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?

EG's comment on the article makes a point:

"Now does it become OK if millions of people in a game instead die in a purely fictional situation of your making? Crawford’s reputation probably hinges a lot on that one screen in “Balance of Power”, for identifying that fictional mass death is fun, so we try to do it a lot in games. Introversion’s “Defcon” chooses a more camp or retro approach to remind the player that millions are dying in a nuclear war in the type of 50s language that inspired “Dr Strangelove”, ultimately making no effective moral point I thought. In “Master of Orion” we bomb planets out of existence. There are also strategic historical games like “Hearts of Iron” where the Second World War happens at a level abstracted from individual tactical unit movements. The paradox being that to exclude crimes against humanity at strategic level is close to denial; to include invites people to use your game to recreate the world’s worst crimes, as well as causing you legal problems in a lot of Europe."

Can I recommend a book (although it is a cinderblock of a book): Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Parts of it discuss this very problem, with examples from This War of Mine and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 thing.

>>> What is the alternative, from a game design perspective?

There are gradations that can be administered to allow the player to realize the gravity of situations presented in gameplay, not as ham-fisted as your example alludes. For example, I think that A Dark Room is a good example of looking at the consequences of your actions, and its storytelling is really good at calling out the player and taking those actions into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dark_Room

I think there's room for some middle ground here. There are two examples I can think of that demonstrate this middle ground (although I can't remember the names of either game).

In game 1, there was a scene where you had infiltrated a terrorist cell as an undercover agent, and were accompanying them in an attack on an airport. You were involved in this massacre of innocent people, and you could choose to either participate in the shooting or not. It was very controversial but I think it was an interesting psychological experiment to play on players.

In the second case, another war-type game, you were a general who had to make a call whether to use white phosphorous bombs against a group of enemies. After it was over, you have to walk through the scene and see up close the destruction and horror that you inflicted.

Both of those, I think, are interesting ways to engage with evil, because they both prompted thought. I don't see any evidence that Panzer has any depth or thought in their treatment of this dilemma.

Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? So many games seem set up so people can play war without consequences, but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.

>>>Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities?

Because these games are first and foremost a form of recreation? Certain things are abstracted because most people don't want to be bothered with them in their entertainment. Nobody would play wargames if they had to write a 5-paragraph operations order or FRAGO at the start of every turn either.

>>>but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.

Short answer: ego. People want to think that, if given the opportunity, they would make better military decisions than the real-world leaders. "Yeah, Manstein won the Third Battle of Kharkov but I would have accomplished it with FAR fewer casualties." To exercise that, you need context and data that only comes from the accuracy of a real setting. Do you attack on the 19th of February, or a week later? How many kilometers is it to Kharkov? Do you want the culminating point of your attack to reach the objective with full lunar illumination, or none at all? What if there was one less Soviet mechanized corps due to an orders mixup? It's easy to cover all those different what-ifs by digging through the available historical records. To do that in a fake setting requires extremely laborious world-building that most people aren't willing to invest the time to execute.

Also, who says the "real victims" are insulted by sanitized wargames anyway? I know we have a large contingent of Eastern European members on HN, I'd love to hear their thoughts.

I'm not necessarily saying Panzer General should have been designed any differently. What I guess I am saying is that it might not be the best idea, as a player, to disengage entirely from the real horrors of the history the game was based on.

There's a small (and free) indie game called STAVKA-OKH that tasks the player with prosecuting the Nazi war on the Eastern Front—and DOES acknowledge the political and moral issues in fascinating and unexpected ways.

It's certainly not impossible. (And frankly I think Rome: Total War would have been a stronger experience had it acknowledged some of the nastier realities of how the Empire was propped up.)

http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/STAVKA-OKH.html

I don't think it's that hard to represent. PG already has a mechanic to disagree with Hitler's decisions e.g. Kiev and Gibraltar. You can easily imagine quandaries such as:

- "Hitler has asked you to detach units for cooperation with Einsatzgruppen operating behind the front. Refuse: lose 500 prestige Accept: gain 1000 prestige, reduced deployment area in the next scenario"

- "Hitler has ordered all captured commissars to be shot. Enforce: enemies no longer retreat or surrender. Disregard: lose 500 prestige"

There's also an end-of-campaign message that can easily be changed.

That's not a moral question, that's a resource allocation question. Better to have no in game effects and let the player say "I don't want to win that way". Morality is in the end a personal choice about how you want to live.

Rome: Total War did have some weird game mechanics that led to strange ethical problems, though!

