U.S. Attacks Iran - Kuma Reality Games

[Evangolis]

I half think I should post this in Politics, but it really is a game design and game marketing issue.

Here is the article that got me started.  It discusses a game called 'U.S Attacks Iran', which simulates a Delta Force attack on an IRanian weapons facility.  The Iranians aren't too thrilled.

Now it is easy to bitch at GTA for hot coffee, and on the other side, bitch at Jack Thompson's murder simulator noise, but where do the offerings of Kuma Reality Games fit in?

Here is the blurb top right of their home page:

Playable re-creations of real war events released weeks after they occur. Accurate missions developed in advanced war game and distributed free online.

I'm not trying to export politics to other forums, but leaving aside Iran's concerns about games based on shooting up their nationals (how would we feel about a reverse scenario?), I have to wonder about basing games on current combat events.  Where does this stand relative to something like GTA?

And what about this featured mission?

Dujayl, Iraq: July 8, 1982:In the restive village of Dujayl, Iraq, the villagers are encouraged by Shiite preachers to rise against Saddam Hussein, the country’s dictator and the man responsible for invading neighboring Shiite Iran. But these were simple villagers, not a militant force. What attack could they possibly wage against the most powerful, well defended man in Iraq? Something simple, yet effective: an ambush.

A well executed ambush can overcome a lack of manpower or sophistication of weaponry. From a covert location, a lone gunman can single-handedly change the entire regime and the very future of a country. In 1982, from the palm groves of Dujayl, a small band of villagers dared to take the fate of Iraq into their own hands.

But things went horribly wrong in Dujayl that summer day. The ambush was botched, Saddam was not hit, and thousands were targeted in retaliation for the effort.

Where are the lines in games, and where are these guys in relation to them?  I'm not clear on how I feel about this just yet, and I'm interested in what others think.

[schild]

No different than a movie being made out of the same thing. Or even worse, a reality show.

I found JFK Reloaded to be more offensive. Gleefully more offensive.

I think that's my personal problem, I don't really get offended by things like this.

[Evangolis]

I've looked at the site further, and I'm still unsure of what I think.  Here is the mission list for their free game.  It is much like you'd find for any FPS combat simulator game, except that instead of covering combats fought fifty years ago, these are about battles of current vintage. 

Take this one:

Mission 25 - Overview
Najaf: Mahdi Cemetery Battle

Najaf, Iraq. August 5, 2004: After months of sieges and ambushes in Najaf, the Mahdi Army uses a five-acre cemetery to stage its largest assault yet on the US Army and Marines.

In recent months, the city of Najaf has been home to some of the fiercest fighting in Iraq. Fueled by the burning rhetoric of cleric leader Muqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army has heeded a call to arms. “Terrorize your enemies,” al-Sadr instructs. And indeed, they do. Once al-Sadr takes refuge in Najaf in April, the insurgents dominate the city. Bombings and ambushes against Iraqi security forces and the coalition move along steadily through the futile days of broken talks and ineffectual treaties, but the US military’s patience is not limitless. When the Mahdi Army launches repeated, callous attacks on the Najaf police station, the Marines and First Cavalry soldiers hunt down the insurgents.

The Mahdi Army claims it set a trap. After luring US forces from the police station into the Wadi Al Salam cemetery, the rebels initiate a full-scale conflict. US Army soldiers and Marines are at the ready, but the battleground is acres upon acres of headstones, underground tombs, and tall mausoleums. In all, the stone markers for as many as five million dead Muslims provide intricate hiding spots for hundreds of fighters in a three week firestorm.

In this week’s Kuma News Report, Jacki Schechner and Major General Thomas L. Wilkerson, CEO of the United States Naval Institute, discuss the tactics of the Mahdi Army’s campaign and why Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia is still fighting US and coalition troops. You’ll also hear from US Army Staff Sergeant Dan Snyder, who shares the strategies you’ll want to employ to navigate your way through this intense mission. Finally, test the theories of our experts by leading your team through the bizarre battlefield that is the Wadi Al Salam cemetery.

