Frontiers of free enterprise

I didn't see this last week when it came out; I found it last night while looking up a different story. This is a press release and it's posted here in full. No edits. It speaks for itself.

New York - (Business Wire, October 14) - Kuma Reality Games, the company that blends news coverage with interactive game technology to allow players to experience re-creations of real military events, announced today that "Kuma/War: The War On Terror" is now available for the PC at retail outlets nationwide.

"Kuma/War: The War On Terror" is a compilation of some of the most critical battles fought in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning of the war, as released on the Kuma/War online service. The CD-based retail product contains 15 playable missions featuring military hotspots around the world including Mosul, Fallujah and Sadr City and includes units from the 10th Mountain Division, 101st Airborne, and the U.S. Marine Corps as they take on well-armed insurgents, al Qaeda, Taliban fighters, and terrorists throughout the world.

"Kuma/War: The War on Terror" also includes one exclusive mission only available in the retail product, detailing Navy Cross Medal recipient Marine Capt. Brian R. Chontosh and his comrades' extraordinary contribution to Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 25, 2003. Capt. Chontosh, who assisted in the Kuma/War re-creation, is currently stationed in Iraq on active duty with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Buyers of the retail product will also get many improvements over the version previously available online, including speed optimization, Win98 compatibility, new weapons and models, and gameplay enhancements to previously released missions.

"Kuma/War" has been available online since March 2004, and there are currently 23 missions available for play through the online service. Later this week, players will be able to download "John Kerry's Silver Star," the first-ever realistic re-enactment of the controversial events surrounding John Kerry's Silver Star and Vietnam service.

"Kuma/War" provides players with intelligence gathered from news sources around the world and expert military analysis by Kuma's decorated team of military advisors who provide strategic and tactical perspectives on the events. At the start of each mission, players watch a video news show about the event and can view technical specifications for weapons used, a detailed chronology of the battle, and even satellite photos used to model the actual battlefield. Worldwide sources for the intelligence include the Associated Press and declassified Department of Defense documents, among others.

"Kuma/War: The War on Terror" is available at Best Buy and other fine retail outlets nationwide for an MSRP of $19.99 and is rated "M" for mature. An internet connection is not required to play.

Also included with purchase is a one-month FREE subscription to the Kuma/War online service at www.kumawar.com, a $9.99 value. Each month, subscribers can expect to receive at least three new missions online that further explore the explosive situation in Iraq and other conflicts from the war on terror. As a salute to the men and women in uniform who have served their country, Kuma Reality Games will donate $1 of all paid online subscriptions to The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which was created to assist the families of the nation's fallen heroes killed in duty.

Remember when some people were saying "Space Invaders" was violent?

Actually, back in 1988 I wrote a short paper about computer war games for the National Campaign to Stop War Toys. I dismissed things like Space Invaders as harmless "alien bashing" - but I did express concern about other sorts of games up to an including those I called "hotspots,"

because, as the hype for one such game says, they "take place in today’s hotspots," often focusing on Asia, Central America, or the Middle East. ...

[T]he absolute level of violence may be in some purely philosophical way no greater than that found in alien bashing. But the level of realism is far greater and instead of blazing away at cute space creatures who would be resuscitated safe and sound with the next quarter or at the touch of a key on a keyboard, the player is killing realistically-depicted people - indeed, people who are identified as Russian or Libyan or terrorists or agents of the "Red" in the "jungle" or some other currently-popular target.

Which is to say that the "hotspot" games by their very design make sometimes implicit but nonetheless real assertions about real people, real places, and real events. The notion that these games are ethically neutral is quite simply ridiculous on its face. Not only are they ethically charged, they amount to instructional manuals in interpreting the situations to which they refer, making judgments not only about historical events but also current events - and, through that, about the "proper" course of future events. And the lesson taught, the judgment made, is always the same: In any conflict, the US and its allies are right and just, our opponents are wrong and evil, and violence is both an effective and a proper way to deal with them.

There are bucks to be made in pandering to a combination of undifferentiated anxiety and swaggering jingoism and Kuma Reality Games is ready to cash in. But I will say one thing for them: It certainly seems that the assertions they make are not implicit.