First-person shooters (FPS) have a long complicated history with the American military and adventurism. In CoD4: MW, the gameplay is tight, fast-paced, and fun, yes. But the plot is this insane over-the-top mess of geopolitics where a nuke (that never existed in real life) goes off in a stand-in version of Iraq. One of the characters you keep quantum leaping to and from crawls over broken glass and dies from radiation poisoning at a helicopter crash. Depicting the brutal and empty finality of going on foreign misadventures. When you'd die during non-cinematic fights, the screen would blur and you'd get mind-numbingly depressing quotes like "an F-35 costs 1.2 billion dollars", as it prepared to reload your last checkpoint.

Lately, they have taken to openly collaborating with the military. A lot of recent games tout the realism of having Military advisors show developers how SEALS ops break down doors, or they license specific make and models of guns, or laser-sights, which are often doled out piecemeal in the game world, or during the multiplayer, as you massacre your way hundreds of thousands of times against other Westerners playing the good team and bad team.

This is to say that FPS like Six Days in Fallujah are honestly a dime a dozen. There is nothing fundamentally remarkable about a game developer taking a combat situation and making it a hamster wheel simulation for bored American kids to run through, as they are babysat by their Xbox. But there is some controversy brewing just like in 2005-2008. When this game was initially announced a decade ago, games did not have the respect ($$$) they had today and it was deemed disrespectful to the troops. Now, the controversy is whether knowing what we know about the long list of atrocities that occurred in Iraq (1.2+million dead) AND specific war crimes committed in and around the city of Fallujah, is it appropriate to have a game like this see the light of day?

Given that the developers are claiming this game is "not political commentary", it bodes ill for its reception. An uninspired middling shooter, set in the deadliest episode of the Iraq War and utterly unwillingly to explore in a serious manner the actual crimes committed. It'll be just another shooter where you pop from a crouch and shoot down an alley, and run to a checkpoint, with bugs, and disappearing bodies like any other FPS set in a brown, gray and dusty, Middle East country stand-in. When Roger Ebert was still alive, he once claimed that games would never be "Art". Despite many people arguing and declaring various games to the contrary (and hundreds of death threats from gamers — deaths threats and gamers name a more iconic duo); he stood by that claim. As he says:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

I agree with him on that much. Most games have a finality to them, a success point. Even if the story is "sad". In CoD2 set back in 1940 you end in Berlin waiving the soviet flag, having pushed nazi forces back whence they came. In CoD4 Modern Warfare, you stop the big bad from setting off further nukes. Resident Evil ends with you escaping the zombified mansion. In Journey, you ascend to the tallest mountain peak and into the heavens. In Portal 2, you escape the rogue AI and its lab. What is there to win in Six Days of Fallujah? At what cost? Whose story is worth telling, whether in cinema, photography, painting, or video games? If we haven't reckoned with the crimes of Iraq and Afghanistan, why is it acceptable to depict them in 4k, 60 frames per second?

There have always been games that have certain perverse connotations. Cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, infantilize and oversimplify their dichotomy. Even Chess, with its pawns, and other pieces depicting a world of conflict affecting military and religious offices. But there is a banality about American FPS in general. Games are a team effort, hundreds of people, working thousands of hours, from inception to the final rendering of each death-loop, or ACOG model, gameplay perk, etc. For example, CoD Warzone allows you to unlock White Phosphorous a chemical weapon banned under international law as a perk, a boost to gain the upper hand; no one in the team stopped to think about the message this might send. Six Days in Fallujah will have the player eliminate the digital stand-ins of actual combatants (and they will only be combatants, these game worlds are often thoroughly deserted of civilian men, women, and children) as you explore with WASD or gamepad through the ruins of America's own making. All the while promising you, zero political commentary.