My inner grognard wants to download the damn thing.  My inner peacnik wants to write a protest song.

[penfold]

I downloaded Kuma and some missions. Some clever ideas and structuring of the game with its downloadable realistic missions based on current events couldnt override the fact as a fps, it was RUBBISH.

[Merusk]

I don't see it as any different than a Strat. Game.  Just because it's using modern weapons and more-recent scenarios doesn't change the essence of the experience.  That being, seeing a simulation of a historic battle and how things could have been altered... from a FPS perspective. (So perhaps comparing it to SOCOM or another 3-d tac is more accurate)    If these were hoplites at Marathon or Spartans at Thermoylae you wouldn't even take issue with it enough to give it a second thought. (beyond the shitty gameplay penfold mentions)

 Hell, you almost say as much by saying, 'instead of covering combats fought fifty years ago,'  so what's the line?  Vietnam ended barely 30 years ago, and 1982 was over 20 years ago.  Does that mean 25 years is the 'magic number' since Battlefied: Vietnam didn't spark a similar line of thinking?  The Najaf battle is a year old, even if they did battles that were 'weeks' old they'rein the past, it's not setting-up anything I could percieve as questionable. (You'd have to question the accuracy of anything post 1992-ish anyway, since there's still plenty of unreleased info about GW1 much less current info.)

 You're going to have to clarify exactly why you seem to think it's an issue.  Is it that the 'characters' can be linked to real people? Well so can 'characters' in any other historic sim.  Is it the fact that 'there but for the grace of God' go you?  If you life had been 'different' it could have been you being digitaly simulated?  What's the problem?

[Sky]

leaving aside Iran's concerns about games based on shooting up their nationals (how would we feel about a reverse scenario?)

Don't be such a PC pussy.

[HaemishM]

You're going to have to clarify exactly why you seem to think it's an issue.  Is it that the 'characters' can be linked to real people? Well so can 'characters' in any other historic sim.  Is it the fact that 'there but for the grace of God' go you?  If you life had been 'different' it could have been you being digitaly simulated?  What's the problem?

My problem with that sort of thing is the same problem I have with TV shows like "Over There." In a time when there are real people still living and dying in that area, in a time when the family members of those people are still living, I think it's a bit disrespectful to put these kinds of things out. It's not about being PC, or being inoffensive, so much as it is being sensitive to the fact that some wife and mother whose husband has just been blown to bits might not take too kindly to seeing a digital representation of a soldier that could have been her husband being kaked on an Iraqi street. I'm all for "reality" and for not being concerned with offending someone, but my line is drawn when I could in essence be parading out someone's recently dead body for his loved ones to see, thereby inflicting more pain and suffering on them than they already have.

Of course, just about the only way you aren't going to get me to object to this is if your product is so goddam good that it transcends the offense. And there are very very few people who have the chops in their entertainment profession to do so.

From the tone this Kuma guy's comments, and watching the movie detailing one of the Kumawar missions (specifically the one about killing Uday and Qusay Hussein), I can tell this cockmuncher is nothing more than a sensationalistic twatwaddler, trying to cash in on the shock value like a piece of shit. The game looks like monkey ass, and the only thing that would even get you to take a second look is the real-world setting.

What a cockmunch.

[Evangolis]

leaving aside Iran's concerns about games based on shooting up their nationals (how would we feel about a reverse scenario?)

Don't be such a PC pussy.

Why should I have to listen to the whines when somebody does put out a 'terrorism simulator'?  Or are people who object to tee-shirts that read 'I <Airplane> NY' PC pussies?  We're plenty sensitive when it is our ox being gored.  BIll Mahr is hip and edgy until he shoots a sacred cow.

Maybe if our knees didn't jerk quite so hard, we wouldn't be hip deep in Iraq.

