The whole hue and cry raised over Konami’s Six Days in Fallujah makes me wonder why it’s okay to create war games based in the Vietnam War or WW2, but not a simulation of an actual war going on now. Sure there’s the cry of “Too Soon”, but the idea that making a game about a subject automatically trivializes it, doesn’t hold true anymore. Sure some older people hear game and immediately think of Pong or Atari, but computer and console games today can handle serious subjects in a way similar to that of a movie. Yes there are no shortage of shoot and giggle arcade games out there, but there are also games like Far Cry 2, that are up there with serious dramas in handling issues going on in parts of the world today.

The Vietnam War was if anything uglier than the War in Iraq, but EA could release something like Battlefield Vietnam, which is a long way from being respectful of veterans and is nothing more than a shoots and giggles game developed by Swedes who got all their ideas about the Vietnam War from watching Apocalypse Now and Platoon. There’s every sign that Six Days in Fallujah would have been something quite different from Battlefield Vietnam or the numerous Call of Duty or Medal of Honor WW2 shooters that are nothing more than counterstrike maps using a catastrophic world war as a background. Unfortunately however the game industry remains ridiculously oversensitive to criticism, and Konami folded.

Of course I’m sure a year from now some Swedish or Russian or Croatian developer will put together an Iraq War game that is nothing more than a shooter, and will not be the product of consultation with veterans, and will not actually tell a story about the people who were there. But it will fly by under the radar and no one will care very much. And that is the problem.