Finished Demos: The Ideal

I don't know how much else is left to say. I think this game (Six Days in Fallujah) is going to fail. I think it's too big for the development team. I hope it doesn't, but there's too much other shit going on around this game. Case in point: I doubt that the dev team and the bigwigs are on the same page when the bigwigs say that "We're not trying to make social commentary...We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable" and one of the stated goal of the game is to give players ethical dilemas in the shoes of real soldiers.

But, before the game finds a life in the hands of Papa Bear and his ilk (not that I'm singling out Bill O'Reilly here), I wanted to talk about it in tones that are respectful and distant, if not hopeful. I'm pessimistic. This needs to succeed in a way to shake up gamers, the press and eveyrone looking over the team's shoulder. There's an outside chance that the people making this have that kind of a game in them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not that my two cents carries much weight.

Anyway. The title is a song by the Explosion, off of their near-perfect Jade Tree full length called Flash Flash Flash. Go buy the CD right now and listen to one of the best punk rock records put to tape this decade. The Ideal starts with the lyric: "There are no good Samaritans. There are no proud Americans. This isn't my idea of success."

Perfect.



“Six Days In Fallujah” is a third-person shooter game set to be released sometime in 2010.

I usually don't get too concerned when I hear titles, but when I heard about the game I seized up. The president of Atomic Games, the company producing the game in conjunction with the Marine Corps and Activision, says they want “Six Days In Fallujah” to be the most realistic military shooter ever.

As a genre, shooters are not known for careful examination of their surroundings. Look at Gears of War 2. That game was as deep as a dog's water dish, but is a fantastic success, not just because it's executed nearly perfectly, but also because it didn't really challenge players. (Okay, Dom tried to find his wife and players complained that he was "too bitchy" during the game.) So a game based on a real-life six-day battle is going to be a tough sell—not to mention a difficult thing to write, script and program.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is based on a careful recreation of one of the longest instances of close-quarters combat the U.S. Marine Corps has been involved in since World War II. To get it right, the developers took the extra step of talking to some of the insurgents involved as well as Fallujah’s civilians.

Read that last sentence again. That's gonna be a sticking point.

Even ignoring the inevitable public outrage over the background work (which in any other medium would be reasonable), there is the larger issue of whose interests the developers are looking out for or sweeping under the rug.

The civilians are going to have a different perspective on the fighting and the tactics employed by both the insurgents who came to Iraq to fight the Jihad and the indiscriminate use of firepower by members of the United States Marine Corps. Oh, and both the irregulars fighting against the Americans and the Marines are going to have different (and truthful) perspectives that are going to skew how the game ought to be portrayed.

The Marines aren't going to be happy if the creators mention the pre-attack bombings Fallujah was subject to or the military’s offensive use of white phosphorous. The insurgents who risked their lives to talk to the game’s developers aren't going to be happy if the fact that members of their group used the civilian population as shields for their indiscriminate attacks is revealed. Oh, and let's not forget a coherent, well-designed game has to be made out of this, one that will make Activision and consumers happy.

“Six Days In Fallujah” has a lot of external hurdles ahead of it — a public suspicious of videogames and commentators looking for an easy topic to boost ratings.

But I think the biggest problem is internal. There's a lot of conflicting, accurate representations of those six days, so how do you pare down the experiences from all these different perspectives to something that resembles the truth? How do you put an ESRB rating on it?

“Six Days In Fallujah” frightens me because this game’s going to be in the spotlight and the creators have the time and money to dig themselves into a pretty big hole. To get the experience right, “Six Days in Fallujah” needs to set a milestone in storytelling. Frankly, I doubt the team is up to the challenge. I want them to succeed, but everyone looking over their shoulder has a different measure of success. And these are just the thematic concerns.

How, exactly, do you make a scripted third person shooter that acknowledges the claustrophobia of high density urban combat and still remains fun? Realism is hard to acknowledge when the actual soldiers can only clear buildings for an hour or two, tops and regularly pass out from heat exhaustion. If it's going to be realistic, then there is going to have to be an imposing penalty for using heavy automatic weapons on the map and huge bonuses for using less heavy weapons, which runs counter intuitive to the expectations the traditional player base.

The parallel that leaps to mind is Rainbow Six videogame series, which was realistic enough to dictate that when of the members of your unit got shot, they were pretty much down for the count if they were lucky. If they weren't, they're dead. Unfortunately, Fallujah isn't a series of three story office buildings or flat surfaces and building clearing is nerve wracking, when your enemies choose where, when and how the fight is happening is not what gamers are used to.

