Kotaku's Stephen Totilo conducted an interview with James Hague (Volition's lead designer for the Guerrilla project) about the game's sandbox design and the insurgency question. Totilo raises relevant questions about the creative team's political intent that are primarily met with denial--Hague holds that the inspiration for the game came from the American Revolutionary War and Afghanistan's struggle against the Soviet Union, not from the most recent war in Iraq. But typically the artist is the last person one should ask for an honest interpretation of the artifact. No experts on the Iraq War were cross-interviewed, and this comes as no surprise: how many diplomats and international affairs professors do you know who play videogames within a month of their release?

In fact, there are a number of signifiers that somebody working on the project did have the Iraq War in mind. Whoever designed the loading screens, for one: one such screen shows Earth's stock market in a spiral, the only profitable corporation being the Earth Defense Force. This is so obviously a connection to the American military-industrial complex reliance on control of Iraq's oil reserves that it is almost insulting that Volition would deny it. The flow of information in the game world is telling: all of the player's directives and news about the EDF come straight from the Red Faction leader and Samanya. We never actually see the EDF slaughtering civilians--perhaps conjuring the offenses of the Blackwater contractors--but we assume that our leader is telling the truth about the occupation because we have no other choice. Finally, there's a car chase cum torture scene that mixes the offscreen action of Aeschylus with the female torture victim's disturbing revenge tale in Dorfman's Death and the Maiden. But these are all thematic/narrative devices--what of the game's actual play?

One of the anecdotes shared by Hague addresses how players have gone about destroying a key EDF structure, a bridge through the Badlands. This moment in the game marks a significant turn, where the remote mines and sledgehammer assaults of the earliest portions of the game all of a sudden aren't strong enough to accomplish the desired demolition. There are numerous ways to accomplish the task--I for one loaded a commercial truck with an antiquated M.O.A.B. bomb (a powerful, single-use weapon acquired by locating a number of hidden radio tags throughout the world map), drove it onto the bridge, and detonated it while running from the EDF who shot at me instead of inspecting the truck I just parked in the middle of their causeway.

Volition was excited that a player had conceived of a novel way to destroy the bridge, something we call an "emergent" gameplay solution--one that the game's mechanics allow for but that the designers hadn't thought of themselves: the player shot an aircraft down as it passed over the bridge, causing its wreckage to crash into the structure as it fell. On reading this anecdote, a law student friend of mine commented: "I can't believe they let that one out of legal." As most people who have studied games for awhile will attest, emergence is a squirrely phenomenon that can't be relied upon for broad interpretations of a game. Instead, let us look to specific ways that Guerrilla's procedural rhetoric encourages or discourages the player to think like a terrorist.

For each of the six sectors of the map, the game tracks EDF "control" the "morale" of the populace. Decreasing EDF control encourages hit-and-run tactics such as destroying or raiding key buildings to chip away at EDF strongholds. As the control meter decreases, more direct assaults against the EDF (key story progression missions) are unlocked. On the other hand, completing side missions such as the rescue of hostages will increase the morale meter; other increases to morale come from EDF-caused civilian death, killing sprees denoted by disposing of EDF soldiers in quick succession, and massive damage to EDF property. Conversely, if the player shoots or explodes a citizen the morale meter drops three points. Hague is careful to note that, unlike in the Iraq insurgency, Red Faction: Guerrilla persuades the player against harming citizens. Unfortunately, another mechanic subverts the rhetoric of this dynamic system: spontaneous civilian recruitment.

 As morale in a sector increases, it becomes more and more likely that a number of civilian passersby will hurriedly arm themselves and join the player's firefight with the EDF. The AI for these companions lacks refinement, meaning their primary use to the player is as a meat shield. They often linger near buildings already rigged for remote destruction and engage large numbers of EDF troops that the player must necessarily run away from in order to avoid being overwhelmed. Moreover, these newly-"recruited" insurgents cannot enter a vehicle that the player has commandeered, meaning they are always left behind if the player jumps into a truck to escape an ensuing horde of EDF reinforcements. Whenever one of these insurgents dies, morale for the region is lowered by one point; however, this minor decrease on the meter is almost always outweighed by the benefit of time and cover it buys the player as she destroys EDF property and rains bullets upon troopers from behind her civilian meat shields.

