Konami announces Six Days in Fallujah, based on 2004 Iraq battle

[thedrifter]

Konami announces Six Days in Fallujah, based on 2004 Iraq battle <br />
12:01 AM, April 6, 2009 <br />
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There have been books, movies, poetry and even rap songscoming out of the war in Iraq. Now, there's...

[thedrifter]

Can a Game Based on the Iraq War be Apolitical?
By Matt Peckham - Tue Apr 7, 2009 1:44AM EDT

Is a "realistic" game about war that's somehow entertaining an irreconcilable paradox? That's the question indirectly posed by Six Days in Fallujah, an upcoming third-person shooter from Atomic Games, the same company (in name, if not members) responsible for the seminal series of Close Combat real-time tactical wargames that ushered in complex psychological soldier morale models in the 1990s.

Six Days in Fallujah follows a squad of U.S. Marines over a six day span coinciding with the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. Apparently the game came about after the 3rd Battalion 1st Marines — then working with Atomic to develop training tools for the Marines — was deployed to Iraq and engaged in the First Battle of Fallujah. "When they came back from Fallujah," explains Atomic president Peter Tamte in an interview with GamePro, "they asked us to create a videogame about their experiences there, and it seemed like the right thing to do."

The last "realistic" military game from Atomic (working with Destineer, which purchased the developer in 2005) was Close Combat: First to Fight, an attempt to simulate the "Ready Team Fire Assist" U.S. Marine Corps tactical combat approach involving four-man teams using coordinated movement tactics like bounding. The game was poorly received, including by yours truly. My review read something like "putting guns in the hands of enemy morons is how you make Doom 3 fun, not a serious military combat simulation."

Six Days already sounds dramatically different. For starters, Tamte claims the team's out to make "the most realistic military shooter possible." Diaries, military documents, satellite imagery, interviews with Iraqis, fully-destructible environments, etc. In fact Tamte actually defines Six Days as a survival horror game. To be honest, when I first read that on the game's Wiki page, I thought some drive-by polemicist was making a political point. Nope, just Atomic.

You see where this is going.

And that's apparently part of the design goal, and for my money, a whole lot more intriguing. Six Days doesn't sound like a modern warfare iteration of Brothers in Arms. It's not a tribute game, where the horror's glamorized and the psychological delving played out in the downbeats between bullet-saturated scrums as stirring orchestral sweeps tug at your emotions like marionette strings.

Of course Konami vice-president of marketing Anthony Crouts is already attempting (unsuccessfully and contradictorily in my view) to defang allegations of "political overtones" when he tells the Wall Street Journal

We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience... At the end of the day, it's just a game.

As Crouts and anyone else who's stopped to think about how games work for more than two seconds well know, however you fall down on the Iraq War issue, there's no such thing as "just a game."

For more gaming news and opinion, park your tweet-readers at twitter.com/game_on.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Six Days in Fallujah brings the battle home

Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 7, 2009


Video game developers have long mined old conflicts for story lines. But an ambitious and potentially controversial video game on tap for next year will allow players to participate in a current conflict - a first for a major console and PC title.

Six Days in Fallujah, developed by Atomic Games and set to be published by Konami, takes gamers into the 2004 battle for Fallujah, the largest urban assault since Vietnam. Developers said they're not seeking to exploit the war in Iraq for profit but to use video games, the medium of choice for young people and soldiers alike, to illuminate an important battle. To that end, the game is incorporating recorded interviews and other documentary techniques.

Developers say it's high time a video game aspired to do more than just entertain.

"It's time for video games to do what movies, music and television have done: give people insight into this war that is shaping our world," said Peter Tamte, president of Atomic Games, based in Raleigh, N.C.

It's a tricky balancing act. Atomic Games must pull off a high-quality military shooter or the game won't sell. But it must pack in as much reality, information and interviews to justify the foray into such a fresh conflict.

Tamte believes they have the equation down. The company already was developing training software for the Marines when the Fallujah battle took place in November 2004. After being encouraged by returning soldiers to take on the topic, Atomic decided to make a game on the battle.

Atomic interviewed more than 30 soldiers who participated in the fighting as well as handfuls of Iraqi civilians and insurgents from various countries. They also consulted battle maps, photos, reports and other information. Developers even built a game engine to allow for fully destructible environments. The result is a faithful recreation of the events, taking players through the actual steps of the Marines who fought in Fallujah.

"People are curious about what it's like to be in war and what they'd do differently," said Juan Benito, the game's creative director. "We're setting the table for them here."

Read Omohundro, 39, a former company commander in the 8th Marine Regiment who consulted on the game, said he was skeptical at first. But he welcomed the chance to paint an accurate picture of the actions of his men, some of whom died in the battle.

"The game allows you to review what was occurring in different scenarios from actual interviews of the Marines who were actually there," he said. "It gives you a better grasp of the objectives to be obtained; you're not just randomly shooting enemy forces; you have a more definitive goal and a way to achieve the goal."

