07 Apr 09 Atomic Games re-traumatizes every survivor of violence

This blog, when I’m keeping up with it, is mostly about measuring social media.  Not today.  Today it is about a game announced by Atomic Games, called Six Days in Fallujah.  Atomic Games President Peter Tamte said this about it: “For us, the challenge was how do you present the horrors of war in a game that is also entertaining.”

Is this guy out of his mind?  The idea of such a “game” is hard for anybody who has lost anyone to violence.  My niece’s husband, a Marine, was killed in action on one of those six days, November 10, 2004.  One of the ways I responded to his death was to become a grief counselor, as part of the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) Team.  I spent last Thursday and Friday doing crisis intervention at a school attended by children recently killed in a murder-suicide here in Santa Clara.  I’m also a former paramedic.  I know the reality of violence.

I am angry.  Any sane person who has lived with the horror of deadly violence knows that it cannot become entertainment.  The fact that it is based on real events makes “Six Days” intolerable as a game. Tamte’s boasts about it have re-traumatized hundreds of thousands of survivors, at a time when violence is on the rise in our nation.  In recent days, the news has been full of horrible police and family homicides and suicides.

I know that simulations can save lives in the battlefield by creating realistic simulations.  I know that simulations can help therapists treat post-traumatic stress.  I was writing about and advocating those uses of simulations many years ago when I co-founded Multimedia Computing Corp., a market research and publishing company.

Another quote from Tamte: “Our opportunity for giving people insight goes up dramatically when we can present people with the dilemmas and the choices that faced these soldiers.”

Baloney.  This “game” offers zero insight into what it is like to be in a chaotic situation where peoples’ real lives are on the line.  It is profoundly disrespectful to claim to know what it was like for those who where there, no matter how many of them may have contributed to it.  

Atomic Games has lost me forever as a potential customer and I hope others will follow.

War is not entertainment a game.