[Margalis]

Over There is a pretty good show. If you don't want people making movies and TV about a war, don't get in a war. Considering that our troops will be in Iraq for at least the next decade "you can't show it if it's current" is pretty silly. It's been over a year since our troops were supposed to have been pulled out.

[Evangolis]

Of course, just about the only way you aren't going to get me to object to this is if your product is so goddam good that it transcends the offense.

I'm concerned with the concept that political speech (which this is, IMO) should be regulated by it's dramatic quality, although I think that is a reasonable consideration for its success in the marketplace.

Over There is a pretty good show. If you don't want people making movies and TV about a war, don't get in a war. Considering that our troops will be in Iraq for at least the next decade "you can't show it if it's current" is pretty silly.

To go to the obvious non-PC extreme, 9/11 is fairly current.  Would a RPG/Tac Sim FPS game based on that plot be a morally acceptable game?

[Samwise]

a morally acceptable game?

Nngh.

[HaemishM]

Of course, just about the only way you aren't going to get me to object to this is if your product is so goddam good that it transcends the offense.

I'm concerned with the concept that political speech (which this is, IMO) should be regulated by it's dramatic quality, although I think that is a reasonable consideration for its success in the marketplace.

Political speech has content. This has Arabs getting blowed up gud. It's shit. I'm not saying, "BAN THEM!" as after all being in a free country means people have the right to say and create something that I find reprehensible.

Over There is a pretty good show. If you don't want people making movies and TV about a war, don't get in a war. Considering that our troops will be in Iraq for at least the next decade "you can't show it if it's current" is pretty silly.

To go to the obvious non-PC extreme, 9/11 is fairly current.  Would a RPG/Tac Sim FPS game based on that plot be a morally acceptable game?

Sure, it just wouldn't get any play from me, if it was handled in the same tone as these fucktards. It's in the presentation, really. The presentation shows me this guy is out for a quick buck off of controversy. As for Over There, I'd love it if we hadn't gotten in the war.  :-D That one isn't quite as bad as the Kuma Games example, but as a writer, it's not something I'd personally write.

[Pococurante]

Heck I was playing "kill the brown guy" games when my C64 was still all shiny and stuff.

I don't understand why someone of Bedouin descent would be any more wrapped up playing this game then someone whose ancestors once smeared blue woad on their skin.  This may escape some of you all but there are quite a few folks alive today with exquisitely precise memories of WW2 atrocity - and yet I don't see anyone here wringing their hands about the poor German kids upset that those mean American kids blow them up when playing BF1942.

Do I expect people of one shade of skin color or another to go looking here for a reason to be publically outraged?  Sure - every society has their share of Al Sharptons.  Ignoring them is always best.

Sorry but I think this is PC thinking.  Drawing a line to a 9/11 "game" is particularly disingenuous - especially if your thought is the game is all about flying planes into buildings.  The issue is not when something happened or the textures on a mob - the issue is taste.  A 9/11 game where you have to round up your office workers and perform triage while trying to escape would probably go over quite well.  The SimXxx games have been used for years this way, like SimCity and SimEarth.  SimRescue: The WTC certainly is less outrageous than any of the GTAs.

[Margalis]

To go to the obvious non-PC extreme, 9/11 is fairly current.  Would a RPG/Tac Sim FPS game based on that plot be a morally acceptable game?

I was talking about Over There, which is not exploitive at all. I imagine a game based around some 9/11 heroism would be morally acceptable, whatever that means. A game where you try to fly the planes into the buildings - less so, but honestly I couldn't care less. EA used to make those helicopter combat games based in the Middle East, whatever those were called.

There is a difference between approaching a touchy subject and exploiting it. I don't see Over There as doing anything other than being current and relevant.

[StGabe]

I wouldn't be one to say that they can't do something like this but I do find it to be very ugly.  It's all in the details really.  If the CNN article is correct then this is positing not just a rehash of history or a "doomsday" scenario but rather an immediate attack on another country in the near-future.  That makes it rather different from a futuristic cold-war-erupting scenario or a game about a recent invasion after it has happened.

