based on reading Liddell Hart's early infantry tactics work" when there is little to no chance that they could have known who he was at the time and most of his writings prior to WWII were based on the ide that "blitzkrieg" was impossible. In turn, he wrote several books along the lines of the "clean Wehrmacht" and that German generals were brilliant---specifically, most of the German generals you've ever heard of.
See *Liddell Hart and the Weight of History" by John J. Mearsheimer.
That doesn't sound like evidence for the claim. It's like saying that Chevron was behind 9/11 because they gained from the consequences.
Also, it seems weird to think the German generals wouldn't have heard of Liddell Hart - he was a major historian of WWI. Indeed, this article provides evidence that Rommel, for one, had heard of him:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a515920.pdf
I came to this article prepared to defend games where you play general, but this is not about that. The moral ambiguity described is playing a game where you are specifically playing a nazi general, and the 'Good German' myth promulgated by the Cold War that has made that palatable.
So like I told my wife when we watched "The Book Thief"- I was not expecting this to have a happy ending
I think that generally speaking the ambiguity increases as time goes by.
Is a 9/11 simulator premature? How about Vietnam war strategy game? Should I think of Wernher Von Braun (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun) every time I see a liftoff from Cape Canaveral? Is playing the character of Genghis Khan morally acceptable?
You mean SS Sturmbahnfurher von Braun? Yes, actually. Although the von Braun building (and a very nice one it is) is on the Army part of Redstone Arsenal rather than Marshall Space Flight Center.
There's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here in north Alabama.
I was really fascinated by this article, but ultimately a bit disappointed by the conclusion. This isn't about the ethics of gaming at all, but the author's drawn conclusion about the ethics of a specific game (with a brilliant long-form exploration of the historical context behind the game).
Why enjoying a Nazi-general-commander game is less justifiable than, say, Postal (where you play a distraught postal worker going on a senseless killing rampage), or Grand Theft Auto is not explored at all. Also, the Milgram experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) is highly relevant when vilifying people for taking orders even if they understand that the orders may be immoral.
Frankly why waste time on Panzer General's ethics when the most excellent Panther Games Command Ops 2 is waiting on Steam to teach you about reality!
When your troops start to rout, flee, fatigue and disobey and you're overwhelmed by your own micro-management... Then you realise how much of the damage is done by distant artillery (more than half of casualties in WW2, true fact) The ethics is clear: being the commander, on any side, you have to be evil.
Readit News
> I should note here that my intention isn’t to condemn those people whose tolerance for moral ambiguity allows them to enjoy Panzer General in the spirit which SSI no doubt intended
I know he's trying to come off as non-judgmental here, but he still makes an error in assuming that people who enjoy this game are "tolerating moral ambiguity." Imagining yourself in the shoes of an evil person is a fundamental part of fiction. Just read The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe. Engaging in such fantasies is in no way, shape, or form an act of tolerance towards moral ambiguity; it's one of the few ways one can safely explore the darker parts of their own psyche and wrestle with them.
However, as mentioned, Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at all, it has been cleaned away from the final product.
What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? Every time one of your units takes a Victory Point on a town, a window pops up: "You captured $townname! Do you want to execute all of the civilians here? [Yes/No]" If you click YES, it shows you a real image of a mass execution from WW2? Can you imagine the uproar THAT would cause? I suspect that players would either click YES on all of them, or click NO on all of them, so as a mechanic it adds no meaningful choices. If you just want to force exposure to the brutality, you could throw in a random "You clicked 'NO' but your soldiers disobeyed orders and killed everyone anyway" and display some shocking content, but all that will accomplish is to turn off some segment of your customer base. The point was to sell a product, after all. If people really want to understand the nastiness that happens during a conflict, they'll find it via other mediums anyway (VHS snuff films before the Internet, BestGore et al. now).
Rome: Total War doesn't let me grapple with the moral issues of crucifying Christians and Jews. Is that omission also a problem? Why/why not?
