Curmudgeon Gamer
07 April 2009
Fallujah? No.
Konami is making a game about the 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq. From Joystiq's article (emphasis added):
Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.
* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.
Unfortunately, for all the realism touted by the game's developer, Konami's VP of marketing, Anthony Crouts, gives the impression that the publisher's still playing it safe, saying, "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience. At the end of the day, it's just a game."I just finished listening to Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. It covers the first few years of the second U.S.-Iraq war* as well as some 1990s background of some of the principals. Frankly, you can't come away from the facts of the second war, and that Fallujah battle in general, without feeling a sense of profound dismay. It is one of the culminations of many critical botched actions that preceded it. (It's at this point that I usually come back to the picture of the 3-year-old Iraqi boy whose leg was blown off completely. Thanks, Mike. I'll never forget that one.)
Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.
* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.
--jvm at 09:29
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