First of all I've not been here long so if a similar topic was posted here recently feel free to link it and call me names. I'm into military sim games and flight simulators. For example DCS, ARMA and Rising storm 2: Vietnam. I really like the gameplay, but I sometimes can't help thinking about the real world atrocities that were committed with the simulated war machine I'm using.
For example, I'm googling the name of an Air-to-Ground missile so that I can find out its effective range or something, and the wikipedia page has paragraphs about how it was "really effective" in bombing bridges in Vietnam, or how it was used extensively in Iraq. Less often it's something more wholesome, like how improper handling of a Zuni rocket resulted in a huge and very destructive fire on a US aircraft carrier while it was deployed in the South China sea during the Vietnam war.
It doesn't help of course how any story or campaign on such games is basically unapologetic NATO propaganda. It's also interesting how games like Call of Duty don't usually trigger this for me, because their mechanics are so far removed from reality it's basically an arcade game with a "realistic" coat of paint, no different from DOOM or whatever.
Anyway, those feelings aren't enough for me to stop playing those games, nor do I think they're fundamentally unethical or something. I'm just wondering if anyone here had similar experiences.
Hmm, depends. In my case I can't play as the Germans in Hearts of Iron III/IV, I just can't, the game makes no effort to show you the horrors of Nazism but you know better, you know about the immediate genocidal campaign that rained upon Poland as soon as the Germans crossed the border, you know that by invading the USSR you're literally killing thousands each day, again, the game makes no effort to tell you about that reality, but you know it's there.
Same happens in TNO, a HoI IV mod. A friend says that playing as Heydrich is very fun from a gameplay point of view, and he is probably right, but holy shit you will have to play as a genocidal maniac, I can't do it.
Now I haven't played many milsims lately, IL-2 1946 was the last one and I haven't played it much, other than a few missions with random airplanes here and there. Can I bring myself to play a full campaign as a German pilot in the USSR? I don't know. As for others milsims, I don't play ArmA but I used to play Project Reality for Battlefield 2, and that is mostly fine, I haven't been around for a while so I don't know how many chuds are there.
My personal ideology does shape the way I play some games, for example Rimworld, I shape my colony as a true Communist society, I accept everyone into the colony, everyone gets their fair share, their personal room, I treat raiders decently well (with decent facilities to live, food, medicine, I will recruit them or send them back to their homes once fully healed and in good weather) and I try to be a pacifist, even going as far as burying all the deceased, enemy or not. I haven't done a "cannibal colony" in which people harvest organs from the dead, I can't bring myself to do it. I also "lead" a clan in a game called World of Warships and it's basically Anarchism, I always ask my fellow members about the possibility of playing things like Clan Wars or Tournaments, where we should spend our resources and so on, I'm a "leader" but just because the game is designed that way, I'm just there to help others. Plus I have a bunch of lefties in the clan as well, and when I speak openly about Communism I don't get people yelling at me or anything.