This a detailed look at the debate surrounding the Fallujah game that is worth a look. Includes interviews with the game's developer and marines' families. Highly recommended read.

But efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen—including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea—prompted a public outcry. The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war. Miguel Sicart, an expert on videogames at the IT University of Copenhagen, says it took decades for people in television and film to figure out how to convey the experience of war (and for audiences to get accustomed to the new media). If videogames can overcome stigmas, he says, their interactive technology gives them an advantage. "You can almost occupy the actual space of Fallujah and explore the environment in a videogame," Sicart says. "For someone interested in the events there, that can be very powerful."
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There's another aspect of the game that could be troubling to relatives. Though parents often want to know the precise details of a child's death, seeing the circumstances even loosely replicated in a videogame—where a player can affect the outcome—might be painful. It potentially raises agonizing questions for the parents, not just about how a tragedy unfolded, but how, with the tiniest shift in circumstances, it might have been avoided. To ease these concerns, Atomic has vowed not to use the Marines who died in Fallujah as characters in the game (though the circumstances of their deaths might be portrayed).
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That gesture is significant to the families. For documentarians, it's where Six Days begins to fall short. How can a game document a battle if it doesn't identify the fallen? And how can the portrayal be accurate if a player can manipulate the events? David Waddington, an assistant professor of education at Concordia University in Montreal who has written articles about the ethics of videogames, says they cannot convey important aspects of real life, including complex characters. "You do have characters in a videogame in some sense, but ... character development isn't very robust. So you don't sympathize with characters very much." Though he hasn't previewed Six Days, Waddington thinks Atomic might have generated unrealistic expectations by billing it as something more than a game. "I'm not convinced Six Days in Fallujah as a first-person shooter game is a legitimate form of documentation."

But since videogames are a relatively new medium, the debate about what they can and can't get across is still open. Sicart in Copenhagen also writes about the ethics of videogames. He concedes that games don't do a good job of accurately portraying a sequence of actual events. But he says they can convey the feeling of being there—of occupying the space and having to make decisions—better than television and maybe even movies. "The real goal is not to document the action sequentially but to understand how and why it unfolds and how it felt to the people who were there," he says. "If players understand the emotions of a serviceman in combat, then they are already understanding the real power of Fallujah."

cornfedgamer via newsweek.com »