Globalization and Global Media, Final Paper

Grant Tabler
Natalie Evans
MDST 4080*01
29 November 2012

Games Without Frontiers

War Without Tears

First person shooters are a genre of video game, which revolve around the player seeing through the eyes of a character with a weapon, and killing enemies you come across while accomplishing objectives. Many of these games are based around war, be they imaginary and science fiction, or modern and realistic. The critique of war video games is that they trivialize the experiences, and desensitize those who play the games to the violence and horrors of war. What if there was an altogether different kind of first person shooter game? A game where you stayed in first person, but you shot people with something other than a gun. 

The game I propose is one in which the player moves through a warzone as a war reporter armed with nothing more than a camera and editing software as she attempts to capture as much ‘truth’ and experience as she have time to cover. The player would then take this footage, and attempt to edit it together to make a legitimate narrative from the random violence. All the while the war would continue and the player would see that their camera isn’t affecting the broader arc of the war, just the opinions of the viewers back home. This game is currently in development and it is called Warco.

Warco is short for War correspondent, and the goal is to take the player out of the shoes of the invincible super soldier striding through battle and righting the world’s wrongs with his rifle, and into something more vulnerable and realistic. The game was originally conceptualized by a journalist as a training simulation for other journalists, but has since shifted to include a more retail audience as well. Though the trailer they released is based around combat, the developers say that’s just one aspect. “You’ll be embedded with local troops on patrol, investigate the bases of warlords, interview child soliders,(sic) kick back with other reporters, and follow the plights of civilians.”

Warco is a game that treads new ground for the medium. It’s a game that will attempt to broaden the public perception of war games from simply being a recruitment tool for the military, “blurring the distinctions between civilian and soldier.” (Shaw). Warco is one of many products that have, and still do, attempt to push the boundries of its medium. Just like To Kill a Mockingbird and Schindler’s List did for their media, there are video games that attempt to discuss serious topics and battle against a public perception that this medium cannot handle it.

I will discuss another example of a border pushing game which was crushed under the public controversy that rose against it. Though the studio creating the game stood up for itself, the publishing model that allowed it to survive – the gaming industry itself – was unwilling to stand up for the project’s laudable goals. It is in this way that the game’s industry itself needs to work harder to stand up for its medium as art; worthy of disseminating thought and granting experience. There are certainly games that work to present war as entertainment, enlistment, or racism, – such as War on Terror, America’s Army and others. However, there are still innovative media productions like Warco and Six Days in Fallujah that are attempting to expand the relevance of the medium’s discourse on very serious issues. This is an effort to be respected and trusted enough to be allowed to handle sensitive topics which would otherwise be restricted to film or print. This paper will be an argument for the validity of these games’ existence.

Atomic Games was a video game developer who worked closely with the US military to design training and simulation games to assist the survival rate of Marines in the line of duty. While they were developing one of these games, many of the Marines they were working with were called away to fight in Iraq. When the soldiers returned after fighting in the battle of Fallujah, they came back with the ambition to tell their stories. These soldiers, who had used video games as a comfort after long days of patrolling in Iraq, (Effron 40) wanted to use this medium as a way of informing a largely oblivious public about one of the deadliest battles of the war. The game they came up with was called Six Days in Fallujah, which chronicled the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. This would be the first game created around the Iraq war, which was still at a fever pitch at the time. Atomic Games went ahead with production despite the risks of controversy and found a publisher for it, Konami.

Konami is a well-known video game publisher who could provide funding for the game’s production. Atomic Games worked closely with the Marines who had served in Fallujah, as well as interviewing insurgents, reporters, and using declassified military intelligence in order to convey the highest level of realism to the events. (Effron 40) When the first glimpses of the game came to the public eye however, it was met with a storm of controversy; the idea was that Atomic and Konami were attempting to trivialize the events by putting it into this medium. The dissenters saw the word ‘game’ and cried foul seeing this as dishonouring the fallen. Konami quickly pulled funding in order to protect their brand and left Atomic without a means to produce the game.