That's a good catch that I skimmed over. One of the things taught at The Basic School is to "turn the map around"; in other words, to approach the tactical situation from your adversary's perspective, come up with a sensible plan for the enemy, and then use that to drive your own planning for how to defeat them. You have to know how they might solve THEIR tactical problems in order to solve YOUR tactical problems. Gaming out the bad guys' Courses of Action is an essential part of military planning and wargaming's role in planning. It has no moral endorsement attached to it at all. Why would the author even think otherwise? That's such a bizarre and huge leap in logic.
Nobody here, for example, is morally tolerant of the CCP or DPRK: https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/how-does-the-next-great-po...
> It’s a judgment call that’s personal to each of us. For my part, I can play the German side in a conventional wargame easily enough if I need to, although I would prefer to take the Allied side. But Panzer General, with its eagerness to embed me in the role of a German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer, is a bridge too far for me.
The "ethics" in the title seemed to me to be referring less to the personal ethics involved in playing the game than to the ethics of reinforcing the "clean Wehrmacht" myth.
To have a society that will not repeat darker sides of history and behaviour, we need to seriously engage with it.
Not sensor them in a fit of moral panic.
You could argue that this game is not qualified as serious engagement, but that's a sloghtly different discussion
Imagine you ask your friend to play as the Axis so you can play the Allies, and they refuse saying "No, I don't want to play the Axis because the game rules require me to be berated with a history of evil". It's not something you expect in a boardgame, so why expect it in a computer game
As long as it's fiction, and you know they're evil. While I've personally greatly enjoyed Panzer General and its sequels, on a moral level the game differs very little from questionable post-war spin and propaganda. There is particularly an entire genre of problematic, self-serving Nazi general memoirs with themes such as:
- Minimizing, or even completely ignoring, the Wehrmacht's essential contribution to war crimes and the Holocaust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht#Criminal_and_genocid...
- Effectively promoting the myth of the superhuman Aryan soldier defeating vast hordes of subhumans. The original Panzer General takes this to a new extreme by making German units vastly superior throughout the war, down to the point where it's practically impossible to win the Battle of Berlin scenario as the Allies.
- Generally treating the entire war as an abstract Kriegsspiel that they'd have won through superior strength of intellect - if it wasn't for that bumbling incompetent at the top. PG is an ultimate fantasy in this regard, with Hitler being hardly mentioned and almost inconsequential (spend a little prestige and you'll easily get over his "bad" decisions at Kiev and Gibraltar).
It is actually possible to do better in a computer game. For instance, I've heard good things about Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa. Apparently it lets you stand up to Hitler about war crimes at risk of losing essential resources and/or being dismissed, or choose to be complicit; and, at the end, runs you through the Nuremberg trials accordingly.
No, my actions won't lead to a single death, no matter how many degrees you move away. It's just moving bits around in a computer.
"Or am I hopelessly overthinking it? Is Panzer General just a piece of harmless entertainment that happens to play with a subset of the stuff of history?"
The answer is an emphatic yes, you are really overthinking this.
"What sorts of subject matter are appropriate for a game? Before you rush to answer, ask yourself how you would feel about, say, a version of Transport Tycoon where you have to move Jews from the cities where they live to the concentration camps where they will die."
If one feels completely comfortable with that, then the argument afterward can be disregarded. However, the author makes that argument on the assumption that you will feel uncomfortable with the above (as I'm sure a lot of us would) and posits that Panzer General should make you equally uncomfortable.
Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful.
If the author is uncomfortable taking on the role of a "German general goose-stepping and kowtowing to his Führer" then he should feel equally uncomfortable acting as a Soviet general goose-stepping for a dictator who imprisoned, tortured and starved millions of his own citizens. Or for that matter the U.S. or Britain. Forget anything based on ancient Greece or Rome as well. Might as well stick to Farmville or Mario Kart if you're going to continue down that road.