Gamers (I include myself in this) are used to having nigh-invincible, emotionally vacant, masculine demi-gods as their avatars, ones that have exquisite fire control and never empty a clip of ammunition to a room of people or prisoners because they've just been psychologically broken by seeing their friend's head explode in front of them. Are the developers of Six Days really going to digitally wrest control from the player at times and possibly alienate the players and force them to acknowledge how far removed our digital heroes are from flesh and blood?

Sherman said war is hell and I'd be willing to bet that with that description most gamers would expect "Doom". Let's hope I'm wrong.

Demos: The Hand That Feeds

I know using a Nine Inch Nails song is passe on the internet, but I'm listening to a stripped down remix of the song, in which there is a light, ambient noise and piano as Mr. Reznor's only accompaniment. (Plus, With_Teeth wasn't good anyway.) There's also a bit of overlap. This one is about John McCain and who was feeding him when and with what.

I respect the man's service in uniform. I just hope he stops keeping the Republican party line, the one that ruined and tarred him with divisive and insulting race-baiting politics not to mention tying Sarah Palin to his ticket and political fortune. Like most other soldiers that Bush commanded, he also was used and led to ruin. It's just more clearly visible here.

If this inspires you to do anything, I hope it inspires you to look up more information on PTSD treatment for Iraq War veterans, because when they get home, they're going to find a host of problems (mental and emotional) waiting for them on this shore.

And that's assuming they can get a job.



There's something that rubbed me very wrong about Senator John McCain's comment about the $800 billion taxpayer bailout, which he called generational theft.

It's a poor choice of words. Admittedly, it's politics as usual—using overly emotional language to discuss something that is as serious as a heart attack and requires careful attention, which a shot to the gut (of which that imagery strikes) doesn't help.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Republican plan of 60% tax cuts versus 40% spending is the wrong way to go. Over the last eight years, we've had quite a few tax cuts and they haven't gotten us very far. I'm in favor of spending a lot of money, but it has to be directed not to one and done jobs (à la construction, see Japan in the 90s) but to industries that have a clear, long term sustainable trajectory.

What McCain means, I believe, is that the money was borrowed from future generations, for us and others to pay back. Which, while accurate, is incredibly callous. It's callous because the resources of my generation have already been plundered, and will never be repaid. That was when all those brave senators stood up and voted to authorize war in Iraq. McCain didn't seem to mind "generational theft" when it was his hand in the cookie jar of my youth.

McCain voted to send people my age out to fight a war when he didn't even bother to read the full 90 page NIE report about Iraq. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war over weapons of mass destruction, a particular point where the U.S.A. hadn't had human intelligence sources for five years. He voted to spend our resources to fight a war when the evidence presented to the Armed Services Committee were blurry pictures of trailers in the desert.

In 2007, when McCain was in Iraq, he said that (based on a visit to the Shorja Market in Baghdad) Baghdad was very safe. And he was right.

Shorja Market was safe because there were 100 troops on the ground and on rooftops in that market. Shorja Market was safe because three Blackhawk and two Apache attack helicopters were circling overhead. He was safe because he didn't remove his bulletproof vest. Traffic was redirected and restricted for that hour-long visit. He went out to visit the production he voted in favor of and found an orchestrated calm.

McCain may want to think more carefully about what he is implying.

When Bush and his water carriers in the Senate and House authorized a war on the other side of the world under false pretenses, it was vital to American national security that it shouldn't be questioned. McCain saw no generation theft there. But when it's an $800 billion spending bill proposed by a Democrat, that's when he draws the line.

We know where McCain stands now that he's away from President Bush. Even though Bush is out of office, it's still too close for my comfort ideologically. I've always felt Senator McCain's political career in this decade has had a tragic quality, and it's no more apparent than here. Quite a few people, myself included, respected him before 2004 because of his ability to speak to more than a traditional base. (Dare I say maverick?) But with the phrase generational theft, McCain continues his slide into a familiar, anonymous role: Republican senator keeping the party line.

And these statements sound as though he's listening to the same people who had a cruel hand in his losing presidential run. The great tragedies end when the protagonists are ruined. After the fiasco that was the post-Palin campaign, McCain isn't looking too good, but I don't want to see his curtain close yet.