Make Strategy, Not War in Iranian PC Game
Odd. You don't often see news briefs on upcoming games that begin "In a bid to counter the West's cultural onslaught and in order to promote the Islamic-Iranian culture..." That's from Tehran-based Taliya News, reporting on a strategy game developed by the Multimedia Office of Tebyan (a "cultural and media institute") and due to be released on May 4th titled "Saving the Port."
Search and news site Iran Mania suggests the game's full title may be "Port Rescue: Defense in the Firing Line," that it takes place in Iran during World War II (I'm guessing 1941), and that "the usual high level of violence found in world games has been replaced by thinking." (Meaning "abstract analysis," presumably; both sources read a bit clumsily, so caveat translator.)
According to Iran Mania, you play the game in seven stages. After a situational report, your enter the "marine war," confront the enemy (Britain? The Soviet Union?), meet with the enemy commander, attack the enemy with your crew at midnight, and destroy the enemy's air force to ultimately safeguard Anzali Port in northern Iran. The faster you play, the more points you get: the player with the highest score gets a medal, with four medals deciding the winner. Since "destroying an enemy's air force" still sounds like violence to me, I'm assuming it's somehow abstracted, and that what the story disparagingly calls "usual high level of violence" actually means violence that's "graphic" or "visual" in nature.
Whatever the content or inspiration behind the game, it does raise a few interesting questions. First, should games be explicitly (as opposed to secondarily) political? Second, at what point--and I'm not pointing the finger at anyone here--do (overtly political) video games cease to be "games" and become "propaganda"? And third, with video games exemplifying an increasingly effective way to interactively engage just about anyone, anywhere, will the future battle for so-called "hearts and minds" be fought in virtual worlds?
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I guess the case could be made that games have been a form of propaganda, however unintentionally, for a while -- remember the early-'80s game Kabul Spy? And if Missile Command wasn't a nod to the Cold War, I don't know what was.
But there's no reason games can't be political. They just have to be good games while they're at it. The arcade game Total Carnage was a hilarious satire of the previous Iraq War, but it was also a top-notch action game.
I don't see how this game is propaganda. Just because the campaign is from a non-US perspective doesn't make it unfair or anything. Look at all the games in which some massive Western power faces off against the enemy, or in which Earth fights aliens (who must clearly be savages). Freedom Fighters had no justification for its alternate-history storyline. But it was (no, is) a great game.
what about the US game ordered by the Marines or smtg ?
You had to kill some bunchs of arabs and then slaughter saddam hussein.. well i *think* i can say its propaganda..
so why nobody criticised that game ?
why in 90% of US adventure games/movies bad guys are russians/germans/Vietnamese/arabs.. ?
stop stereotyping everything ! like if u r french u r romantic, if ur british then ur like a snob, if ur muslim ur terrorist, if ur black or mexican ur a lazy m*******er who?s probably in a gang...
u gotta wake up guys...