FWIW, I was born in Iran.  My parents lived there for 2 years.  They met nothing but very nice and hospitable people there.  Random people they met on the street would ask politely if they could kiss me -- the only blue-eyed, blond-haired baby they had ever seen -- for good luck.  Etc.  As such I can do naught but despise all of the "Axis of Evil" propaganda that keep a lot of our culture embedded in hatred towards a stereotype of the evil Muslim, be it an overt or covert hatred.  A game like this seems only to stir up the pot and let us indulge in that hatred a bit and play it out on the screen.  Which only accomplishes bad things in my opinion.  What we need are games, movies, shows, etc. that give a sympathetic view of all sides to the conflicts and recent history of the Middle East.

Really I guess it upsets me more that there is a market for this stuff than that anyone makes it.  I hate censorship and I wouldn't want to censor something like this.  I just wish that everyone would realize it was crap to begin with and move on.  But since that isn't the case it is only natural that some group somewhere is going to make a game like this.

[Lum]

There's been current scenarios in wargames since there've been wargames. I can whip up a USMC vs Generic Arab Fedayeen scenario in SPMBT in about 5 minutes.  Admittedly it doesn't have the shock value of being a bad FPS level.

If you want more bad tasteless shooters, why not try Hezbollah's?

[koboshi]

  I'm not seeing the connection between a game about Vietnam and a game about the Iraq war, or the war on terror in general. One is not being fought and the other is. It’s not in bad taste because of the war widows, or any of the dead soldiers, it’s a problem of desensitization to current events. It's a problem of the game not being real enough. As a player wanders through poorly rendered Baghdad streets blowing away enemies, they might be forgetting that the soldiers and insurgents are fighting a real war for real reasons. When you’re running around screaming “BOOM! HEADSHOT!” it’s easy to confuse your experience with that of a real soldier's experience of war. So what’s the difference between desensitizing us to Vietnam and desensitizing us to Iraq? The outcome of one is still within our power to control.

  I would like to point out another, completely political, reason this is a 'bad' game to make. The war on terror is a culture war, as such it is not through the use of weapons that the west, and the US in particular, do battle for the hearts and minds of the Islamic community, but through our culture. If you want to know why the Islamic fundamentalists want nothing to do with the west it's because of shit like this. I believe that if we are ever to 'win' the war on terror we must learn that we as a nation speak very loudly, and everyone in the world can hear every word of our free speech. Now before you get on your high horses, let me say the point is not a matter of free speech but of how we wish to represent ourselves. None of you should have any problem saying this is a deplorable act by an un-talented hack, and yet you don’t, you hedge and yaw. In short the problem is not that he is a shit head, it’s that you aren't pissed off about it. Yes, he is allowed to make his game, but more importantly, you’re allowed to say he deserves to rot in hell. Free speech doesn’t mean that you can't disagree with what people say, just that you can't stop them from saying it.

  I don’t have too many good things to say about former president Reagan but he did know how to fight a culture war.

'I've spoken of the Shining City all my political life. …In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.'

  ...sounds a lot better than...

Do I expect people of one shade of skin color or another to go looking here for a reason to be publically outraged?  Sure - every society has their share of Al Sharptons.  Ignoring them is always best.

[Merusk]

My problem with that sort of thing is the same problem I have with TV shows like "Over There." In a time when there are real people still living and dying in that area, in a time when the family members of those people are still living, I think it's a bit disrespectful to put these kinds of things out. It's not about being PC, or being inoffensive, so much as it is being sensitive to the fact that some wife and mother whose husband has just been blown to bits might not take too kindly to seeing a digital representation of a soldier that could have been her husband being kaked on an Iraqi street. I'm all for "reality" and for not being concerned with offending someone, but my line is drawn when I could in essence be parading out someone's recently dead body for his loved ones to see, thereby inflicting more pain and suffering on them than they already have.

