Six Days in Fallujah - A military shooter about a real battle in the Iraq War, back from the dead and more controversial than ever

[Gravityqueen4life]

so, another spec ops the line?

feel like a hero yet?

 

[Syaoran Li]

Bit of an unrelated note but Spec Ops: The Line is a perfect example of a game that has aged very poorly in retrospect.

 

[Jack Awful]

The video game media's hatred of apolitical games is a transparent attempt to make every video game that can push their agenda.

It's the same mindset as "silence is violence". Everything has to line up with their politics at all times so they can get the dopamine hit from being reaffirmed, attempt to brainwash people to their side, and alienate the unwanted "chuds" from their hobby.

It sucks you can't just be objective as possible and present events without comment to let people make up their own minds, you have to push a very specific agenda or you're a bad person.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

Can't wait to play what my dad lived through. Knowing his ass he'd probably play it too cause he only enjoys singleplayer fps games.

Goddamn this shit makes me feel old.

You might not know it, but there's a line from Patton's speech to his men:

"Thirty years from now when you're sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, 'What did you do in the great World War Two?' You won't have to cough and say, 'Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.'"

Except now there's games for that; shit ones, largely made by the same type of people he hated.

"This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real battle than they do about fucking."

If the man had lived, he'd have been so disgusted by the state of our media it wouldn't have taken long from him to stroke out (or outright grease pinko hippies).

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Tamte later stated that "When they came back from Fallujah, they asked us to create a video game about their experiences there, and it seemed like the right thing to do."

Why was this game considered disrespectful? Troops that were in Fallujah wanted this game.

 

[Jack Awful]

Why was this game considered disrespectful? Troops that were in Fallujah wanted this game.

The pundits assumed all video games = cartoony violent shooter game for fun. Plus, it's the news so they're incentivized to create controversy for profit.

 

[Miller]

Why was this game considered disrespectful? Troops that were in Fallujah wanted this game.

The gaming press at the time went full "big yikes, not a good look, Konami" and pushed the company to cancel the game. They thought that the game would be pro-Iraq war.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

Hopeful but worried its gonna fail at launch, hopefully its great though so people will shut up about spec ops the line.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

Why was this game considered disrespectful? Troops that were in Fallujah wanted this game.

Nobody I know from that shit would want a game of it.
Samarra sucked. Sadr City sucked worse. And from where we stood, Falluja sucked like watching two fags fuck on death row.

Only fucking fobbits want that; probably something to cover the shame of their countless hours playing Madden or cockgazing in the gym; while not counting BBs, babysitting haji/slants hauling water, working the DFAC, or bogarting the MWR internet/phone.

 

[Alter Ego]

Bit of an unrelated note but Spec Ops: The Line is a perfect example of a game that has aged very poorly in retrospect.

On the contrary, many of those online who are decrying Six Days in Fallujah are also mentioning Spec Ops: The Line as the pinnacle of military shooters.

The video game media's hatred of apolitical games is a transparent attempt to make every video game that can push their agenda.

It's the same mindset as "silence is violence". Everything has to line up with their politics at all times so they can get the dopamine hit from being reaffirmed, attempt to brainwash people to their side, and alienate the unwanted "chuds" from their hobby.

It sucks you can't just be objective as possible and present events without comment to let people make up their own minds, you have to push a very specific agenda or you're a bad person.

To be clear, Peter Tamte didn't even say that he intends for the game to be apolitical, but Polygon's misleading headline has many people believing that anyway. The exact paragraph from the interview article:

“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.”

In other words, Peter Tamte's intention is not to for the game to moralize over the policymaking and events of the Iraq War as a whole, but rather focus on the Second Battle of Fallujah specifically and show the personal experiences of the Marines and soldiers there that he has testimonies from. There's still plenty of politics to be gotten from the battle itself including, as Peter seems to be alluding to, the rules of engagement applied to US combatants such as, for example, whether they can return fire when attacked from a hospital building or mosque.

For more quotes, here's another interview Peter Tamte had with GameIndustry.biz, who are obviously also opposed to the game like Polygon.

The gaming press at the time went full "big yikes, not a good look, Konami" and pushed the company to cancel the game. They thought that the game would be pro-Iraq war.

