Call of Duty: Black Ops upsets Cuba with Castro mission | Technology | The Guardian

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A video game developed in the US that challenges players to assassinate former Cuban president Fidel Castro has provoked an angry response from Cuba. Call of Duty: Black Ops, which went on sale in the UK this week, is set during the cold war, with gamers taking on the role of a special operative as he saves the US from a communist plot, travelling between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia. However a mission in which players try to kill a young Castro has sparked a fierce response from the Cuban government. "What the United States government did not achieve in more than 50 years, it now tries to do virtually," said a story on the government-run cubadebate website . It said the game glorified real US attempts to kill Castro – there have been 638 attempts on the former leader's life, according to one of his bodyguards. In 2006 Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuban intelligence services, revealed how plots ranged from an exploding cigar that was intended to blow up in Castro's face to a fungus-contaminated wetsuit that would infect him with a chronic skin disease. Perhaps the most fanciful plot involved planting explosives inside a mollusc shell painted in bright colours in the hope that Castro might be drawn towards it while scuba diving in the Caribbean sea. In a section of Call of Duty: Black Ops set in Havana, players gun-down enemy combatants while pursuing Castro, who was president of Cuba for 49 years before resigning in 2008. "This new video game is doubly perverse," the article in cubadebate said. "On the one hand, it glorifies the illegal assassination attempts the United States government planned against the Cuban leader ... and on the other, it stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents." It is not the first military style shooter game to generate controversy this year. Medal of Honor was banned from US military bases before it went on sale last month because it let players take on the role of Taliban fighters battling US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. Developer Electronic Arts later changed the name of the combatants from Taliban to "Opposing Force." Reviewers of Call of Duty: Black Ops, which retails at around £50 in the UK, have been unfazed by the challenge of gunning down one of the primary leaders of the Cuban revolution. The game was given five stars by the Guardian.

Well they've got a point. If some Pakistani company developped a game where you had to try to assassinate Reagan or something everyone would be calling them terrorists.

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... but how many attempts were they on Reagan? The US did try to kill Castro even if the 638 number seems... weird. Surely, the CIA could manage to succeed once in 638 attempts. Most of these "plots" must never have left the drawing board...

A Pakistani guy trying for historical accuracy should try and use supposed Iraqi attempt(s) on GHB...

Then, it's OKay in my book.

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He got shot by a guy who was obsessed with Jodie Foster, if that counts.

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Nope. That's American nutter-on-American nutter. But, if you did do a cyberpunk game about "the collapse of the USA" people felt was about to occur in the 80s, it might be a good 'mission'.

OTOH, you're right that Americans have no sense of humour when it comes to "threats" to their president so your basic point is still correct. I mean, there is no doubt that CoD creators and even most players aren't in it for the subtle socio-political points within the finely crafted scenario... It's "cowboys vs. indians", just actualised.

Personally, I think it's a vastly missed opportunity but this kind of criticism still irks me because they used to be leveled at (pen & paper) wargames. A long time ago, maybe in 1992, some wargame company came up with a game about Gulf War 1. It wasn't a fantastic game, iirc but, like a lot of these hex map games, it was trying to bring a flavour of the modern warfare strategy and tactics to wargamers, who long practised moving Napoleonic, Greek, Roman and WWII-era troops around big hex maps... And they were immediately accused of being vultures, rejoicing at new conflicts opening up new games and also of being militaristic fascists etc etc. Of course, wargames like that are a very niche hobby so it never reached public frenzy level. Still - It was basically all the same arguments and bad faith...

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Well come on, you;ve got to admit that those sort of wargames are indeed liable to some pretty suspect analyses. If you are going to take games seriously, then to say "it's just a a game" is the last thing you can do.

Well yes, ideally things would be like that, but if we're going to have hysterics over terrorism I'd rather they were evenly distributed.

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Originally Posted by contracycle

Well come on, you;ve got to admit that those sort of wargames are indeed liable to some pretty suspect analyses. If you are going to take games seriously, then to say "it's just a a game" is the last thing you can do.

That's not true. I take my games seriously because I take my fun seriously. But I know that moving troops on hexes (not my favourite stuff anyhow - I am more a role-player than a wargamer) doesn't make me a general.

And, if I want to learn about tactics, whether Napoleonian or WWII or modern, I think that's a lot healthier than, say, collecting Waffen SS or even just WWII memorabilia... Learning about tactics, if anything, could make me a better citizen, more able to see the costs of the wars we're waging...

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Games, even more than works of fiction, embed their creators biases right in the logic by which they operate. Every game is a sort of thesis about "how reality works", even if the reality in question is imaginary. This, IMO, is what makes games "real" and important. As war games have a tendency to be popular among a set heavily populated by militarists and reactionaries of various sorts, they often contain implicit politics reflecting those views. Fex, thew Wild Geese game, which I had as a kid, in which a small number of white guys can mow down a very large number of black guys, all built straight into the rules.

Originally Posted by contracycle

As war games have a tendency to be popular among a set heavily populated by militarists and reactionaries of various sorts, they often contain implicit politics reflecting those views.

I would dispute that view. Even things like paintball which might have used to be populated by militarists have become far more "mainstream geeky" - I remember having a heated discussion with one of the guys because I had call the "launcher" a gun and the balls, bullets. I was like "Look, dude, this is cowboys and indians, let's stop pretending it isn't". And he was all "We have had enough bad rep. with militarist wannabes, let's keep our image clean"...

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Fex, thew Wild Geese game, which I had as a kid, in which a small number of white guys can mow down a very large number of black guys, all built straight into the rules.

In SA maybe. These days, games are pretty tame indeed. Even CoD: Black Ops or MoH. Darker ones like Metro 2033 etc may be grittier but they still don't exactly provide a scathing critique of the world order.

I mean, I love cyberpunk as a genre and it can have a strong social critique/revolutionary streak. I do not know of any computer or mainstream game that goes as far as taking the piss out of the American Dream and criticising unbridled capitalism as Cyberpunk 2020 or even ShadowRun with its emphasis on Native Americans and racism against Orks... Some of my frinds think it's weak to try and criticise real-world racism against Blacks by making them Orks but nonetheless the critique is there.

Show me a computer game like that!

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Well sure, some of this is a definitional problem, inasmuch I would describe paintball as being more sportlike than gamelike. It's rules do not define a reality in the way that, say, board games do.

Wild Geese was not a South African game, and it was based on the British film of the same name.

Anyway, even with the point above about paintball, it was invented by some Vietnam vets who worked as lumberjacks and used the paint guns to mark trees for felling, so there is a direct link between the origin of the game or sport and the real military.

I'm not saying everyone who plays wargames is a proto-Fascist, far from it. But the demographics of wargamers no doubt overlaps with that of militarists in a way that that of, say, tennis, does't. And as a result, many of the people who design games are also operating under those views, and they percolate into the rules by necessity.

At any rate, I think you object to a c rticism levelled at a given game, but I don't think that you can say it is an accusation made in bad faith.