Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Real Life vs Video Game Life

I'm often struck in the vast difference between video game life and real life, especially when it comes to war.  I just finished reading "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge.  As a real to life account of war, it it vastly different than what is experienced in the average video game.  The average video game throws amazing circumstances at you and you end up fighting constantly, effectively dying and retrying.  Video games are full of banzai charges and insane attacks.  It's the kind of stuff that makes for great movie scenes.  It's also things that were learned and quit.

By the time of the battles at Pellilou and Okinawa, the Japanese banzai charge had gone the way of the dinosaur.  It was an ineffective action when faced down by a bunch of entrenched Marines.  It was replaced with deep emplacements and disciplined fire.   That led to slow slogging battles battles where every inch of ground was a difficult struggle. 

You don't see much of that in video games.  It's all blind charges and insane maneuvers as your bullet sponge avatar heroically destroys an obviously inferior enemy.  It's a sad blight on humanity.

I once thought of a movie to describe real war.  It would have been called Guard, and it would be four hours long in real time.  No quick cuts, no exciting scenes.  You have three people standing in a guard tower watching a mobile populace move through their day to day lives. 

It would have been the most boring movie known to man.  But then it would have been the most accurate war movie ever.  Just by observing you would learn the wonders of high intensity anxiety and tension.  It would have been beautiful. 

But then, I've never been a screen writer.  Or much less a story board person.  It would have been interesting. 

The general answer is that real life is not video games.  And that's about all there is to it. 

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