Black Powder\\Red Earth: Yemen – There’s No Call of Duty In This Modern Warfare

If you have even a passing interest in military stories, both fiction and non-fiction, you’ll know that the most crucial element that these stories live and die by is accuracy. Are the characters correctly demonstrating military protocol in their tactics, dialogue and use of equipment? Does the story reflect the chaos and moral grayness of warfare? Is violence depicted in all its unkind glory? It’s an incredibly hard thing to get right, given the near-infinite levels of complexity within the military world; a world with its own set of rules so foreign to civilian life that those who leave it often find themselves at a total loss as to what to do.

Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen, a graphic novel by writer John Chang and artist Josh Taylor, is arguably the most realistic, well-researched and visceral works of modern military fiction that delves into the unexplored realm of private military contractors. They’re often depicted as cannon fodder or convenient villains in many other military works, but in BPRE we get to see an honest and realistic portrayal that is as refreshing as it is labyrinthine.

BPRE follows Cold Harbor, a PMC (Private Military Company) that, officially, has established operations in Yemen to train the local military (or “indig”, as they put it) and protect foreign aid workers. In reality, they are there to hunt ISIS. Without the diplomatic shackles and threat of repercussions that would normally keep a conventional military in check, Cold Harbor are free to negotiate under-the-table deals, trade prisoners like currency, work with both US allies and enemies, and backstab them when convenient. One of the most iconic moments happens early in the story: a squad of Cold Harbor operators, led by a man known as Crane, wipe out an Al Qaeda cell on behalf of the Yemeni military. Upon returning to base, they are greeted by an officer, who salutes Crane. Instead of returning the salute, Crane hands the man his business card.

The narrative style is minimalist. There is virtually no captioning, little exposition to set up each scene, and many of the action sequences have little to no dialogue. This is a wonderful example of “Show, don’t tell”, though given the complex nature of the story, I did find myself having to re-read several sections in order to better grasp what was going on. As someone who yearns for more accuracy and authenticity in military works, BPRE at times felt to me like a classic case of “be careful what you wish for”. This is an exhaustively researched story that does not hold your hand at all and requires at least a basic understanding of military lingo, the history of the War on Terror, and the geopolitical situation in the Arab peninsula. For example, one of the key plot elements involves Cold Harbor working with the Houthis to invade an ISIS-controlled town. If you don’t know what the relation between the Houthis, Quds Force and Saudis are, you will have no idea what the hell is going on in the negotiations that follow. That’s the beauty of BPRE, though. It’s a very sophisticated story written for adults, and it expects you, the reader, to be an adult and do your homework if you want to fully appreciate it.

The most striking aspect about BPRE is how brutally honest it is in its portrayal of modern warfare. This is neither a pro-war nor anti-war story; it’s a neutral-war story. There are no heroics, no big morality speeches, and no answering to a higher calling other than the call of profit. Yet, despite their decidedly greed-driven motives, Cold Harbor are shown to be a necessary evil in a country so deeply corrupt that it simply can’t deal with the ISIS threat with its own soldiers. Although BPRE has no shortage of battle sequences against terrorist insurgents, it takes a refreshing approach by devoting much of its time to the backroom deals and tactical planning that allow these battles to take place. We are shown Cold Harbor agents negotiating with a myriad of shadowy figures within the Saudi, Iranian and Yemeni governments; many of these characters would normally belong in the darker side of the morality scale, but even they see ISIS as an existential threat that must be wiped out at all costs. These backroom deals don’t involve suitcases full of money; instead, entire battles are waged by Cold Harbor just so they can capture a specific high-value target and trade him to an interested party for information on their primary ISIS target. The battles often entail collateral damage; scenes of hapless civilians blown apart by bombardment from both sides of the battle are common, and most disturbingly, there’s a sense of resignation in the way these civilians are portrayed. One panel shows a man, his arm sheared off at the elbow from an explosion, calmly walking his son out of the raging battlefield.

