14 Apr 09 Why “Six Days in Fallujah” should be banned
I have to share my epiphany. ”Six Days in Fallujah” must be banned, since the company creating it says that it will allow players to ”become someone else,” specifically, the players apparently will become combatants in the battle for Fallujah. Combatants are maimed. Combatants are killed. I know this because I’ve buried one.
No matter how entertaining it might be, we just can’t allow all these game players to be wounded and killed. To use the classic example, the right to free speech doesn’t allow us to yell “Fire!” falsely in a crowded theater.
I realized that the game needs to be banned when I received a personal email from the president of Atomic Games, Peter Tamte, in which he said he was misquoted by a reporter who wrote that he said “The challenge was how to present the horrors of war in a game that is entertaining.” Perhaps so.
However, Tamte also wrote to me, “We believe it is time for videogames to deal with complex issues and that videogames can give players deeper insight into the events in Iraq than passive forms of media, such as movies or TV, because videogames can make players become someone else.”
That’s when the light bulb came on. I can become a Marine, like my niece’s husband, fighting in Fallujah. And if I do what he did and go start up the engine in my AAV near the train station at the wrong time, somebody will fire a rocket at me from a nearby mosque and blow me to bits and I’ll be dead. Seems harsh for a “game,” but that’s what happens when you walk a mile in somebody else’s boots. I wonder if I’ll be eligible to be buried in some sort of simulated Arlington cemetery? Will my wife receive survivor benefits from Atomic Games?
If the game is published, how many people will it kill and wound? Let’s calculate!
In the actual battle, there were about 5,000 combatant troops, of which 95 were KIA and 560 were wounded. That’s about 2 percent killed and 11 percent wounded. If this game is as successful as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, it will sell around 6.25 million copies a year. Assuming at least one player who will “become someone else” per copy, about 125,000 of them will die and close to 720,000 will be wounded. Good news, though – only 55 percent of the wounded in Fallujah were so badly injured that they could not return to duty, which means that about 325,000 of Atomic’s wounded customers will fare well enough to play the game twice! Let’s just hope they have good health insurance.
Still, that’s a lot of dead and wounded people – and we haven’t even counted those who choose to “become” insurgents, who had a far higher mortality rate. I doubt if “innocent bystander” is a category that players can “become,” but if so, that’s another 5,000 to 6,000 dead. In any case, it seems to me that if there ever were a justification for setting aside the First Amendment, killing and wounding this many game players fits the bill.
One thing I’m still wondering about. If the game really would let me become my niece’s husband, does that mean that the computer will actually scatter pieces of me hundreds of yards in either direction? That would be messy. The cleanup costs alone would be prohibitive.
Well, enough bitter satire. Back to measuring social media.
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http://pyromosh.org B.J. Richards
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http://nickarnett.net Nick Arnett
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anon
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http://attentionspanmedia.com Josh McHugh