Tamte said developers were sensitive to the participants in the battle. He said the team incorporated Iraqi and insurgent viewpoints and has Muslim staffers on the title. Family members of Marines who lost their lives in Fallujah also were consulted. Tamte said the goal is not to advance a certain argument but help players empathize with the participants.

Tamte said he expects - and wants - the game to generate debate.

"We want people to talk about this," he said. "I hope people from both sides will say they're informed and have an understanding of the experience."

The game, which will be released sometime next year for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Mac, faces an uphill battle, said Michael Zyda, director of the GamePipe Laboratory at the University of Southern California.

Zyda said he expects a game based on an ongoing conflict will struggle for the same reason that early Vietnam War movies flopped: People would rather use entertainment to escape reality, not relive it.

"If you think of the tenor of people, they're sick of the war in Iraq," said Zyda. "Are they interested in playing a game on Iraq? I doubt it."

Tamte, however, believes the game's realism will be its asset, helping it stand out among the legion of shooter games.

"These are real locations, participants. This is what happened," he said.


E-mail Ryan Kim at rkim@sfchronicle.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
APRIL 7, 2009, 7:43 A.M. ET

Game Face
Iraq, the Videogame
War is hell. Should it be a game?

In a darkened hotel room just south of San Francisco's downtown, Peter Tamte, president of Atomic Games, is excitedly running through the details of the company's latest project, "Six Days in Fallujah." Mr. Tamte and his team tapped dozens of soldiers who were involved in the real-life 2004 battle for the Iraqi city to add realism to their action game, which the company plans to release next year.

Verisimilitude is par for the course for military games which often tout their faithfulness to real battles and wars. As the capabilities of videogame hardware have burgeoned, the bar for realism in games has been raised. But Atomic Games wants its new release to be more than a game. The company sees it as a new kind of documentary.

"For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames," Mr. Tamte says.

Videogames are not foreign to using real-life events as fodder. Many military games such as some of the popular Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series are based on past American campaigns during the various wars over the last century. The "serious games" movement, which often seeks to teach a particular message or idea, frequently draws on current events as well. MtvU, the college version of Viacom's MTV, launched a Web game called "Darfur is Dying" in 2006 to teach about the atrocities in the Sudan, and non-profit Global Kids and developer Gamelab created "Ayiti: The Cost of Life" that challenges players to keep a virtual family of five alive and healthy in Haiti.

But Atomic Games argues that releases like those, while drawing from real facts, are still just historical fiction. "Six Days," which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. "We replicate a specific and accurate timeline -- we mean six days literally," says Mr. Tamte. "We track several units through the process and you get to know what it was like from day to day."

To develop the game, Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game's appearance is faithful to the actual location. In addition to creating the game, Atomic will also use some of the material to create a training simulation for the military.

Eddie Garcia, a Marine sergeant from the Bronx, received a Purple Heart after being injured on the first day of fighting in Fallujah. Having worked with Atomic on one of its past titles, he was involved in the design process from the very beginning. He tweaked how characters communicated with their superiors and walked them through the different tactics the Marines used in battle.

One of the most important contributions to the game was Mr. Garcia's diary. During the battle, many Marines carried a small notebook to keep notes about their positions and their activities each day. Mr. Garcia, for example, had marked the exact time that he had launched a particular illumination flare during the battle which could then be incorporated into the game. In aggregate, the notebooks gave Atomic an overhead view of the entire battalion's movements.

"It's easy to be an armchair quarterback [about war] when you're at home. There were 19-year-olds in the Marines making life-altering changes," Mr. Garcia says. "I think this game will add some humanity to the subject."

Atomic Games had to create new technology to match the Marines' fighting style. Unlike many cinematic depictions of ground fighting, Marines in Fallujah often opted for knocking over the rebar-and-concrete houses with bulldozers or by calling in air strikes, rather than bursting in the front door. Atomic was forced to create a new game engine, the software that governs the physics and appearance of the in-game world, to depict the structural damage. In the game, buildings fall apart and columns crumble under the onslaught of bullets and grenades.

The new technology becomes immediately apparent when the game is played. Atomic chose an over-the-shoulder point of view to simulate the look of an embedded journalist following your squad, and players must duck and dive into cover. Because all the elements of the game are destructible, hiding spots become more precarious and deteriorate through the course of the firefight. Players can use this to their advantage to knock over walls and expose enemies or chip away at columns that might be shielding an aggressor's position.

But according to Atomic Games, "Six Days" lacks one notable aspect of documentary: commentary. Recent films such as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" have popularized a more argumentative style of documentary filmmaking. But those involved in the new game said they didn't want to push a particular viewpoint and certainly weren't taking a stance on the morality of the invasion.

"We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience," says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game's publisher. "At the end of the day, it's just a game."

Creating a game absent of political overtones may prove difficult. Although Atomic Games is talking to Iraqis involved in the conflict, they haven't decided whether players will be able to fight as an enemy against the marines. The game is still in development and Atomic may change its mind. "We're still deciding what's appropriate to include," says Mr. Tamte.

