Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Kuma\PR : more on the reception of newsgaming

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Kuma\PR : more on the reception of newsgaming

by Ian Bogost July 12, 2004

categories: Console & PC Games , Newsgames , Political Games

Important note: Kuma and Kuma\War has no affiliation with Gonzalo's Newsgaming project; I am adopting the term "newsgaming" here in a more general sense.

$Kuma\War$ Inc. Magazine ran an interesting piece in their August issue on Kuma\War, the subscription-based game that lets you play recent events in the continued conflicts in the Middle East (and elsewhere in the future, promises the game's developer, Kuma Reality Games).

The Inc. piece focuses on the "bad PR" the game has received, including accusations that the game exploits soldiers, takes advantage of real suffering for profit, and panders to the Department of Defense, among other tough charges. Inc. is a magazine for small businesses, so they try to channel lessons business owners can learn about good and bad press coverage in general, and how to respond to such coverage.

The two-page spread details strategies Kuma used to abet the press accusations, from offering free subscriptions to active military personnel ("'It shows we support them,' [Kuma marketing head Sarah] Anderson says.") to donating $1 from every paid subscription to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund.

Interestingly, Kuma is billing itself as a "different kind of news service," one that "offers a new way of experiencing the news." In the article, Kuma's top brass (as it were) explain how they were "losing control" of their message as a result of the broad press. CEO Keith Halper concludes that he needs to "make sure we take advantage of interest in what we're doing and get our side of the story across."

The fact that a company that hoped to channel news for games found itself ill at ease when it became the subject of the news is one of those diamond-pure kinds of ironies. Maybe they should make another game about their own plight -- Kuma\PR ;). Kidding aside, I don't doubt that Kuma had a controversial product, but I think their lack of preparedness had more to do with a lack of product vision than a lack of communication strategy. How could you think that the current events of an already controversial war, one yet to be measured and reflected upon by history, wouldn't create a good measure of terse criticism? Newsgames cannot be opinionless.

But perhaps more interesting are the sidebar responses to the article. In case study columns like this one, Inc. always runs an "experts weigh in" sidebar, where semi-related executives and personalities offer their assessment of the situation. I was most interested in Mark Bowden's response. Bowden is most widely known for writing Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, but he is also a 20+ year veteran reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. So, he knows something about the news. Here's what Bowden had to say about Kuma's plight:

Turning war into a game trivializes a powerful, traumatic experience. The issue came up when a video game company wanted to purchase the rights to use my book for its game. I didn't want to profit from it, so I declined. No matter how Kuma dispenses its profits, it doesn't alter what it's doing. That it promotes its games as "real" or "journalism" is laughable. There is a profound difference between that and entertainment. I would tell the company: Don't try to act like anything other than a game company. The most important thing is to make a cool game -- that's how people will judge you.

Clearly, Bowden had no problems profiting from the use of his book for a motion picture, so he's drawing an important distinction between the media here. Bowden couldn't argue that all representations of war in entertainment are immoral, or he would quickly find himself hoist on his own petard (or helicopter, as it were). But surely he wouldn't offer the same advice to Ridley Scott -- "the most important thing is to make a cool movie." Black Hawk Down was an important book (and later film) precisely because it offered a thorough reconstruction of the events of "The Battle of the Black Sea," especially in the absence of a significant government investigation. Furthermore, in the epilogue to the book, Bowden goes to great lengths to argue that, for one part, the mission succeeded, even in the face of its human losses on all sides and, for another part, this and related missions had dubious goals to begin with, namely to impose peace on a country that didn't want it. I think the film makes this point well, even if more subtly than the book does.

I offer these observations to underscore the fact that Bowden himself is neck-deep in the conflation of reality, journalism, entertainment, and political commentary. Still, that fact alone doesn't discredit Bowden's criticism of Kuma, even if it does suggest that the respected author is not trying very hard to understand the potential rhetorical power of videogames. What I think Bowden underscores in his Inc. commentary is that Kuma\War has a massive framing problem. It is simply not enough for newsgames just to offer re-creations of real-world events. Political and social circumstances, commentary, and elucidation must frame these events in order to give the first-person interactivity of the game sociopolitical meaning. I believe that such framing can be done with gameplay, but designers must take great care to get it right. I am not sure that players gain any meaningful insights into the subtle tenors of US military aggression when they choose between advancing troops to slaughter perimeter guards in order to capture Uday and Qusay Hussein at their Mosul villa, rather than bombarding it with 10 TOW missiles and killing pretty much everything in the structure. The more interesting rhetoric surrounds the military's need to capture or kill (either one) Uday and Qusay in order to demonstrate control over the regime's demise, and thereby to win further local support. And that kind of military rhetoric goes unchallenged in the Kuma\War mission.

I do wonder if the hypothetical Black Hawk Down game wouldn't have carried Bowden's message of American military inconsistency quite well. Imagine playing a mission where you were to provide humanitarian aid to people whose only intention was to continue their mutual aggression. Surely that game would telegraph the need to just stay out of situations with mutually repellent outcomes.

Update: turns out there IS a Black Hawk Down Game. Not sure what the deal is, but my guess is that Bowden no longer controls the rights to the name -- probably his publisher or the film studio does now. So, even odder that the author would make such comments given the actual existence of such a game.

