OXCGN Discusses – Six Days In Fallujah: Now We All Can Go To Hell
Can War Games Aiming For Realism Be Edu-tainment?
by dkpatriarch
© 2009 David Hilton:- 2IC Sub-E (OXCGN’s own resident historian)
Update: 27th April 2009:
It seems Konami have dumped Atomic Games’ controversial title, bowing to pressure by releasing their rights to the game’s coming publication in 2010. Atomic Games will be hoping that a braver (crazier?) publisher grabs publication rights.
I have to admit I am a bit of a contradiction. I tend towards being against violence, wars and killing but love my shooter games. As someone with a history background I also tend to like historical accuracy in games like the World War II shooters. But ever since they started to get more serious about their content with games like Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway and Call Of Duty: World At War, no longer just focusing on the big battles, brotherhood of soldiers, and glory, I have wondered if this is where games meant to provide entertainment and fun should head.
• Six Days In Fallujah Interview with Peter Tamte President Atomic Games
• Plus 3 new screens to check out
• UPDATE: More info on the game here at OXCGN’s Six Days In Fallujah page
No big deal though; after all those wars were long ago and we can feel far removed from those experiences of hell, right?
They make movies about it, songs about it, but games . . . ?! What is the difference . . . !?
But now we have Konami announcing their new third-person tactical shooter Six Days In Fallujah, which chronicles the real life experiences of several U.S. Marines during the fighting in November 2004 in the Iraqi town of Fallujah. The game will be released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC next year (2010). Apparently this battle saw 38 U.S. troops die and an estimated 1,200 insurgents also perish. Not only that, the game will present the gamer with the same task the soldiers stationed in Iraq faced: identifying civilians from insurgents and not shooting innocents. Interestingly it seems it was the soldiers themselves who wanted the story to be told in video game form rather than a film. According to the Los Angeles Times’ article, Mike Ergo, who was in a Marine infantry battalion during the battle in Fallujah, said:
Video games can communicate the intensity and the gravity of war to an audience who wouldn’t necessarily be watching the History Channel or reading about this in the classroom. In an age when everyone’s always online or playing games, people’s imaginations aren’t what they were, sadly. For this group, books may not convey the same level of intensity and chaos of war that a game can.
In my previous article last year titled War Games: How Serious Is Too Serious? I wondered:
Is this trend toward realism an educational analysis of the nature of war in game form, or tasteless exploitation of it? Previous historical war shooter games tended toward the ridiculous but fun (Return To Wolfenstein) or tried to be authentic and dramatic but without too deep an emotional attachment (Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series). Today’s focus on modern or near-future shooters, like Call of Duty 4 or the Ghost Recon games, do not touch historical scenarios, instead making up plausible possibilities to fight in and so empathy with past reality is not called on.
Other 'games' honour those who gave their lives - so, can this!?
Look at war in the Middle East from the 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand perspective: no seriousness anywhere (or if there was I just laughed anyway). The game was fun; you just couldn’t take it seriously. It was gangsta fighting in the Middle East instead of LA. But can this game about such a recent war and continuing conflict be sensitive and educational? No, according to some. Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was a Royal Marine killed in 2003, said in the Daily Mail
:
Considering the enormous loss of life in the Iraq War, glorifying it in a video game demonstrates very poor judgment and bad taste. These horrific events should be confined to the annals of history, not trivialised and rendered for thrill-seekers to play out. It’s entirely possible that Muslim families will buy the game, and for them it may prove particularly harrowing. Even worse, it could end up in the hands of a fanatical young Muslim and incite him to consider some form of retaliation or retribution. He could use it to get worked up and want to really “finish the game”
Is it possible for a game about war to not be stylised for entertainment and instead try to demonstrate real horrific events and elicit empathy? I still remember the sad story reported last year where Call Of Duty 4 was linked to the disappearance and later suicide of a traumatised U.S. Marine veteran who is said to have “experienced a flashback of some sort” of one of his combat experiences, which included “seeing his best friend decapitated at Fallujah”.
Many younger generations are sheltered from the 'realities of war'. Do they need to be exposed to them - or not?
The thing is that I don’t really know what it’s like out there in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if you don’t support the political and military decisions made there is still a respect that is demanded for those who have had to go through hell on all sides. War hits the soldiers and the civilians both but we are safe over here watching the brief news on TV and then forgetting about it. So I would probably play this game, but I would play it with a different attitude than I would approach playing 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, or even Call Of Duty 4. If done well the game could indeed educate me as to the horrors I’m immune to here in my safe home and give me a better understanding of the difficulties everyone faces in wars today. Or maybe it’d just shake me up a bit to realise that something close to what is being depicted happened in my world.
I could feel emotional, even if I’m just looking at polygons.
Would it be fun? I’d like to think that I could enjoy it like I would enjoy watching Black Hawk Down…not with an idiotic gung-ho ‘kill all the bad Iraqis’ madness, but with a ‘how the hell do we survive this’ approach. In Black Hawk Down the Somalis were not the point: it was the situation the soldiers found themselves in and the attempt to survive that interested me, not their enemies. I might very well feel some exhiliration playing a game to survive overwhelming odds and trying not to kill innocents.
