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Konami Announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle In Fallujah
The LA Times reports that Konami has announced Six Days in Fallujah, a video game due out next year that is based on an actual battle fought in Iraq in 2004. Quoting:
"The idea for the game ... came from US Marines who returned from the battle with video, photos and diaries of their experiences. Instead of dialing up Steven Spielberg to make a movie version of their stories, they turned to Atomic Games, a company in Raleigh, NC, that makes combat simulation software for the military. ... 'The soldiers wanted to tell their stories through a game because that's what they grew up playing,' said John Choon, senior brand manager for the game at Konami... More than a dozen Marines are featured in documentary-style video interviews that are interspersed with the game's action. The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia, talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat."
FTA: "For us, the challenge was how do you present the horrors of war in a game that is also entertaining, but also gives people insight into a historical situation in a way that only a video game can provide? Our goal is to give people that insight, of what it's like to be a Marine during that event, what it's like to be a civilian in the city and what it's like to be an insurgent." ... "Our opportunity for giving people insight goes up dramatically when we can present people with the dilemmas and the choices that faced these soldiers... It's a chance to really give them a better understanding and empathy."
Seems like this is more of a "real" first-person-shooter: it's not only based on history, it's actually built with living combatants in mind.
Some folks are going to call it tasteless to "present the horrors of war in a game that is also entertaining," but how is it any less tastless than playing a fictional character in such a game??
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Anyway, I just hope there's an option to play as the Iraqi resistance. I remember once playing one of the Call of Duty games - it began with a pretty well made Pearl Harbour, and I was terribly disappointed to learn that you had to be the Americans.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
We haven't really evolved much since the days of the Roman Colosseum. At least we are not flying "insurgents" here to be killed live before large audiences. Its a small step forward. Still RE is a lot of fun, and the enemy there is always some unfortunate zombie creature.
Think Deeply.
I've spoken to some people that were at Fallujah. I guess everyone sees it differently, but they saw it as a massacre. Over 1300 "insurgents" dead, less than 100 Americans.
As opposed to every other wargame in history that glosses over war crimes and touchy topics?
I mean how many D-Day games were there that never even mentioned the fact that the Allies were under orders not to take prisoners for the first 24 hour of the invasion and that they were often killing 16 year old German reservists.
And to be fair Germans, Japanese, and Soviets did far worse things...
Yeah, sometimes war is really brutal and people do bad things and have to do bad things in order to survive (at least they think they do).
And then sometime in the future someone will make a game about it, but they are probably not going to include the really bad parts.
I mean in Silent Service series... Do you get to machine gun the Japanese sailors after sinking the merchant ship?
No.
But did it happen sometimes in the real war.
Yes.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Your forces have conquered Jerusalem!
* Install a new governor
* Raze the city
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I'm normally at my genocidal best when it comes to playing Alpha Centauri: sunspot activity gives you twenty turns in which the international community won't pay any attention to your atrocities, and missile needlejets equipped with nerve gas pods are such a wonderful weapon in your first major wars...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So in your sick, sorry world, once we are at war we can kill all the civilians we want, and that is a good thing. Fuck you. I would be glad to go into more detail about what a fucked up world view you hold, but if there is one thing I have learned, it is that the wilfully ignorant cling to their ignorance like a drowning man clings to a liferaft.
Like this one?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This was more or less the reasoning behind the 2005 bombings on the London Underground.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Western militaries are still tooled and trained to fight WWII. We need to wise up and move on and recognise that blindly teaching the doctrines that won the last war may not win the next one.
[FUCK BETA]
If they had made a movie would it have been not so tasteless? If you think the game is tasteless but a movie isn't then it's a matter of the limitations you think of games as a medium to convey some human experience. Also, why is a game about a recent war tasteless but WWII is a very popular theme for most games? Do you think WWII was somehow cleaner or easier? From what I gathered WWII was pretty gruesome too, as is any war.
How the battle was is a foregone conclusion as is any historical battle. Putting 50 years in between or showing it in a different medium doesn't change the nature of war itself. So before making up your mind about it, how about giving the production a chance to do something meaningful? It could end up tasteless but it could be transcendental but that has to do with how they make the game, not the era they're depicting. If nothing else, how recent the battle was gives us more information about its actual nature rather than some glorified account that we often see about past wars.
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The left won't play because they don't support the war.
The right won't play because they don't want to glamorize American soldiers getting shot at.
Everyone else won't play because it's tasteless.
