Before videogame critic N'Gai Croal left Newsweek, I like to think you wouldn't see inane comments like the following in an article about a videogame:

Can something as weighty and complex as war be conveyed by the same medium that produced Mario Brothers and Grand Theft Auto? Mostly, videogames are associated with mindless entertainment or gratuitous violence or both.

But that's how Newsweek's article about Six Days in Fallujah opens. The game, developed by Atomic Games, was recently dropped by publisher Konami after the developer's clumsy attempts at publicity generated controversy instead of enthusiasm. Good for Konami. Now the game is in limbo, and the article reveals that Atomic will need an investment of several millions of dollars to finish the project.

Under a headline that reads "a videogame so real it hurts", the Newsweek writer talks to the head of Atomic games, the mother of a killed American soldier, and a couple of folks in academics. One of them, a professor at a Danish university, compares a videogame about Falliujah to the effect of television footage of Vietnam. He even toes the line that Atomic has been pushing about how the game is supposed to help players understand what it was like to be there:

The real goal is not to document the action sequentially but to understand how and why it unfolds and how it felt to the people who were there. If players understand the emotions of a serviceman in combat, then they are already understanding the real power of Fallujah.

I seriously doubt a shooter is ever going to convey "the real power of Fallujah", much less "the emotions of a serviceman in combat". And while I have no problem with games tackling serious issues, I do have a problem with games that resort to grandiose claims of social value when they hardly seem to understand the medium of videogaming.