Briefly, as a ruler you control a number of provinces, each with a capital city. The taxes you earn from each province are a function of its population size and tax rate. Population growth rate depends on the level of farm buildings constructed, and the tax rate (higher taxes = lower growth rate as some people simply opt out of the cities). "Happiness" also depends on tax rate (lower = happier), as well as level of temple/sanitary buildings constructed. Crucially, happiness also depends on a function of the population size and the number of troops garrisoned in the province. More population = less happiness, but more troops = more happiness (perhaps it makes sense to think of "happiness" as "orderliness"). If happiness falls below a certain level and stays there for two turns, the province will revolt, and other unhappy provinces can join in.

As an aspiring emperor, you need tax revenues. You can achieve this by setting taxes very high, but this makes the population unhappy and lowers population growth. It is better, in the long run, to encourage population growth and maintain happiness through a combination of modest taxation and temple-building. 2% annual population growth soon adds up, and your city with 10,000 residents now has 30,000, which is a nice 3x on the potential tax revenue - more than you could have got by maxing out taxes!

But there's a problem. With maxed-out farms and temples, and low-ish taxes, population growth continues. Soon there are 40,000 citizens, but no ability to build more temples to keep them happy. You can lower taxes, but this just makes things worse, as population growth increases further! Sooner or later, the only way to prevent a revolt is to garrison some troops to keep order.

This runs directly contrary to your military aims: you want those legions on the Rhine or in Persia, not keeping order in some Gaulish backwater. And even if you can spare the troops at first, the number required will only ever increase. Eventually imperial expansion becomes difficult because most of the army is back home keeping the peace. Even worse, you may have to withdraw troops from lightly-populated border regions, making your empire vulnerable to attack.

There is, however, one way out. Provincial rebellions occur when a province is below a critical happiness level for two turns. The rebellion will have its own army, which is guaranteed to be slightly bigger than the local garrison, whatever size that is. The winning move here is to find your least happy province, increase taxes to the maximum level possible, and withdraw the army. Two turns later, rebellion breaks out. You can now move the army back in, easily deal with the small rebel force, and then kill half of the civilian population. This reduces the population to a level where, with plenty of temples and modest taxation, they will remain perfectly happy even with no local garrison. At least, it stays that way for a generation or so, until the population gets back to its previous size and you have to go in and kill half of them.

Needless to say, this is ethically unpleasant! The game gives you no way out of the situation other than mass, organised slaughter of your own citizens. In the later periods of the game, you could convert to Christianity, which gives you more effective temples and allows more populous cities before you have to resort to these methods, but it still only delays the inevitable.

To some extent, this simply demonstrates the harsh reality of imperialism. Having been confronted with these choices and made these decisions myself, I now find it much easier to understand and to believe the accounts of imperial atrocities in history. Not because the game mechanics are strictly accurate, but through the demonstration of how simple incentives can make notionally evil acts seem like inevitable choices that simply have to be made.

I do seem to recall this being somewhat controversial among fans of the game. There were definitely some players who didn't like the idea of running an empire that killed its own people when they became inconvenient. Perhaps they wanted a more sanitised experience! But, as it was, RTW was highly unusual in forcing you to engineer genocides in order to win the game.

That's actually a great example, thanks for taking me back to some of the nuances about that game that I had forgotten over the years.

If you want a masterclass in moral game design, then you can't do better than Brenda Romero's game Trains[1].

You are unlikely ever to get to play this game (it is more art piece, than game), but there are spoilers below and in the linked article which render the game unplayable.

In short, this board game has you managing the logistics of moving a large number of people by train. As you play the game you slowly realise that the destination is Aushwitz, and each meeple represents 100,000 Jews. The entire game is built around this moment of realisation that you have been complicit in genocide.

Another example, which I've never been able to rediscover (and would be grateful to anyone who remembers is) was a small videogame which simply presented you as a firing squad facing a condemned person. You knew nothing about what they had done, or if they were guilty. You were simply given the option to execute them or not.

If you executed them, then this was written to the windows registry and would even persist afteer reinstalling. The choice you made was permenant, rather than being ultimately inconsequential as in every other video game.

Another great example, was Moiria[2], was a very basic looking 3D game where you started in a village and explored a mine, chatting to people as you went. As you went into the mine to find a missing person, you would encounter a stranger leaving covered in blood. After a conversation with them, you would have a choice to let them go, or kill them in retribution for the assumed murder of the missing person. At the bottom of the mine you would find the missing person having attempted suicide and beyond rescuing. Upon leaving the mine you would encounter someone else entering the mine to find the missing person, adn would be prompted to give your answers to their questions to explain yourself. At this point you would realise that the answers you saw on your way in were the answers of the person who played before you, and your answers would be presented to the next player.

You had misjudged, not a computer character, or a prewritten plot, but your own actions.

Unfortunately, as with anything on the internet with a text box, it quickly succumbed to griefing and was taken offline. But the moment of realisation was extremely powerful.