Um, there kids on both sides. Heck if it is really historically accurate, I could actually see it be used to teach. I haven't played FPS games in awhile, but I'm sure 1/2 of /. would play it even if they called it tasteless here.
Heck, if this was really good, I could see the military paying for it just for a training aid. Historically, the hardest part of military training is getting your average civilian where they will kill other humans on command. So in that respect, this game series could have an extremely long life span if it can take your average civilian and get them to mentally accept performing these acts.
I am so sick and tired of listening to people whine about the way war is conducted. War is not some pleasant little tea time where people come out and politely wave flags at you and say "Hey I'm the bad guy! Please shoot me!" or "I'm the innocent bystander! Please let me walk by".
What I fail to understand is why people think we spend so much money on our military budget to just have people sitting around. The military is trained, equipped, and prepared to go in, do as much damage as possible, then get the hell out with minimal casualties. 1300 killed for 100 losses? Good for our guys, but you know what, that's 100 of our countryfolk who did not come home.
Furthermore, everyone remembers the 'massacres' the winning side may inflict upon the losing side (we have years to play armchair general and criticize every movement, every shot, everything basically) but no one seems to remember any atrocities that the losing side may have done. If I recall correctly the reason why the US went in was because we were searching for a group of insurgents/freedom fighters/whatever you want to call them we believed to be responsible for the attack on the Blackwater Security teams and contractors over there who were doing their jobs.
It's all about perspective here people. If you can't at least try to remain impartial then you've already failed at history.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
No, it's not a valid weapon of war. Like wooden bullets, white phosphorous was deemed to simply be too cruel for use as a weapon. There are other, actually more effective, ways to kill people which do not mutilate the corpses or run afoul of the Geneva Convention, and white phosphorous simply should not be used as a munition.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Except that a group of these soldiers are the ones who wanted the game to be made.
I agree that there are more effective ways of waging war but WP is but one tool in an arsenal, not the main weapon. Also, WP does not violate the Geneva Convention at all UNLESS it is used to target a civilian population. Like firebombing a city or napalming vast areas. Indiscriminate use would be illegal. But that isn't just WP, it's a LOT of things.. like land mines.
But i think what makes WP such a hot topic is Fallujah. It WAS a civilian area. The US gave ample time and warning for the population to leave safely before hand though. So everyone within the city after that point would have been considered a combatant. Even though we know that isn't true.. there will always be civilians mixed in, right? That's why the use of WP is such a big deal. If there was 100 clearly identified enemy combatants.. the Geneva Convention wouldn't bat an eye if they all burned to the ground. But because it took place in a formerly occupied city it's iffy.
It's possible WP was used as an offensive weapon in Fallujah, i don't know. But i honestly have the feeling it was not.
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Having talked with some guys who came back from Iraq, the insurgents use the spray and pray method of shooting their guns. Very inaccurate.
Under the applicable conventions, combatants need to be in uniform, under a military command. Otherwise they are spies and can be executed.
Prisoners of war are those who follow those conventions, spies, saboteurs and terrorists are those who do not.
Let's be clear, simply the fact of your inability to win a war in uniform does not mean you get a pass when it comes to being captured. You may be a "freedom fighter", but you are not a Prisoner of War.
Terrorists are definitely not prisoners of war, but they are also not necessarily simple criminals. They are foreign nationals engaged in hostilities in regard to your people. I believe the closest "old" parallel for what they would be are pirates, and pirates could legally be hung at the yardarm by military vessels or shot.
The Geneva Conventions and others are not some humanitarian bill of rights, they are in place to ensure reciprocal treatment by an enemy in a war. While that does not mean we should abuse others at will, it does mean that the Geneva Conventions themselves are not a sufficient reason that we should start opening the umbrella to all people who we have some sort of reasonable doubt about their motivations. Otherwise, we end up in a situation where the humanitarian act of accepting a surrender actually weakens, rather than strengthens our ability to prosecute that war.
In the end, if conventions like this are allowed to become so easy to circumvent, and even use against the victor, few of the less scrupulous countries out there will agree to such things, and even fewer will actually comply with them in good faith.
A lopsided fight can in fact be a massacre. It is routinely used in cases where defenders in fixed positions are attacked by massed, human waves of attackers; to describe units destroyed under massive artillery bombardment; to describe units that are massively outnumbered being encircled and destroyed; etc.
All a massacre requires is that one side stand no chance against the other and be slaughtered en masse.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance