The potential? Yes. Nothing I've seen said about the game by those working on it has inspired confidence and plenty I've seen said has inspired doubt.

Nobody seems to be challenging or exploring Tamte's assertion that games are empathy machines. They aren't. Games don't have a special ability to impart empathy over say, a movie. They certainly can, but they don't have some sort of special quality that makes this easier or better. In many cases, it has less depending on your choices.

I want to see how they try to accomplish this goal, and whether they do. The fact that you have filmed interviews of the soldiers themselves is telling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF0c9SwewpA

This is the most recent one I’ve seen.

I don’t know what it’s going to turn out to be, but to me, this looks like a pretty human story about the battle itself and the experiences of the Marines who fought there, and dare I say it, a quite apolitical one at that. I don’t see any commentary on the war being made here. I didn’t agree with the Iraq War at the time and still don’t, but that doesn’t invalidate the sacrifices made by the Marines who were there, or the fact that they are real people who just want to do their job and get home in one piece. They’re not responsible for the war. I’d also make the argument that, regardless of the justifiability of the war or the efficacy of our presence in Iraq (and again, I stress, I didn’t agree with the Iraq War at the time and still don’t), we deposed a terrible regime and fought insurgents who would have installed another terrible regime, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. We were not fighting innocent victims.

On top of that, the Battle of Fallujah is a historically significant event, one that hasn’t been given much attention in popular media due to the generally negative public opinion of the war, and to me that is a shame. This battle saw some of the heaviest urban combat the Marines have ever fought, and certainly the most intense conflict in at least half a century. That sort of combat entails a very high human cost, not only death and injury, but psychological trauma as well. There are hundreds of stories within that framework worth telling. Why would you not want to tell them?

People tend to forget that our wars are fought by human beings. We do not have to agree with the wars to sympathize with the soldiers who were sent there to fight for us. It is entirely within reason to sympathize with them, as well as with the citizens in Fallujah (some of whom were interviewed for this project), and to make a game that attempts to chronicle their experiences. Again, your personal opinion of the war does not invalidate their sacrifice, and I don’t agree with the implied notion that any story about the Iraq War is negligent if it does not portray “our” side overtly as an interloper. Not every war story has to be political.

The concept of a war crime has only existed with any kind of legal weight or enforceability since the formation of the United Nations, and is only enforced by the existence of the United Nations. Technically we’re not even supposed to go to war with each other at all, “we” meaning any nation that is a member of the UN, since the UN Charter prohibits member states from doing so unless they have met certain very specific (and subjective) criteria. All of our “wars” since WWII have been legally obfuscated as “police actions” and “extraordinary measures” and the like. That is to say, lame and transparent euphemisms for war. Again, we encounter the contemporary desire to “civilize” war, because if we can’t stop it, I guess it is easier on the conscience to call it something other than war?

The real question is, what happens to all of this meaningless posturing and idealism when, inevitably, UN member states do formally declare war on each other? What happens to the enforceability of “war crimes”? I would think it will go right out the window… wouldn’t you? Every major war ever fought has involved “war crimes”, so what exactly do we expect will happen next time? There will be a next time, hopefully not for a long time, but it is an inevitability.

I say this not to upset you or anybody else here, and not because I think war is fine and dandy, or even desirable - because it very much is not. I just think we’ve kind of forgotten, as a global community, what war is really like, because we haven’t really had to deal with war on a global scale since the 1940’s. Simply put, war is hell. War is not fair at all. It is the manifestation of the ugly side of humanity that we like to pretend doesn’t exist - and yet it does. Some might even call it mass hysteria of the absolute worst variety for the extremes that it reaches. Really bad shit goes down in times of war, including inhuman things that can scarcely be imagined by those of us who have been lucky enough not to live through a real war. It is very easy to look back at a war and declare it criminal, or some aspect of it anyway, but I always wonder what the people on the ground at the time were thinking. We are not better than them. We are not above them. We have just convinced ourselves that we are, and that, I think, is actually dangerous and kind of terrifying. The assertion that “war crimes” are a legal fiction is not that upsetting. It’s the idea that human beings are capable of doing those things that really upsets, because it is frightening to realize that any of us can be pushed to that extreme given the right incentive.