"The best thing you can do is get in front of an issue by going to whatever group it is that will be angry and do whatever you can in advance to get their blessing," said a marketing executive at a major Hollywood movie studio, who requested to remain anonymous. It was knowable far in advance that the subject would provoke strong feelings, and the particular bent of those feelings were, likewise, pretty easy to anticipate. "The massacre in Fallujah should be remembered with shame and horror not glamorized and glossed over for entertainment."įallujah is a perfect example of game controversy both because of how predictable the reaction was, and because of how utterly the critics tend to ignore the sentiments of the creators. "There will never be a time when it is appropriate for people to 'play' at committing atrocities," Hoskins told TechRadar. Hoskins, of a protest group called Stop the War Coalition, also spoke out against Fallujah. "Considering the enormous loss of life in the Iraq War, glorifying it in a video game demonstrates very poor judgment and bad taste," Red Keys told the Daily Mail. The family of a British Red Cap killed in the Battle of Fallujah spoke to the media. Still, the protestations came almost immediately after the game's announcement in March 2009. "We absolutely did not want to get in the middle of the argument about whether the U.S. "Our goal has always been to recreate the stories of specific Marines who fought in Fallujah and let people experience bits of the war from these Marines' perspectives - without editorializing about the politics," said Peter Tamte, president of Fallujah developer Atomic Games.
Even saying the word "Iraq" tends to provoke discomfort actually forwarding a specific opinion on the subject is guaranteed to be met with protestation. Six Days in Fallujah set out to transgress common expectations of games by recreating a specific battle from one of the most controversial military campaigns since the Vietnam War.
What follows are some thoughts, strategies, and experiences from around the industry about how to better understand and prepare for what happens when your game suddenly winds up in the cracking waves of public ire. When games stop aiming to entertain and become comfortable delving into the moral murk, there will be more storms left to inherit. Speaking at the Art History of Games Conference in Atlanta earlier this year, Jason Rohrer suggested that video games haven't even gone through their classical period yet.Īs they continue to develop, their ability to provoke, challenge, and subvert popular culture will become ever sharper. Yet, there's every reason to believe the biggest storms lie ahead. The effects of sex in the media on teenagers can always generate debate, but when the specific cause of debate is the absurd marionette work of the Hot Coffee mod, it's understandable that most people would lose interest. Ironically, games themselves have been so crude there's been a perceptible gap between the issue of a given controversy and the actual scene or mechanic that agitates that issue. Game controversies tend to be a digestive to help the heavier portions of a daily news cycle rest a bit more comfortably in one's subconscious. Games are still considered trivialities in the larger scope of foreign wars, Tea Party debates, and the drug infractions of pseudo-celebrities. Part of an explanation for all of these uprisings of propriety is found in the persistent obscurity in which game culture still churns. The protestations against Fallujah evaporated when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 invaded Afghanistan - though Medal of Honor has recently drawn some fire. The simulated sex that brought Jack Thompson back onto cable news returned in Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption, and Heavy Rain. Blood and executions became more detailed in the wake of Joseph Lieberman's Mortal Kombat inquiry. In the cultural ghetto where games live, these controversies had a seismic effect, but the scenery was left unchanged afterward. Mortal Kombat was drawn out before a congressional hearing in the mid-Nineties Jack Thompson systematically dismantled his career in the effort to protect children from Grand Theft Auto and, most recently, some have objected to games that use real-life tragedies as source material, such as Super Columbine Massacre and the unreleased Six Days in Fallujah. The recorded controversies in the video game world have, to now, been relatively mild.