The thing is, there are still MANY men and families alive from the WW2, much less the Vietnam war.  What makes one war more sacrosanct than the other? The passage of time doesn't heal some wounds, the loss of close friends and husbands/ wives/ sons/ daughters being among them.  Suppose you recreate the Tet offensive down to the street fight in and around the US Embassy.  You can name who died there, and the majority of their friends & family are still alive.  Does the fact that it was 37 years ago make it any less offensive or horrific to those families than the family of those who were killed a year or a few weeks ago?

 You're welcome to come ask my Dad if you can make a game where his buddies get killed in glorius 3d splatter, but it'll be a great game, enough to overcome the shock because you'll forget it while playing.  It's just entertainment after all!   Just be readfy for him to shoot you in response, he's still a mean cuss even after the Agent Orange gave him Lieukemia.  The issue of 'taste' or 'if it's old enough it doesn't matter' is a red herring.  If a game is in bad taste because someone died a week ago, it's still in bad taste if he died 3000 years ago. It's just that nobody alive cares.

Koboshi has the more correct reason to be offended, IMO, and the one you all started hitting on.  It's not that it's more horrific or offenseive because it's a modern war rather than something "buried" 3 decades back.   It's that the game has the potential to be another match in the powderhouse.  It's inflammatory, irresponsible and all-around wrong.  However, I find it amusing that I see more people in this community taking offense about this than Grand Theft Auto, whcih I find in just as bad for the same reasons.

[Ironwood]

The thing is, there are still MANY men and families alive from the WW2, much less the Vietnam war.  What makes one war more sacrosanct than the other? The passage of time doesn't heal some wounds, the loss of close friends and husbands/ wives/ sons/ daughters being among them. 

Context.  Show me a WWII game where you're not playing either the 'hero' or someone so removed from the 'nasty horrible action' as to be bloodless.

Seriously.

I can't think of one.

Point me to the game where you're allowed to be Nazis beyond wearing the uniform on a deathmatch.

It's all about context.

[Merusk]

WW2 Online.

Unless by 'wearing the uniform in a deathmatch' you mean something more profound than playing at battles, moving lines of force, etc.  Since the discussion was based on this FPS game, I wasn't looking for things to let me funnel resources or gas masses of people, as that's not the argument being given against this game either.

[HaemishM]

Here's a better example than a 9/11 game. Let's talk about a game where you are a suicide bomber, Rainbow Six style, where you have to plan out the bombing for the most civilian casualties, you have to plot your route to the bombing, and there's also a mini-game that you have to play to create the homemade bomb. Then it all gets played out in glorious 3d including the horrific aftermath. Oh, and your targets include downtown Jerusalem, New York City, London, etc. etc. etc.

Or a game where you are cast as a Nazi SS officer running a concentration camp. Get rid of as many Jews as you can! HURRAH! Or a Neo-Nazi trying to kill as many of the darkies as you can! GRAND THEFT SKINHEAD!

Yes, they are perfectly valid game ideas, and taken JUST AS GAMES (i.e. in Raph's terms, patterns we learn for fun), could actually be enjoyable as games. But that starts to fall into the area of the responsibility the game developer (or author, or filmmaker) has to himself and his society. I'll defend his RIGHT to make that kind of game. But you can damn sure bet if he starts getting hammered by bad press, I will say he is a cockmuncher of the highest order, an insensitive profiteer and a shitbag. The fact that this Kuma assgoblin has real video of the Hussein brothers bodies in a mission briefing video just shows him to be what he is. Yeah, the brothers deserved to be killed, but showing their bodies is just tasteless.

