From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

GamePolitics: South Korea Lifts Military Games Ban

A few weeks ago (forgive me -- I was in a holiday K-hole) Gamepolitics noted this tidbit from the Korea Times:

Government to Lift Ban on Games on North Korea

Military and action games dealing with North Korean politics will be available in South Korea next year, the game censorship agency said.

Kim Key-man, the chief of the Game Rating Board of Korea, said last week that it will allow the sale of such games after carefully reviewing their contents, to guarantee freedom of expression.

So far, games like ``Ghost Recon 2’’ and ``Mercenary’’ have been banned in South Korea as the government is worried they may damage the relationship between the two Koreas. The two games depict imaginary war scenarios between North Korea and China,
and between North Korea and the United States, respectively.

``Through propaganda, entertainment and movies, Americans have shown everyone their hatred for us,’’ North Korea’s Tongil newspaper said about ``Ghost Recon 2.’’ ``This may be just a game to them now, but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths.’’             

Spicy copy from Tongil there.

South Korea announced its censorship of games depicting North Korea as enemies only a year ago, as noted back in Dec 2005 in the New York Times. The Times stressed that the South Koreans didn't necessarily approve of seeing North Koreans depicted as one-dimensional villains, and wished to avoid factual inaccuracies:

"Ghost Recon 2 assumes that North Korea has nuclear weapons at a time when we are unable to verify their possession of nuclear weapons," [South Korean game ratings board member Lee Chan Gyeong] added. "If we were to allow distribution, the users might perceive an unreal opinion, one that is unfavorable in an international setting."

Well, guess that argument's outdated...

Link: GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » South Korea Lifts Ban on Military Games.

Kim ist Zuper-Cool!

Conventional wisdom that Germans can't do comedy is hereby dispelled by the appearance of Super Mario parody video Super Kim, a dark spoof of Kim Jong-Il's quest for nuclear weapons. And now there's this great English subtitled version. Don't miss it!

I'm sure Kim would like this a lot more than Ghost Recon 2, which features North Koreans as bad guys. After that came out in 2004, one North Korean newspaper wrote: "Through propaganda, entertainment and movies, [Americans] have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now, but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths."

(Via: GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il Lampooned in Mario Parody Video.)

From Sun Tzu to XXXbox

From Sonshi.com: paris-hilton-suntzu.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x521 pixels).

Text and the City

At Grandtextauto, Mary Flanagan writes:

There is a great set of posts readers may wish to check out at the IDC list about situated technologies, ubiquity, games, war, and the ISEA interactive city project. Insightful stuff & worth the read.

  Quoting one post by Catherine D'Ignazio regarding ISEA 2006' s "Interactive City" theme: 

The festival's imagination of the "Interactive City" seemed to be characterized by a spirit of play which feels increasingly oriented towards middle-class consumer spectacle and the experience economy...

my questions to the artists, the organizers, the attendees and  everyone else is - is psychogeography/locative media work simply R&D  for a new generation of entertainment spectacle? Or, what are we  actually trying to do with these ideas of "play" in urban space? Who  gets to play? And what about the interactive cities in Iraq and  Lebanon and elsewhere? Why didn't we address war, security,  militarization and terrorism as aspects of the contemporary  interactive city? For me, running around making the city into a  sandbox, a playground or a playing field feels increasingly  irrelevant and irresponsible.

Second Life for Israelis

Wagner James Au does "embedded reporting" from within the online world of Second Life via his blog New World Notes. Recently, he sought out Israeli SLers within the game to get their views on the current conflict.  

The "SL Israel" group is several dozen strong, primarily comprised of Israeli Residents, and when their country's conflict with Hezbollah reached a savage apex over the weekend, I sought them out, to get their perspectives-- on the situation in particular, and how it's impacted their Second Life.

For the record, I also searched for Lebanese Residents, but was not as lucky; consider this an open invitation for Residents in Lebanon to contact me, so I can give their perspectives equal time.

Au's interviewees include a software developer who's also an intelligence officer for the IDF, who built an area within SL called "Big Shalom," pictured above, during the early days of the bombings. Big Shalom includes Israeli memorabilia like "the Israeli flag and large photos of the country's leaders, past and present, it also features links to webpages on Israeli history, a comment box, and free copies of IDF uniforms." Also interviewed are Israelis with a variety of outlooks who live in London, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

This isn't the first time Au has looked into how real-world war impacts the virtual-world society. Previous posts have included a visit to Camp Darfur, a memorial-cum-infosite on the genocide in Sudan that's currently guarded from racist vandals by superheroes, and a look at Hiroshima Garden, built for SL's version of Burning Man to mark the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Au discusses his reportage in an interview at We Make Money Not Art.

Link: New World Notes: THE VIEW FROM JERUSALEM.

Visualizing Death

Via We Make Money Not Art: Moiz Syed's "simple and extremely sad visualization of the proportionality of deaths in the conflict between Isreal & Lebanon. The page is updated using the numbers taken from BBC's coverage on the conflict."

The site has already inspired a response that uses similar graphics to visualize US deaths in Iraq versus Iraqi deaths.

Link: we make money not art: Israeli/Lebanese coffin counter.

Hasan Nasrallah web games

From Israeli news site Ynet comes word of two new anti-Nasrallah web games.