I don't recall that at all, though a decade is a long time ago. Rather, my recollection is that the gaming press were either indifferent or mildly sorrowful about the game getting pressured into cancellation by more mainstream forces. For review, one could probably go back and listen to the corresponding Giant Bomb episode at the time as I consider those guys to be a pretty good barometer of general sentiment from game journalism.

 

[UnKillFill]

This looks like the worst Five Nights at Freddy's sequel yet.

 

[A_Callow_Youth]

Nobody I know from that shit would want a game of it.
Samarra sucked. Sadr City sucked worse. And from where we stood, Falluja sucked like watching two fags fuck on death row.

Let's go with "that's kinda the point". Depicting actual battles while the men who went through them were still alive has been going on since Medal of Honor. On occasion, games have even used this to teach the player a modicum of respect for the men who did these things, perhaps most famously seen in CoD 2's Hill 400 sequence. What's different about this one, though, is that it is trying to suck the "fun" out of the "game". At the expense of agreeing with Extra Credits, "interactive documentary" really is the appropriate appellation for what this game is aiming for. A cursory summary of your post history indicates that you're probably not that into games, so let me put it this way: this isn't supposed to be like whatever your kids are playing, nobody wants that. Not the players, not the developers, not even the publisher, or they wouldn't have picked up this particular title. Rather, it's supposed to be the equivalent of what Black Hawk Down was for film, a "holy shit, people actually did this for real, how did anyone survive this shit?" It's a ludicrously ambitious goal, but I applaud that they have the balls to try.

Either way, at least we'll get something to talk about.

 

[Snekposter]

Yeah. A lot of the guys who saw shit overseas grew up playing video games. An 18 year old who signed up after 9/11 would have been born in 1983 at the earliest, higher chance of 1984. Add in the 18+ years of shit over there, and to this generation's soldiers, its video games that are the preferred way to tell their stories, not movies or books. If one was to say no other medium can really put one on the ground, making hard choices and actually experiencing these things from the point of view of someone who was there, its hard to argue against that thanks to the literal first-person perspective and the fact that you will be issuing orders and watching men get shot and killed as a result. No room for dispassion unlike a movie.

 

[I.B. Niggin]

Just make it a combination of Brothers in Arms and Full Spectrum Warrior and this might still end up being a decent little game.

 

[Alter Ego]

So to exemplify the anger of game journalists and their friends on social media over this game, I was considering posting Twitter rants from Rami Ismail, but he just had a huge lolcow moment that, while worth telling here, is harder to show direct sources for because it ended him deleting his Twitter account in rage.

For those who are not familiar with Rami Ismail, he was an indie game developer responsible for half of such games as Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne, his popularity especially among game journalists making him the current "king of indie games", a title held previously held by Jonathan Blow and Phil Fish. Why is he popular, exactly? Not really because of his games, as fine as they are, but rather because of his correct politics as a very outspoken Egyptian-Dutch Muslim from the Netherlands who appears to genuinely regard the United States as the worst country in the world. As far as I'm aware, he hasn't even done any game development since Nuclear Throne in 2015, but rather makes his living as a globe-trotting public speaker.

Anyway, Rami was obviously set off by the re-announcement of Six Days in Fallujah, going on a viral Twitter rant soon after. Unfortunately, without access to his direct tweets, I cannot find this rant anywhere, not in an archive or even a screencap. You can easily imagine what it entailed though. Lots of complaining about the Iraq War, dead Muslim civilians, supposed war crimes, and how its a travesty for this game to take a (primarily) US military perspective and portray them as anything but villains.

Come yesterday, there was something else that concerned Rami. You see, as the king of indie games, he was used to his friends in games journalism calling him up all the time for his expert opinion on games and events he wasn't involved in. This time, however, nobody called him to ask for his thoughts on Six Days in Fallujah. And this made him upset. So he took to Twitter again:

This morning, he went much further:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1362067023874957316.html

I'm going to be very real with you all for a thread. I'm disappointed in the games media.
I am a huge fan of their work, their ability to see story, their caring so much for games they invest the time & energy despite all.
But they don't care for Middle Eastern folks.

Imagine a game where you go and misrepresent the real-life murder of 185,000+ women. There would be interviews with the creator, but there'd be a plethora of articles signal boosting women and their views launching simultaneously, all over games news and games culture.

