Six Days in Fallujah

Recently there has been a bit of controversy over the game Six Days in Fallujah. The game is meant to chronicle the Second Battle of Fallujah that took place in 2004 during the still going Iraq war. Konami agreed to publish it earlier this month, but announced yesterday that they were backing out due to a large public outcry. I, and apparently others, find it strange that a game about World War II can be so popular and rehashed so many times, but changing the setting to Iraq causes a huge uproar. Though, on some level I agree and I’m not entirely sure why.

First, the obvious difference between the Iraq war and WWII is time. One is still very much a part of our lives. It’s in the news fairly regularly, people are still dying every day and it doesn’t show much signs of stopping in the near future. The other ended over sixty years ago, the pain it caused has eased over time, and the majority of people playing games based off it are the grandchildren of the men who fought in it. This seems like kind of a lousy reason, especially considering the smaller scale outcry over Call of Duty 5 taking place in Japan. Despite WWII being so long ago, several people still had problems indiscriminately killing Japanese soldiers.

That leads to my second possibility that WWII is more suitable for games. If you ignore the Japanese side of the war, like most games do, then the fight is solely against the Nazis. They are one of the few groups in history that almost fit as a comic book style villain. They were essentially trying to take over Europe and eradicate an entire group of people from the planet. They were practically the embodiment of evil so the fight against them has been glorified and turned into one of the epic struggles of mankind. Most other wars of the last century have been a bit more convoluted than that to say the least. You could say feeling bad about the Japanese, but mowing down hordes of Germans is hypocritical, but like James says in the CoD5 piece I linked earlier, we draw a disconnect between Germans and Nazis. They aren’t the same two groups of people in our minds anymore.

This seems like the real reason WWII works so much better as entertainment. It would also explain the lack of games set during all the other wars in history. There have been a few here and there, but nothing compared to the sheer number of WWII games out there.

A game like Six Days in Fallujah could work if it took an approach more like Full Metal Jacket or Platoon. It even sounds like that was their original intent, capturing like no war game ever has before the feelings and emotions the soldiers during Fallujah experienced. Konami was definitely advertising the game like that, but once the gameplay footage rolled out it was clear that somewhere along the line they lost their way.