What I'm getting at is that you're wrong to think about how to tack moral consequence onto an existing game loop that denies it. If you sell a commercial game on a game loop - shoot more people, conquer more land, whatever. Then anything tacked on that says "You shouldnt be doing the thing you paid £50 to spend many hours enjoying" is going to fall flat as you describe. Even CoD4 mentioned in other comments didn't judge you for shooting ~people~ it judged you for shooting these particular people. You still got to enjoy the shooting you'd paid your money for in every other level.

Moral ambiguity really needs to be baked into the core of the game and the associated game-loops, reward systems and framing.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board... [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs...

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.

There's a difference between taking pains to ignore a reality that's there, and hiding the reality entirety. With that evil reality being all around them (as described in the post), I'd be very surprised if these people did not have any "Are we the baddies?" moments.

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.

Nobody here, for example, is morally tolerant of the CCP or DPRK: https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/how-does-the-next-great-po...

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.

This is right on the money.

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

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

Is there a clear dividing line between engagement and celebration?

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:

- 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.

"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.

I am morally opposed to a lot of things. First and foremost, violence that is not in self-defense. So that covers wars, genocide, mass conscription, and taxation. Basically the modern state in general. But that is real life I'm talking about, which has nothing to do with what goes on within the confines of a video game. I'll go back to the original quote:

"For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best."

Your actions, or the actions of anyone else in Panzer General will not lead to a single death, let alone millions. It makes no difference to anyone else but the person who is playing the game. If you enjoy playing the game, then great, have at it. If playing as a German General makes you uncomfortable then that's fine too. I really don't see any ethical issue here at all.

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"?

>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.

I agree, which is why I have provided several resources to engage with the philosophical (and by following references, psychological and sociological) literature on the topic of the intersection between violent video games, morality, and (more dubiously and controversially) real world behavior here[0]. The arguments go for and against, but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration. Furthermore, these arguments are sometimes agnostic regarding major meta-ethical positions. Is this the kind of base for the argument you're looking for?

>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"?

There's some concept shuffling here which does not accurately get to the heart of morality and moral resposibility. The word 'morality' is generally used in a normative sense (consider war, vegetarianism, killing, advertising, the environment, etc. as topics we frequently speak of in the normative sense), but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community[1].

The normative sense, which I believe the article and GP targets, concerns a code that would be accepted and followed by all rational people given access to moral facts (and processes of deliberation). Those facts may be deducible a priori (but need not be). This is the same sense in which someone might say "you should not do X".

Moral judgements may also imply moral responsibility - not only should you "not do X" as a rational person, but you are in some way responsible if you do do X. Moral responsibility pertaining to both meanings of morality is widely (but not unanimously) accepted by philosophers.

Building on moral responsibility, we finally reach moral blameworthiness, which allows us to "cast those who play games" one way or the other, or reserve judgement.

There are quate a few steps between [deducing that some video games, and indeed playing them, is morally significant] to [casting someone as 'objectively immoral']. Ask, however, that if there is an argument showing that torture is wrong, would we be justified in labelling a torturer with full mental and rational capacity and access to moral facts to be "objectively immoral"? If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187823

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

> but no author to my knowledge has argued that video games and their players do not at least qualify for moral consideration

This is a weird phrasing, to be honest: if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration. By the same logic, by how niche this topic is, even by moral philosophy standards, we could deduce that most authors do not believe it is worthy of consideration?

Honestly AFAIK, the position that actions happening in a fictional scenario have no moral weight is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I couldn't read the papers you linked because they are paywalled. I'd be interested in hearing a dissenting opinion if you could outline one.

> but your usage of the concept in describing lotteries as unethical targets the descriptive sense - a code accepted by an individual or a community (...)

This is a distinction without a difference. Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set, AFAIK most of the philosophical arguments are "moral implications", i.e. if you accept X, then you should also accept Y; but it's dubious it's possible to make any moral judgement in the sense you require.

The root cause of my opposition to lotteries, etc. is the moral belief that it's unjust to reward or punish people on the basis of events or characteristics they have no way to control. This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

To make a different example, why do you oppose slavery? (I'm going to assume that you do) The most likely answer is a variation on "all humans have a natural right to self-determination", but why is that? Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

> If so, why wouldn't we be able to say the same if the papers I have cited make convincing arguments about video games and players of video games?

Because I'm not convinced they do.

>if an author decides to write on a topic, by definition they believe the topic is worthy of consideration.

This was not my point; rather, it would be possible for a philosopher to argue that they are not worthy of moral consideration, or not worthy in some way (but are worthy in others) - "worthy of moral consideration" refers to the object having moral properties, or that an activity is morally relevant. It does not mean that the topic isn't worth arguing about. For instance, some moral philosophers have argued that animals are not worthy of moral consideration.

>is the default and widely accepted one, with hardly any credible objections.