“The sad truth is that game makers aren’t weighed on the merits of their work, they are judged by the name of their medium. When controversy arises our opposers don’t look at a game studio and see a team of artists, they see a team of toymakers who’ve gone too far.” (Portnow “Facing Controversy”)

             The tragedy of Six Days in Fallujah is the way that it is the reflection of an industry trend of complacency and fear. In the current publisher model, companies are willing to hold their brand in higher regard than the artistic validity of their medium. Konami knew this game would generate controversy, and endorsed funding anyway. Then, at the first attack on them, they left Atomic high and dry. Unable to find another publisher, they soon floundered and crashed. The Atomic Games website is now the home of a skiing and snowboarding sporting goods store. The studio doesn’t exist now because they attempted to further the discourse of their medium. Atomic attempted to tell a story that the gaming industry had never been respected enough to tackle in the past.  The proposition was to create a video game that took a documentary perspective on the events, based on interviews with those involved on each side of the conflict, and the Marines that had survived. Atomic proposed tackling the battle with the kind of representation that would honour those that fought in the battle, enlighten an uninformed public, (50 per cent of players surveyed in the US had no idea of the battle) and showcase the horrors of war as a deterrent. This is of course something often taken on by other media.

“These games are not being judged because of their content, they are being judged because they are ‘games’. Countless filmmakers, novelists and artists have tackled difficult subject matter before and been celebrated for it. Topics like war, genocide, sexuality, hatred. Many of these pieces are critically acclaimed, and rightfully so, they dare to explore humanity’s dark side, the ugly realities of the human condition. They venture into uncomfortable territory and find the truth hidden within. This is the stuff art is made of. What is it about games that disqualifies them from exploring this harsh territory?” (Portnow “Facing Controversy”)

             If Six Days in Fallujah were a movie instead of a video game, it would not only be financed without interference, it would be celebrated. It would win awards for documenting the Iraq war and giving the public a view into the human stories and horrors existing within war. How can I be so sure of this double standard? Compare the movie The Hurt Locker; a movie that was released in the US less than two months after Six Days in Fallujah was cancelled. It was a movie with significantly more controversial content then just covering a battle. It looked at the hardship and mental instability that went along with serving in modern warfare. It chronicled a war which was still going on, something that critics of Six Days in Fallujah took issue with. It was also nominated for nine Academy awards, won six Oscars, and six BAFTA awards, to name a few of its achievements.

We can’t know for sure the exact story that Six Days in Fallujah would have told. Despite having active duty Marines and veterans of the battle on the production team, it could have been a less than inspiring story. However, the game was not even given the chance to prove that it could tell this story in a legitimate and honourable way. The video game was condemned for its medium, and not its message. 

The way in which a committed publisher was able to pull the rug out from beneath a dedicated developer, shows the weakness of getting funding for an artistic medium like this from a publisher. Konami withdrew funding on this game after controversy arose, they stopped publishing it based on the PR of their corporation. Six Days in Fallujah represented a furthering of the medium, it could have been a totally new type of interactive experience that allowed people to see ‘games’ in a more serious and documentary sense. Moreover, it had the potential to break down barriers to other serious narratives. These kinds of narratives could have been future war documentaries that went further in their examinations, like many movies have been able to. Beyond this, Six Days in Fallujah could have opened the flood gates for any number of game developers to broach more introspective and controversial topics; the kind that games have been seen as trivializing in the past.

When Six Days in Fallujah was in development and the funding was pulled in mid-2009, other funding options for the video game weren’t available. The only way to get funding for a game was to align oneself to a publishing company and abide by their decisions. The flaw in this model, as any gamer will tell you, is that the game design is structured or restricted by the publisher instead of the players. The audience should be the ones to decide the kinds of creative decisions that need to go into a game, and what should be allowed to be created. The current publisher model doesn’t allow for this, neither does the model in most other media. In books, movies, and TV shows, you must find a publisher to fund and distribute your content. What has changed, in regard to video games since Six Days in Fallujah, is the way in which games can now be funded, such as the birth of Kickstarter in late 2009. Kickstarter is a non-profit organization that allows individuals to set specific incentives to contributors for donating given amounts of money to their project.

