A Taste of Our Own Rhetoric

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:In "Rescue the Nuke Scientist," U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq. 

Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named "The Special Operation," which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to Israel.

To complete the game successfully, players have to enter Israel to rescue the nuclear scientists, kill U.S. and Israeli troops and seize their laptops containing secret information.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.As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran's capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won't be easy. Your team's mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. 

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 star wars galaxy of heroes hack nor 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.Comment from Patrick Dugan on July 19, 2007Where can I get a copy of this well developed political criticism?  Thanks for writing a great review of the game, but no-one has included contact websites or any real details of the group that made it!  Everyone else just copied and pasted the AP story to their websites!Comment from Ian Bogost on July 25, 2007You're right, and this is an ongoing problem with games from the middle east: they are very hard to get one's hands on in the west. Many of us are looking, hopefully we can find out how to get access, if it's even possible.