propaganda war games

Osama Bin Laden as depicted in the computer game KumaWar
In manchurian operations club among other things I mused about the detailled historical naturalism of Kuma Reality Games‘Kuma\War’ [scroll down a bit]. Now those games seem to have generated a dramatic backlash into empirical reality. The Day 6 Documentary: Propaganda Games by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

You don’t have to be a Middle East expert to recognize the relationship between Iran and its western foes has gotten just a wee bit tense.
    There’s been sabre rattling military exercises, threats to slow the flow of oil to a trickle, downed drones and uranium enrichment in a highly protected underground bunker.
    This week the Iranian government sentenced an Iranian-American to death. Amir Mirza Hekmati was arrested in December. Iran says he’s a spy, and that he was in Iran on an intelligence mission. His mother says he was visiting family.
    Shortly after his arrest, Iranian TV and newspapers published what they say is a confession.
    It’s impossible for us to know how his confession was extracted.
    But in it, Hekmati says he’d worked with a company called Kuma Games – making propaganda video games for the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Day 6 first featured Kuma Games last year. At the time they’d just rushed out a video game version of the US raid on the Abbottabad compound that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden.
    It’s one of the things they specialize in: video game stories ripped from the headlines.
    But could they secretly be CIA propagandists? Day 6 producer Dominic Girard’s documentary tries to make sense of it.

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