UPDATE AGAIN: read to the end for a surprise 🙂
UPDATE: Ex-Vlambeer founder Rami Ismail is going through Polygon’s interview with Victura CEO Peter Tamte and explaining why shit extremely sucks. You should go read Ismail’s thread. It begins below:
Fuck. God dammit.
Six Days in Fallujah is a once-dead-and-buried, now-resurrected first-person military shooter video game project about a series of slowly-escalating US-committed war crimes during the Iraq War, which was itself criminal, developed by ex-Bungie folks Highwire Games and published by Victura, a production company owned and operated by former Bungie Executive Vice President Peter Tamte.
Tamte was connected to the game’s previous incarnation when it was being developed by Atomic Games (which went bankrupt in the early 2010s) and temporarily published by Konami before the game publisher canceled their involvement in the project.
Tamte claims the game will not be political, in a new interview with Polygon. “For us as a team, it is really about helping players understand the complexity of urban combat. It’s about the experiences of that individual that is now there because of political decisions. And we do want to show how choices that are made by policymakers affect the choices that [a Marine] needs to make on the battlefield,” Tamte told Charlie Hall. “Just as that [Marine] cannot second-guess the choices by the policymakers, we’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war itself was a good or a bad idea.”
He also said that the game would feature about 90 percent American/Coalition forces’ perspectives and ten percent Iraqi civilians’ perspectives. “This is as an unarmed Iraqi civilian,” Tamte told Hall. “We do not at any point ask the player to become an insurgent, to be clear about that. This is an Iraqi civilian who was trying to get his family out of the city during the battle.”
I’m tired, and Oklahoma is in the middle of a cold snap so epic it’s causing the power grid to fail, so I don’t have it in me to type all the reasons why this game is bullshit, but I will go ahead and do two things: link you to the original “fuck this” piece on this here website (also this one) and leave you with a quote by Matthew Thomas Payne, a telecommunication and film studies professor at the University of Alabama:
If gameplay matters for digital games generally, then it certainly matters in the case of military-themed video games. War games frequently engage and conspicuously elide some of the most challenging political issues of the day: the efficacy and moral status of using torture to extract intelligence or of drone-aided assassinations to disrupt terrorist networks; the questionable justness of preemptive war policies; and the existential horrors of collateral damage and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to name but a few.[1]Payne, Matthew Thomas. Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Print.
Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11, page 2: Introduction
Additionally, here are some references that talk about the people and circumstances behind the Battle(s) of Fallujah being hotspots for war crimes.
Common Dreams: Duncan Hunter Admits His Marine Unit ‘Killed Probably Hundreds of Civilians’ in Iraq
Reveal News: Did defense secretary nominee James Mattis commit war crimes in Iraq?
The Guardian: US Admits Using White Phosphorus in Fallujah
Anyway fuck this game, we have moved past the need for this propaganda bullshit, and simply put, if these motherfuckers wanna “make their story heard” they can write a fucking book.
And hey, Peter Tamte:
References
| ↑1 | Payne, Matthew Thomas. Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Print. |
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