The Exploitation of War

As the idea of the ugliness of war become more popular, a subtle change occurred in our society. Finally, people were becoming more aware of the harsh realities of war, but instead of trying to prevent these atrocities of happing again, they looked for it as a source of entertainment. Society has a way of searching for the raw emotions and discovering realism. A story is more compelling when the premises seems more logical. This hypothesis can be tested with movies. Take the 1990 movie “Navy Seal”, nowadays people would rarely watch it and if they do watch it, it is for the comedic reason of how it’s a cheesy 90s action movie. Now take the 2014 war drama “American Sniper”. More people are truly interested in watching that film because the story is more compelling with it’s with violence and real topics, like the PTSD that the Navy Seal, Chief Kyle, had. With this idea, people began to understand that they can make a profit off of this emotion. Video games like Battlefield or Call of Duty are the number one source of this exploit.  These two games have a way of representing the realness of war but at the same time they desensitize the violence, or maybe our society just ignores it now, searching for its story. The games can be as dark as they can as long as it for the truth. In one of the Call of Duty games, you are held captured by the North Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War. Then you forced to play a game of Russian roulette with the other captives. These evil scenarios most likely happened during the war but to put that in the game for entertainment purposes, seems completely unnecessary and truly disturbing. Real scenarios and dark truths are completely two different entities. They should not be put in the same category of making a compelling story.