I don't think so. Consequentialist accounts of the morality of violent video games and even other media more generally cite arguments such as increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. I'm not convinced the data is correct, but I think that among the general populace, some topics and actions are mff-limits morally blameworthy, such as engaging in a simulation in which it is your choice to molest children.

>This is a distinction without a difference.

It very much does make a difference, at the very least in the way we talk about morality. "It's against my ethical code" is not the reason you'd hear when you ask why someone disapproves of torture. "It's immoral" is what you'd hear, and it means something much stronger, something we act on in the world to the extent of restricting others, and the reason we have the state, courts, justice, the non-aggression principle, socialism, libertarianism, capitalism, and any other ideology or justice.

>Morality in the sense that "all rational people should accept it" is basically an empty set

The fact that no metaethical theory makes the case for you sufficiently does not mean that none of them do, and the same "choose your axioms" argument could me made just as well against, say, mathematics, identifying colours, epistemic standards, or logic itself. The only token that allows you to throw out the grounding of morality allows you to throw out anything else too. That's not to say moral facts necessarily exist, but many people take them to insofar as they provide for (almost) uncontroversial moral facts involving, say, slavery or torture.

There are very good arguments against morality in general, but "you can't prove any particular code of ethics is the right one a priori" is not one of them - the sophist's hammer is too blunt to be useful to me, you, or anyone else.

>This is a moral intuition, there is no way I can rationally convince you in a non-circular way that you should absolutely accept this fact. If you don't, the discussion is kind of over.

There is, assuming that we share systems with roughly the same results, just as you can convince me that A == A assuming we share similar logical systems, or that the earth is round assuming we seare similar epistemologies. They don't even have to be the same in order to rationally convince someone of internal consistency, which is what matters here.

>Again, it's a moral intuition without any absolute justification.

We could continue reducing the question down to a single basic statement of any ethical theory. That's not a problem, because although we may say on forums that morality is relative or descriptive/non-normative, we act as though it is objective and absolute, and we frequently ground our rational actions in that belief.

I'm sorry to say I don't think I'll do a good enough job of explaining or relaying the arguments against the immorality of video games more succintly than they have been made already, but here are PDF links to a good non-paywalled paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18384555564403984...

The papers citing this one also do a good job of arguing that some video games can be immoral to play, but none are as high-level and cover as many ethical bases as this one. It's worth noting that even this author cannot say that video games are unworthy of moral consideration. "It's just a game" is by no means his approach here.

Edit: here is one such paper I cited in my other comment that argues the immorglity of certain multiplayer video games from a Kantian perspective: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-019-09498-y

> This was not my point

Fair enough, I misunderstood.

> increasing aggression or anti-social behaviour. > I'm not convinced the data is correct.

I'm not convinced the data is correct either. What are we talking about, then? It's a baseless claim, as empirical data shows.

> the reason we have the state, courts, justice...

The reason we have those things is that we have to coexist with other people. There is no necessary relation between state and ethics, nor there should be. Politics on a large scale is the result of interest groups with differing moral codes/interests/priorities pushing in various directions.

> There are very good arguments against morality in general...

I'm not trying to argue morality does or doesn't exist, it's not a question I find personally interesting, I was just claiming the request for morality to be universally grounded is unreasonable, we seem to agree there. I don't really have an objection to what you're saying.

Mathematics is very different because it's a formal language. One could view all mathematics as purely string manipulation. There's no requirement to agree on anything, not even the meaning of the symbols, except for a set of primitive concepts and a set of axioms. In a formal language you have proper definitions and checkable (even machine-checkable) proofs, a privilege that natural language doesn't enjoy.

> but here are PDF links

Much appreciated, I'll take a look.

> "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.

Who's saying anything about banning anything? Neither the author of the article, nor I, am making a case for that. I merely think the idea that the media we engage with has some effect on us is not one we should dismiss out of hand just because we all have bad memories of Jack Thompson's crusade.

"What is the next step, we either find a scientific way to measure the effects and then create laws if the effects are bad."

There are two problems.

1. No (interesting :-)) questions have simple clear answers. Sometimes, propaganda is good. Context matters, as do a lot of variables that are either prohibitively difficult to address scientifically or to legally control for effectively. (Let's say that X (a form of media, say) is perfectly harmless unless you have a certain set of genetic values. Requiring a whole-genome assay before you could interact with X would be theoretically unlike banning X, but practically?) Further, there are plenty of things that I don't like[TM], but which I wouldn't care to make laws about.

2. The environment changes continuously. How do you decide what your personal take on X is, in the absence of concrete and final scientific data on the effects of X? Knowing the future is hard, by the way.

The area of inquire of the article, and of asking those questions, is moral philosophy, and it's goal is to provide an individual with the tools to make decisions[1] in the absence of hard data and with the knowledge that other decisions are completely legitimate.

