The first video game about the Iraq war provoked a firestorm of its own. A realistic game about the second invasion of Fallujah might be a bit too ambitious, writes Benjamin Pauker ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
War is a messy business, but it also makes for good entertainment—eventually.
In the six years since the Iraq war began, there have been several dozen films and a handful of television shows about the conflict. Some, like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Generation Kill”, have been good, but most have been poor—either blatantly anti-war (Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs”), deceptively shallow (Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies”) or simply melodramatic (Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss”).
On the whole, fictionalised dramas about the war have earned little controversy and performed extraordinarily poorly. The execrable “Home of the Brave” (2006), for example, which starred Samuel L. Jackson, 50 Cent and Jessica Biel as soldiers grappling with physical and psychological injuries sustained in the war, cost an estimated $12m to make and grossed a mere $51,708 in America.
None of this helps to explain the furore over the first video game about the American experience in Iraq.
Konami, a game publisher, and Atomic Games, a game developer, announced in April that they planned to release “Six Days in Fallujah”, a third-person shooter based on the bloody second invasion of Fallujah in 2004. Meant to feel harrowingly realistic, the game puts players into the boots of American Marine Corps soldiers as they fight insurgents in the dusty streets of Iraq. Atomic Games reportedly consulted with both insurgents and Marine veterans to recreate the six-day assault, described by many as the heaviest urban combat in recent memory.
In its “First Look” review of the “ultrarealistic” game, GameSpot had much to praise:
With a focus on urban combat, and all of the complications that fighting in close quarters and among civilians brings with it, the developers at Atomic Games have created a new game engine to power the action in Six Days. The hallmark of the new engine is destruction; everything from individual bricks to entire buildings will be candidates for destruction in the game, a fact that opens up entirely new avenues of strategy when taking to the streets in the hunt for insurgents.
"Cool", said the boy in me. While I wouldn’t describe myself as an ardent video gamer, playing them remains an occasional guilty pleasure. I’m still amazed by how real games look and feel these days. When I was nine, my father returned from a business trip to Hong Kong with an Intellivision console, billed as the most advanced gaming system of the time. I recall blissful hours playing “Major League Baseball”, a game made up of right angles and primary colours, with sound effects that hovered somewhere between "The Three Stooges" and flatulence.
Check out a current baseball video game, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a television broadcast of an actual contest. Perhaps that’s why killing aliens or zombies—popular fare in many of today’s shooter games—seems so tedious to me. Granted, I’m far too old for any of this, but if the technology exists, why not explore more adventurous and controversial territory? Atomic’s “Six Days” is certainly bold, possibly foolhardy and probably insensitive, but if they can pull off the claimed realism, I’m interested.
Popular response to the announcement, however, was decidedly mixed. Avid gamers were mostly excited by the planned release, but public opinion tended towards shock, if not outrage. A group representing the families of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq condemned the game for trivialising the conflict. In a damning interview in the Daily Mail, the father of a British soldier killed in the battle called it “crass and insensitive.” Too soon, said the chorus, too soon.
Konami, the game's distributor, balked and summarily pulled out of the project only two weeks after the big announcement. "After seeing the reaction to the video game in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it," a Konami rep told the Asahi Shimbun.
I spoke with Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic, and asked him if he expected this firestorm. “Well, we knew there would be some controversy,” he chuckled, then exhaled. “But no, not like this.” Konami’s decision to pull the release reportedly caught Atomic by surprise.
What is it, then, that so inflamed public opinion? Perhaps it’s the fact that the video game is based on an ongoing war. The 2004 invasion wasn't so long ago, and for some the wounds are still fresh.
Of the hundreds of studio films and television shows that have dramatised war, few have ever attempted to tackle the complexities of one that was still in progress. Fewer still have done it well. The problem, of course, is perspective. The films that burst forth from Hollywood during the early days of the second world war were consistently of the rah-rah variety. It is for good reason that no one remembers "Stand By for Action", a film made in 1943 about naval battles in the Pacific. But the more reflective "From Here to Eternity" (1953) and "The Great Escape" (1963) have stood the test of time.
John Wayne’s controversial pro-war vehicle “The Green Berets” was one of only a handful of popular films produced during the Vietnam war. When it was released in 1968 Roger Ebert, a film critic, gave it zero stars, and eviscerated it for being “offensive” and “dishonest.” More nuanced efforts, such as “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now,” came ten years later.
Like Vietnam, Iraq is a complicated and unpopular conflict, and few seem to be ready to see it dramatised on screen. Back in early 2005, Stephen Boccho, a vaunted television producer ("NYPD Blue", "LA Law"), released “Over There”, billing it as the first serial television drama about an ongoing conflict. It earned some fanfare but little critical acclaim. No one watched it: the show was cancelled after only 13 episodes.
Supposedly there are only two types of stories: a stranger comes to town, and a man goes on a journey. The Iraq war is both, but everyone hates the stranger, and the journey was a dumb idea to begin with. Do you want to see that film? American audiences don’t--at least not yet--and for good reason.