"The process of constructing the game will have built-in decisions made by the creators that will have ideological overtones," says Aram Sinnreich, an assistant professor of global media at New York University. He says that choices that videogame makers make to add and excise content are no different from those of filmmakers. "What goes in their product constitutes a bias."

In parts of the "game-amentary," as the developers of "Six Days" have called it, users are forced to make hard choices. In one opening sequence, an enemy bursts from a door without a weapon in hand. Players can decide if this character qualifies as a hostile and can act accordingly. Whether you choose to shoot the unarmed person will drastically change your experience with the game and will be heavily based on the player's own support or objections to the war. Those personal feelings are complicated by the need to survive to succeed in the game.

"There are things you just can't do with passive media," says Mr. Tamte. "The decisions you make in the game -- we can make you someone else."

While these questions about documentary elements in games may be new, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ken Burns says the standards of good documentary work, regardless of medium, will remain the same as those established by Aristotle. "We're all bound by the same ancient laws to tell our stories," he says.

Write to Jamin Brophy-Warren at Jamin.Brophy-Warren@wsj.com

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-DL020_sdif1_F_20090406093959.jpg

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Soldiers Respond To 'Six Days in Fallujah' Controversy
Posted by Stephen Johnson - Thursday, April 09, 2009 2:09 PM



The G4 award for most controversial video game of the month goes to Six Days in Fallujah. This documentary-style combat game for the PS3, 360 and PC is being developed by Atomic Games and released by Konami. It's set in the Iraq war, and aims to give players as realistic a view of 2004's Battle of Fallujah as possible. Atomic says it will not editorialize. But despite the game's just-the-truth attitude (and the fact that all that's been released so far is a concept, a title and some screenshots) just the idea of a realistic Iraq war game has angered a number of peace activists and military veterans.

Tim Collins, a former colonel of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment, told Britain's Daily Mail, "It's much too soon to start making video games about a war that's still going on, and an extremely flippant response to one of the most important events in modern history. It's particularly insensitive given what happened in Fallujah, and I will certainly oppose the release of this game."

On the other side of the idealogical coin, Tansy Hoskins of Stop The War Coalition, had this to say about Six Days:

"To make a game out of a war crime and to capitalize on the death and injury of thousands is sick... The massacre in Fallujah should be remembered with shame and horror not glamorized and glossed over for entertainment."

These are some strong opinions, but I doubt that the people who are most outraged by Six Days are gamers. To get the true scoop of the rank and file of the U.S. military, I contacted some gamers in the armed forces and asked them what they thought about Six Days.


Sgt. Casey J. McGeorge served three tours (36 months) in Iraq, and told me, "As a combat veteran and as a gamer, I have no problem whatsoever with the game...As long as it's made as realistically as possibly, I believe that this could be a good thing for both combat veterans and for the war in general."

While former Army Sgt. Kevin Smith worries that the game could be used by anti-war activists to further their agenda, he said, "Let it be made, and hopefully it will bolster support for military veterans by giving civilians insight into what this war was actually like for them."

Marine Corps. Gunnery Sergeant John Mundy thinks the game might actually help Marines train. "I know Marines would use this as a tool to not only give each other knowledge on the battle itself, but also have another tool to get the Marines thinking about Rules of Engagement and such so that they can play the game together and maybe learn a thing or two."

As for how civilian gamers will like a realistic depiction of war, Smith points out that real combat is not a game of Call of Duty 4. "You can't just lob a frag down the street or launch a RPG at a couple of guys if you have to reload," Smith said. "There are restrictions on what types of weapons you can use and when. Depending on what the Rules of Engagement were for the Marines in Fallujah, and if Atomic Games has consequences for violating them, I think some gamers might find it a little frustrating."

Gunnery Sgt Mundy sees potential problems with the "humanity factor" that multiplayer would bring to Six Days if the feature ends up in the game. "You will have your group of idiots that try to be the terrorists and kill Americans and shout obscenities through the TV, damning American military personnel," Mundy said. "But hey, those individuals can make fools of themselves all because of the protection that we military people give them each day."

Both McGeorge and Smith brought up a point that both the makers of the game and its detractors failed to mention: Perhaps playing a game that depicts war realistically will lead civilians toward a greater understanding of what military people go through during battle.

"It can be extremely difficult for the average person to understand why a person who returns from a combat zone may seem so jumpy and alert all the time," McGeorge said. "The first time in the game they get too close to a car and are blown up; the first time they are killed in the game without knowing what is really going on, they might be able to get a small understanding of what we have had to go through on a regular basis."

"A lot of soldiers have had a hard time readjusting when they return from war, and this has caused an extremely high suicide rate," Smith said. "I really hope that this title receives positive press and encourages more empathy towards veterans after gamers have 'experienced' what they have gone through. On a side note, I really hope this game includes co-op!"

Sergeant Mundy summed up the feelings of the three military men we spoke to with this simple statement: "If someone doesn't agree with the game, they can spend their money elsewhere."

Ellie