https://www.polygon.com/2021/2/15/22279 ... r-politics
In an interview with Polygon on Thursday, after the game was announced for a second time, he was insistent that developer Highwire Games will not grapple with the political machinations that led to the titular conflict. Instead, their first-person shooter will try to engender empathy for American troops in the field, for their work destroying the insurgents that dug in throughout Fallujah, and for the civilians trapped in between.
“I think reasonable people can disagree with that,” he told Polygon of his narrative strategy. “For us as a team, it is really about helping players understand the complexity of urban combat. It’s about the experiences of that individual that is now there because of political decisions. And we do want to show how choices that are made by policymakers affect the choices that [a Marine] needs to make on the battlefield. Just as that [Marine] cannot second-guess the choices by the policymakers, we’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war itself was a good or a bad idea.”
This is just flatout cowardly. Deliberately omitting an important component of the battle is a political decision in and of itself. If the content of the battle is too "distracting" from whatever message you were going for, then you shouldn't be covering this battle. If your sources only cover a small element of the battle, then it's your duty to seek out more. You are the ones who pinned your colors to the mast of historical recreation and conveying the experience rather than doing another Call of Duty fiction.The U.S. military has said that it used “shake-and-bake” tactics, a combination of high explosive and white phosphorus rounds that flushed out insurgents from their hardened bunkers in order to destroy them. But using white phosphorus as a weapon, and in close proximity to civilians, would seem to contravene the accepted laws of war. Again, Tamte isn’t interested in litigating what constitutes a war crime.
“There are things that divide us, and including those really divisive things, I think, distracts people from the human stories that we can all identify with,” Tamte said. “I have two concerns with including phosphorus as a weapon. Number one is that it’s not a part of the stories that these guys told us, so I don’t have an authentic, factual basis on which to tell that. That’s most important. Number two is, I don’t want sensational types of things to distract from the parts of that experience.”
Victura seem to have zero self-awareness:
“A message that I heard from all of the people who’ve lost loved ones in battle is, they don’t want their child or friend’s sacrifice to be forgotten,”
Are they even aware that they're aping classic war propaganda techniques? Classic propaganda is to turn all the focus inward instead of outwards. You are fighting for the man next to you. Your unit is your family. Keep the focus as narrow as possible. Never question the wider geopolitical issues that have placed you in these positions in the first place. Your reason to fight is a self-fulfilling premise where you fight to protect the people shooting at your soldiers, even though they're only shooting because you went there to shoot at them. Through this you never need to consider your reasons to fight."And so, by talking about this battle in a game, we are helping people remember the sacrifice of some very specific people."
Their themes and documentary footage will focus solely on individual acts of heroism by US marines devoid of context. How this environment that requires acts of courage came about - not important. The consequences of all this fighting that lets them showcase these soldiers' bravery - who cares? Just focus on how heroic they all look. Why they're being put in harm's way and having to be brave in the first place doesn't matter. This game will narrow the focus until anything outside of a few soldiers clearing a street is squeezed out of scope.
The article sums it up best:
Peak imperialism that you could glass another country's city and then years later make a game about how sad it made you feel.For Tamte, the goal of Six Days in Fallujah is to celebrate the heroism of those Coalition forces who fought there. The goal is to empathize with them, and also with the civilians trapped in the city. Anything else is a distraction.