Aside from their technological and tactical sophistication, the one thing Cold Harbor has that none of the local forces have is best embodied in Crane: a man who has devoted his existence to waging war, not for family or country, but because he’s good at it and there just so happens to be an enemy no one on planet Earth likes. At one point, he waterboards a captured Al-Qaeda agent for information on ISIS, but unlike what you’ve seen in shows like 24 and Zero Dark Thirty, Crane literally drowns the man, has him brought back from the dead with CPR, drowns him again, revives him a second time, and THEN asks for information. It’s this scene that tells you everything you need to know about the plausible future of BPRE, and the kind of men and methods it takes to wage war on an enemy driven by religious fervor to the point of inhumanity. It reminds me of Colonel Kurtz’s iconic speech in Apocalypse Now: “You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement.”

The world of BPRE is relentlessly dark, and Jon Chang and Josh Taylor conveys this by simply giving us an honest, no-bullshit look at the world of the modern mercenary. There’s no emotional hysterics, no dramatic character arcs, and no plot twists; there is only the cold, calculating game of chess played by private contractors, religious fundamentalists, rogue generals, and shadowy politicians in their respective quests for personal gain. Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen is a story about war itself, the likes of which you will rarely, if ever, see in more recognizable works, and is a stunning and important achievement for crowdfunded projects.

If you want to purchase the graphic novel, go to the official website if you’re in the United States. Otherwise, use Amazon (Volumes 1, 2 and 3).

Chernobyl – The True Horror of Tyranny

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for the longest time, stood out to me for two reasons: It took place on the year I was born, and it gave inspiration to one of my favorite videogames, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. To me, and presumably many others, the disaster was a relatively minor footnote in history and at best a point of curiosity for some late night Wikipedia reading. HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl was like a violent wake-up call, jolting me out of my ignorance with some of the most shocking depictions of bravery and environmental horror. However, its most notable accomplishment is how it masterfully exposes the Soviet Union to its own kind of radiation: Truth.

Chernobyl is a rare feat in which a show manages to stick to the facts of its real-life story as much as possible while maintaining an insane level of dramatic tension that few works, fiction and non-fiction, can conjure. This is even more remarkable when you consider the imperceptible nature of the show’s major antagonist: the radiation. Although basic storytelling conventions suggest that you should show and not tell, some of Chernobyl’s most unsettling moments are when its lead character, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), is describing the incalculable dangers of the radiation billowing out of the Chernobyl power plant to various ignorant bureaucrats. Indeed, the show goes through great lengths to ensure you, the audience, have a rudimentary understanding of how nuclear power plants and radiation work. By the time soldiers clad in protective gear venture into the irradiated zone, their geiger counters crackling like white noise from a TV, it’s hard not to feel nervous for them, because by this point the show has made clear that anything, anything within the radiation zone can trigger a slow, agonizing death. It’s like a horror movie, except the danger isn’t some creature lurking around; it’s in the air, the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and before long, inside one’s skin and bloodstream. Worse still, many of the men don’t fully understand what this radiation will do to them once the mission is over; they cheer and hug when they succeed, not realizing their lifespans have just been slashed in half, at best. The show doesn’t shy away from the effects of exposure either, and it’s hard not to feel genuine anger at those responsible for the disaster once you see the suffering that inevitably dooms these young men.

There’s a scene in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, in which the Galactica discovers a civilian ship heading their way, but are unable to establish communications with it. An argument ensues among the crew: is the ship full of civilian refugees, and their communication systems are merely not working? Or is everyone on board dead and the Cylons have set the ship on a suicide course for the Galactica? Unable to take the risk and lacking any good options, the crew of the Galactica opts to fire on and destroy the ship. It’s this kind of grim reality that drives the dramatic tension in Chernobyl; when they realize the gravity of the situation, the Soviets have no fancy tools and no “a-ha!” moment. They field their best scientists, the full weight of their military resources, lunar rovers, and even beg the Germans for sophisticated robots, but instead of arriving at a brilliant plan, they come to the slow realization that the only solution they have is to basically send waves of men to their deaths and annihilate everything that has been touched by radiation. One of the show’s standout moments involves thousands of soldiers having to scoop enormous piles of radioactive graphite off the power plant’s roof with shovels in 90-second shifts (any longer would certainly kill them from excessive radiation). The comical simplicity of this solution, faced against such an enormous threat, makes this scene one of the most compelling in recent memory.

