Iraq Game Sparks Outrage, Soldiers Have Mixed Reactions

We recently discussed news that Konami will be releasing a video game based on a 2004 battle in Fallujah. Many people have now had a chance to react to the game, and there has been a great deal of criticism voiced over the game's choice of setting. A group of families of soldiers who lost their lives in the war questioned "how anyone can trivialize a war that continues to kill and maim members of the military and Iraqi civilians to this day." Others criticized the game's glorification of the "massacre." Conversely, some soldiers and veterans have responded with optimism, hoping the game can raise awareness of the realities of war. Dan Rosenthal, Iraq veteran and long-time gamer, worries whether Konami will be able to do justice to the experience. Eurogamer posted a related story about the controversy over increasingly realistic war games.

Wars and Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem here is that there is always some relation about wars and heroes in common imaginary. People playing battle games feel like powerful beings. Is that acceptable? If in most cultures killing is not ethically accepted, should not everything celebrating wars be truly immoral?

Re:Yeah all those WW2 games are offensive too

[4D6963]

If all your squad died you'd rather be placed into another squad than have a whole new squad based around you.

That's the sad thing about most video games with NPCs, they're heavily unrealistically biased towards you. It's like in GTA games, any gangster can shoot you right before the eyes of a bunch of cops and not get in trouble, but if you so much as shoot back you'll have every cop in town on your tail.

Re:...families of dead soldiers...

[BlueStrat]

How about the civilians of Falluja? After all, it was their homes that were blown up, their families that were murdered.

Wasn't that the reason the US troops went in?

To stop the killing and terrorizing of Fallujahs' civilians by the insurgents, many if not most of which were not Iraqis but jihadists from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc? Isn't that what basically turned the war around for the Coalition, that the civilians were tired of being bullied, held as hostages/human shields, and killed by all the foreign insurgents and decided to stand with the Coalition forces and defy the insurgents?

Strat

Re:and fucking badguys !!

[The Master Control P]

The Iraqi insurgients fight an occupying force... that's about as far as the similarities with the Wolverines go. Just to start:

The Wolverines aren't fanatics who snuck in from Canada, they're a bunch of unfortunate teenagers unwillingly pulled into the war.
The Wolverines don't bomb the church and markets in Calumet with the express intention of mass murder.
The Wolverines risk their own lives to save civilians rather than use them as human shields.
And if you want to compare the US to the Soviets, show me where we do this [wikipedia.org]:

Irrigation systems, crucial to agriculture in Afghanistan's arid climate, were destroyed by aerial bombing and strafing by Soviet or government forces. In the worst year of the war, 1985, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over one quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or government troops, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts

If you look past the obvious rah-rah patriotism, the message in Red Dawn is "This horror is what the Soviets do everywhere they occupy. Don't let it happen here." So please don't insult real or imagined freedom fighters by comparing them to religious fanatic terrorists (and yes, there is a difference as outlined above).