The reveal trailer for the fifth installment of Electronic Arts and DICE’s acclaimed Battlefield series was…odd. It was the first time the shooter series returned to World War II since its initial game, Battlefield 1942, and the tone of the trailer was strange for what many expected. But unfortunately, while the odd tone of the trailer was noteworthy, what many within the gaming community latched onto was the inclusion of women and minorities, and it unleashed a fury of raw hatred far more real than anything the game portrays.

Our society has a problem with angry young men online. It’s something mainstream media have reported on recently, particularly with the Toronto killings from April of this year from an “incel” that sent the news media into deep and dark places of the internet. A lot of people were shocked that such a subculture existed. Those who followed and participated in the gaming community online weren’t too surprised. This kind of attitude had been developing slowly over the years among young men in gaming (it’s been developing everywhere, frankly, but gaming is where the signs started to show first and the worst).

The reaction to Battlefield V’s reveal was harsh, but not unpredictable. It echoed the GamerGate controversy, where people dressed up their obvious issues with women as concerns about “ethics in journalism,” and a primarily online movement drove several women out of the industry. Reddit and YouTube were aflame with anger about the ‘SJW agenda’ or the ‘forced feminism’ or whatever other dog-whistle you choose to cover up meaning ‘having women and minorities now’.

A lot of the complaints were disguised as fears of historical accuracy. Women and minorities on the battlefield of World War II? Those aren’t in the history books, they said. Of course they actually are, and what’s not in the history book is that soldiers got shot, hid in a bush and regenerated their health, but you’ll never see complaints about that. One of the most humorous episodes of that backlash was a reddit poster pretending to be a history professor fearing that the portrayal of WWII would be confusing to young children learning about the war for the first time. The ‘professor’ apparently didn’t think anyone would look at his post history to see he was a fraud.

It feels funny until you read Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain, where he details how Steve Bannon saw GamerGate as inspiration for weaponizing online outrage that eventually, among other things, led to Donald Trump storming the White House. Or how fallen far right icon Milo Yiannopoulos was so impressed with the movement and used Breitbart, which he edited then, to ‘convert’ these angry gamers to politics. It’s not so funny then, when you realize the hate from these virtual places bleed into the real world more than you realize.

To EA and DICE’s credit, they haven’t backed from their decision to include women and minorities in the game. A DICE developer commented after the reveal that if people were bothered by it so much, they should not play it. Despite what appears to be a soft launch (no official numbers have been released, but the game had steep discounts after only a week on the market, and the playerbase online seems much lower than earlier releases), EA pushed a #EveryonesBattlefield hashtag to promote the game after release. Those gestures, unfortunately, were met with even more rage. The game’s main reddit page was filled with comments of gloating that the game underperformed combined with the same familiar hatred for new representation. Even as writing this the main Battlefield reddit is filled with people ready to pounce at anything positive about the game, or anything about these new additions at least. Many of the members and moderators fled to a dedicated BFV reddit in the fallout.

To those on the outside, it all may seem strange and surreal. Maybe less so with how strange and surreal our everyday life has become, but still, we’re talking about video games. An artform still in its infancy where polygons crafted to look like people shift around in simulated environments. What is the all the fuss about, and why is it that a group of people take it so seriously to such a visceral response?

The simple answer is that it’s not really about the game, or games in general. It’s about something far more simple and primal: hate.

Next year will be the eightieth anniversary of World War II’s official start. It’s impossible to relive that. Even in the best and closest representation that can be crafted, from the standard video games of today to the budding technology in Virtual and Augmented Reality that can put you in the simulation, it will never be more than that. The days of that war are over, the soldiers who died are gone forever. We can do nothing but look back at imperfect doppelgangers portraying the sweat, blood and flesh that fell to the mud during it.

But the hate that drove so much of the atrocities of WWII is still here and, in bitter irony, the reaction to the game depicting it has shown that it still lingers as much today as it did back then. It’s a beast in hibernation toward what may be an inevitable and unstoppable awakening.

In W.B. Yeats’s haunting poem, “Second Coming,” the narrator talks about technology swirling out of control and how the world crumbles around him. While the poem is about WWI it can apply just as much to WWII (one can argue the World Wars were really one big war with a long interlude). It’s hard not to feel echoes of that in all this in how under the nose of many, a technology designed as not much more than an elaborate toy and the forums to discuss those that play with them became weapons of hate, while those in control of both either seem ineffective or unwilling to do anything significant against it.

The battles, locations and soldiers of Battlefield V aren’t real. No matter how accurate they may strive to recreate the blood, uniforms, weapons, tanks and all the terrible things of that war, it’s all just a big simulation. We can only look at imperfect images in a dirty and cracked mirror from the past. But alongside these recreations, something very real shambles forth. As the new year dawns, it feels like the worst are full of passionate and intensity once again, and who knows what truly is coming to this new age to be born soon.

Don’t Miss More Posts Like This! Please leave this field empty Email *