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Post-War Iraq And Videogames
DarkBlackFox writes "MSNBC has an article on how gamers relate to the rebuilding of Iraq, and how current world politics influence strategy and action games." A slightly odd article, but it begs the question - considering there are already games based on the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, how soon will it be before the Operation:Iraqi Freedom shooter or RTS, and how delicately should recent wars be handled in games?
It wasn't long after the first gulf war fiasco that they started cashing in on it. If I recall correctly, 3D0 released a Gulf War themed game the same year that it ended.
Add to this that the US government has recently embraced interactive media as a form for spreading propaganda (Americas Army) and training troops for the field. It's a great way to convince another subculter who's "right" and who's "evil".
They put on a straight and sombre face when talking about it, but in reality it seems it's a disgraceful race to the money tree...
"The fires along Baghdad's Euphrates River waterfront had barely subsided when Sony registered "shock and awe" with the U.S. Patent Office. (Sony then quickly retracted, proving that even game companies have limits.)"
He alluded that Sony tried to register the name "Shock and Awe" with the USPTO just after we withdrew, and then decided against it. I thought Sony was in the process of registering it already?
::blink::
Anyway, the idea of a video game that involves practicioners of political science to implement their policy in a virtual world does sound interesting. But it remains to be seen how valid such a (relatively) simple model can be used to predict something so complex.
I want to see that sort of idea tried on a smaller scale. For example, residential planning, college boards, business deals, etc. Of course, the starting point will be "studies" staged by shrinks, think tank eggheads, pol. sci and comp. sci graduate students, where they get undergrads to brainstorm ideas to solve problems around campus using a virtual forum/interface. Then the let the thing chug and present the outcome to see how the kids react. Then maybe they let them implement one of the proposed solutions to the "problem" (which may not even be real...) and see how it plays out in comparison.
If that shows promise, excellent. But why bring in the game developers now? He doesn't seem to address that. In fact the article sort of drifts off into talking about upcoming games about Iraq.
Yawn indeed (oooh, Hollywood and video game designers look to real life for inspiration, how novel!)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If anyone were paying attention, they'd know that modders are already making games based on the war.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
How about a Civ/Sim type game where you rebuild Baghdad. Manage the building of new hotels, government buildings, markets... If the Iraqi's get out of line, send in more troops and what not.
Someone hates these cans.
...a really funny flash-animation: The Real Hussein :)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
What would be wrong, for example, with a game wherein you're part of an infantry regiment/division in Takrit and your goal is to take the city with as few civilian casualties as possible? You could be penalized for causing civilian death and even end the game court-martialed because you didn't exercise good judgement in a firefight. Such a game would include all the carnage of a real war and, handled properly, encourage the player to think about the lives lost in the process of winning or losing the game. No doubt it would be rated "M" for Mature but it might be a game that actually deserves the rating for good reasons as opposed to bad.
We all know that war games (strategic, tactical, FPS, etc.) will be made. It would be good to see a high-profile war game, though, that tried to really address the negative side of war instead of simply glorifying violence and conquest without consequences.
For at least 100 years, wargamers have understood that to make their models accurate they have to include diplomacy and other subtle sociological factors. [great long history of wargaming]
More recently, when Chris Crawford did his breakthru nuclear-armageddon sim Balance of Power in 1985, he read all the basic texts on international diplomacy and found them almost completely useless-- his model ended up being entirely about 'saving face', which was something the texts hardly ever spelled out. (If you let your enemy get away with anything, you lose face, so to avoid that you have to rattle your nuclear 'sabre'.)
But what's most alarming is that as long as AI's been around (almost 50 years) and as popular as computer games and simulations have gotten, I'm not sure there's any university program yet that surveys how to do this kind of semantics, for games and other simulations. (I've been scouring the Web about this for my timeline.)
Hear, hear. Even ignoring the issue of 'how soon is too soon?', Operation Iraqi Freedom was such an unbalanced war that any game based on it could hardly be called challenging - unless the challenge was derived from secondary objectives, such as keeping casualties to a minimum or remaining undetected.
Either way, the bulk of the Iraqi forces consisted of ordinary men whose own lives (as well as that of their families) were under threat from Saddam's regime. Any game in which players are rewarded for killing or capturing those soldiers, in some cases ensuring the massacre of their families, hardly seems in good taste.
Perhaps equally important is this: the war isn't officially over, the debate about whether it was justified is still raging, the victims are still grieving and the effects on the future of Iraq - let alone the entire Middle East - are still unsure at this point. When we play games based on World War II, we already know the full outcome of the war, and we (well, most of us anyway) feel that this outcome is worth fighting for. That simply isn't the case yet with Iraq.
Hee-hee. Dying tickles!