Six Days in Fallujah: A Documentary Wargame

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Ray Huling	36 POSTED: 7 Apr 2009 09:56
	This strikes me as a redemption fantasy. Malygris: Players will be confronted with many of the same tough decisions soldiers in the war had to make Many? What possible variety of decisions could there be? Players will make tactical decisions, of course, i.e. how to kill enemies. But it's almost inconceivable that the game would allow players to decide whether to kill enemies, i.e. to decide whether an Iraqi is an insurgent or a civilian and behave accordingly. Fallujah remains controversial precisely because of the debate over the meaning of 'insurgent' and 'civilian'. The U.S. military claims to have killed 1,300 insurgents there, while others say at least 800 of them were civilians. In any case, the fighting there--prompted by the killing, mutilation, and display of Blackwater personnel--did result in large numbers of civilian casualties. How will this game enforce a distinction? Grade the player on his ratio of insurgent to civilian kills? With an especially big deduction for killing a child? In a mosque? In a hospital? The problem of modern warfare is the reason why there are so many WWII shooters: these days, there are no battlefields where soldiers kill only other soldiers.

SharedProphet	37 POSTED: 7 Apr 2009 10:07
	As described, it sounds great... hope they don't botch it.

cainx10a	38 POSTED: 7 Apr 2009 10:38
	KDR_11k: Third person might be for better damage modeling on the player character, an FPS can't show you that you're limping or bleeding and in pain, all it can do is show a health indicator for a body part and maybe slow you down. In an FPS the player cannot really see the actions of his character. HobbesMkii: Atomic was an excellent choice for this. They excel at the war games they make. I've yet to see them present a game that offers any real narrative, but I have no doubt that they will succeed admirably here as well. If it's a realistic game I don't think there'll be much narrative beyond people dying and suffering. Erana: I just pray to God that they're gonna depict the actual Iraqi people accurately and not one-sidedly. Most of them have such animosity towards Americans because we screwed over their country. And "our" poor planning did. But the well-intending, hardworking soldiers did not. Does it matter? You're playing a soldier down on the street, you can't even understand their language! How can they depict the motivations of the Iraqis from that point of view? Should they have your squadmates hold a speech on why the country is fucked when they're supposed to be hiding behind cover and keep quiet to not give their position away? Then it should not boast about being a documentary. 1-Sided documentaries are just opinions. Not facts.

KDR_11k	39 POSTED: 7 Apr 2009 10:55
	cainx10a: Then it should not boast about being a documentary. 1-Sided documentaries are just opinions. Not facts. It is facts, it shows you what the troops felt like down there. They didn't ponder the various reasons of why they're there and why people hate them and such, they pondered how they can avoid getting killed in the next five minutes. It's a documentary about one thing and that one thing is not the political situation in Iraq, it's the physical situation of a soldier in there. It doesn't matter how justified the enemy is in wanting you dead, YOU don't want you dead so you're going to make THEM dead. And probably a lot of people who didn't actually want you dead but didn't look different enough for you to care. I don't think you're going to see immediate feedback on civilian deaths but you may get a debriefing about it to show you what the headlines would look like with your playing style. One thing I wonder is whether there will be sanity effects, stuff like hallucinating about enemy fire after a while and seeing insurgents where there aren't any, resulting in you shooting at civilians without reason.

cainx10a	40 POSTED: 7 Apr 2009 11:55
	KDR_11k: cainx10a: Then it should not boast about being a documentary. 1-Sided documentaries are just opinions. Not facts. It is facts, it shows you what the troops felt like down there. They didn't ponder the various reasons of why they're there and why people hate them and such, they pondered how they can avoid getting killed in the next five minutes. It's a documentary about one thing and that one thing is not the political situation in Iraq, it's the physical situation of a soldier in there. It doesn't matter how justified the enemy is in wanting you dead, YOU don't want you dead so you're going to make THEM dead. And probably a lot of people who didn't actually want you dead but didn't look different enough for you to care. I don't think you're going to see immediate feedback on civilian deaths but you may get a debriefing about it to show you what the headlines would look like with your playing style. One thing I wonder is whether there will be sanity effects, stuff like hallucinating about enemy fire after a while and seeing insurgents where there aren't any, resulting in you shooting at civilians without reason. Yeah, that would be a decent game play mechanic(hmmm, the haze of the usual F.E.A.R player has to go through with the nightmarish appearances). Although, I kinda hope it will stay true to what a documentary is usually like. Well, 2010 is still a long way for me, and I still have a lot of my to-do, to-buy list.


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