Eddie Garcia (left), a former U.S. Marine, and an unidentified former soldier consult at the Atomic Games studio in Raleigh. (N.C. Credit: Atomic Games) A game being designed, created and overseen by those who served and want to tell the story.
It wouldn’t be the same fun as blasting away a bunch of zombies in Left 4 Dead, but it may give me a different satisfaction- if the game is well done. Are there those who will see the game as a jingoistic exercise in vicarious patriotism or go around trying to kill civilians for kicks? Maybe…but hopefully the majority of gamers are mature enough to play a game and get the point it is trying to make. Sure the game is about entertainment and making money, but so are films about these topics. The difference is interactivity and a closer identification with the protagonists you control. Atomic Games has a huge task ahead of it to portray a recent and ongoing conflict in a sensitive and realistic way and still make it fun. The challenge will be to make the game a way to give those of us without the knowledge and experience an insight into what the war is like, without making it so unpleasant that it isn’t fun and without reducing it to a typically trivial shooter with standard spawning enemies. Or worse, making it a gung-ho patriotic propaganda recruitment piece. What do you think? Is the war in Iraq too sensitive, too serious, or too political to touch in video gaming? Can video games be mature enough or be effective edu-tainment? Let us know in the comment box below.
More info HERE.
© 2009 David Hilton:- 2IC-Sub Editor
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Filed under: Console gaming, Editorial, Industry News, New Game Information, New Xbox 360 Games, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | Falluja, Fallujah, Konami, konami games, six days in falluja, Six Days In Fallujah
Thanks David for your comment, much appreciated.
I agree with you. If you are going to try and make a ‘realistic’ game based on true events you either are going to have to sanitise it like Medal of Honor and older CODs or you have to deal with it in a sensitive way focusing on the story of men thrust into a horrible situation.
The questions is: will a game like that be fun; if you are not running and gunning Gears Of War style laughing at the explosions, blood splatters, and chainsawing the baddies and instead are trying to just survive?
Again, I think it matters how both the gamer and game-makers approach it.
Sorry about the spelling in the above post. and I ment to says Black Hawk down does NOT glorify the Killing of other…
Thank you for that article. I agree with most of what was written. I understand that at first view a lot of people could be worried or even offended about this game just from reading the title. But if the game objective is to tell the story of the soldiers who experienced Falluja then I can only support the game.
Now on the other hand if the game glorifies killing inocent civilians or soldiers then thats another story and I beleive that I will not be the only one in doing my uttermost to shoot this game down. I like your example of the film “Black hawk down” though the film shows us the horrore of war and has some very graphic scenes it does seek to glorify the killing of others like a lot of action flicks, on the contrary its an honest attemp to tell the story of those who lived through the hell of combat in Somalia.
If this game has the same objective I applaud the people making the game and can only hope that there will be more games of the genre.
Thanks for dropping by mate, and glad thatyou’re enjoying the article/s . . I think if the men working on the game with the developers follow their initial ideals, then it could quite well work. It’s when the publisher then comes in and says “hey guys, this isn’t going to sell . . . let’s ad this-that-and-the-other and we’ll make a motza” – Which is what some publishers do do.
I think we need games like this, even if it is to wake up some of the generations of gamers to the fact tha war is NOT a game, as they have had very little of real war other than what they see in newspapers and on CNN, which has now made war a serial – which has made war to a greater extent, almost unbelievable.
If these guys can pull it off, I say great, then it would get added to games like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising that their level of detail is right down to one-shot-you-die level and even down to each and every weapon, machine and item having it’s own characteristics, like in real like. Not some generic AK47 or submachine gun.
Here’s something to think about – a discussion about the game with a Muslim who served in that time period in Iran’
AFter speaking with a friend from Iran today about this, who now lives in Australia, he even said that the game, if made and guided by those who served, could overt some future repetition of such things.
He served in the Iranian war and his cousin was in the front lines and saw some terrible things, which I won’t even go into here (visions of Black Hawk Down will surfic for now), but he said if a game was developed that showed the horrors of it. Then it could have an impact on the younger and more impressionable ones.
Those countries use emotion to drive patriatism and that he said is the key factor. If they saw the “real” aspects of it, perhaps it would have an ongoing affect and alter the way things are now. Not in the immediate future, but in a generation or two ahead. WHich makes sense.
Now that’s from a man who comes from a Muslim country and has had exposure to this sort of thing. I think he’d be well versed in knowing what would, and wouldn’t be “appropriate” – wouldn’t you (generalisation)???
It was an interesting conversation actually, and opened many doors of discussion.
WHich this is ideally what the soliders creating this game would want to happen. The discussion with him would not have ocurred, nor would I have found out his involvement, or some of the hidden things his country and Iraq have done to each other, IF this game was not mentioned.
Those things would remain silent and hidden. Information is our best weapon, not hiding the things that happened. If that makes sense?