But why not a video game? You can’t really blame the developers at Atomic Games for trying. There are dozens of extremely popular and profitable console video games about modern warfare. Even Konami, the erstwhile distributor of "Six Days in Fallujah", sells the remarkable “Metal Gear Solid 4”, which begins with its protagonist caught in a Middle Eastern firefight. Grab your gun and you’re off, sniping and slicing the throats of sinister private military corporation employees.
It’s easy to understand the small leap to pixellating the Fallujah invasion. “Six Days” is meant to capture the visceral feel of urban warfare, with morally complex scenarios and documentary footage to heighten the realism. “Every aspect of the game is based on a true story,” says Tamte. "We want—and it’s very hard to do this and it hasn’t really been done too well before—is to make people feel what it was like to be there. And video games are among the best ways to explain what it’s like to be a Marine in intense, urban warfare.”
Tamte notes that just like in real warfare, characters in the game will have to make “split-second moral choices,” though he wouldn’t elaborate on what exactly that means. (I’ll hazard a guess: collateral damage.) Herein lies a key problem: video games are not yet sophisticated enough to dramatise the sometimes awful consequences of certain choices (though this is starting to change), and they are just not built to evoke the terrible costs of war.
Say, for example, a player accidentally--or wilfully--kills a few civilian families by calling in an air raid: what is the punishment? Remorse? A cut-scene of a court martial? And what about injuries, or death? How could such things be represented meaningfully if they fail to capture the bigger picture?
Our feelings about this war may be just too complicated for what is meant to be an entertaining simulation. “The word ‘game’ is a problem for us,” Tamte acknowledges. If it ever sees light of day, “Six Days” will be judged not for its high-minded ideals, but for their execution. On this, it will inevitably fail. The essential problem is that part of the fun of video games, and third- or first-person shooters in particular, is the superhero aspect: the ability to wage war almost single-handedly, racking up a staggering body count. This forces game programmers to choose the simpler "realism" of intense urban combat over the more difficult task: conveying the folly and futility of war. Want realism? Read Dexter Filkin's book "The Forever War". Cowering for hours on a rooftop and then watching a friend get shot in the face just isn't fun.
Still, Atomic Games may be on to something. Recently I asked Ned Parker, a long-time Baghdad correspondent, what he thought of "Six Days". “It sounds kind of crazy,” he allowed, “but the last time I embedded with troops in Iraq, as soon as they got back to base, all they did was get on their laptops and play war games.”
Picture credit: "Six Days in Fallujah", Atomic Games
(Benjamin Pauker is managing editor of World Policy Journal.)
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
War is a messy business, but it also makes for good entertainment—eventually.
In the six years since the Iraq war began, there have been several dozen films and a handful of television shows about the conflict. Some, like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Generation Kill”, have been good, but most have been poor—either blatantly anti-war (Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs”), deceptively shallow (Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies”) or simply melodramatic (Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss”).
On the whole, fictionalised dramas about the war have earned little controversy and performed extraordinarily poorly. The execrable “Home of the Brave” (2006), for example, which starred Samuel L. Jackson, 50 Cent and Jessica Biel as soldiers grappling with physical and psychological injuries sustained in the war, cost an estimated $12m to make and grossed a mere $51,708 in America.
None of this helps to explain the furore over the first video game about the American experience in Iraq.
Konami, a game publisher, and Atomic Games, a game developer, announced in April that they planned to release “Six Days in Fallujah”, a third-person shooter based on the bloody second invasion of Fallujah in 2004. Meant to feel harrowingly realistic, the game puts players into the boots of American Marine Corps soldiers as they fight insurgents in the dusty streets of Iraq. Atomic Games reportedly consulted with both insurgents and Marine veterans to recreate the six-day assault, described by many as the heaviest urban combat in recent memory.
In its “First Look” review of the “ultrarealistic” game, GameSpot had much to praise:
With a focus on urban combat, and all of the complications that fighting in close quarters and among civilians brings with it, the developers at Atomic Games have created a new game engine to power the action in Six Days. The hallmark of the new engine is destruction; everything from individual bricks to entire buildings will be candidates for destruction in the game, a fact that opens up entirely new avenues of strategy when taking to the streets in the hunt for insurgents.
"Cool", said the boy in me. While I wouldn’t describe myself as an ardent video gamer, playing them remains an occasional guilty pleasure. I’m still amazed by how real games look and feel these days. When I was nine, my father returned from a business trip to Hong Kong with an Intellivision console, billed as the most advanced gaming system of the time. I recall blissful hours playing “Major League Baseball”, a game made up of right angles and primary colours, with sound effects that hovered somewhere between "The Three Stooges" and flatulence.
Check out a current baseball video game, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a television broadcast of an actual contest. Perhaps that’s why killing aliens or zombies—popular fare in many of today’s shooter games—seems so tedious to me. Granted, I’m far too old for any of this, but if the technology exists, why not explore more adventurous and controversial territory? Atomic’s “Six Days” is certainly bold, possibly foolhardy and probably insensitive, but if they can pull off the claimed realism, I’m interested.