There's no one here other than you talking about banning things. And, honestly, "do what thou wilt until there is concrete proof of physical harm" is a valid ethical approach, although I don't know of anyone who subscribes to it and it has some poor consequences. (Are lootboxes and social media unequivocally bad? Good? Are the consequences such that legal action is required?)

[1] To any philosophers who wish to disagree: Fight me! I'll immanentize your escutcheon, you cheese-headed babbadook!

Sorry i went directly to banning things, but remember rock music and video games were not banned but the media outrage had a lot of bad effects. So my concern is that is easy to create hypothesis that are not backed by science that can cause bad effects.

Edit: I am not against discussing this topic, we need to make sure what is fact and what is just some hypothesis/fantasy. If we discuss it then we should have some goal, can we measure something, can we look at the past and conclude something or we are just either wasting our time or try to spread some ideology that is not backed by evidence.

I think thay ability to discuss this topic is important part of free speech.

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.

You're not playing a subset of history nor a subset of propaganda: you're playing a simple tactical game about tanks.

Eh. I get it. The nazis put my family through hell. Playing as them would make me feel shitty too.

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.

This little chunk seems questionable:

'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?

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

That's an interesting review!

"One visitor was Major General F. W. von Mellenthin, a former General Staff officer on Rommel's staff in North Africa. Since Liddell Hart rarely if ever deviated from his established schedule, it was my responsibility to entertain the general for several hours, which provided the opportunity to inquire whether Rommel had in fact ever mentioned Liddell Hart in his presence. "Oh yes," he assured me, "many times. He had a good opinion of his writings. That is why I have come from South Africa to meet him." This of course does not make Rommel a pupil, except perhaps in the eyes-and books-'--Of Liddell Hart. But Rommel was familiar with his theories, and there is no doubt that other serious military readers found many of his ideas worth thinking about."

I'll stand corrected! (Although the little cynic that lives inside me wants to point out that this conversation seems to have occurred well into the cold war. And then, there's

"If I was being "used" I was not aware of it, although when he read proofs to a book I was about to publish he did insist that I insert the word "deep" before "strategic penetration" in a part characterizing some past writings of his own. I could not understand why the point seemed so important, and when I retorted that this was not the way it was worded in his analysis of the Mongol campaigns, he replied that it should have been obvious from the context that it was what he had meant. I conceded the point, but wondered at the time why he was being such a stickler about it."

which is essentially the behavior Meersheimer is describing.)

On the other hand, this quote makes it seem like a character trait rather than a devious plot:

"One day I found in his files a copy of one of General Douglas MacArthur's reports to the Secretary of War when he was Chief of Staff in the early 1930s. Liddell Hart had underlined numerous passages and marked in the margins which of his own works a specific idea or phrase had come from. It was an old file, so this had nothing to do with rebuilding a "badly stained reputation." To Liddell Hart these passages signified that MacArthur, who later demonstrated brilliant applications of the indirect approach in New Guinea and the Philippines, was familiar with his books."

Anyway, the history of Liddell Hart's thought as I understand it is, in the last year of WW1 and shortly after the war, he was involved in the development of the British version of what would be come to be called "stormtrooper tactics"; attacking at a single point to create a breach in the front lines which could then be expanded. This period also included his collaboration with JFC Fuller (who was all "Tanks you very much!").

Then, through the 20s, he wrote about the "indirect approach", which may or may not have been a conceptual predecessor or possibly even influential on "blitzkrieg" (which wasn't a solid doctrine or plan to the Germans in 1939-40).

However, through the 30s he became convinced that, tactically and operationally, the defense was much stronger than the offense (which was largely the guiding wisdom in Britain and France in the late 30s and early 1940. As a result, his indirect approach became more and more indirect until he became a strong proponent of "the British way of war": maintaining a strong blockade and giving the French money, not soldiers. By the late 30s, he was strongly against putting British soldiers in continental Europe and is on record as supporting appeasement to at least some extent.

As a result, in the 40s his name was mud, at least in military circles, and his interactions with German generals and the white-washing of the Wehrmacht was very important to the recovery of his reputation, whether that was a grand scheme or no.

In any case, here's another detailed take on Liddell Hart and the German generals, from the standpoint of his and their participation in German rearmament for the cold war.

"A Very Special Relationship: Basil Liddell Hart, Wehrmacht Generals and the Debate on West German Rearmament, 1945-1953" by Alaric Searle.

http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/30779/1/War_In_History-1...

