Game industry petitions to ban upcoming video game Six Days in Fallujah for ‘war crimes’ and threat of mass shooters

No games journalists actually care about this, they’re just doing it because their friends tell them to.

Video game simulations have been par for the course in military training exercises. However one has caught the games media’s attention. For now. In about a month they’ll have long since forgotten about it again because their attention spans are bottom of the barrel.

This isn’t the first time Six Days in Fallujah was attempted for a project. In 2009 Konami cancelled the game because of media outrage. You’d think by 2021 people wouldn’t repeat this mistake.

Games media bloggers at Kotaku were mad at IGN for even hosting the above YouTube clip. Even though careful effort on the part of the creators has gone into the production to make sure it hits the best accuracy and not fall into gratuitousness.

On an objective mechanics-based level, the games industry should applaud Six Days in Fallujah for getting a unique take on combat from military veterans. Unfortunately the game is falling victim to an emotional political mob that is in no way connected to the work itself.

The petition's premise is they want to appeal to Joe Biden and the United Nations to stop this game's release because they believe it "normalizes the mass murder of Iraqis." Acting as if the mainstream media didn’t tout the weapons of mass destruction line pushed out by the Bush administration in the first place.

(This crowd is going to be very disappointed when they learn about the Obama administration’s efforts in Syria.)

"TOGETHER WE CAN STOP THIS MADNESS. War is not normal. Video games that dehumanize brown people ARE NOT OK," the petition screams at you.

The charge that Six Days in Fallujah will inspire a new generation of mass shooters is laughable given that the previous target, 2014’s Hatred, has not since caused an atrocity of widespread death and mayhem that the people who tried to censor it claimed it would have. Valve CEO Gabe Newell brought Hatred back to Steam because he saw through the media’s empty lies.

It smacks familiarity with the media’s strange fervor about 2019’s Joker, given the unfortunate atrocity carried out on July 7th 2012 by James Holmes  in Aurora, Colorado at a The Dark Knight Rises screening. Despite a heightened security presence at Joker screenings, the supposed “incel rampage” the media tried wishing into existence never happened.

In fact, by the logic deployed here, Frozen 2 should be banned. Seeing as how in November 2019 a group of 100 teenagers engaged in a “machete brawl” at a Frozen 2 screening in Birmingham, England.

Clearly the Disney movie inspired the violence.

But most of the people rallying behind this are a who’s who of games industry ideologues, that are outing themselves as willing to stifle the free expression of people they disagree with.

At the time of writing, Jack Thompson wasn't available for comment about how proud he is of this petition effort.