"Further, I think it is unwise to brush aside any argument that the nature of the media we consume does not affect how we interact with the real world without consideration. Just because it turns out that old 90s arguments about DOOM turning us all into violent murderers was wrong doesn't mean that there aren't effects that might be harmful."
I did not brush it aside, I read the entire rambling article, most of which had very little to do with any potential harmful effects and gave it a lot more consideration than it truly deserved. It was in no way compelling, nor did it contain any real insights. I stand by my earlier statement, he is really overthinking this.
It's like claiming "it's unwise to brush aside any argument that reading HN makes your skin turn green", it's entirely baseless; I don't understand why the burden of proof should rest on me.
There's an argument that some themes might be less palatable to some people, but that effectively comes down to personal preferences. For example, I personally hold the view that lotteries and similar games are unethical, but is it really fair of me to cast those who play such games as "objectively immoral"?
Most people here have played Master of Orion. Recall that you can take over planets by either bombarding them with your ships, resulting in the death of the entire planetary population, or sending in troopships carrying your own population, resulting in the death of the some or all planetary population and/or some or all your own population committed to the assault.
I'd be surprised if more than a handful of players ever even gave the act a moment's thought before ordering the attack and I don't recall the ethics ever being brought up in any review or analysis.
I think we should have learned our lesson and first gather some data before we ban war games, RPGs or Sims because some person has an hypothesis that maybe somewhere, someone would be "transformed" by the media into a criminal. I really don'w want some government or american christian dominated companies to start banning stuff.
Once it's dressed up as making Nazi Germany win the 2nd World War with as little tact as the author makes it out to have, it's no longer "just" moving bits around in a computer. It's also about the story we're telling about and through these bits. Are you claiming that a raw output of memory along with the concrete mathematical operations you can apply to it would suffice in satisfying your urge to play [Panzer General]? Does the visual & narrative dressing not play a role in your interest (or others') in the game?
It's probably not harmful for most "well-adjusted" individuals (whatever that can mean); nonetheless I think it's important to talk about how much the piece of media encourages (or fails to encourage) mindfulness towards what it represents. Even more so for interactive media like video games.
I further agree with the author that we can't look at an instance of this in the void; it is important to consider what's happening in the world at large. With all that has been said on the "Clean Wehrmact", consider what role this game might have had in further propagating that narrative in, for example, kids looking for a fun wargame to play without yet having knowledge of what happened in WW2.
'Hart befriended many of the surviving German generals — often by visiting them in their prison cells — and bolstered his case via a tacit quid pro quo that would have gone something like this if anyone had dared to speak it aloud: “Say that you developed Blitzkrieg warfare by reading my old texts, and I’ll use my influence to promote the position that you were only a soldier following orders and don’t deserve to die in prison.”'
If it was tacit, how do we know it happened?
See *Liddell Hart and the Weight of History" by John J. Mearsheimer.
Also, it seems weird to think the German generals wouldn't have heard of Liddell Hart - he was a major historian of WWI. Indeed, this article provides evidence that Rommel, for one, had heard of him: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a515920.pdf
So like I told my wife when we watched "The Book Thief"- I was not expecting this to have a happy ending
Is a 9/11 simulator premature? How about Vietnam war strategy game? Should I think of Wernher Von Braun (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun) every time I see a liftoff from Cape Canaveral? Is playing the character of Genghis Khan morally acceptable?
You mean SS Sturmbahnfurher von Braun? Yes, actually. Although the von Braun building (and a very nice one it is) is on the Army part of Redstone Arsenal rather than Marshall Space Flight Center.
There's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here in north Alabama.
More here: https://www.wrsonline.co.uk/big-ben-rocket-strikes/1944-v2-r...
Why enjoying a Nazi-general-commander game is less justifiable than, say, Postal (where you play a distraught postal worker going on a senseless killing rampage), or Grand Theft Auto is not explored at all. Also, the Milgram experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) is highly relevant when vilifying people for taking orders even if they understand that the orders may be immoral.
https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-5-na...