"Bywayofconclusion, ifoneseekstoputtheveryspecialrelationshipwhichexistedbetweenLiddellHartandWehrmachtgeneralsintotheoverallcontextoftheformer'scareer, anumberofobservationscanbemade. Firstofall, undoubtedlyLiddellHartbenefitedgreatlyasawriterfromhiscontactswiththegenerals; ontheonehandasasourceofinformationforhishistoricalwritingandontheotherforsupportintheeffortshewasmakingtoadvertisethe'influence'ofhistheoriesinGermanyintheinterwarperiod. However, thecentralmotivatingforceinthealliancebetweenLiddellHartandthemostprominentGermangeneralswasnothistoricalresearch, butrathertheexigenciesofthecampaignforrearmament; arehabilitationofthetopgeneralswasseenasacrucialcomponentofthepublicrelationscampaignwhichhadtobewaged."

[Yeah, cut-n-paste from PDF is probelmatic.]

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?

"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?"

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 sometimes think of him looking and the shrapnel marks on the building of the V&A museum in London.

More here: https://www.wrsonline.co.uk/big-ben-rocket-strikes/1944-v2-r...

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.

Well, it's "Part 1", and it's specifically about strategy gaming. The author recently wrote a critical piece about DOOM as well:

https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-5-na...

I thought the Milgram experiment was problematic, science-wise.

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.

Guess I need to be charged as a war criminal for the thousands I slaughtered in Call of Duty...talk about overreacting.

Games are works of entertainment, in the same camp as literature and movies. Imagine if someone said they could not read a book if it included chapters from a Nazi's perspective. Some people may simply not enjoy such works, but to say that such passages are inappropriate is going down a dangerous path.

As the author notes, there is nothing closer in most of our minds to pure evil than the Nazis. It is easy for us to treat them as monsters - inherently irredeemable demons in human form who committed atrocities that we never could. The idea of even trying to humanize such villains seems like an insult to their victims.

But those who did such monstrous things were not monsters but men. There was neither some mass delusion which overcame the german people for over a decade while a small cabal of evil beings were in power, nor some tragic fault built into these people that is absent in all the rest of the world. People exactly like you and me were convinced that their compliance with this system was, if not explicitly good, at least acceptable.

The author wonders why someone might want to play a game as a proud german general on their way to conquering great britain, the soviet union, and eventually the united states; the answer to which should be self evident when one considers how desirable this position was to real people in real life. The same desire for victory and glory which motivated war criminals in the wehrmacht also lives in most everyone else. The willingness not to ask what that victory means for the hidden jewish populations of the conquered is common to both camps too.

The author brings up a terrifying game idea to demonstrate their point: an Auschwitz Transport Tycoon. Of course the very idea seems revolting. But for all those who have played train simulators: have you seriously asked what your cargo was and what it was being transported for? Or did you simply accept that your job was to get it between points and thus satisfy some arbitrary requirement from an unquestioned authority. Our default assumption is that we're supposed to play the game according to the rules and that achieving the stated objectives is a good thing in and of itself.

No one sees themselves as the villains of history. When you must decide whether your orders are just, they most likely won't be coming from someone with a skull on their cap. We must understand that being a villain feels just the same as being a hero, the only difference is the lack of honest introspection. Seeing things from the bad guy's perspective is important for reminding us to question our own. More generally, the idea that we should avoid putting ourselves in someone else's shoes because that makes us confront uncomfortable realities is anathema to the sort of liberal culture the Nazis tried so hard to stamp out.

> But for all those who have played train simulators: have you seriously asked what your cargo was and what it was being transported for?

Imagine playing a game like you'd find on the back of a cereal box. "Draw a line to help the doggie find his way through the maze!" Did you ever stop to consider that the doggie might be a rabid, crazed attack dog and at the end of the maze is his child victim that he will maim and kill? And that by drawing a line through the maze, you are tacitly supporting the killing and maiming of innocent children? No? Then what the hell are you talking about?

Feeling bad about a game is pathetic. I play Hearts of Iron 4 (with original flags, so a nazi flag) and the number of soviets that I have killed combined from all games as germany must be more than 100 million. It really is so much fun.

Hey, tell me what is your country and I'll tell you how many times I thoroughly nuked it while playing Civilization)

You both are clearly a killer material, if not serial killers already!

I on the other hand played Surgeon simulator extensively! So i am definitely qualified to operate on anyone you two might attempt to kill. xD

On a serious note this old old trope 'games make you a X, Y, or Z' is so tired and dis-proven so many times, that I lost hope it will ever go away.

Playing as wehrmacht in company of heros have not turned me into a nazi. It cant because its just a video game and I can think and reason. So unless video games gain ability to brainwash people they will do nothing but entertain people.

> Feeling bad about a game is pathetic.

That's a particularly uncharitable sentiment. Weighing moral consequences is a thing we do in real life (unless we're complete sociopaths I suppose), and doing it in a simulated environment free from real consequences has value the same way practicing anything in a safe environment does.