The battle to stem the flow of radiation and the sacrifice of so many firefighters, miners, soldiers and scientists already makes Chernobyl a superb drama, but what makes it exceptional is how it slowly unravels the true cause of the disaster: the Soviet Union’s futile quest to project an image of strength to the world. The show has no shortage of despicable bureaucrats who care more about the Soviet agenda than the lives of those beneath them, and the heroes struggling to salvage the situation often find their efforts needlessly sabotaged from behind because some KGB asshole deemed it more important that the Soviet Union not look vulnerable in front of its allies and enemies. The irony is that, in order to achieve this cause, the Soviets have built an institution that is so good at spying on people, withholding vital information, blackmail, coercion, and ruining the lives of those who step out of line, but is jaw-droppingly incompetent at protecting its own citizens when the time to shine comes. It’s a deeply corrupt empire built on lies in order to perpetuate more lies, all in an effort to pretend that it’s something it’s not, using people as commodities that can be thrown away at the slightest inconvenience, even if those people are the very ones who saved the country from radioactive destruction. Chernobyl presents such a savage and decisive takedown of this regime that it’s surprising it’s even allowed to be shown in Russia.

The big tragedy of Chernobyl is that it’s the decent, honest people who suffer the most. The Soviet Union was one of the worst blights on human history, but within this failed socialist state were millions of good people who, when called upon, willingly risked their lives for the simple reason that there was no one else who could. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character arc of Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), a deputy chairman who, at first, is your typical government stooge, but is gradually humbled by the sacrifice of those beneath him and becomes disillusioned when his superiors’ executive meddling condemns so many of those people to a fate worse than death. Chernobyl is one of best dramas to come out of HBO, but it’s also a masterful lesson on the horrors a corrupt, selfish government can wreak on so many ordinary people, many of whom will never realize how avoidable it all could have been.

There Is Something Terribly Wrong With Game Journalism

Ever since I started reading gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro in the 1990s, and then eventually moved onto online outlets like GameSpy and Gamespot, I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews, commentary and coverage from a variety of game media outlets. Much like the relatively young gaming medium, game journalism always stood out to me as more youthful, fun, and vibrant than the hoity-toitiness of more established mediums like film. Guys like Greg Kasavin, Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro were some of my favorites, and it really felt like both gamers and game journalists were part of the same community, experiencing this fascinating and burgeoning world of videogaming together as it forged its own brave new world.

Unfortunately, somewhere around 2014, I began to notice a growing disconnect between today’s generation of game journalists and the gamers that formed the bulk of their readership. It seemed like many game journalists were coalescing into some kind of elite private club that was increasingly out of touch with the game community at large, sneering at them from up high while allowing their political biases to contaminate their game coverage.

The first time I noticed this was with the worst game I have ever played in my life, Gone Home. I had read many reviews from the likes of Kotaku and PC Gamer about how amazing this indie title was, and the Metacritic Critics’ Score was also exceptionally high. Gone Home was quite expensive for an indie game, but I mean hell, it was supposed to be amazing, so why not? As it turns out, not only did I beat the game in slightly over 90 minutes, but it was a ferociously boring experience with a weak story that may have been interesting in the 1960s, but definitely not in 2013. I felt like I had been lied to by everyone; this was, by every conceivable objective standard, nowhere close to a 9/10 or 10/10 game. The most likely explanation for the disproportionately high critic scores for this at-best-mediocre game was its LGBT-centric storyline.

Indeed, in the years since then, many of today’s professional game journalists have become more flagrant in allowing their political views to infect their game coverage and reviews. Here are some notable examples that I can recall simply off the top of my head:

Grand Theft Auto V was marked down by Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit because of its misogynistic characters, completely missing the point that the GTA series has always been a visceral satire of the worst elements of modern society.
A writer for Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez, described the indie game Papers Please, in which you play an immigration officer in Soviet Russia, as a white male power fantasy of deporting Mexicans.
The #gamergate controversy, in which the gaming media used incidents of sexist harassment and death threats towards game journos to paint the gaming community as a whole as being bigoted thugs.
Nathan Grayson of Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku criticized Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a historical RPG set in medieval Europe, for its uniformly white cast.
Far Cry 5 was also criticized by many in the gaming media, such as PC Gamer, for not using its rural America setting to make a political statement on their favorite topic of white supremacy in the age of Trump.
VentureBeat journalist Dean Takahashi, often regarded as a joke in the gaming community for his inability to get past the Cuphead tutorial, openly advocated for the censorship of the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare because he felt the game’s real-world violence had no place in a game.
CNet journalist Ian Sherr wrote a hit piece on several independent gaming YouTubers such as The Quartering and Upper Echelon Gamers that was designed to pull advertising revenue from those channels.
Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer journalists Jay Castello and Andy Chalk openly criticized a statement from Ubisoft regarding their refusal to politicize their games, opining that such impartiality could lead to sympathy for slavery, Nazism and homophobia.

Note: The last three examples alone happened in the span of the past week.

One could argue that, as games become more sophisticated and touch on real-world topics, it behooves game journalists to offer more “mature” commentary in turn. The problem is that many of today’s so-called game “journalists” are losing sight of the difference between being a professional journalist and being a political activist. As shown in some of the above examples, you have cases in which journalists are openly advocating for certain political causes, most particularly LGBT and Net Neutrality, and even going after independent creators by targeting their sources of funding. The sneering, condescending attitude a number of these journos have towards gamers, many of whom are young men, does not make the case for continued patronage, either. When gamers complain that Battlefield V has included ahistorical female soldiers in frontline combat, it’s not a good look when gaming outlets dismiss these gamers, many of whom form their readership, as sexist bigots filled with toxic masculinity, rather than gamers who just can’t buy into the notion of black female Nazi soldiers.

It’s also worth pointing out the monolithic nature of these political views in the gaming media; they cut in one direction only, and I cannot recall having ever read an editorial from any of these outlets that argued from a more conservative or even centrist point of view. There is virtually nothing that distinguishes the political and social commentary of Kotaku, Polygon, PC Gamer, and virtually every other major game media outlet, which is kind of ironic considering that they all champion diversity in gaming.

This is all a far cry (no pun intended) from the days when gaming coverage and commentary were much more in-line with the expectations of the people who consumed such media. It’s not necessarily that the political viewpoints today’s gaming journos are expressing are right or wrong; it’s that they are so vastly removed from their target audience, and expose these journos as biased and unreliable at doing their one job: covering and reviewing games fairly.

This is not to say there is no room for political and/or LGBT commentary in gaming media; of course there is. That kind of commentary should be relegated to games that inherently want to deal with those topics (of which there are very few), and not more mass-marketed games like Far Cry 5, which use real-world topics to set the stage for story and gameplay, not to define them. Most game developers are not looking for this kind of trouble; they just want to create games that are fun and generate profit. It’s the responsibility of game media platforms to cover these games fairly and expose poor gameplay and narrative design as well as shady business practices in order to keep gamers informed and push the industry to higher standards. It is not the responsibility of these journalists to use games to promote their political activism, call for censorship, disparage their own readers, and threaten the livelihoods of independent competitors.

Of course, if these media platforms knew this, they wouldn’t be losing their audience to independent creators like Pewdiepie, Markiplier, The Quartering, and Upper Echelon Gamers. Some of them, like Markiplier, have a sense of youthful wonder and excitement that reminds me of the game journos from when I was growing up. Others, like Upper Echelon, have highly nuanced, relatively apolitical commentary on the industry that is in increasing short supply in mainstream outlets. Part of this, I think, is because these creators are a lot closer to their audience than, say, an editor at Polygon is, and are better able to get a feel for their audience through livechats and comments.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still great content from major media outlets such as Game Informer’s Replay series, which is an absolute hoot, and Giant Bomb, which has alumni from Gamespot’s best days. It’s just that after all that I have seen and read, I think more old-school gamers like myself need to stop sitting around, being spoonfed politically inept garbage from the likes of Ian Sherr. We have to be more proactive in seeking out indie creators who love games like we do, and show them our support both through continued viewership/readership and donations.

Upper Echelon Gamers

The Quartering

Downward Thrust