Death by Video Game by Simon Parkin

Author:Simon Parkin [Parkin, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Divulgación, Deportes y juegos, Tecnología
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2015-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

07

EMPATHY

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The brittle bark of rifle fire rattled the back of Mitch Swenson’s teeth. If the guards had shot to scare rather than to wound, the warning had its intended effect. As he sprinted across a Turkish field, Swenson, a twenty-six-year-old journalism student at Columbia University, was ‘utterly terrified’, as he puts it today. As he and his three accomplices pressed through a hole in the fence and padded into an unexpectedly peaceful Syrian pomegranate orchard, the relief was palpable, even if it was short-lived.

This was not, as Swenson puts it, his ‘first rodeo’. Two years earlier, in 2011, the young journalist was present in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the first day of the revolution that helped instigate the Arab Spring, the wave of revolutionary protests that spread across the Middle East, unseating rulers in its wake. Since then he’s visited a clutch of troubled nations: Libya, South Sudan and the Congo. He’s ‘been around men with guns before’. Even so, this autumn night, clammy with cloud and heat, saw him enter a different kind of battle. ‘Syria is a type of conflict that humanity has never really seen before,’ he says. ‘All of the rules are out of the window.’

For the next ten days Swenson and his partners (David Axe, the founder of War is Boring, a blog that covers war zones, a photographer and a local fixer) travelled with members of the Sham Falcons Brigade, a group of rebels opposed to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his troops, the Syrian armed forces. Few foreign journalists have remained in the country; the dangers are extreme. The preceding day two Spanish journalists were kidnapped while preparing to leave the country (they were eventually released in March 2014). During his brief time reporting in the country Swenson interviewed soldiers and smugglers and saw first-hand what he describes as an ‘all-consuming, merciless and heart-eating machine of war’. Then, on 4 October, Swenson left Syria. He was due to start at college the following week.

When he landed in New York, Swenson began to write about his experiences. But the prose failed to capture the urgency of the chaos and distress he had witnessed (or, at least, failed to stand out from other similar reports written by foreign journalists). Moreover, he shared a challenge with many an overseas news reporter: how to interest readers in a faraway nation and its remote problems, ostensibly unconnected to their own.

Swenson decided to move from written reportage to something entirely different: video-game reportage. The medium has often been used to replicate vivid historical and futuristic battlefields, but rarely to present contemporary war journalism. Swenson’s logic was sound: if readers struggle to engage with stories of the lives of ordinary people living in fear and anguish on the other side of the world, perhaps they will empathise if asked to live out a day or a week in their shoes. Maybe a video game, which moves the player from passive spectator to active protagonist, would communicate something of the urgency that he had felt there, running across that field.

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