Rendition: Guantanamo – The Controversy Everyone’s Missing

• Tweet
• Pin It

This one leaves me somewhat speechless – although I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised.

Rendition: Guantanamo – from Scottish developer, T-Enterprise – isn’t a new announcement, but it made the news (general and specialist) recently for involving genuine G-Bay survivor Moazzam Begg as an expert consultant.

I suppose my initial reaction – that this was an exciting opportunity to demonstrate the flexibility of interactive entertainment to explore important and hard hitting topics like Guantanamo – was a bit naive.

The reality is so much more… shit.

Teaser

From the official trailer: “Captured behind enemy lines and sold to Guantanamo for illegal scientific experiments… Imprisoned for five years with nothing to live for… until now… It is time to fight back… It is time to rescue your son.”

So Rendition is (or ‘was’) a stunningly stupid take on Guantanamo that typifies precisely the sort of shit the Boris Johnsons of this world think video games entirely consist of. At first it was easy to point fingers, and they were pointing towards Glasgow. With a bit of hindsight, though, when we look at the fallout suffered by Six Days in Fallujah it’s not hard to see why T-Enterprise chose to move away from the real, and toward mad scientists and mercenaries. I could even give them the benefit of the doubt that they genuinely wanted to produce a serious memorial to the controversial soon-to-be-closed facility.

What’s really annoyed me in the days since the fallout is not the game’s childish waste of the opportunity, or the inevitable media backlash – it’s the nature of that backlash, and that’s the real story here.

Logging onto the game’s website in recent days, you’ll be greeted by a press release simply announcing the title’s cancellation. Seeing that for the first time, I wasn’t surprised. The backlash amongst the gaming community had been extreme – we want games that we can champion as grownup and important, not games that reduce important subjects to ridiculous genre tropes – so it was a fair guess the developer might reassess their audience.

The Real Issue

And yet, that wasn’t the reason. The press release begins,

“Based on a simple teaser trailer that actually revealed little of the game, many conclusions were reached that have absolutely no foundation whatsoever.”

Fair enough, I thought. They’re defending an old build of their game.

“It was never designed to be “propaganda” or “a recruiting tool for terrorism”. Neither was it designed to glamorise terrorism as has been reported.”

Hold on… what’s going on here? Why are they talking about propaganda? I thought the issue was the game’s childish treatment of G-Bay?

“Furthermore, Guantanamo was to be a mercenary run institution and so there would have been NO American military personnel killed within the game.”

As ever, Fox News to the rescue. So… let me get this straight… This is a game where the horrors and grey moral space of America’s most famous concentration camp are reduced to tales of mad scientists and rescuing kidnapped sons, and the problem the media has is that it’s too real a representation? I’m pretty damn sure the problem here is that it IN NO WAY threatens to tackle any real issues. Maybe I’ve missed something. They’re complaining you get to shoot American soldiers – the fact that you don’t was the real problem here.

Ultimately, despite the fantasy on display in Rendition: Guantanamo, I think we all understand why the place itself has had a bad press. Looking at the media response – who not only get the wrong end of the stick, but probably wouldn’t recognise the stick if it were shoved up their sanctimonious arseholes – it’s easy to see why games are often treated like the bigger devil.

Related Posts

• 

  A vote to give the people say over the terms of Brexit.
  A vote to give the people say over the terms of Brexit.
• 

  Do you hate the NHS?
  Do you hate the NHS?
• 

  Resistance is futile: 5 reasons your games need to run in the cloud
  Resistance is futile: 5 reasons your games need to run in the cloud
• 

  How to avoid diversity pitfalls in your studio
  How to avoid diversity pitfalls in your studio