At some point last year a game was doing the usual rounds, called Six Days in Fallujah. Only recently has this game resurfaced, the developers trying to find a publisher, but nobody wants to tie into the game. Why? The mass media condemned the game as disrespectful to the people living in Iraq. If this is the case, how exactly do other games of the ‘realism’ standby become the lesser evil?
The fact is that they don’t. If we beat the old example of Modern Warfare 2 again, the closest you get there to getting ‘in the head’ of the people down on the ground is when you’re asked to slay innocent civilians, but the game makes no attempt to follow this up, simply killing the character off and furthering the story. When anybody dies in this game, there is no lasting effect on any of the characters. The worst you get is a quick ‘noooo’ and then it’s back to saving the world as usual.
Six Days in Fallujah wanted to do something different. The idea behind the game was to portray what it’s really like to be at war, what the people down on the ground think, how they feel, to actually put a player into their shoes, their mindset. I believe it was even meant to be based on real events. But of course it was decided by the media that such a thing is disrespectful, ‘God forbid we actually show what these people go through!’, they must have collectively said. If anything it’s the complete opposite, it allows anyone and everyone to find out exactly how bad war can be, to realise what people go through after losing friends to war, and perhaps even what it really feels like to suddenly realise you’ve just killed an innocent bystander to a war. Is that a bad thing, to let people understand such things?
That said, there is the question of whether we really want to see such things in games anyway. It works well enough in film and writing, films such as Saving Private Ryan do a good job of showing this sort of thing, but for a game, are they designed to entertain as films and books are, or simply to provide fun? If such a thing were to appear in games, it would most certainly be a new genre, ‘realism’ storytelling, rather than ‘realism’ for gameplay. Personally I’d like to see such a thing, it would make single-player experiences far better, and perhaps even ebb the flow of games-bashing that comes from the media as a whole.
What about you?
