“Some distant conflict” – Conflict: Vietnam

Contemporary reviews of Conflict: Vietnam mention its position as part of a wave of games based on the Vietnam war, alongside Vietcong: Purple Haze and Shellshock: Nam ‘67, the latter released in the same week as Conflict: Vietnam and #2 in the chart behind it. The explanation for the trend seems to be a pretty prosaic one: lots of developers banking on people being fed up with games based on World War II, and looking for a recognisable historical war that hadn’t been similarly exhausted. In the case of British Conflict developer Pivotal, they would have struggled to drag out the Gulf War further, so even fewer options were left.

A preview article in PSW gives a bit more background to the approach that Pivotal took. The magazine asked managing director Jim Bambra whether he thought they were letting themselves in for any controversy with the subject matter. “I don’t see it as a problem. We’re in the business of entertainment” he starts, before going on to say “I don’t really give a shit who won or lost the Vietnam War”. He also talks a bit about their research — “manuals on tanks, handbooks, photographs” — and mentions the fun of watching movies, a point expanded on elsewhere in the article: “the team were quite happy to talk about the immense number of Vietnam movies they’d seen”.

The article also talks views on the quality of jungle graphical textures in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and Pivotal’s desire to improve on both those and its enemy AI. They did so, and came up with a game that sticks fairly closely to the third-person squad-based gameplay of Conflict: Desert Storm while adding some slight twists. Mostly, things are less tactically staged and more reactive, more desperate and against-all-odds. There is no laser sighting mechanism or planting of C4. You can now pick up enemy weapons and ammo, further lending a more improvised feel. It even has a miniature Doom 3 approach of introducing you to a base in peaceful times before having it overrun with enemies. There is nothing revolutionary but the twists align with the more significant narrative change.

In Conflict: Desert Storm and Conflict: Desert Storm II, you could choose whether to play as the British or American military, not that it made much difference beyond accents. Britain wasn’t part of the Vietnam war, so this one is from an American perspective, drawn directly from those Vietnam movies (from which it also harvests its ‘60s soundtrack choices). This gives it a somewhat bolder narrative than the very functional ones of either of the Desert Storm games. It’s accompanied by greater characterisation, facilitated by having to keep your squad of four alive rather than controlling replaceable nonentities.

It doesn’t take much to have greater characterisation than Conflict: Desert Storm, of course, and Conflict: Vietnam doesn’t provide much. Your squad are broadly drawn to the point of barely getting one feature each: the sergeant Ragman is tough, the medic Kahler is the new guy, Hoss is White and from the South, and Junior is a Black guy (“New Yorker” in the developer’s interview euphemism). At one point you briefly get assistance from an Australian soldier who mentions wanting to get back to tinnies and a barbie; this puts him about level with the regular cast, depth-wise.

You get to see the squad bicker and bond as they go through a series of unfortunate events, set off early on when their helicopter goes down behind enemy lines. They don’t have much knowledge of what is going on, and neither are you given any. Conflict: Desert Storm II already retreated from the pseudo-educational historical approach of the first game, but Conflict: Vietnam junks it completely, providing you no wider context for the events you take part in beyond the dates they occur on. This handily removes the need to give a shit who won or lost the Vietnam War, and lends itself to nihilism along with claustrophobia. Squad members repeat “it don’t mean a thing” in the story almost as often as phrases like “ain’t got time to bleed” in the fighting. All they have is each other, whether they like it or not. The most effective moment of resultant bonding being when the new guy’s nickname gets changed from ‘Cherry’ to ‘Doc’ as a mark of respect, reflected right through to the UI.

All of that means that the problems of Conflict: Vietnam are very different from those of Medal of Honor: Rising Sun or even of the previous Conflict games. It is not a jingoistic or patriotic game, perhaps unsurprisingly from developers approaching it from such distance in all senses. It doesn’t really give a shit about the war or the reasons behind it, but it doesn’t have much good to say about America either. In the wry narration of the ending cutscene, Doc discusses the fate of each squad member and describes how Junior joined the Black Panthers and was killed by the FBI. It’s a rather radical detail by war game standards, though British people have long been more comfortable discussing America’s racism than our own country’s. The game avoids racist slurs in the way that Medal of Honor: Rising Sun conspicuously didn’t. For all that your squad shout “motherfucker!” at them and kill 100 of them a mission, the Viet Cong are just sort of… there.

That is at the heart of the widespread issue that Conflict: Vietnam imports wholesale from the films it so obviously takes after. It’s a question of perspective up there with thinking of Pearl Harbor as the beginning of World War II. That is, it presents Vietnam as a purely American psychodrama, not a country with its own people and culture, but a meaningless hell imposed on unwitting American soldiers. It don’t mean a thing becomes a cop-out at best; it’s still Americans that it don’t mean a thing to. That ends up treating the Vietnamese people on all sides as being merely there to provide development for Americans by suffering and (mostly) dying: the fridging of a whole nation.

One time in the game in which you do hear a Vietnamese voice is a cutscene where the characters listen to a radio broadcast (based on real ones), in which a woman tries to persuade them to question their role in the war. They argue over whether to listen, with Junior sexualising her. Particularly put together with the bit later on where he makes a racialised joke about penis size, it’s pretty clear there is more than one racist hyper-sexualisation stereotype in play. Sexual and misogynist jokes are a repeated theme throughout, from the radio broadcasts you can hear in the initial camp onwards. The bittersweet narration that closes the game plays over pictures of the squad dancing with (presumably) local women, implied as their reward.

You could get into depiction versus endorsement here, or questions of frank realism. Toxic male bonding really happens, after all. Pivotal drew stronger lines on what should be included for realism’s sake elsewhere, though. And it’s not really about one game “in the business of entertainment” turning misogyny into that entertainment. It’s about the fact that those decisions took place in a wider context where this was industry standard. It was utterly unsurprising to me to discover a review of Conflict: Vietnam in PC Zone which used a racist and misogynist meme as a sub-heading. That was the culture of video games, the one which has been built on ever since to get to where we are today. That’s what happens when you build an industry on the leadership of men taking pride in not really giving a shit.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 4 September 2004:

• 

• 

• 

• 

•