Battlefield 6 Looks like the State of the Art in Jingoism and Propaganda

The reveal trailer for Battlefield 6, which details many of these plot points, would have you believe the U.S is a victim on the grand stage of global politics. It is a blistering piece of jingoistic work that interpolates an anti-war Bob Dylan screed against images of a siege on Brooklyn. It seems, at a blush, like a campaign that would prefer to depict the U.S. as the bullied rather than the bully. It is a short trailer featuring a lot of men with American accents shouting about doing “whatever it takes” as scenes of destruction follow in their wake—destruction that I’m sure the characters of its story will feel justified in carrying out to challenge Pax Armata, fix the ills of its fictional world, and once again establish the U.S. as some scrappy defender of all that is morally good, virtuous, and/or otherwise righteous in the world.

I hope that I do not have to spell out the ways in which the U.S has fallen short of this falsehood. Look no further than its continual armament of Israel and its ongoing endorsement of the genocide in Gaza, or its extensive and brutal 20-year campaign in Afghanistan. In fact, America can spot its own worst enemy by looking into a mirror. And yet Battlefield 6 looks poised to emulate the “greats” before it—like 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and its depiction of an attack on Washington D.C—and look outward for demons rather than inside itself. 

First-person shooter military games have long played in the world of theoretical conflicts, imagining future wars—largely built upon leftover tensions from the Cold War—and constructing playgrounds, shooting galleries, and action-movie setpieces from them in which players can then feel like cool guys while playing pretend as morally dubious mercenaries. Battlefield 6 is hardly the first offender, nor will it be the last, but it is the latest to inherit that legacy, and it’s why it so readily apes images of the single largest terrorist attack in U.S. history in its depiction of an invasion on American soil. By casting the player as the red-blooded American(s) who will inevitably save the world from another 9/11 or WWIII, it sells a comforting lie to consumers about how it can combat the rampant (and largely unfounded) paranoia of outside intervention/invasion with good ol’ fashioned American exceptionalism and ideals. That and more weaponry of mass destruction than any country really needs. 

That last bit is beginning to feel like the only truth you’ll find in Battlefield 6. And I guess, in its defense, it has never purported to be anything other than a piece of fiction, one which just so happens to be content to extrapolate on real-life tragedies and worries that threaten the world over to delight its players.  Battlefield 2042, which precedes the upcoming shooter, left me cold about its depiction of a future that seems to be ceaselessly ravaged by war and the erosion of the climate. Maybe there are no answers or ways forward here, only bodies and the conflicts that put them there. 

And perhaps that will always be the case with games like these, which are largely reflective of the world from which they are born. But if that’s the case, I beg them to at least be honest. As Dylan puts it himself in the very song the Battlefield 6 trailer co-opts, “Come, you masters of war, you that build the big guns…I just want you to know I can see through your masks.” Maybe then, once the artifice has been stripped away, a game like Battlefield 6 might feel like it’s in conversation with the moment as opposed to feeling so left behind by it. 

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.