In one game, created by Amir Lotan, you send an F-15 to bomb the Hezbollah leader as his head appears at random on a Google Map of southern Lebanon. Ynet suggests that "you must gamble" to win (that is, bomb at random until you hit him). However, I found it easiest to hit him if you only wait for him to appear at the very bottom of the screen. Perhaps the game's difficulty is a comment on Israeli military strategy, though it's unclear.

In another game, you bomb Nasrallah (here depicted as a clucking turkey) with a variety of missiles, including a broken toilet, a pig's head, an old refrigerator, and a dead peace dove. Cathartic ridicule, along the lines of the old whack Osama games from the post-9/11 days, or the celebrity assassin games from which they evolved.

The Tournament of Shadows

From Guardian Gamesblog:

Bambino_Tostare has sent in his thoughts on a recent article from the BBC, suggesting that a round-up of the continuing war in Afghanistan is awfully similar to the design and format of real-time strategy games. Indeed, upon consideration Auntie Beeb has reduced the five-year "conflict" to a list of the factions, their weaponry, their vehicles and the country's terrain. Sections include "mobility" (with sub-categories including, defences, strengths, weaknesses and cost), "key weapon" (with subcategories including year of development, caliber, magazine capacity, loaded weight and range) and "manpower" (with subcategories including, main weapons, strengths and weaknesses). Creepy

The comments so far are also interesting

OfficePest: Does anyone find it odd that it's creepy looking at this now, but you can guarantee that in the not-too-distant future there will be a game based upon this war? There are games for pretty much all historical battles. Hundreds of WW1 and WW2 games. Yet these don't seem creepy to us now. Maybe we just need time to get over the horror of a war, then we can re-enact it in games without feeling distaste.

Goodnessme: Battlefield 2 IS set there. Though they never come about and say it, and the MEC have more weaponary than the Taliban, the setting for the game is pretty much USA vrs. generic terrorist state (or China). Actually, maybe they don't mention the country it's set in as that would only confuse the American players...And, yeh, I do find it a bit creepy. But I find COD, Battlefield Vietnam etc. a bit creepy in that respect, too. I guess the good thing about these games is they've certainly destroyed any notions I never had of going to war. You've just got to look at your kill/death ration and think; 'ah, but my death limit is 1 in real life.. man my stats would suck.'

Well looks like gamers were thinking about this pretty soon after the US invasion and one company announced an Afghanistan title that never got released.

And even earlier. The Brits called their old Central Asian war of intrigue with Russia "The Great Game" (the Russians, with darker poetry, called it "The Tournament of Shadows") and American artist John Klima has explored this angle.

Fracas in Caracas, Bono edition, update

I know I've written about this already, but from the perspective of a New Yorker like myself, there's something so special about the Post's Page Six:

PAGE SIX-Richard Johnson
FAR-LEFTIES SEE RED OVER BONO

July 10, 2006 -- BONO, the Irish rock star touted for a Nobel Peace Prize because of his advocacy for Third World debt relief, is being blasted by lefties for investing in a video game that depicts Venezuela as a banana republic led by a "power-hungry tyrant."

The president of Venezuela is, in fact, Hugo Chavez, a darling of the left not only for his Marxist domestic policies, but his virulent anti-American diatribes.

Bono is in the hot seat because a private equity firm he established invested $300 million in Pandemic Studios, the Los Angeles-based maker of the game, "Mercenary 2: World in Flames."

Players assume the role of a mercenary sent to a fictitious Venezuela, where a dictator has seized control of the country and its oil. The gun-for-hire is instructed, "If you can see it, you can buy it, steal it, or blow the living crap out of it."

Jeff Cohen - author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media" who's just back from a trip to Venezuela - told Page Six, "It's hard to fathom why an artist who claims to be about new paths to justice for developing countries would be mixed up in a computer game that glorifies stale, old mercenary approaches."

Dave Lindorff - co-author with Barbara Olshansky of "The Case for Impeachment," just released by St. Martin's Press - told us, "This kind of right-wing war game plays to the propaganda message that the [George] Bush White House has been pushing for years: that Chavez is a dictator oppressing his people . . . Bono should use his financial interest in the company to kill it, or better, he should pull out entirely as an investor, and condemn such imperialist garbage."

Gabriela Ramirez, a stalwart supporter of Chavez in the Venezuelan National Assembly, told the Associated Press the game "sends a message to Americans, 'You have a danger next door, here in Latin America, and action must be taken.' It's a justification for an imperialist aggression."

But it's Chavez who sounds aggressive. He started recruiting and training a people's militia earlier this year, claiming it would fight the "war of resistance" against the U.S. invasion he predicts will come. In this fantasy, he's the Che Guevara-type fearless martyr. Maybe he should design his own video game and get Bono to finance it.

Bono's reps did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Fracas in Caracas, Bono edition

From Techdirt:

It seems that U2 lead singer Bono just can't get out of the tech related news world lately. Last week there was talk about "drafting" him into the fight against the recording industry's stupidity, but this week the controversy concerns his association with violent video games. The folks at Digg highlight the uproar over Bono's association with the new video game we mentioned recently whose story line is about invading Venezuela. Bono, you'll recall, became a celebrity venture capitalist a couple years ago. While we haven't heard much about his actual involvement, the firm invested in a video game company last year -- which leads to the connection people are now complaining about

And in other Bono news, via BoingBoing: