On Forced Empathy in the Magic Circle

Editor’s note: I have decided not to delete any of the writing below, because as part of the original work it serves as a good example of what happens when you act like an asshole, jump to conclusions, let your overarching point get away from you, and decide to snipe at your interlocutor rather than make the point you wanted to make. If you want to know more about why this is Like This, click on this.

All of this is beside the point, though, because we know there are many different analytic frameworks through which a game can be viewed, and no single approach is either wholly sufficient or singularly ideal. And also because Ed Smith isn’t really talking about Spec Ops: The Line or even Bioshock, though those games and their effects on discourse are relevant. The game he’s really talking about is Six Days in Fallujah, aka Explicit War (Crimes) Profiteering: The Video Game.

The Problem With Video Game Discourse™ is that we have always, without fail, been here before, wherever “here” is. Time is a flat circle, we’re in hell, et cetera and so on forever amen. But I think it would be a mistake to replace recognizing the cyclical nature of our discourse (and the implications of that) with a full-on off-hand dismissal of any new additions to old arguments. This particular discourse didn’t just crop up by itself; it was literally resurrected by the developers of Six Days in Fallujah, and just like with its original incarnation from nearly 15 years ago, the “controversy” is part of the game’s marketing — and so, unfortunately, must the discourse be.

Why is Six Days in Fallujah “controversial?” Because it depicts a real battle in a real – and recent – war. The Marines who are expected to take center-stage through most of the game’s narrative are at least based on real Marine veterans of the Iraq war. Moreover, the battle of Fallujah the game is stated to be focused on is arguably a major instance that the United States and coalition forces committed real war crimes, such as using white phosphorous and depleted uranium bullets as implements of warfare. (I’m being cagey in my language but there really isn’t any question about this.)

In this real battle, which took place not that long ago, over a hundred US-coalition fighters were killed and 613 were wounded; 1,500 so-called insurgents were killed and another 1,500 were captured; and over 800 so-called regular citizens of Fallujah were killed. I say “so-called” because, prior to the second battle of Fallujah coalition forces dropped nearly a million pamphlets stating clearly that “any military-age male over the age of 12 would be considered an enemy combatant.”

According to public records, the original developers of Six Days in Fallujah registered the trademark for “THE REAL LIFE COMBAT EXPERIENCES OF THE PROUD FEW” on December 8, 2004, almost a month to the day after the second battle of Fallujah started. Peter Tamte has really wanted to make this fucking video game in particular over the last sixteen years. And it was canceled by Konami over controversy — specifically, the same class of controversy we’re dealing with here.

So let’s return to Smith’s text, titled “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHEN YOU KILL ALL THE CIVILIANS.”

Actually, let’s examine some paratext first. Here are two tweets written by Smith, a day before he publishes his piece, where he talks about “game[s] about the American Marines.”

“I don’t believe a game about the American Marines is necessarily going to be anything,” he writes. “You’ve got films like Southern Comfort, TV like Generation Kill, games like Spec Ops The Line. I don/‘t think something being about something means it automatically endorses that something.”

He adds, “At the same time, when’s the last time a game, especially a war game, was surprising or different in any way? And when’s the last time there was a war game that could be accused of every kind of pro-West -ism you could imagine? Odds are on, a war game is going to be patriotic.”

“Pro-West ‘-ism’” is an especially odd euphemism to use here, but we don’t have time to unpack that framing. What’s clear is that the “game about American Marines” is Six Days, and that he’s clearly thinking about it in particular as he writes “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHEN YOU KILL ALL THE CIVILIANS.” The most charitable reading of these two throwaway thoughts possible is that he wants to give the game itself the benefit of the doubt, even as we have piles of public records and interviews, new and old, with the game’s producer and Victura CEO Peter Tamte which give us a pretty good idea what “the vibe” is going to be.

Tamte has said, on-record, that the game is going to be roughly 90 percent about the brave and heroic actions of a handful of “Real US Marines” who took part in the second battle of Fallujah, and that ten percent or so would be spent focusing on an Iraqi family trying to escape. We know from on-record interviews that Tamte is not going to depict war crimes like depleted uranium or white phosphorus use because the guys he knows of course didn’t do any of that stuff, and also because he believes people won’t ultimately care. We know from an interview he gave to GamesIndustry last week that he doesn’t value Iraqis and doesn’t believe his target gamer audience would either. These are expressly political viewpoints, and they absolutely have bearing on the text of the game, regardless of the technical quality of the narrative. And while we can argue all day about whether it’s “moral” to play Six Days in the future without a clear winner to that argument, I will legitimately die on the hill that it isn’t “moral” to even make the blatant war profiteering propaganda in the first place — the first and last time I’m going to agree with Fox fucking News about something.

But look – Ed Smith is planting a flag here and now —

“I’m not interested in being told things or asked questions about myself by videogames […] because I’m asked and I answer questions about myself all the time, every day, and they’re almost always more searching than anything a videogame has so far ever thrown at me” —

“I don’t think the player has any moral responsibility or energy or potential in a game whatsoever — whatever the player does is neither moral nor amoral, but unmoral” —

“When I choose to bomb all the civilians in Spec Ops: The Line, I’m doing it to advance the game and see what happens and how it’s going to affect the characters. It’s precisely the same to me as turning a page in a book. It has no moral aspect or essence. It’s a mechanical action. And when I see all the burned bodies it matters to me in the sense of I’m following the plot and I want to see what happens now, but it doesn’t matter to me morally, and I shouldn’t be expected to give myself some kind of personal moral inspection, and I certainly shouldn’t be expected to be subjected myself to someone else’s moral inspection of me, and then take to heart that appraisal — because I haven’t done anything.” —

that for him a video game confers no more or less consequence or significance or meaning than a particularly good book, regardless of the content, and he’s not gonna hear any shit about it from anyone. And that’s fine. That’s his wont to do. And if he wants to do that for Six Days in Fallujah, that’s fine too.

I just think his framework is wrong.

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