Basic Playing field for the Wild West Bank
I confess to having a poor knowledge of the current politics of the current
the Isreali - Palestinian situation, so it was with great interest that
I today discovered the Wild West game via Ynet News.
Since most of this game's dialogue is in Hebrew, and my knowledge of
the language is pretty rusty (as in non-existent), I thought that
playing this game would be a good experiment in the rhetorical power of
a video game.
Fortunately, the article that linked to the game had a summary of
how to play it, as well as the important point that this game is
produced and disseminated by the left in this particular political
climate. Armed with this knowledge, I still find a lot to be learned
from the actual game itself. The game menus have a "Wild West" theme,
but that doesn't really work it's way into the game itself, which is a
simple "whack-a-mole"-style play where one must click on Isreali
settlements to remove them. Once the settlements actually become a
house, they require two clicks to remove, and if a settlement is
guarded by soldiers, those soldiers must be moved back outside of the
West Bank boundaries.
Game play quickly becomes hectic, and ends (I think) somewhat
unfairly in a sudden onslaught of heavily defended settlements which,
contrary to the pattern already established, appear fully established
on arrival.
I think the visuals are particularly interesting in how they
illustrate the three groups involved. (Again, I have only a little
knowledge of the actual situation, so the following comments are based
purely on what I infer from the game.) In short, the settlers and the
soldiers look nervous:
, and the Palestinians look angry:
.
Furthermore, the Palestinians appear to be nomadic (they move around
the West Bank, but don't seem to affect or otherwise react to the
settlements), and perhaps most telling of all, the soldiers appear
quite relieved (
) when they are delivered back out of the West Bank.
This tells me a number of things -- Isreali soldiers don't really
want to be in the West Bank (perhaps because they simply would prefer
not to be in harm's way or they are generally indifferent to the
situation itself?), Isreali settlers are reluctant as well (for some
reason, they look to me like nervous suburbanites on the front edges of
suburbia's encroachment into the "bad" part of town), and Palestinians
in their natural state lead a "grumpily idyllic" existence unfettered
by housing developments or roads (the implication is that the
Palestinians prefer their way of life, but they don't "cheer up" in the
fleeting moments when the West Bank zone is actually free of settlers).
Overall, the game leaves me with a few nagging questions (For
example, why is the "danger zone" green? Is it supposed to represent
the verdant resources of the disputed area?) and makes me want to read
more about the issue to find out about the situation. More importantly,
my reading of the situation will now by influenced and enhanced by my
perceptions of the various parties involved. It will be difficult, for
example, to read about an armed conflict in the area and not recall the
impression I received of the soldiers' apparent reluctance to be
involved, or the settler's apparent vulnerability.
Finally, for the question of rhetoric, the most interesting
component of this game is the role of the player. Since clicking on
settlers removes them, am I playing as a Palestinian defender forcibly
removing the invaders? I don't think that's the case, since I'm also
removing the soldiers, and they seem happy about that. I think the best
interpretation is that, as the player, I represent the
best-case-scenario "ought". I enact what ought to happen in a
best-case world, and I think this is a particularly salient point for
rhetorical games in general. The player's interaction also seems to
correspond to a moral position in September 12th,
though in that case it's obviously a "should not." I want to ponder
this some more because I think it's a useful way of honing in on the
moral implications of any game (even ones that don't claim to be
rhetorical), but since this post is already pretty long, I'll leave it
for now. I'm interested to hear what other people think about this game
or what they conclude from it, especially if you actually know more
about the real situation than I do.
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