Comments (6)

Writing an article (in Dutch) on the same subject (Kuma War & military games) I came across this post of Bowden (commenting on the BHD game), it's from Salon.com (if i remember correctly). He makes the same argument on games being 'just entertainment':

"For unrelated reasons, the game generated some controversy, especially after Mark Bowden refused to have anything to do with NovaLogic's project. "I think there's a substantial difference between a work of art, which I consider a film to be, even a Hollywood film, [and a game]," Bowden explains, reached while on a train headed for Manhattan. For him, "A game is a game. It's something that you play. And this story is about real people, and I know many of the family members who lost brothers and husbands and sons in that battle. And I did not want to be part of something that turns it into a game." (...) "Mr. Bowden is certainly entitled to his opinion," NovaLogic producer Wes Eckhart e-mails me later, "but who is he to judge what a work of art is, or even what an acceptable form of entertainment is?" Eckhart says that NovaLogic hired two Rangers who fought and were wounded in the conflict as the game's subject-matter experts, and on their request, will donate some of the profits from the game to charities that will benefit those families."

Dave on July 15, 2004 2:47 PM

Dave -- Killer, thanks for that reference. Very useful indeed. Love to see your article when it's ready.

Ian Bogost on July 15, 2004 2:51 PM

Very interesting posts...

I, for one, thought that Black Hawk Down (the Film) was also very problematic. Technically and aesthetically, it was a marvel, and in trying to present the event from an American soldier's point of view, it was very successful. But that was part of the problem. The film was very one-sided in terms of representing the event as a whole (what led up to it, what the US/UN decided to do once they were there, why--perhaps--those Somalis reacted like they did and, especially, how Somalia became such a 'failed-state' to begin with)... this made the film an almost complete faiure IMHO. Why not try to include a Somali point of view? At least then viewers might be able to understand the very complex situation that Somalia was (and is). For instance, how did war-lords come to rule? The US gov. propped up former Somali president (and despot) Siad Barre who was deposed in a 1991 coup. When the resulting chaos and famine reached it height in 1992, the US and other countries did nothing. Also, how did these warlords get all those weapons? The film makes no mention that western countries have been dumping arms into Somalia and the region for a long time. What is more, the Somalis, as a rule are only depicted as some kind of super-predators (much like another of Ridley Scott's film from the Alien series). It is not that BHD's representation of the event is wrong but it so simplifies things and totally leaves out any question of how we (in the west) contributed to it. In the end, al we are left with is another Hollywood good vs. evil story.

I feel the same happens again and again with almost any video game that represents or re-creates military conflicts. Design resources focus exclusively on verisimiltude but only in representing the weapons, environment, and combat. Very, very little consideration is given to the (geo)politics, morality, ideologies, etc. Perhaps games are still too much in their infancy to deal with the complexities in terms of story-telling and representation. But I suspect that (as with Hollywood or the nightly news) any controversial subject matter is just left out because developers/publishers do not want to be seen as unpatriotic or whatever. I have not played Kuma War yet, but I imagine that it is the same and that is why this debate is such an important one... to my mind, these games (and many of the films) border more on propaganda than anything else. It is a very complex issue but what does it mean when we as a society make entertainment and game-play out of horrendous events?

I was reading a similar discussion thread on GameSpy recently about a recent game set during the Vietnam conflict.. It too provided an interesting and varied discussion. One thing that struck me, however, was how many times commentators said that games could not adequately deal with past conflicts and mis-represented history and pointed to past Hollywood films as source material for a proper historical understanding!?!? Hollywood film as a historical document? For me, this shows just how mediated our understanding of the past is becoming and why this discussion is so damn important. Video games and films are more than just 'mere' entertainment.

Anyway, thanks for the interesting post... and I, too, would like to read Dave's article when it is finsihed.

David C. on July 29, 2004 11:42 PM

Dave C.> Very, very little consideration is given to the (geo)politics, morality, ideologies, etc.

This is dead-on. And surprising, really, since games like Civilization do such a good job at showing the material basis for abstract historical outcomes. Is it that games trying to represent actual historical events, rather than abstract historical systems, don't do a good job of integrating the broader context of such events?

Ian Bogost on July 30, 2004 2:43 AM

Ian: Is it that games trying to represent actual historical events, rather than abstract historical systems, don't do a good job of integrating the broader context of such events?

Yeah, an interesting point. Perhaps it is that the foucs on historical events usually draws on a tradition of a single soldier as hero... the story or event always revolves around him and his exploits. Of course, this is integral for a game (i.e. a FPS or third-person action) as the focus is on the action but it also reproduces the most simplistic way of representing what a soldier encountered and leaves out the complexities of the whole experience. As well, questions about the necessity of the war and discussion about the individual decisions that lead to war can never really be raised. Perhaps some genres are more attuned to this. Story-driven RPGs seem better at dealing with moral complexity (even an action/adventure game like Beyond Good and Evil present an intriguing and complex story but I didn't really think of strategy games in this way. But it makes sense, those kinds of game present a very different point of view.

David C.

David C. on August 2, 2004 7:50 PM

look im sorry but in the sims 2 (say no to gay marriges) its your choice if you want to make them gay or not just if you dont like it other people might if it a change to have sims be gay and i dont think it matter to you sarah if people choose to have gay sims or not

like you care on January 16, 2006 3:38 PM

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