![]() In a few German beaches, like those in the island of Sylt, sandcastles have been forbidden at least since the 1990s, and in many others the local governments have set strict limits on height and width. Expeditions: Viking (2017) Greetings from Europe! Control, whether by means of the immediate death of humans or at the safe remove of a warship, becomes of utmost importance. Like the US warships roaming the Persian Gulf, they exert a pressure on the border that hardens it, turning the beaches into sites of dominion over life and death. ![]() At the same time, the sea is usually inaccessible for certain kinds of units, and sea-bound war machines are nigh-untouchable unless countered by opposing nautical forces. Regular tactics in these games are to deploy turrets and ranged weapons facing the beach: the role of World War II’s Normandy in the military imagination and a wider public is, in this sense, fundamental to the “castle-less siege” nature of beach combat in games. Freedom of movement comes at the highest of prices. In the Cossacks series, for example, your transport ships can carry dozens of soldiers at once, but when it comes to disembarking, they do so in orderly single file, widely open and susceptible to enemy fire. The flexibility it offers to the regular vacationer, as a place of self-reflection and relatively free expression, as well as the hardness of the sea as the limit of movement, are translated in RTS games into a line that offers both extreme vulnerability and its opposite. These military games emphasize that border character of the beach, the way in which it both divides and connects two types of space. But in both, the fluidity of the beach as frontier means access to greater territory control and greater freedom of movement. In Pacific General, the theater of war retains this warmth and placidness, while in Panzer General it is mostly grim. The Polynesian beach had everything the global north tourist wanted: opalescent tones, bronzed bodies, and the kind of sand that would begin to be imported and exported to places where it did not occur naturally it is the basis of the results you got in your Google image search. Older games like Pacific General took care to depict the “Polynesian” standard configured in the mid-20 th century, to which our current image of the beach is beholden, contrasting its vibrant and relatively complex color palette to the duller and much simpler one used for European theaters of war in Panzer General. We’re there to claim a territory, and the beach is the (beautiful) frontier which allows it. After all, we’re not there to enjoy the aesthetics, we’re there to burn forts to the ground and kill enemy fleets and soldiers. The wilderness of roaring seas and hostile weather do not exist: the relative agency of Nature is erased by sheer human will, and only other humans disrupt the pleasant scenery. And while it does consider different climate settings, the wintery versions of northern beaches still have clear-blue, calm and steady oceans. Panzer General (1994) Welcome to ParadiseĪge of Empires II: Definitive Edition made the otherwise rudimentary (but still nice to look at) beaches of the original into an isometric version of the global beach photograph. ![]() ![]() How Metal Gear Eschewed Realism to Convey the Horror of Imperial Violence.Why is There So Little Religion in Games?.7 Great Games for Chilling Out on Vacation.This eternal season lingers in our imagination as a time of leisure and a space of play, in which the border between land and sea becomes an equally timeless playground, away from the anxious tick-tock of the work schedule, our bodies free from many a social constraint (just try doing a cartwheel in a busy street of a major city at midday and notice the looks you get).īut what happens when that play is rigidly structured into a game where freedom is of a different kind? In strategy and tactics games, whether real-time or turn-based, the image of the beach has its utopian associations transformed, and is actively reconfigured as a site where pleasure is only to be had in death. It suggests that at the beach, it is always summer. What unites all these images of the beach, apart from style, is the lighting. If you do a quick Google image search for “beach,” it might strike you that most of the photographs, whether taken in Panama or Ireland, are crafted similarly: sun, sand, some trees, maybe a lone recliner looking outward into the ocean. ![]()
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