Popular response to the announcement, however, was decidedly mixed. Avid gamers were mostly excited by the planned release, but public opinion tended towards shock, if not outrage. A group representing the families of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq condemned the game for trivialising the conflict. In a damning interview in the Daily Mail, the father of a British soldier killed in the battle called it “crass and insensitive.” Too soon, said the chorus, too soon.
Konami, the game's distributor, balked and summarily pulled out of the project only two weeks after the big announcement. "After seeing the reaction to the video game in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it," a Konami rep told the Asahi Shimbun.
I spoke with Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic, and asked him if he expected this firestorm. “Well, we knew there would be some controversy,” he chuckled, then exhaled. “But no, not like this.” Konami’s decision to pull the release reportedly caught Atomic by surprise.
What is it, then, that so inflamed public opinion? Perhaps it’s the fact that the video game is based on an ongoing war. The 2004 invasion wasn't so long ago, and for some the wounds are still fresh.
Of the hundreds of studio films and television shows that have dramatised war, few have ever attempted to tackle the complexities of one that was still in progress. Fewer still have done it well. The problem, of course, is perspective. The films that burst forth from Hollywood during the early days of the second world war were consistently of the rah-rah variety. It is for good reason that no one remembers "Stand By for Action", a film made in 1943 about naval battles in the Pacific. But the more reflective "From Here to Eternity" (1953) and "The Great Escape" (1963) have stood the test of time.
John Wayne’s controversial pro-war vehicle “The Green Berets” was one of only a handful of popular films produced during the Vietnam war. When it was released in 1968 Roger Ebert, a film critic, gave it zero stars, and eviscerated it for being “offensive” and “dishonest.” More nuanced efforts, such as “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now,” came ten years later.
Like Vietnam, Iraq is a complicated and unpopular conflict, and few seem to be ready to see it dramatised on screen. Back in early 2005, Stephen Boccho, a vaunted television producer ("NYPD Blue", "LA Law"), released “Over There”, billing it as the first serial television drama about an ongoing conflict. It earned some fanfare but little critical acclaim. No one watched it: the show was cancelled after only 13 episodes.
Supposedly there are only two types of stories: a stranger comes to town, and a man goes on a journey. The Iraq war is both, but everyone hates the stranger, and the journey was a dumb idea to begin with. Do you want to see that film? American audiences don’t--at least not yet--and for good reason.
But why not a video game? You can’t really blame the developers at Atomic Games for trying. There are dozens of extremely popular and profitable console video games about modern warfare. Even Konami, the erstwhile distributor of "Six Days in Fallujah", sells the remarkable “Metal Gear Solid 4”, which begins with its protagonist caught in a Middle Eastern firefight. Grab your gun and you’re off, sniping and slicing the throats of sinister private military corporation employees.
It’s easy to understand the small leap to pixellating the Fallujah invasion. “Six Days” is meant to capture the visceral feel of urban warfare, with morally complex scenarios and documentary footage to heighten the realism. “Every aspect of the game is based on a true story,” says Tamte. "We want—and it’s very hard to do this and it hasn’t really been done too well before—is to make people feel what it was like to be there. And video games are among the best ways to explain what it’s like to be a Marine in intense, urban warfare.”
Tamte notes that just like in real warfare, characters in the game will have to make “split-second moral choices,” though he wouldn’t elaborate on what exactly that means. (I’ll hazard a guess: collateral damage.) Herein lies a key problem: video games are not yet sophisticated enough to dramatise the sometimes awful consequences of certain choices (though this is starting to change), and they are just not built to evoke the terrible costs of war.
Say, for example, a player accidentally--or wilfully--kills a few civilian families by calling in an air raid: what is the punishment? Remorse? A cut-scene of a court martial? And what about injuries, or death? How could such things be represented meaningfully if they fail to capture the bigger picture?
Our feelings about this war may be just too complicated for what is meant to be an entertaining simulation. “The word ‘game’ is a problem for us,” Tamte acknowledges. If it ever sees light of day, “Six Days” will be judged not for its high-minded ideals, but for their execution. On this, it will inevitably fail. The essential problem is that part of the fun of video games, and third- or first-person shooters in particular, is the superhero aspect: the ability to wage war almost single-handedly, racking up a staggering body count. This forces game programmers to choose the simpler "realism" of intense urban combat over the more difficult task: conveying the folly and futility of war. Want realism? Read Dexter Filkin's book "The Forever War". Cowering for hours on a rooftop and then watching a friend get shot in the face just isn't fun.
Still, Atomic Games may be on to something. Recently I asked Ned Parker, a long-time Baghdad correspondent, what he thought of "Six Days". “It sounds kind of crazy,” he allowed, “but the last time I embedded with troops in Iraq, as soon as they got back to base, all they did was get on their laptops and play war games.”
Picture credit: "Six Days in Fallujah", Atomic Games
(Benjamin Pauker is managing editor of World Policy Journal.)
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