Ban This Sick Filth: Why Six Days in Fallujah Deserves to Exist
I don't know if you were around gaming in the 1990s and 2000s, but I was.
I remember people like disgraced lawyer and obscenity campaigner Jack Thompson railing hard against videogames. I remember his arguments about how videogames were morally decrepit murder simulators, used to train teenagers into becoming violent animals, useful tools for the American military. I remember his arguments - tenuous at best, dishonest at worst, and full of bad science in support of his points.
I remember the collective outrage of the gaming community at the time, as well. "How dare you infantilise us like this," was the message. "How dare you presume to decide for us how we will process a piece of media. How dare you attempt to cast us all as murderers in the making."
I don't know if you were around at the genesis of the war in Iraq. If you remember the constant lies, the flimsy and blatant excuses for ever-escalating attacks, the nonsense justifications for continuing to keep American soldiers in that country. Endangering and wasting lives in the name of "The War on Terror." "I can't wait until the War on Terror is over, and there is no more terror," was a common sarcastic refrain at the time. Wars on nebulous concepts, on emotions, can't be won and that's because they were never designed to be. The war in Iraq was many, many things. It continues to be many, many things. One of them is contentious, and that was as true at the time as it is now.
When Six Days in Fallujah was originally set to be published, and was prevented from reaching the market in the first instance, the world was a very different place. It was much closer to the inciting events of the war, for one. Different reasons were used to justify the game's removal. The prevailing sentiment from the talking heads in the game industry at the time was one of disappointment. There was this shared sense of frustration and anger; it was clear that games were not yet considered art in the same way as its closest contemporaries, being film and books. Had a book or a film dealt with such problematic subject matter, it would at least be seen as a discussion piece, if not well-received. Something to take seriously and evaluate its message as a product of the culture that had created it. Games, it seemed, had some time to go yet before they were taken as an honest artistic medium. It was a shame that games were not yet allowed that chance in mainstream culture. They were, ultimately, still seen as children's toys and that was a hard pill to swallow for the people who had made creating games their life.
I am not pretending to think that Six Days in Fallujah is likely to be a particularly incisive work. I would even go so far as to say it's just as likely that the game may be a mindless and tacit approval of the American military's actions at the time. I don't know. I haven't played it, and neither has anyone. SDiF is not the type of game I champ at the bit to play, particularly. To continue the horse analogy one step further, I don't have a horse in this race where it comes to bringing this game to market. My argument is that SDiF should be brought to market, because my argument is that games are art.
I graduated University in 2016 with a BA Hons in Game Art. During that time, I had to write several essays, one of which was arguing for the concept of games as art, worthy of being afforded the same level of weight and analysis as its closest contemporary forms. Crucial to this is the idea that art does not need to be good to be art. Art does not need to say things we believe in for it to be art. Art is a product of the culture from which it comes, and it carries those messages with it for good or ill. My argument is certainly not that anyone need to "listen" to this piece of art. No one needs to buy this game or take onboard whatever its messages are. I know I'm not inclined to.
But here we come to the conclusion. There exists a change.org petition circulating around, being boosted by several figures within the gaming industry whom I deeply respect and whose work I admire. In this petition, which calls for Six Days in Fallujah to be banned from distribution, the wording is exceedingly and almost peculiarly similar to Jack Thompson's screeds of the early 2000s. The author goes into detail ascribing many different motivations to the creators of this game, including the assertion, with very little context, that murdering Iraqi and/or brown-skinned people is being normalised. The author asserts that the game will, among other things,
"[...]inevitably breed a new generation of mass shooters in America and brainwash gamers into thinking RACISM IS OK[Sic]."
If Six Days in Fallujah were a book, or a film, would we be having this conversation in this alarmist and reactionary way? Would the book or film be given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to exist first, then have its messages dissected and criticised, for right or wrong, later? Or is it enough that a person uses the right combination of words and ideas that any reasonable persons abhors into just agreeing to ban a thing?
I find it interesting that several aforementioned figures in the industry whom I admire and look up to have faced similar criticism towards the art they have been a part of, themselves. Unfair accusations and judgements, calls for censorship, deeply spurious and hurtful assumptions made. In today's world, some of those works are discussed critically, and loved immensely as products of their time, lauded for being progressive for the world they were made in, yet left with plenty to discuss about their more unfortunate messages and subtext.
Why, then, have we unlearned what we all did from Jack Thompson's time on the pulpit?
Personally, this tells me that culture still has a long way to go before it can trust games as a medium to exist and to handle problematic subjects, much less to be bad at doing so. Clearly, videogames still “aren't” art yet, after all. But I look forward to when they are.