Imagine a game where you go and misrepresent the real-life murder of 185,000+ black folks. There would be interviews with the creator, but there'd be a wide range of articles signal boosting black folks and their views and anger about once the game offered in games media.

Imagine a game that misrepresents the focused, real-life, & ongoing murder of 185,000+ people in any minority.
Imagine it for women, people of colour, gay people, trans, disabled, Jewish, poor, anyone. People who all deserve better.
Imagine coverage being only dev interviews.

Our blood is the cheapest on Earth.

Maybe the real life death and murder of Arab people, day in day out, has become too normalized for the games press to remember that we are human.
Maybe they don't have Arabs on their team, so they can't see the Arabic response to it, and they're unaware of the oversight.

Maybe they're scared of writing against the US government, which is not entirely unfair given the business considerations of US politics or the censorious overreach of the US government regarding its misbehaviour at war.
But that is their job.

Maybe they can't see their own racism in demanding to own the dialogue around critical perspectives on US wars. Criticism on US wars comes from US veterans & US protestors & US widow(er)s & US politicians & US critics & US pacificists.
We are subjects. We don't get to speak.

Whatever it is, the games press failed the Arab/Muslim community today. In sharing only interviews with the creator of Six Days of Fallujah over the past week, with only US/Western criticism - even where the pushback was convincing and strong - they failed to give us a voice.

You might ask, Rami, why do you think they would reach out to *you*. You're Egyptian, not Iraqi.
I think so because whenever games press needs anything Arab or Muslim, they come to me. Because I know any Iraqi developer the games press would know - if not directly, indirectly.

If any of us had been asked to speak, I would probably be aware. But since I am not aware of anybody, I can guarantee you that either nobody was asked, or so few were asked that as a whole, it slipped under my radar.

Because most of the time, that request gets forwarded from that developer to me. It is too risky for industry Arabs, Muslims, brown people to speak out in public. Because in the end, the US remains critical to gamedev, and the US will deny you access if you speak ill of it.

Remember that the US now demands five years of social media information to enter the US. Remember the US will reject brown people at the border if someone sent you a US-critical Whatsapp picture that auto-saved to your phone.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/02/denied-entry-united-states-whatsapp/

Most brown people? Most Arabs? Muslims? We run into industry racism and the reality of a Western-centric industry hard enough that most of us don't get to say "if the US wants to ban me it is what it is, I have my opportunities".
I'm one of the lucky few because I was indie.

So if I got no requests from the press, no requests from fellow developers to pick up on their requests, no requests to connect anyone with the press, and I see no articles with our voices - that means there was no effort to hear us speak. It is that simple.

And thus the cycle continues: brown people get murdered, US people speak. They speak of how hard it is to see your country go to a false war. They speak of how it's about justice for the veterans, and the veterans speak of how war is an abomination.
My people die in silence.

In a way, this is the same treatment Six Days of Fallujah itself gives us: we are subject, filtered through US perspective for nuance, only given a speaking role if the story aligns. We never get to set the direction of conversation. We never get to speak. While we are dying.

You see press sending out articles without a single Arab voice on their site, or in the article? They're like Six Days in Fallujah.
You see someone tweeting their US hot take without letting an Arab speak or demanding to hear one? They're like Six Days in Fallujah.

So yesterday I pointed out that I saw no reach-out from the press, and since several folks have reached out to correct that. Some freelance writers who have to pitch the idea, one employed writer who saw my tweet. One employed writer who was asked by a mutual friend what's up.

Some podcasts have reached out, too. But for the major platforms, the websites, podcasts, livestreams? Nothing.
As of yet, the biggest request to talk I've received remains the podcast a Gamergater who was forced to go solo after no one wanted to deal with his shit anymore.

But we needed an Arab to spend ten years building an audience on Twitter to lose his shit on Twitter visibly enough for anyone to even consider that WE SHOULD HAVE A FUCKING SAY IN THE MURDER OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF US.
And even then I had to ask for it, beg for it.

Games media, you write how Six Days in Fallujah removes Arab agency. Talk of how the game turns us into silenced props and our deaths into a context rather than a subject. How it is not letting victims speak their truth, while the perpetrators speak their hurts.
You do the same.

