War game marketing offensive, insensitive

(November 11) - When introducing new products, timing can be everything. Most people in the marketing and communications game understand this. Some don’t. There are people in the electronic games business who don’t get it. Neither do some of the folk at Blockbuster headquarters.

Last week I got an e-mail from Blockbuster saying they would stay open past midnight on the morning of November 7 to celebrate the release of a new Xbox game. Actually, it wasn’t so much to celebrate the game as to sell it. Anyone who showed up to buy Gears of War 2 between 12 and 12:30 a.m. qualified for a free download of the Gold-Plated Hammerburst Assault Rifle. They didn’t sweeten the incentive by throwing in a Hammer of Dawn for customers showing up with a poppy in a lapel. The Hammer of Dawn “can wipe out anything from small Locust squads to entire city blocks.”

All of this was happening just four days before the rest of us observe Remembrance Day.

Okay. I know it’s a game. I have never played it, and I expect to live out the rest of my life without having done so. I don’t think it should be banned. I have never advocated censoring things just because I don’t like them. I would sooner see them languish on store shelves until they are removed because no one would buy them. The introduction of this particular plaything just four days before Remembrance Day strikes me as just a tad offensive and hugely insensitive.

There is never a good time to promote fantasies about war and killing. Never a good time to pretend that wiping out an entire city block could be a good idea. It isn’t. Never has been, never will be. We know this because it has been done in the real world. It was done in Guernica, Spain; London, England; Dresden, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; Hiroshima, Japan; My Lai, Vietnam; Baghdad, Iraq. The list is staggering in its enormity.

There is never a good time to pretend that war is an acceptable way to settle political differences. The violence is pitiless. The suffering is borderless. The victims have no country. Soldiers lie buried in the same earth. Sailors drowned in the same oceans. Bomber pilots descended from the same skies. Nothing is settled. The victors take the spoils. The vanquished lick their wounds, gather their strength and get ready to resume the fight. By the time the city block is rebuilt, someone is getting ready to wipe it out all over again.

On the same day as Blockbuster sent out the poorly timed e-mail, the names of 68,000 Canadians who died in World War One began appearing on public buildings in seven Canadian cities. The names of all the men and women ion the armed services known to have died in action are projected onto the buildings during the dark hours of night. It took seven nights to do them all. It ended at daybreak this morning.

The artists who designed the project chose WW1 because this is the 90th anniversary of its ending. If they projected the names of all the Canadians who have died in all the wars since then, we might have seen close to a month of Remembrance Days. Then add in all those killed on all sides of the conflicts and imagine how long it would take. Gather up the names of all the civilians who died – the collateral damage, as they are so callously dismissed – and project them onto a war memorial wall. How long would it take?

There would be no end to it. The remembrance would never stop. Nor should it. When we remember, we don’t just think about those who died. Many come home in coffins, many more come home on stretchers. Brave men and women who will learn to adjust to a life without legs.

Last year at this time, the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan was 72. Today it is 98. One quarter of all our military deaths over there happened in the last year. What will it be when we put on our poppies next year?

There has never been a successful war because it is, in its essence, a failure. It is well past time to come up with a better way.