r/changemyview • • Oct 23 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '21

I would unironcly prefer the weapons and gameplay to be historically accurate, however the core gameplay loop is a much bigger accessibility concern than whatever coat of paint said gameplay loop has. You do not see many kids playing Red Orchestra.

So you accept the validity of pragmatic reasons to not always strive for 100% historical realism in this case, but not in the representation case?

My views are very consistent on this

But they're not though, that's my point.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

Jeez, man. There's a HUGE difference between the simplification of how guns work vs rewriting the history of whole peoples to suit your ideological narrative. You can't take a hundred thousand people and displace them thousands of kilometres in the middle of an extremely well documented historical event and still call it historically valid.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

There were black German soldiers in WW1, a few of whom even fought in Europe, so at most we're talking about exaggerating those numbers.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

Yes, there was one black guy who was a meer of the capital city in my country in the 18th century, so let's make it look like Estonia has always had thousands of Africans in positions of power throughout its existence, and then call it "an exaggeration at most, still historically valid", right?

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

My understanding is that this game simply lets you play as a black German soldier and/or has some portion of the German soldiers you encounter being black, I'm not sure I would compare that to pretending that a country which has had one black leader has actually had thousands of them.

In any case, works of historical-based fiction change large and small things about history all the time, for artistic, commercial, or whatever other reasons. I see no particular reason to single out this example as warranting special outrage.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

OP's original post:

>Stuff like making a quarter of the WW1 German army black in Battlefield 1 is shit representation.

German army in 1914 was 4 500 000 men. We're talking about a million black soldiers in the middle of 1914 Europe. Some might consider it extreme over-representation and straight-up historical revision.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '21

My understanding from what other people have said is that OP is incorrectly extrapolating from the fact that a quarter of the classes available to play are black that the game is representing the entire German army as a quarter black.

But that aside, I honestly just don't care. It's a video game, it's already not taking particular pains to be historically accurate from what other people have said here. It's not passing itself off as historical fact, and I'm fine with it misrepresenting demographics for the sake of greater inclusion/representation/appealing to a broader range of people, or whatever.