Justifying Six Days in Fallujah

When it releases, Six Days in Fallujah will be one of the most controversial games ever made. Dealing with the War in Iraq, its immediacy is unprecedented, and with it, Atomic Games can single-handedly change our expectations for video games.

The animated documentary Waltz with Bashir parallels Six Days in lots of ways. With any luck, Six Days will treat its subject matter as seriously as Waltz, because in order to be justified, it has to become more than just a video game. It has to paint the reality of war, not glorify it the way so many games do.

Video games are essentially, well, “games,” so it’s easy for them to trivialize death and war. Understandably, there’s been outcry against Six Days; if handled incorrectly, it will insult the memory of those who died in the Second Battle of Fallujah.

So Six Days has a tall order: it must transcend the genre of video games as we currently know it, even become a documentary, which, Atomic Games says, is one of their goals.

The company has the potential to do it, the same way director Ari Folman did with his animated film Waltz with Bashir. Animated films are usually made for kids, but Waltz explores the circumstances surrounding the Sabra and Shatila Massacre during the Lebanon War. Ari Folman lived through the massacre, and with Waltz, his goal was to illustrate the horrors of war.

Both Waltz and Six Days use underappreciated mediums to get their point across. Both are being made with firsthand knowledge of the incidents. They’re also more than an old shoot’em up way to pass the time. They’re dealing with real people and events. Settling for anything less than a meaningful portrayal is unacceptable.

Six Days needs to go further than say, Grand Theft Auto. It needs to use the story of Fallujah for good reason, because the world needs more than an ultra-realistic first person shooter that’s simply a lot of fun. Atomic Games is pushing the limits of what constitutes “acceptable” content for video games, and I’d hate to see it spark controversy for the mere sake of it.

At the end of Waltz, no one wants to join the army.

Unfortunately, as of right now, it looks as though it’s only another FPS, albeit one with destructible walls and more accurate depictions of combat. But what’s the point? Will prepubescent teenagers play Six Days and think, “Oh, awesome, I want to shoot some Iraqis!” or, “Man, just give me a gun, I could do that.”

Last I heard, most families of the deceased weren’t willing to have their loved ones’ lives and deaths recreated in the game. But we need to truly understand the struggles of a soldier throughout those six days, what they lost, the gravity of their decisions, the ambiguity of war’s morality — as in Waltz, we need to understand these things if this game is going to become all that it can be.

And Six Days can make this come alive in a way we’ve never experienced before. It has the potential. This is a game that needs to be made, and if Atomic Games make this work, using Fallujah as a backdrop will be worth it after all.