Gaming in the Midst of Current Events

Many would argue that video games are realistic. They're certainly getting more realistic every day, especially with the industry's overzealous focus on graphics (but that's another post). Soccer moms would talk your ear off about how games are too realistic, with exploding heads and blood everywhere. Heaven forbid they actually pay attention to what their kids are playing (sorry, yet another post there). As realistic or unrealistic as games are or are not, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree that there are lines game developers should not cross.






One of those lines squiggles its way in and out of the realm of current events.

An easy way to sell a game is to fashion it out of what's going on in the world at that point in time. The winter Olympics are coming? Make an Olympics game. Presidential election around the corner? Make a Flash game where you pin the tail on the Democrat. Devastating war in the Middle East? Design a shooter game where you lead a squad of soldiers through an actual US mission.

"Woah, hold your horses there, partner," you say. "That mission involved real people who fought and killed and died. Those soldiers were heroes, and they deserve respect!"

Video games, being interactive, have a unique position in entertainment media. Games can present ideas and concepts in a way no media really can. As such, they get a lot of attention and often fall under controversy. Usually the claim is that they're too violent, and are "criminalizing our nation's youth."

The game I referenced above, Six Days in Fallujah (trailer), fell under a different sort of controversy. Six Days in Fallujah follows the events of Operation Phantom Fury, the second offensive by a joint US-Britain-Iraqi task force on the city of Fallujah, Iraq. This happened back in 2004, and the actual timeline of Operation Phantom Fury lasted from November 8th to December 23rd, when Fallujah was finally liberated from insurgents. In the game, players control a squad of soldiers as you move from building to building, fighting the insurgents while trying to avoid civilian casualties.

Sounds like a lot of video games, doesn't it? Let's name a few that this reminds me of:

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
• Close Combat: First to Fight
• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Just about every game in the Delta Force series, including Black Hawk Down

These are mostly the more popular titles that involve similar scenarios. The list is very long, and is not solely made up of shooters.

So, going back to my fictitious quoting of your objection. Yes, Six Days portrays a horrible and bloody conflict in an entertainment medium. The developers, Atomic Games, knew this would be an issue when they started. So why did they do it?

Members of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines had worked with Atomic Games on military simulators before being deployed to Fallujah, and when they came back, they asked the developers to create the game. This gave the developers an almost first-hand look into what happened, what the soldiers had to deal with, and how they felt. Atomic Games put an emphasis on making the game as realistic as possible, not to trivialize the horrors of war, but to bring it to the attention of those of us who only hear about it on the news. Atomic Games described Six Days as more of a survival horror title, in the sense that the player is faced with the unpredictable and terrifying tactics used by insurgents, all pulled from reality.

Despite the care, sensitivity and attention to detail that Atomic Games allegedly lent this title, it suffered extreme scrutiny and controversy. Many opponents believed the game was an affront to the men and women who lost their lives in that conflict, while others worried it would fail to break the entertainment shell and present the second battle of Fallujah in the promised dignified sense. Konami, the game's publisher, feared a deluge of lawsuits was headed their way, cancelled the game and laid off the entirety of Atomic Games' staff.

Okay, fine. As long as the scenario is fictitious, and the people involved are as well, we can have our video games. Even though if you paid any sort of attention to what was going on, you'd see exactly what living models are being referenced. And let's all just completely ignore the video games that are based on historical events, like the OVER 9000 (!!) times I've stormed the beaches of Normandy. I don't know what the difference between killing Vietnamese and killing Iraqis is in a video game, besides about forty years. So there's the real irritant to this controversy for me: it's not any different at all. Maybe everyone is following South Park's rule that 23 and a half years must pass before an event can be taken lightly.

Or maybe not. E3, the huge video game expo, just passed, and several new titles have been announced. One, called Homefront (trailer), caught my eye. It's a Facebook game about fighting off a country's army that's invading America, and looks to be a little more involved than farming and reading about running a mob family. Intrigued, I watched the trailer.

The trailer opens with a press conference given by Hillary Clinton, regarding the recent sinking of a South Korean navy ship near the maritime border with North Korea. This real event happened at the end of March, and since then, an independent team of investigators from several different countries have determined that the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo. North Korea has overtly threatened war if any retaliatory actions are taken against them. This happened a couple months ago, and we already have a video game citing the event as an influence. In comparison, Six Days in Fallujah started development a couple years after Operation Phantom Fury.

Now, I should point out that Homefront is about North Korea since rising to become a nuclear-armed nation, that goes on to defeat its neighboring countries before invading America, where the actual game takes place. The year for this setting is 2027, so the events following the sinking of the Cheonan are of course completely fabricated. But its basis is in reality, with current events and real, living people setting the stage.

Let me clarify something here: I'm not against basing games in reality or current events. On the contrary, I'm completely for it. I'm one of those insufferable gamers that believes video games are primarily a story-telling device, be those stories real or made up. With an interest in the world around me, I'm more likely to pick up a game about an actual situation, to live those moments, than I am one that dilutes similar circumstances into "an adventure." But I am also not against games that are "based on" something. I just want it recognized that there is a negligible difference between a game (or story, movie, whatever) that is loosely or somewhat based on an event, and one that is derived from that event.

To me, demanding the cancellation of Six Days in Fallujah is an act of censorship. Since I'm in America, and Atomic Games was based in America with an intended audience of Americans for Six Days, I can cry foul on the grounds of free speech and the First Amendment. Recreating a historical event in the form of an interactive simulation is not slandering or in any other way violating the rights of anyone else. And the idea that Six Days can be censored because actual Americans suffered in Operation Phantom Fury, while we can turn around and promote a game like Homefront that rides the waves of South Korean suffering, is simply deplorable in its hypocrisy.

As far as remaining sensitive to what happened, the people involved, and their surviving family members? That I feel is up to the developers, or whoever is presenting the event in whatever medium they are presenting it in. They can present it as a droll history of facts, as an engaging experience where they simply change the names, or even leave the names and make it all into a farcical comedy.

I personally would be unlikely to endorse Six Days in Fallujah if it was designed to be a political statement, nor would I be interested if it was another lackluster run-of-the-mill shoot 'em up. When I game, I do it for the experience, for the story, and yes, for entertainment. So as far as I'm concerned, keep your PC out of my PC.