You can skip almost this whole hand-wringing article as the "why" is articulated right here:

"the focus on Rommel and more generally the German side (many wargames feature prominent German military motifs and use German military nomenclature) cater to a genre that customarily finds more interest in playing the underdog, relying on [the player’s] brains rather than overwhelming force, and accepting the challenge of reversing the historical result."

Combine that appeal with uniforms designed by Hugo Boss and it's a no-brainer why the Germans are the most popular force to play in wargames. There are some VERY interesting tactical/operational challenges for the Japanese and the Soviets, depending on where you look in the war, but neither force is quite so well-dressed as the Waffen SS.

This article is like an extremely-long-form version of Twitter outrage...the same mentality that is targeting otherwise-fun-looking content (Ghosts of Tsushima, Cyberpunk 2077) and wants to beat us all over the head with how bad we are as people for enjoying it. It's tiresome.

"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."

Man, I hope this guy never finds out what sorts of sociopathic stuff Rimworld players get into...

"If, as I dearly hope, you would prefer not to play such a game, ask yourself what the difference between Panzer General and that other game really are. For your actions in Panzer General will also lead to the deaths of millions, at only one more degree of remove at best."

See what I mean? The next thing you know, he'll be writing about how we shouldn't play a real-world map in Civilization as the Europeans, because their explorations led to millions of deaths from colonialism. Slavery shouldn't be a featured game mechanic either, for the same reason. If you play as the Spanish/English/French/Germans and you research Slavery, then you are a BAD HUMAN BEING. Maybe games should send a message to a centralized server, alerting Big Tech so your media accounts can be flagged, and your bank account terminated?

I have ancestors who survived genocide, and ancestors who survived chattel slavery. I enjoy wargames, in all of their varying degrees of focus, without the ridiculous navel-gazing.

There's more to this article than SJW outrage- after WWII the allies (well, US and UK) tended to sweep German atrocities under the rug in order to use them against the Soviets in the Cold War. This has made the semi-fetishism of the nazi military more acceptable in many domains (film, games, model building, re-enacting, etc) than would otherwise be tolerable in society at large.

History is written by the victors, and water is wet. As another poster in this thread alludes to, if we go down the rabbit-hole of digging up the crimes against humanity of every military ever and arguing that we shouldn't play games based around those armed forces.....well, the only thing we'd be left with is Farmville.

Do we have to receive lectures on Roman brutality before we play Rome: Total War, or I can just enjoy my endless ranks of lorica segmenta? Do I really need to be told that $famousauthorname was a Roman apologist and the Roman Legions shouldn't be "tolerated"?

Are these issues not being discussed in a mature and thoughtful manner in high school these days? I realize education in the US is a dumpster fire but I find it hard to believe things have fallen off the cliff since I graduated in 2001.

The Romans weren't particularly brutal given their time- being beaten by the Celts and being beaten by the Romans would be a similar experience. What the Germans and Japanese did was of a scale and brutality that had not been inflicted in 'civilized' warfare for centuries. And neo-nazis are a thing now, and they're not nice. When I last donned a lorica and hefted a scutum the most political thing we debated was whether Keens looked enough like caligae to be allowed on the field.

Time also plays a factor in these things- I've never known anyone who fought the Romans. If I had a great-uncle Camulos telling me what bastards they were, maybe I'd write an article lambasting Great Battles of Caesar.

I graduated 10 years before you, so no idea how history is taught now.

>The Romans weren't particularly brutal given their time- being beaten by the Celts and being beaten by the Romans would be a similar experience.

Funny that you say that. You could say that during WW2 Germans weren't particularly brutal compared to Soviets. Aside of death camps (which weren't really Wehrmacht's thing) you could probably even say that it was Red Army which was more brutal and committed more war crimes (if only by virtue of Wehrmacht's better discipline).

I was going to add the Soviets to the list, but I don't know enough about their mass treatment of German civilians in particular, though obvious they treated their own civilians badly enough. The Eastern front was more brutal, but brutality of soldiers against soldiers is not really an exception even in modern warfare as opposed to organized murder and abuses of enemy non-combatants on a strategic scale.

Why just treatment of German civilians? Soviets were assholes to pretty much everybody. Baltic states, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Finland, China, ... - they all enjoyed "friendliness" of Soviets. They also raped women liberated from concentration camps. During liberation of Poland it's estimated they raped ~100,000 women. Talk about saving the victims.

The Soviets were bad, but I am not personally familiar enough with the sources to say whether Soviet atrocities were official policy, ill-disciplined soldiers or both.

The Eastern Front is popular with a certain sort of armchair historian/wargamer/etc. because 'the Germans were the good guys' (or 'there were no good guys') which allows them to distance themselves from the atrocities while still fetishizing the cool tanks and uniforms. Seems spurious to me, but it's not like I would call someone on it and tell them they're a bad person.