And yes, GTA is a great game, but again, defending the subject matter to a non-gamer is hard as fuck because of what that subject matter says about the gamers. I honestly believe that a lot of the reason games like GTA and this are even popular is that for the longest time, gaming has been somewhat sanitized and restricted to very juvenile subject matter (the Doom's of the world aside). Console games have been that way for years thanks to Nintendo's NES/SNES content censorship days. It's only now that real, adult themes are getting tackled. And of course, the people who looked at games as the stuff for kids (like animation, or comic books before them) are shocked that such things are being made FOR TEH CHILDREN! When, of course, they aren't but the association is already made that games = kids.

[Sky]

And yes, GTA is a great game, but again, defending the subject matter to a non-gamer is hard as fuck because of what that subject matter says about the gamers.

Defend your vulcan ears or watching teletubbies or the cow jars in your kitchen. Who cares what the fuck people thing about what you do, so long as you aren't hurting anyone. Video games don't hurt anyone. Unless maybe you break a disc and stab someone with it.

I don't bother defending anything, because I don't give a shit what people think about what I do.

[HaemishM]

I do bother defending something when the person I'm having to defend it from is wielding a law the size of Texas that is about to be slammed down onto the game industry.

I could give fuckall what "regular people" think about gaming. But when we start talking about politicians who WILL pass laws (or try to) infringing on the ability of someone like Rockstar from making GTA, you damn well better believe I'll defend GTA to the death.

[Sky]

Heh. I used to be a pro-marijuana activist. Gaming's got nothing on that one in legislator's eyes. I gave up on our system long ago, it's completely fucking rotten and will do whatever is most profitable.

I still think this will blow past just like 2 live crew, ozzy, and AD&D did.

If not, I do love Canada, too.

[Evangolis]

This is more my concern:

Master's Thesis:
Changing the Rules of Engagement: Tapping into the Popular Culture of America's Army, the Official U.S. Army Computer Game

Abstract

 Digital games are rapidly becoming the preferred pastime of men and women all over the world. Whereas the research and development into simulation technologies was initially the domain of military communities, over the last few decades the commercial game development industries introduced new modelling and simulation technologies. By the appropriation and adaptation of successful commercial game technology, the United States military contributes to specific areas of research and development thereby deliberately tapping into youth popular culture.

This thesis examines the status of the free state-of-the-art PC game America's Army within the military-entertainment complex and contemporary youth popular culture by exploring the implications of the interaction between commercial game culture, technology, marketing and military culture. Since the United States military uses the same simulation technologies as commercial game designers do, there is a blurring between commercial (military-themed) games and governmental military simulations.

America's Army is a logical outcome of the expanding military-entertainment complex and signals the successful linking of entertainment and defence. The U.S. army is just one of many institutions using games to promote its services. However, unlike many other companies thus far, the Army can claim that it has been very successful at it. Why it became such a success is only part of the question, but its implications are equally important.

By juxtaposing the game within the broader range of First Person Shooter games the aesthetic and socio-economic implications of a new generation of computer games in an age where war has become an experiential intertextual commodity will be explored. The realistic approach to both the production of America's Army and the representation of the U.S. Army in a virtual environment raises questions about the status of America's Army as a game. By analysing the game itself, its production, distribution, and its reception, four different dimensions of the game will be proposed: a recruiting tool, a propagame, an edugame, and a test bed and tool for the U.S. Army.

The success of America's Army has consequences for thinking about games and simulations and the use of these interactive texts for advertisement, education, analysis and propaganda. The appropriation of a global game culture results in a dynamic relationship between the top-down institutional nature of the U.S. Military and the bottom-up participatory character of game communities and signals a shift of the changing status of the representation and simulation of war. The extensive and multi-dimensional analysis of a single PC-game documents its curriculum vitae and at the same time provides a framework for further game research of this kind.

by David B. Nieborg, Master's Thesis, Utrecht University

(Full Paper)

Yeah, I'm a damned academic geek, still, I do wonder about shit like this: "The success of America's Army has consequences for thinking about games and simulations and the use of these interactive texts for advertisement, education, analysis and propaganda."  As Lum noted, this is a growing phenomena world-wide.  Games can be one way of pushing unexamined ideas into a culture.  Lately I've been advocating overt political expression in games, particularly re politicians restricting speech in games, but I'm unsure how I feel about more covert political speech, particularly by governmental and other institutional entities.

