I used to believe what I was doing was right, that it needed to be done and the only way was with a gun. I was wrong. As a rookie, I was eager to fight, some might say green. With time, with experience, that changed. I went from being a greenhorn to a veteran in such a short time, it doesn’t seem real; all from what you could call my first blooding, when the greenhorn was introduced to red; oddly, though, now I think back I don’t recall there was any great amount of that spilled… strange the tricks the mind plays sometimes, hmm? It was a beach at Normandy… where I ran past, ran from, the screams of men I’d never met and never would in a dawn where the world seemed to shake, the air thrummed with the presence of death.

I’ve seen countless battles since then, so many I’ve forgotten how intense that one was. I’ve gotten a knack of almost blanking out the faces of the men I’ve killed; men that, if I were to stop and think, probably had the same motives as me – to fight for what they thought was right. But time has an ironic way of filling in the “gaps” in memory… and technology makes the anonymity of combat harder to accomplish. The faces are more vivid now.

And so it was that I was horrified to learn of a game that was set in the world’s latest war, one that is still in progress. A game called Six Days in Fallujah. Make no mistake, I used to play war-set FPSs with little thought of the horrors that inspired them, horrors that gave us all the freedom we have to play such games. As I have grown up, that thought has made me ever more uneasy. To peddle death as entertainment? Hmm… as long as it’s aliens or zombies, it’s not so bad. But “people” that may or may not be based on actual people? “Events” based on real events? No thanks. I can maybe push my comfort zone to such games set in “near-future” scenarios or even warzones that are very loosely inspired on real events (and, believe me, I’m aware that smacks of hypocrisy), but even that is something I’m starting to baulk at. And the increased realism of the faces of my “enemies” as we go deeper into the Uncanny Valley makes it harder to… ignore.

As the title says, the setting is six days during the Second Battle of Fallujah; the perspective is that of a squad from the 3rd Battalion 1st Marines. The developer, Atomic Games, is stating the intent of the game is to “create the most realistic military shooter available”. I’m not so sure about that as a feature of the game is apparently the use of recharging health… I wasn’t aware the US military had such a thing. Not only that, the battle itself caused the death, injury or displacement of countless civilians. The controversy of the source material is such that, after much backlash, Konami stepped down as the publisher.

With the apparent discrepancy between the stated aim of Atomic Games and a soundbite attributed to a Konami employee, Anthony Coutts – “At the end of the day, it’s just a game” – I wonder which side of the fence the game will land on. In a way, much as the game’s concept makes me uneasy at this stage, I hope it will deal with the events in a mature, non-exploitative way. That it will – as many of the greatest war films do – be something of an indictment of what war does to men. I’m not sure it will.