A Note on “Forced Empathy”

Earlier this week, I wrote a response piece to Ed Smith’s article, IT DOESN’T MATTER WHEN YOU KILL ALL THE CIVILIANS, which he published first on his own blog and which has subsequently been republished at Unwinnable. If you haven’t read Smith’s piece (or the response here), take the time to do so before moving forward. At the very least, Smith’s piece is thought-provoking.

Upon my writing my article and sharing it on Twitter, Smith retweeted it with a slight retort. He said, “A direct response to my article on Spec Ops and the prospect of ‘morality’ in games, which argues, astutely, that believing moral choices can exist can make a game more tolerable or useful.

“It also argues my article is ‘really’ about Six Days in Fallujah, which it is not,” he concludes.

And so I’m writing this second response. To begin, I simply want to apologize to Smith. As part of my process of “thinking through” his article, I read into only-tangentially-related material the phantoms of a discourse Smith may never have desired to truly join and forced a connection between two tweets and a piece that, as Smith says, never once explicitly mentions Six Days in Fallujah.

And taken as a whole, in my piece it’s clear that the axe I wanted to grind is not really with Smith at all, but with Peter Tamte, the game dev CEO responsible for dragging the corpse of Six Days in Fallujah out of its grave and into the public square once again. While the argument could have been made that Smith’s phenomenological framework as he described it can be extended to a game like Six Days in Fallujah, where the narrative isn’t based in pure fiction, and the (frankly troubling) ramifications of that extension could then be examined, the fact is plain that I didn’t make that argument. Instead, the latter half of my response to his article was mostly bad faith sniping and little supporting evidence in any direction.

To be clear, Smith and I haven’t talked or interacted past his sharing of my original post and my liking that quote retweet. Sometimes a post just feels off after writing it, and it’s better to examine that and make the necessary adjustments, even if they come after the fact, than to simply shrug that bad feeling off and pretend like everything you say is always right.

I’m not going to take the original post down entirely. Instead, tonight or tomorrow I’ll be going back in and re-writing that second half to be more reflective of where I do find actual disagreement with Smith rather than simply swiping at strawmen and tilting at windmills.