America can be a scary place.

I've been watching the E3 press conferences unfurl on TV. There's been a lot of genuinely cool shit on display, a lot of casual shovelware (Good dog, Skittles! Skittles, that tickles!), and a bunch of surprises. But I think it was the EA presentation that made me think... maybe a bit too much.

A bit of history:
On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked in terrorist operations by Al Qaeda, a trans-national terrorist organization. Thousands died as the tower complex was completely demolished in the first successful attack against the nation on its own soil since Pearl Harbor. American citizens were immediately consumed by fear and rage and the Bush administration, which had run on a platform of minimal foreign involvement, suddenly found itself obliged to respond to this call to action.

Unlike Pearl Harbor, where Japan attacked the United States, this was not the aggressive effort of any particular nation. The terrorists themselves came from a variety nations, among them Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, funded and trained by many others. However, our military, having been effectively formed towards the needs of the Second World War, and shaped by the Cold War, is geared pretty much solely towards nation-to-nation conflict. Our cultural milieu also tends to phrase wars in these terms, so someone had to be invaded to appease the demand of the electorate.

Now, attacking Saudi Arabia wouldn't have made much sense. They're an economic ally, and while, certainly, Osama Bin Laden had close ties with particular members of the Saudi royal family, they, like the other Arabian kingdoms (like the UAE), are an enemy of Al Queada. Likewise, Iraq, a secular totalitarian regime, was an enemy of the terrorist group. The predominantly Shia Iran was also a target of the radical Sunni Al Queada. These nations, most directly threatened, also stood as potential valuable military allies as they possessed, and some continue to possess, vast amounts of valuable military intelligence on the organization.

Afghanistan was not a novice when it came to conflict. A previous war destabilized Soviet nationalism and fueled intense dissent in even small cities, like Samara, in a nation that had previously never tolerated it. The Soviet loss shaped the Islamic guerrilla renaissance, demonstrating that a small number of people could take on and defeat a super power. Further victories against the West, like the defeat of the US in Somalia in 1993, and active combat on European soil during the Yugoslavian dissolution through the 90's (Muslim populations suffered some of the worst atrocities in that war and elite guerrilla units, arriving from the Middle East, were critical in their defense, ultimately sparking increased NATO intervention, for fear of increased radical Islamic presence on the continent) aided the cause of global, trans-national militarism.

Of course, the US invasion of Afghanistan did little to further American efforts to destabilize terrorist strength. A virtual standstill for nearly a decade, it has only further united and radicalized terrorist opposition. In fact, it was largely the abysmal failure of this invasion that prompted the Bush administration to invade Iraq, to divert attention from the Afghani quagmire. After all, the first Gulf War was quick and dirty and launched Bush Sr's approval ratings into the high 90's. Americans wanted war, and this was a means onto some manner of satisfaction (a road that'd be paved with lies and misrepresentations). (Of course, this wasn't without a ton of internal fallout. The blatant deception and manipulation of intelligence data to make WMD claims made our 30+ intelligence agencies look absolutely inept. The National Intelligence Estimate, a summary that reflects collected base intel among the US's 30+ intelligence agencies, in 2007 demonstrated a refusal among agencies to submit to the Bush administration's desire to designate Iran as a nuclear threat and declared that Iran had neither a nuclear program nor the capability, an act of internal dissent.)

The whole discussion of Iran as it relates to US foreign policy and American foreign wars is a complicated beast in itself, and isn't the point here. The point, Afghanistan is and was a total shit show. It is not a good war, it is not a noble war, it is not a worthwhile war. To see EA launch an Afghanistan game, where you the player gets to pick a side and have a rousing skirmish in your favorite Aghani warzone just felt kind of... oddly morbid.

They announcement of the EA Gun Club was comparably... weird. It's not that war games can't be fun or interesting; World War II games are kinda cool, futuristic combat's pretty sweet, fictional covert ops stuff is often fun. The difference, though, is the narrative being propagated. As gray as WWII was, and black and white our views of it tend to be, our mythologizing of it doesn't really shape our views of current events or foreign policy as much as these newer conflicts. An Afghanistan game confounds fiction with reality and glorifies militarism in a conflict where such an attitude has been ruinous to the health and prosperity of the United States. The Gun Club, in its language and tone, has similar hawkish overtones... it almost felt like EA is trying to write a very particular cultural narrative.

I understand that there's nothing nefarious going on in EA studios... game devs, game writers and producers, they tend not to be the most worldly or literate people. I say this as someone with several dozen game cases scattered across my coffee table. It's innocent but also kind of irresponsible. The advantage that games have is that, because they're not taken as seriously as an entertainment medium, like film and television, they're not frequently the targets of intellectual criticism. I think, knowing how wide their influence is, how many kids and young adults play these games, the sort of influence they'll have on policy in the future, they have a particular responsibility to be intelligent about these sorts of things. That goes beyond "honoring the soldiers", a phrase they tend to drop every now and again, but honoring the reality.