You don't have to talk to me, but you can't put the creator of that game on your front-page without an Iraqi and/or Arab and/or Muslim voice anywhere. You wouldn't for a game that misrepresented the real-life murder of hundreds of thousands in any other minority that way.

You have to be better than this. You have to be. Because every time you fail, the propaganda works. We are dehumanized. We are subject. Our deaths a US context without our voices. We are target. And the next time the US wants to bomb us, popular opinion will kill us again.

You have to be better because international media failed to save the lives lost in Fallujah, Iraq.
Now the life, freedom, & dignity of 2 billion people still alive today -including my own- partially depends on your ability to show us as full human.
Will you fall short again?

Spare me another moment of coverage of Six Days -or any game in our culture, where you kill our people- without us. If your team doesn't speak the language, fix it. If you don't know us, fix it. Let us speak.
Be better than Six Days in Fallujah.
Please.
A fan of your work.

To reiterate, Rami is a lifelong European, his dad being from Egypt.

As an aside, see that bit about "the podcast of a Gamergater"? That's his response to an offer from Colin Moriarty, certainly not a "Gamergater," but rather a game journalist and internet media personality who, in similar fashion to Gina Carano from The Mandalorian, was thrown out of Greg Miller's video game and pop culture media group Kinda Funny for being moderately conservative:

As it happened, there were some things said in Rami's rant above that ticked off his own Leftist social circle, and it's not just him complaining about game journalists who obviously can never do wrong. Can you guess where his mistake is? It's the part at the beginning where he places his preferred victim status above black people's.

Cue confrontation with Gita Jackson, an awful game journalist from VICE and formerly Kotaku:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1362104867284807680.html

i don't have to imagine this.
https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/1362104781528059906

imagine a slave going overboard during a storm, and then another and another, because they are all chained to each other. all of them will drown. that's just one ship, one ship of thousands. that's the legacy i carry.
then! imagine that all the forms of popular music and dances and plays and stories that you create during generations of slavery are stolen by your masters. except your masters literally dress up as you, painting their faces with burnt cork, making you look as stupid as possible.

imagine that this trend of minstrelsy lasts so long that full color television sitcoms like amos and andy are literally based on them! that the entertainment industry as a whole sees black people as absolutely empty entertainment to either steal from or openly mock.
imagine that this is so pervasive that over a hundred years after the end of slavery, one of the few black directors able to make his own movies on his own terms makes a satirical movie about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMZ6zp-3oGY

imagine a video game comes out where you just slaughter black person after black person and your boyfriend buys it for you and tells you that it's not a big deal when you complain.
imagine having to write this.
https://kotaku.com/what-its-like-to-write-about-race-and-video-games-1832886047

he blocked me

that makes me two for two on "known industry figures calling for change that block me when i tell them they're being anti-black"

it's literally black history month

With this among other angry responses from people who are ordinarily his buddies, Rami went ballistic:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1362094548604907528.html

ok literally going to redo that entire thread because folks just refuse to talk about arab murder and execution

literally anyt fucking excuse

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE THOUSAND OF MY PEOPLE DEAD

EVERY FUCKING YEAR BY YOUR ARMIES

AND YOU FUCKING DARE

fucking block me

get the fuck off of my timeline with this shit if you read "185000" fucking executed by white phosphorus

shot in a mosque

and that's ONE FUCKING CITY

in TEN FUCKING YEARS

IN YOUR FUCKING MOVIES WITH HOORAH USA

BLACK HAWK DOWN HOORAH

if you can't for ONE MOMENT see an arab man broken by fucking decades of propaganda where killing my people is RAGDOLL PHYSICS and UNDERSCORED WITH HEROIC MUSIC and not understand how that is UNIQUELY AN ARAB AND MUSLIM PAIN

if you can't for ONE FUCKING MOMENT SHUT THE FUCK ABOUT MY ENTIRE CONTINENT BEING RAZED FOR OIL SO YOUR FUCKING NICE BIG FUCKING CARS DRIVE WELL AS WE GET FUCKED BY THE ECHOES OF YOUR COLONIALISM

then fuck off and block me

you dare make this about ANYTHING BUT THE EXACT FUCKING THING I AM TALKING ABOUT and I will fucking block you

because millions of us are dead and we are not counted, we are not cared for, we don't have any commemorative day, we have nothing but the brains of our kids on the street between our feet and our lands in smoke and every "civilized" country on earth passing laws to FUCK US

I will redo the exact thread, with two tweets removed to stop the distraction from it. If anyone dares to change the subject, I will block them, no matter how just or fair the reason is. 185,000 civilians in one city murdered because of a lie to make your fuel cheap. Shut. Up.

any fucking US-ian open their mouth I swear to god

any of you I swear to god I do not care who you are or what your race is or what your gender is or what your creed is or whatever it is
literally a single US-ian open their mouth

shut the fuck up and listen to somebody outside of your country about their fucking hurts for ONCE IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE
fuck, ok, again, thread.

