The Battle Over the Battle of Fallujah

Omohundro says many of his troops would play shooter games on their Xboxes or other consoles after patrolling all day in Iraq. "It seems pretty natural to me that these guys would want to have their war documented in a videogame." But on April 9, when Atomic showed a 30-second promotional clip at a publicity event put on by the game's distributor, Konami, Fallujah relatives responded immediately. "The war is not a game, and neither was the Battle of Fallujah," the group Gold Star Families Speak Out said in a statement. "For Konami and Atomic Games to minimize the reality of an ongoing war and at the same time profit off the deaths of people close to us by making it entertaining is despicable."

Konami is a Japanese company that distributes and underwrites mostly family-oriented games with names like DanceDanceRevolution and Karaoke Revolution. Two weeks after the publicity event, Konami's Los Angeles–based executives told Tamte in a conference call that the company was ending its involvement with Six Days. Atomic would have to find a new distributor. (Konami would not return newsweek's calls.)

Tracy Miller, whose son, Cpl. Nicholas Ziolkowski, was killed Nov. 14, was among the Gold Star family members behind the letter. Ziolkowski had been attached to Omohundro's Bravo Company. He and other snipers had taken up position at the Grand Mosque in downtown Fallujah that morning. Dexter Filkins, a New York Timesreporter who embedded with Bravo Company, wrote that Ziolkowski had removed his helmet to get a better look in his scope when a bullet caught him in the head.

Miller, an academic adviser at Maryland's Towson University, believes Atomic genuinely wants to honor the Marines who fought in Fallujah. She thinks Six Days is the kind of game her son would have liked to play. Still, Miller says any game about the battle would be distasteful. "I think they're bending over backwards to contact people to make sure what they do isn't going to offend anyone," she told NEWSWEEK. "But I think that it's probably impossible not to offend people with a game." Miller teaches a popular course on the 1960s, including the antiwar movement. She worries that Six Days, precisely because it aims to re-create the Fallujah battle so realistically, will further desensitize youngsters to the horrors of war. And she's concerned that insurgents will learn about the operational procedures of American troops.

There's another aspect of the game that could be troubling to relatives. Though parents often want to know the precise details of a child's death, seeing the circumstances even loosely replicated in a videogame—where a player can affect the outcome—might be painful. It potentially raises agonizing questions for the parents, not just about how a tragedy unfolded, but how, with the tiniest shift in circumstances, it might have been avoided. To ease these concerns, Atomic has vowed not to use the Marines who died in Fallujah as characters in the game (though the circumstances of their deaths might be portrayed). In an e-mail to the Fallujah families dated May 22, John Farnsworth, Atomic's studio director and an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, wrote: "I have the highest regard for our troops in uniform and their families, for their brave willingness to sacrifice for liberty, country, family and friends. Out of respect, we have not included any fallen Marine in the interactive reenactments."

That gesture is significant to the families. For documentarians, it's where Six Days begins to fall short. How can a game document a battle if it doesn't identify the fallen? And how can the portrayal be accurate if a player can manipulate the events? David Waddington, an assistant professor of education at Concordia University in Montreal who has written articles about the ethics of videogames, says they cannot convey important aspects of real life, including complex characters. "You do have characters in a videogame in some sense, but ... character development isn't very robust. So you don't sympathize with characters very much." Though he hasn't previewed Six Days, Waddington thinks Atomic might have generated unrealistic expectations by billing it as something more than a game. "I'm not convinced Six Days in Fallujah as a first-person shooter game is a legitimate form of documentation."

But since videogames are a relatively new medium, the debate about what they can and can't get across is still open. Sicart in Copenhagen also writes about the ethics of videogames. He concedes that games don't do a good job of accurately portraying a sequence of actual events. But he says they can convey the feeling of being there—of occupying the space and having to make decisions—better than television and maybe even movies. "The real goal is not to document the action sequentially but to understand how and why it unfolds and how it felt to the people who were there," he says. "If players understand the emotions of a serviceman in combat, then they are already understanding the real power of Fallujah."

Tamte is now negotiating with a few other potential investors. He says Atomic needs several million dollars to complete the game and millions more to market and distribute it. "We have a lot of people who are interested in the project," he says. "But I'll feel better when we sign something and the checks start coming." Tamte concedes he had not given enough thought to the feelings of the Fallujah families and should have reached out to them earlier in the process. But he says their perceptions have been shaped mostly by the word "game"—which doesn't quite do justice to his project. "We're trying to do something that hasn't been done before, and naturally people use the points of reference they understand," Tamte says. "It's hard for anyone to envision it until it's actually created." Opponents of the project hope that time never comes.

With Dina Maron in Washington

© 2009