To illustrate this, I’d like to bring up a game called Star Citizen that made headlines recently because of its funding method. Star Citizen is a game from Chris Roberts, a renowned figure in the gaming community with a proven track record for his games. What he proposed was a form of crowd funding through the game’s own site and Kickstarter. Roberts and his company started to put out bits and pieces of what the game had created so far, and what they proposed to accomplish, much like asking for a grant. While other projects have been crowd funded before, Star Citizen made headlines for its capacity to garner donations. The goal for the game’s funding, and successful completion was two million dollars, without a publisher. At time of writing the game has gathered almost seven-million dollars in crowd funding. This game has broken records by becoming the most crowd funded game of all time. Roberts stated in a thank you letter to the contributors that “…it is another nail in the coffin of the traditional publisher model.” (Roberts)

A large portion of Star Citizen’s funding was provided through websites like Kickstarter. Kickstarter’s incentivising style is a similar process to pre-ordering a game, since many plateaus will include copies of the game with it. By simply paying now, instead of after release, gamers can affect which games get released and get more value for their money with the extras or in game content they receive. Star Citizen is proof that high-end, mainstream games can indeed be funded entirely by the public if the means and incentive for fundraising are there. If this option were available for Atomic Games, and they had turned to their audience and made a heartfelt plea for a chance to tell their story and advance their medium, this game would probably exist today.

Even with these changes to the options game developers have, more needs to be done for the breaking of this inter-media double standard. There need to be more developers like Atomic Games standing up for their design decisions despite an onslaught of bias towards the medium. More than this, there needs to be more publishers, organizers, and players themselves, that are willing to fight for the medium as an art. In a landmark US Supreme Court case in late 2010, video games did battle to see if they should be allowed to keep first amendment rights. In doing so they were arguing against a law that removed protections that other cultural and artistic productions have; in essence, their right to be considered an art. Before video games succeeded in being declared an art, the following argument was brought up by James Portnow, a game designer, journalist, professor and scholar. The quote was regarding free speech and video games as art, with the bulk of the quote from John Milton’s Areopagitica.

“Once long ago a great man said this to his colleagues to remind them that killing an idea was as much a sin as killing a man, ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.’
If that’s true of books, can it not be said tenfold regarding games?” (Portnow “Free Speech”)

             I will leave you with another of Portnow’s comments on the industry, one that informs the debates of this paper. Portnow gave an inspirational call to action about what needs to happen within the industry regarding what I’ve discussed thus far. The ways in which the gaming industry needs to change in order to fully realize video games as a respected medium.

“This will take real courage from within our industry. It will take the bravery to face critique and the fortitude to weather outcry. It will ask that we expose ourselves to short term financial risk, and that we don’t back down from early losses, firm in the knowledge that we are doing right. We will have to be steadfast under the scrutiny of the world, and resolute when we are asked to justify ourselves in the court of public opinion. It will ask that, for the moment, we give up ease. But if we can do this, we can do good, real good with our medium. If we do this, we can expand the industry and bring whole new genres within the purview of games. If we do this, we can turn a greater profit while providing more meaningful experiences, and reach audiences hitherto unthinkable. If we do this, we can elevate at least some small portion of our labour to an art. But if we do this we will no longer be able to pretend as if what we do doesn’t matter. If we do this we can never go back to the way it was before.” (Portnow “Facing Controversy”)

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Works Cited

Ephron, Dan, Dina, and Maron. "The Battle Over the Battle of Fallujah." Newsweek 153.24 (2009): 40-2. Print.

Grill, Dan. "We Shoot People: WarCo Interview." Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Rock Paper Shotgun Ltd., 04 2011. Web. 10 Nov 2012.

Holt, Chris. "Game Cancellation Misses the Mark." Macworld 26.8 (2009): 19-. Print.

Portnow, James, writ. Extra Credits: Facing Controversy. 2010. Web. 1 November 2012.

Portnow, James, writ. Extra Credits: Free Speech. 2010. Web. 2 November 2012. .

Shaw, Ian Graham Ronald. "Playing War." Social & Cultural Geography 11.8 (2010): 789-803. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 Oct. 2012.

Roberts, Chris. "Pledge and Grace Period." Roberts Space Industries. Cloud Imperium Games    Corporation, 20 2012. Web. 12 Nov 2012.

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