I fucked the copy-paste of the thread, so no thread.
Short version: Games media do better than Six Days of Fallujah and let an Arab speak. How the fuck is all I'm seeing dev interviews instead of Arab voices. That's it. The rest is lost.

And then he deleted his Twitter account shortly thereafter. But he'll probably just come back again within the month, in which case all of his tweets will be available directly again. We'll see.

P.S., I wish I could link to this post in my OP, but it looks like I can no longer edit that.

 

[A_Callow_Youth]

Is it still a JULAY! if they left on their own?

 

[AMHOLIO]

DELETE FUCKING EVERYTHING

On the one hand America and twitter's racial politics are garbage and stacking "muh slavery" (which was horrible but 150 years ago) above "muh war" (which happened within the past 20 years) is fucking weird and ass of them. On the other hand Mr. Rami is a european who has european privilege, his egyptian half of his family are the ones who could honestly speak out like this. Not only that, the man's head seems up his own ass which is not a good look for anyone.

if you can't for ONE FUCKING MOMENT SHUT THE FUCK ABOUT MY ENTIRE CONTINENT

....your family is Egyptian. That's on Africa. Iran Iraq etc are technically part of asia. You are in the netherlands. You are still technically eurotrash depending on whether they're counting Asia and Europe as one and the same or not.

Also congrats to him for purchasing a continent with all his game dev money, hope he enjoys it.

any of you I swear to god I do not care who you are or what your race is or what your gender is or what your creed is or whatever it is
literally a single US-ian open their mouth

Ooops, this is where he double fucked up. He told black people(and black people alone probably) to shut up. I'm sure a lot of Arabic speakers in the usa will pop in and talk about their experiences but its too late. The damage is done. The white sjws see it as an attack on race. He's alt right now.

shut the fuck up and listen to somebody outside of your country about their fucking hurts for ONCE IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE
fuck, ok, again, thread.

Reeeeee

I don't give a shit about a eurotrash. I give a shit about the person currently or formerly living their for most of their life. Put your dad on, junior. Edit: or, put on people from your side of the family in Egypt on. OR, maybe put a fucking Iraqi on you dipshit. They can share the same opinion as you, but they can actually fucking claim to be affected by the goddamn battle instead of reee by proxy. My friends taught me not all people from the same region are a monolith. I don't think Iraqi citizens would say an Egyptian is a subsitute for an actual iraqi. That's like saying a Frenchman is a substitute for a Pole.

I kinda feel bad for him. He's learning people don't care about him for his actual opinions, they care that he's "african" and successful and that's it. They're only here to use him. That must burn something fierce.

Is it still a JULAY! if they left on their own?

I mean he did sperg out so I count it as honorary at the very least. !

 

[L50LasPak]

I think a realistic war game where there's a lot of downtime and tedium would be an interesting idea but i'm not sure how well combat would work with that scenario. A player wouldn't be able to hone their skills in any way and then would just get straight up tossed into battle where a wound of any kind would mean they're taken out of the action. It would be almost unplayable and who completely wreck the pace of the game.

I also of course lack faith in the developers doing this idea any kind of justice. Even if the negative PR just somehow magically never existed; this game was doomed back when it was announced and is equally if not more doomed today.

 

[The tired cat]

Sooo..I'm trying to figure out what gameplay is this game gonna have, 'cause most my brain goes too is like a tactical squad game like Full Spectrum Warrior was.

 

[Serbian Peacekeepers]

Sooo..I'm trying to figure out what gameplay is this game gonna have, 'cause most my brain goes too is like a tactical squad game like Full Spectrum Warrior was.

Probably gonna play like other main stream tactical games , maybe rainbow six inspired.