Blasting away and blowing up baddies has been a staple of video game mechanics for decades. Game play for the last twenty years has been about surviving while trying to reach a goal. Save for a few games that don’t have game-over screens, killing your enemies has been the main method of survival. Games follow this school of thought: if an obstacle is in your path, remove it.
Video games of the last five years have been all about the “shooters.” The games include a style that put you in the place of a soldier, mercenary, revolutionary, and the list goes on. The main goal of these games is to shoot anyone that gets in your path. To make this genre of video games socially acceptable, they are normally placed within periods of unrest or war time. Mass murder and destruction makes sense as entertainment due to the large set pieces and exciting content. Gamers get a thrill from killing hundreds of baddies with well-placed explosives, while escaping in a plane that is about to run out of runway.
Following the Cold War, companies that make shooters often use Russia as an enemy to fight. More and more, modern games are finding ways to turn Russia into an evil superpower that wants to destroy western civilization. Hundreds of Russian soldiers fall to American-made weapons and vulgar gung-ho attitudes in modern military games. Why is this? Are gaming companies using lingering Cold War attitudes in America to sell games? Are gaming companies perhaps trying to bring to light a fear of Russian domination in America? Or is Russia being used as a default enemy – a way of promoting Cold War attitudes?
Exciting games will be around for a long time to come, as they often give players the ability to experience something they never will in their lifetime. This idea sells millions of games and constantly creates new and riveting experiences for players to enjoy.
A game will always explain why, in that fictional universe, an enemy is at the other end of your gun. Try to keep this question in mind however: Why did the developer put them there?