By the end of the game, I was outright annoyed whenever these civilians decided to join me--a mechanic that was meant to draw us together in fact alienated us. The sad thing is that all of these problems could be averted with the simple implementation of D-pad commands such as "Get away from these buildings," "Don't try to help me," "Follow me," and "Get in this car."

On the other hand, there are key ways in which Red Faction: Guerrilla does not resemble the Iraq insurgency at all. For instance, the Red Faction possess a number of "secret" outposts a few hundred meters into the mountains off of the game world's main roads. Entering any of these zones will completely reset the EDF "alert level" the player may have acquired from destroying buildings and killing soldiers. Not until the end of the game are these outposts directly assaulted by the EDF. These outposts are nothing like the isolated cells of insurgents hidden in dark alleyways throughout a city such as Fallujah--this is a matter of ludic necessity, making the game accessible to players of all skill level.

Also, the Red Faction eventually acquires a powerful nano-weapon that far outstrips EDF technology--this would be tantamount to the Iraq insurgents possessing novel forms of nuclear weaponry. Finally, although the game's liberal save system allows suicide attacks wherein the player attempts to recklessly destroy as much EDF property as they can before being overwhelmed and gunned down, this leads to a docking of morale points and the inability to collect valuable scrap created by the rampage. The "instant threat reduction" mechanic of the Red Faction outposts encourages players to flee and seek temporary refuge instead of indulging in such suicide runs.

Hague explains that the Guerrilla's game world is designed to be a blank slate in as many ways as possible. So the question isn't so much whether it is a direct analogy for the war in Iraq, but to what degree Volition's Mars allows its players to write their own understanding or opinions about Iraq and other insurgences onto the supposed tabula rasa. As Prof. Michael Nitsche explains in his Video Game Spaces, "Words like sandbox do not refer to structures but rather their use" (171). In fact, terms such as "analogy" and "metaphor" aren't at all proper for the expressive work being done here. We should instead think of this game as a parable--a narrative form recently used quite effectively by PopMatters game critic L.B. Jeffries in a retrospective on the game TIE Fighter. Unlike Red Faction: Guerrilla, which was created during the Iraq insurgency, LucasArts made TIE Fighter in 1994. In order to draw similarities between American operations in Iraq and the Star Wars universe, Jeffries leverages the unique strengths of the parabolic form.

 In The Literary Mind, Mark Turner explains that unlike metaphor and analogy, which imply a direct correlation between source and target, parables compose a blended mental space that can creatively pick and choose from the specifics of its input spaces. The parable undergirding the Star Wars universe has a number of input spaces--these include Kurosawa's story of feudal Japan in The Hidden Fortress, the American Revolutionary War, and spaghetti westerns. Once such a blended space has been created, it can in turn be blended again into subsequent parables. In the case of Star Wars, these include Reagan's appropriation of the name for his missile defense system and Jeffries' post-9/11 analysis of TIE Fighter. Reagan and Jeffries refigure the Star Wars parable by selectively mixing in their own new input spaces.

The murder of Luke Skywalker's uncle and aunt in the sands of Tatooine is almost surely an input space for the opening scene of Red Faction: Guerrilla as well. When we consider the fact that parabolic thought is intrinsic to how human beings operate cognitively (for proof of this you will have to read Turner's book yourself), it is inconceivable that the designers at Volition didn't selectively and perhaps unconsciously choose specific details from the Iraq insurgency to include in their own blended design space. Parabolic narratives take from their input spaces, but they also reflect back onto these inputs--allowing novel understandings of the problems they present. Far from being in bad taste or deserving of denial in developer interviews, the interpretive work this game allows through its virtual world and procedural rhetoric should be celebrated, analyzed, and learned from.