Additionally, I do think it is incumbent on designers to consider how any game might impact the emotions of others, even those removed from our own little worlds.  Not just out of fear of consequence, but because being an obnoxious shit really isn't a particularly good legacy to leave behind you.

[tazelbain]

> the expanding military-entertainment complex
I smell bullshit.

[Hoax]

What if this wasn't a shitty game though?  If these types of very recent and realistic scenarios were available on say the CS:S engine I would want to try them for sure.  How can you worry about me playing some video game compared to the effect not showing the coffins of dead soldiers on TV, or any of the other halfassed journalism we get from the mainstream media outlets.  Which put more of a premium on the latest celeb gossip then the story about the IED that severed and instantly cauterized some poor GI's legs after ripping a hole the size of a softball through his "armored" humvee's driver door?

As for our free speech being misunderstood by the Muslim world, are you kidding me?  Lets start on our foreign policy and perhaps in a few years we can worry if some douchebag makes a terrible game designed to make money off of anti-Arab sentiment.

[Evangolis]

So I was reading Hideo Kojima's 9/29 blog entry, and I came across this bit:

World peace? In Japan we are happy to not think about such difficult matters. Yet we are going to deliver MGS to our audience all over the world; we cannot use false information as the basis of our creation, even it if is only a game. We cannot hide our faces from reality.

I first really was concerned with this sort of thing after reading Cris Crawford in his book On Game Design.  From his discussion of his game, Balance of Planet:

While I wanted to be fair to all sides, I had to plunk down some values for the coefficients, and those values represented my own opinions about environmental problems.  Although my own values are obvious in this game, the fact is that every game we produce reflects the values of the designer. ... The games that you design reveal your values.  You can't avoid it, so you'd better learn to live with it and take responsibility for your actions.

When I started programming, I was advised to comment even the most throw-away of code, and treat everything I wrote as if it was going before my most picky customer, because you never knew what would happen to a piece of code once you delivered it to the world.  I found this to be good advice.

(Well, either terrorists are attacking an empty Metra station, or the Sox just won.  Explosions outside.  Cheerful drunks, no doubt.)

In reading Crawford's discussion of Balance of Planet, I found that lesson again:

Balance of Planet was a commercial and critical near-failure. ... What saved the game was the unexpected sales to educational institutions

In other words, the game wound up primarily as a educational tool, and thus taught many children Chris Crawford's opinion of how the environment worked.  I have similar concerns about games in general, not just FPSs, but all games.

I'm terribly torn about this stuff.  On the one hand, my values on free speech are handed down from a life-long ACLU member.  On the other, I come from a long line of teachers, and I know the power of ideas, not just on children, but on all of us.  I remember one video gamer, interviewed in the wake of Columbine, who scornfully told a reporter "I know there is no giant freeze gun that I can use to turn people into ice."  But what about the near future, as games move toward more realistic depictions of the world?  I'm not concerned about driving the unstable into violence, but I am concerned about driving covert agendas, consciously or otherwise, into the general populace.

... we cannot use false information as the basis of our creation, even it if is only a game.

[Sky]

I'm not concerned about driving the unstable into violence, but I am concerned about driving covert agendas, consciously or otherwise, into the general populace.

In that case, I'd be more worried about corporate controlled media rather than video games.

[Evil Elvis]

I agree.  Over There is exploitive.  It's sold as if it's some real-life look at what people who are in Iraq right now are facing every day.  In reality, it's just another common, over-done drama set in controvertial place.  Its Hollywood trying to bank on your emotions over the war, and your relationships with people who are actually in the military.

It doesn't bother me that shows like it are being produced.  It's just another crap show on television.