Delta Force sure is a heady mix. A game from Chinese devs about the American military in a Somalian civil war, with a not-yet-released singleplayer campaign modelled after Black Hawk Down, it’s the kind of thing you might expect to have opinions. A perspective. A criticism? Anything to say at all, really, about the experience of US soldiers gunning down countless indistinct Somalians.
I hoped for something, anyway, but more fool me. In a recent Delta Force campaign demo, PCG’s Wes Fenlon got a chance to try the new campaign and prod the devs about the statements they might be making, specifically its perspective on the American military. Turns out it’s no statement at all. “We don’t have an opinion in this regard” said game director Shadow Guo (via a translator).
“First and foremost, we are a game company,” said Guo. “We believe that Black Hawk Down as a movie and as a game is a timeless classic enjoyed by gamers across the world,” he said, and added that Team Jade’s motivation in making the campaign is “to create fun and meaningful gameplay for players to enjoy.”
Which, okay, yes. That’s the precise kind of bland boilerplate response you expect from a big game company hoping to get a few million people playing its game by stepping on as few toes as possible. It’s the response I’d anticipate from Activision, say, if I ever got a chance to ask what exactly it meant when it decided it’d be sick as hell to open Modern Warfare 2 by letting me live out the dizzying highs of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. It’s the response we pretty much did get from Activision when it made the whoopsy of creating a notionally fictional one-to-one parallel of an actual American Gulf War massacre, but then blamed Russia for it.
But it is also very silly to do the ‘no politics here, boss’ routine about a campaign you have very consciously chosen to set in the actual, real-life Battle of Mogadishu. Even the movie version of Black Hawk Down had pretensions to a political point—though you might draw qualms with its depiction of Somalians—rather than marketing itself as two and half hours of Josh Hartnett wasting bad guys. There’s something a bit Steamed Hams about this kind of response. No sir, that’s not politics you detect in our game, it’s sparkling militarism.
It’s the kind of absurdity that happens when you try to make a rip-roaring videogame that’s fun for all the family about organisations as fraught and controversial as the US military and about real historical events. I’m not sure you get to have that cake and eat it too, although Guo says “We don’t feel this is the question we are best-suited to address because, again, we are a game developer here, and we don’t feel we are equipped with the knowledge or insight to address this kind of topic.” I dunno about you, but I kinda feel like making a game about a thing counts as addressing it.