The big story this week in political games is Rescue the Nuke Scientist, the Union of Students Islamic Association's videogame response to Kuma\War's Assault on Iran. Most of the coverage I could find described the game's basic premise:

What I haven't seen anyone take note of, however, is how literally the Iranian game adopts traditional Western game conventions in order to turn them on their head.

Read the official description again. The rhetorical position of this game is so indistinguishable from any number of real or hypothetical U.S.-produced games about foreign insurgents. Don't believe me? Compare it to Kuma's official description of Assault on Iran, the Kuma\War mission to which the Iranian game responds.

In Persuasive Games, I argue that the main procedural rhetoric of America's Army is in the commutativity of the game's American soldiers and the nameless insurgents they fight -- every player in the game sees themselves as the good guys (the Army) and the opposing players as the bad guys (the plainclothes guerillas), no matter which side they are playing.

Something very similar is at the heart of Rescue the Nuke Scientist, but this time it is more deliberate. No matter one's opinion about Iran's nuclear capabilities and what the U.S. or anyone else should do about it, the rhetorical power of the game is in how adeptly it adopts the logic of Western rescue-justified invasions. Zach Whalen bemoans the fact that neither game has any hope of persuading the other side to change its mind. But while Kuma\War's mission just reinforces the American position (albeit in the guise of newsgame-style reporting, as Keith Stuart notes), Rescue the Nuke Scientist has a very different goal: to expose that position on the world stage by showing how easily it can be copied almost action-for-action to support an opposing point of view.

It is thus ironic when Union of Students Islamic Association leader describes the game as "our defense against the enemy's cultural onslaught," since they use their enemy's own logic to express their own position. Hopefully the rather obvious lesson we can learn from both these games is that unilateralism is always equally one-sided, no matter whose side it supports.