Opinions about the game fly fast and furious ranging from leftist commenters who want the battle portrayed as an unjustified atrocity perpetrated by the fanatical baby-killers of a fascist America to those on the right who would be unsatisfied with anything that portrays America's soldiers as less than John Wayne-heroic. The families of slain soldiers want their lost ones' stories portrayed in a respectful light, yet in a battle where thousands were involved, how can all their stories be told? We are paralyzed by the awesome responsibility of making judgments on history, yet we must make them in order to function. We must interpret reality to stay sane. That means making choices when we create our art -- whatever forms that art takes.
These aren't questions with easy answers. There is, however, one answer that is totally unacceptable: "It's just a game." Nothing makes my blood boil faster than the battle cry of those who on one hand get upset that games aren't taken seriously and then retreat when confronted when the difficult issues are raised. Call it the "tyranny of fun," but I can easily reel off a list of movies made in the past few years about the Iraq War ("In the Valley of Elah," "Redacted," "Lions for Lambs," "Rendition," "Stop-Loss") that certainly don't fall into the realm of "light popcorn entertainment." Yet while I've seen people argue about the themes contained in those movies, why they bombed at the box office, whether they were accurately portraying the war and the issues involved, only the dimmest bulb ever trotted out that "they're just movies."
A movie is a medium. A game is a medium. As such it is value-neutral. A comic book is merely paper and ink. It can bring us the adventures of Archie and Jughead or it can bring us Art Spiegelman's "Maus." As such a game can bring us the happy agrarian adventures of Animal Crossing, the abstract beauty of Tetris or the exploration of Objectivism and capitalism that is BioShock.
It can also bring us Six Days in Fallujah. I have no idea whether the game is actually "fun" as I have neither played it nor been given a demo of it but I do know that reducing a game to merely being "fun" is to condemn every comic book to being about the X-Men, every movie to being a light romantic comedy starring Charlize Theron, and every painting to being a Norman Rockwell slice of Americana. I certainly have no objection to the X-Men, Charlize Theron or Normal Rockwell -- I enjoy all three, in fact, but they are only part of the so-called "entertainment universe." Games can and must find their way to the fullest range of artistic expression -- even if we are made uncomfortable along the way.
[Originally from Long Island, New York, Allen's been gaming since that day in 1975 when his parents had to drag him kicking and screaming away from a PONG machine. The Angry Bear is his opportunity to release the thoughts in his head to a safe and controlled environment. If you want to know more about him, you can catch up with what's going on in his life through his personal Twitter.]