That is not actually true. German army behavior in Eastern front was literally genocidal. Death camps were only one part of project.

There was no discipline preventing Wehrmacht's or SS war crimes at eastern front - because those were not seen as breach of discipline. There was nothing of that sort that would cause trouble to soldier, per policy, because the place was meant to be living space for germans and germans only in long term.

And when you add SS batalions literally composed of basically uncontrolable convicted criminals and literally tasked with removal of civilian population, your thesis becomes even more absurd.

>>>What the Germans and Japanese did was of a scale and brutality that had not been inflicted in 'civilized' warfare for centuries.

Doesn't that boil down to skewed perceptions re: the nature of war as much as anything? That's a question for HN writ large, not you specifically, as I think you capture understanding of that with your quotation marks. WW2's death toll was in the same order of magnitude as WW1's, which should have already shattered misconceptions of clean wars. However, I think WW1 had a higher ratio of combatant casualties vis-a-vis noncombatants. WW2 being a "regression to the mean" so to speak with regards to brutalizing civilians, combined with the growth of media dissemination, may be why it's made such a socio-psychological mark.

>>>And neo-nazis are a thing now, and they're not nice.

Communists are a thing, and they're not nice. There's a lot of reasons we never had mass-market video games singing the praises of Konstantin Rokossovsky (the only Soviet war hero I can think of as photogenic as Rommel), and the virtuousness of the ideology and/or its adherents isn't the deciding factor IMO. We also don't spend anywhere near as much time and energy, as a society, highlighting the sole modern ideology with the dubious distinction of a larger 8-figure excess death count than national socialism/fascism. But I digress...

Agreed that the time scale of Romans vs Germans is an issue. I don't know how we can consistently get people to "zoom out" and look at things with a larger, multi-generational timescale in mind and see that the things they are taking exception to are closer to "business as usual" than they realize.

> WW2 being a "regression to the mean" so to speak with regards to brutalizing civilians

It wasn't, though. The level, and degree of planning, of genocide in conquered territories was historically _very_ unusual. Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units. Even in, say, the Reconquista, there was no real equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen, nevermind what came after occupation.

This isn't to say previous wars were clean; lots and lots of civilians died, but there was rarely an organ of the military whose explicit purpose was in massacring civilians until WW2.

I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil.

> "Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units."

Wasn't sacking of cities in antiquity and medieval times basically looting of all valuables and either the killing or enslavement of the population, mixed in with considerable brutalization during the process? The entire besieging army took part in that.

> "I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil."

Nope, I'd say the Imperial Japanese Army had them beat on that score easily: they spared themselves the need for specialized units by simply having the entire military commit atrocities. Much larger scale than the Nazis too.

"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. I would feel more comfortable with it if it made some effort to acknowledge — even via a footnote in the manual! — the horrors of the ideology which it depicts as all stirring music and proudly waving banners."

"Are these issues not being discussed in a mature and thoughtful manner in high school these days? I realize education in the US is a dumpster fire but I find it hard to believe things have fallen off the cliff since I graduated in 2001."

These issues weren't being discussed in high school, mature or otherwise, when I graduated in 1986. And if I read your previous comment correctly, it wouldn't be discussed at all (because the Nazis had better uniforms?), no?

>>>And if I read your previous comment correctly, it wouldn't be discussed at all (because the Nazis had better uniforms?), no?

No, you didn't read that correctly. Better uniforms is a somewhat-facetious explanation for German popularity as a faction in wargames. People will naturally gravitate to the team that looks cooler. Same reason why the 501st Legion is a thing in the Star Wars fandom, but there isn't really an equivalent Rebel Alliance fangroup of similar size.[1]

That in no way suggests that Nazi atrocities should never be discussed in any medium or venue just because they were stylish. Maybe my experience was different attending Quaker schools, so quite a bit of our history classes covered various crimes against humanity in detail. I'm just saying that nobody needs to be beat over the head with historical moralizing and soul-searching in what is essentially a game of chess with more complicated rules, and the starting positions of the pieces imported from reality. There's plenty of other, better, ways to handle the morality of the history besides a computer strategy game.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501st_Legion

It'll be interesting to read his thoughts about Company of Heroes, should he ever get to that game. The developers naively implemented the Nazis, Allies, and the Soviets as historically faithful as they could - which made the Nazis incredibly overpowered.

If it were historically faithful the German player would never know how many of his forces were going to never show up because of mechanical failure and air interdiction.

There is a campaign mission where you have to hobble a broken Panzer through a bunch of Allied territory. The voiceovers for the infantry can be heard sarcastically commenting about the quality of German engineering.

And this is shit - https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/25/4553536/is-company-of-hero...

Whatever they tried to portrait Soviets, it's not historically accurate

All other great points in these comments aside, empathy (not simpathy!) with the enemy is a great tool to defeat him.