For instance, the Civ games are basically Whig History: The Game, presenting liberal capitalism as the ideal end point for all societies. It even includes uncivilized “barbarian tribes” whose sole purpose is to be exterminated so you can take their land for the glory of capitalism.
The ARMA games. ARMA: Cold War Assault lets you join the communists but they’re goofily evil mustache twirling villains that execute you two missions in. ARMA 3 starts with American soldiers bitching about how shit their economy is and how we need to stop those evil CSAT, an organization of Chinese and Middle East countries that had the audacity to work together and gain independence from western hegemony. They’ll constantly talk about the evil Russians or Chinese doing things America has done many times in real life like killing democratically elected leaders and influencing other countries elections. The mods are great though, some let you play as Russians helping Syrians fight ISIS or let you be revolutionaries taking over a whole island from NATO.
I can’t remember if it’s ARMA 1 or 2 but you play through half the campaign and only near the end if you do enough optional quests you find out the US was accidentally supporting the fascist right-wing coup all along. Big ole whoopsie-doodle.
ARMA 2 almost reads like a deconstruction of post-9/11 war fever to me. It starts off with everybody on an aircraft carrier hooting and hollering about going to war to kill the baddies, and then the whole game is spent shooting at smudges in the far distance while both yourself and all of your friends can die instantly at any moment. Then the game ends and the whole war has basically accomplished nothing except making you feel terrible.
CoD realized that in order to do war propaganda well you have to be incredibly unrealistic.
To be fair I think 90+% of the playerbase has never played the single player, and a good half almost never play with the content the game comes with.
The single player is almost unplayable because the game is so unforgivingly lethal. I tried many times but getting tapped by AI I never saw, while realistic, is also very frustrating.
People who say this trying a milsim for the first time have no idea how to identify terrain features, base of fire, enfilade/defieldade, or even where the line is.
It takes some time to learn, but if you try play a milsim without knowing it it’s like trying to play chess without knowing the rules and without anyone showing you. You make an illegal move and instantly forfeit the game doing so, having no idea what you did or how to even understand what happened.
Like for instance, if at any point your silhouette is backed dropped by the sky, you fucked up majorly and are probably going to die within the next few minutes. And yet not knowing about that kind of stuff, you wouldn’t realize you were killed by something you did several minutes ago.
If you understand the basics of infantry combat the ai is insanely easy to outmaneuver and destroy. That’s why everyone plays multiplayer.
If you wanna enjoy games like that, I recommend having someone teach you the basics and reading field manuals to fill in the details. It’s kinda hard to learn just from a book because it’s all about how to apply simple concepts to real situations, which is the thing books are horrible for.
The “Rebels fighting against NATO/CSAT” mod is one of the most popular mods.
My group really leaned in to the “We’re all mercenary war criminals” aesthetic, fully and ironically aware that in most scenarios, regardless of which faction we were fighting, we were definitely the bad guys. You can only blow up so many technicals with drones and bleeding edge main battle tanks before you start to question your role.
Funny enough, ARMA is what really broke me out of the idea that war is “Cool”. I was playing with like forty people, we were stuck in a ditch with mortar fire coming down on us and a couple of enemy tanks strafing us with machine gun fire. And there was nothing to do except wait to die. No CoD hero moments, no last minute clutch saves, no happy ending. We had no anti-tank weapons, we were pinned, and we all died. And I thought “This has happened to millions and millions of people” and it kind of permanently broke me out of the idea that there’s anything noble or heroic about war.
Edit: Also, ARMA is notable for being the only game I’ve ever heard of that partnered with the International Committee of the Red Cross to make an expansion about unexploded ordinance, mines, and the laws of war. It has a whole mini-campaign where you play as an explosive ordinance disposal expert after the war has ended. I think the opening mission has you playing as a civilian who inevitably dies to artillery fire.