Re: Six Days in Fallujah
You raise a valid point here which I agree with - all media is political. However, where we disagree is that I think that accepting that is all the more reason to analyze and criticize the values of any given work.
The AAA video game industry in particular has a problem where it wants to pretend the games its releases aren't political texts; rather the big companies pretend their products are mere disposable consumer products, not art to be discussed and analyzed, in a weak attempt to blanket shield themselves from informed criticism and tough questions.
Ubisoft in particular is one of the the biggest offenders of this idea recently, what with The Division very openly and loudly supporting the 2nd Amendment in its fiction to justify the rampant use and presence of automatic weapons and military equipment in real-world US cities, Far Cry 5 lifting a MAGA-adjacent middle American town in which to set its story, and Tom Clancy's Elite Squad co-opting raised-fist imagery (commonly associated with black protest movements in the United States) for its bad-guy organization (albeit this has since been removed after a lot of obvious and justified criticism). Ubisoft will tell you til they are blue in the face that their games aren't political whatsoever, yet they continue to lift political imagery and real-world discourse to give their games an air of authenticity so they sell more copies. It's entirely disingenuous, and the only reason they do it is because they don't want the uncomfortable conversation, they just want you to give them your money, shoot the bad guys without thinking about it, and buy the in-game cosmetics to look cool with your friends.
Six Days In Fallujah has the same problem as those Ubisoft games, but to a greater degree. It directly engages with political ideas far more directly than any Call Of Duty, Battlefield, or any Ubisoft game by using the real-world setting and events of an actual United States military operation to lend authenticity to its action. However, it irresponsibly omits any uncomfortable part of that history which is inconvenient to their making as much money as possible, so much so that the story of their nonfiction game is arguably an outright lie. That is a legitimate problem, it deserves calling out, and it is not just uninformed "hating" or whatever.
Informed criticism is a valid response to a political text. Any work of art is a political text. Video games are works of art. Since video games are art and all art is political, all games are political texts. Therefore, informed criticism about video games is valid.
Rather than just dismiss critics as "haters" or "just looking to make controversy", we should be more willing to engage with problematic beliefs, so we can address them and fix them. We'd all be better off for it if we would just listen for a second.
In this thread I've got people insulting my manhood, my intelligence, and accusing me of hating my country because I relayed some verified facts about a real-world event which made them uncomfortable. Why is that okay, but me identifying the problematic value set promoted by a piece of media as problematic not okay? How do you begin to conclude that I, the person complaining about the problematic thing, am the one who is wrong here?
You raise a valid point here which I agree with - all media is political. However, where we disagree is that I think that accepting that is all the more reason to analyze and criticize the values of any given work.
The AAA video game industry in particular has a problem where it wants to pretend the games its releases aren't political texts; rather the big companies pretend their products are mere disposable consumer products, not art to be discussed and analyzed, in a weak attempt to blanket shield themselves from informed criticism and tough questions.
Ubisoft in particular is one of the the biggest offenders of this idea recently, what with The Division very openly and loudly supporting the 2nd Amendment in its fiction to justify the rampant use and presence of automatic weapons and military equipment in real-world US cities, Far Cry 5 lifting a MAGA-adjacent middle American town in which to set its story, and Tom Clancy's Elite Squad co-opting raised-fist imagery (commonly associated with black protest movements in the United States) for its bad-guy organization (albeit this has since been removed after a lot of obvious and justified criticism). Ubisoft will tell you til they are blue in the face that their games aren't political whatsoever, yet they continue to lift political imagery and real-world discourse to give their games an air of authenticity so they sell more copies. It's entirely disingenuous, and the only reason they do it is because they don't want the uncomfortable conversation, they just want you to give them your money, shoot the bad guys without thinking about it, and buy the in-game cosmetics to look cool with your friends.
Six Days In Fallujah has the same problem as those Ubisoft games, but to a greater degree. It directly engages with political ideas far more directly than any Call Of Duty, Battlefield, or any Ubisoft game by using the real-world setting and events of an actual United States military operation to lend authenticity to its action. However, it irresponsibly omits any uncomfortable part of that history which is inconvenient to their making as much money as possible, so much so that the story of their nonfiction game is arguably an outright lie. That is a legitimate problem, it deserves calling out, and it is not just uninformed "hating" or whatever.
We simply live in an era where everyone wants to find controversy in everything for whatever reason. If someone simply disagrees with someone or something they will go out of their way to find anything they can to try and bring that thing/person down a notch if they can.
Rather than just dismiss critics as "haters" or "just looking to make controversy", we should be more willing to engage with problematic beliefs, so we can address them and fix them. We'd all be better off for it if we would just listen for a second.
In this thread I've got people insulting my manhood, my intelligence, and accusing me of hating my country because I relayed some verified facts about a real-world event which made them uncomfortable. Why is that okay, but me identifying the problematic value set promoted by a piece of media as problematic not okay? How do you begin to conclude that I, the person complaining about the problematic thing, am the one who is wrong here?
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