Yes, it is ridiculous to compare what I am doing to protestors who truly put their lives on the line - just as it is truly absurd to think this game gives kids any real sense of the experience of warfare. That the immediate audience is limited is meaningless. How many diners were in the restaurant when a few blacks decided to sit down? How many were there witnessing the Boston Tea party? You get my point - the idea of the act is often of larger significance than the act itself. Getting press becomes part of the work and is a typical strategy of every activist organization under the sun.

The above considered, I would, however, make a strong defense of using Internet based environments for protest activities. As the web takes on further significance as a focus for human social interaction - (similar to the local shopping mall in the sense that this is the only place in most cities you still find large groups of people out of their cars) if you will - it is valid to consider such an arena as the Internet and computer games as new types of public spaces.

Granted, although one takes about as much risk protesting in a pretend game as on does killing or being killed, conducting this protest/memorial has very real risks (on the lower end of the scale I have been flamed viciously on various blogs, on the more frightening end of things I have been threatened with violence).

Finally, of interest to me is the complete anonymity of gamers, bloggers and letter writers to Salon alike. Quite curious - I have intentionally used my full name, provide a link to my website in this type of context. Are we having a real debate if all is anonymous? Perhaps off subject although if you are questioning my protest because it is online and on some level fake and/or cowardly - what does this say about what we are engaged in using this forum?

Mr. DeLappe, I have not called into question your courage or legitimacy. I never said that protesting in an MMO game was somehow inherently inferior to protest of any other form. I am not questioning your motivation or your resolve, in fact as I stated I am anti-war and am strongly opposed to the US + coalition presence in Iraq (and other countries). I am merely pointing out that regardless of your intentions, you are simply not going to see results in terms of gamers paying attention to your message.

People who are in the midst of having fun via a game are not interested in any sort of grand-standing. Especially when the grandstander is pronouncing things that most gamers are already well aware of... that people are dying in Iraq.

I think it is somewhat presumptuous of you to compare yourself to the American revolutionaries or civil rights activists. What, may I ask, is the purpose of your protest if the immediate audience, i.e. people playing the game, are not your /target/ audience? Your actions are not really raising awareness in the press or the public. That is to say, most people who would read about what you're doing are already well aware of what's going on and have formed their opinions and acted accordingly.

I mean no offense but as a gamer offering her experience and advice, I would say there are probably more effective methods of protesting than trying to catch the attention of uninterested gamers who are too busy trying to blow the crap out of pixelated people to listen anyway.

Sorry, the first few paragraphs of that should be in quotations.

I received the following email yesterday:

"I never "track down" the subject of a Salon piece, and I don't post commentaries on Salon. (Sometimes I think it's just filled with people who like to read their own words. :) )

However, I had to find your contact information to say, "thank you," for your wonderful work. I don't care if you call it a memorial or a protest. As the aunt of impressionable teenage boys (15 and 16) coming close to enlistment/draft age, and the mother of a young toddler, I cannot think of a better way to reach kids with a message that at the very least may wake them up to reality.

Men and women die in war. It is no game.

I don't think your message is lost on the kids who play the game. Honestly, if you make just one young man (or woman), stop and think twice about the violence he or she is participating in under the guise of a "game," or, even more importantly, about joining the army, you have saved a life.

I truly think you have saved more than one young life. More than one young future.

But even one life or one future saved is an amazing feat for an artist, let alone a human being.

You should be very proud.

Thank you.

Sincerely,"

**************

I've withheld her name in the interest of privacy.

I pray that she is right and you are wrong.

Peace.

CPTMitch, I can almost HEAR the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' swelling in the background as you intone this junk. The core of my impatience with you is very basic and appears as a constant in my letters in this thread, but you’ve either been too clever to engage with it directly or too dim to discover it in the text. I’ll reiterate: you offend me playing this gimmicky, dishonest role of Noble Defender. It’s a self-serving fantasy; a tacky, stilted performance.

You were defending neither the American nor the Iraqi people in Iraq. You were in Iraq under the aegis of a unilateral police action against a regime that was not the remotest threat to your country. This police action was executed under demonstrably false pretenses and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of the civilian population you’d have us believe you were there to help. While none of this, being as you have zero influence, can be blamed on you, I don’t feel any responsibility towards enabling the fantastical view of yourself you obviously need some public approval in order to maintain.

You’d like to think of me as a utopia-hugging peacenik, but I’m far from it. While I don’t believe in first-strike military adventurism by Kingly fiat, I believe in multi-lateral police interventions in the true sense of the word ‘police’. I’d like to believe in a stronger U.N. (if only the U.S. would allow it). I wouldn’t have minded a show of multi-national force in the prevention of the Rwandan orgy; I wouldn’t mind seeing Brits and Yanks and the French and Germans, etc., together in Darfur about now...in a measured way. There is wisdom in using physical force to back up carefully negotiated diplomacies; there is nobility in marshalling an army with no profit or strategic motive beyond saving lives. There is neither wisdom nor nobility in being a cowboy or a bully waving the biggest gun on the planet. How you can try to manufacture a little moral gravitas out of serving under the latter rather than anything resembling the former is beyond me.

You write: "I think that is what you are proposing in reality, mass suicide by the side that does not show up. There is nobility and dignity of a sort in that too I suppose." Are you ‘saying’ with a straight face that if by some epoch-making miracle in the course of human social evolution, boy and girl soldier robots had refused en masse to participate in an unjustified war (preventing many thousands of deaths, not the least being their own), the Iraqis would have jumped in canoes, paddled thousands of miles West, and invaded Florida?

I’m only interested in cutting through all this bullshit: your particular self-delusions (to the extent that you represent a type) and all those unexamined attitudes that flourish in a culture when critical thinking becomes a negative value.

You write: “I believe that is what is called, ‘Supporting the soldiers, without supporting the war.’ The conservatives say it is impossible to do both (I disagree), and they point to people such as yourself as proof of that (you are their pawn), and a great many people believe their argument, and that is why people who think as you do seem to not get their candidates elected to the majority...’ A great many people will think as they do whether they hear my opinion on this matter or not. Being sane, and possessed of a good strong common sense, I’m not trying to change a bloody thing about either you or the electorate by stating the obvious truth. If the electorate was truly prone to voting its conscience rather than its pocket book; if it had a sense of the world ‘out there’ and any knowledge of history and any real concern for justice; this would be a very different planet, and certainly not one in which powerful weapons were thrust in the hands of borderline adolescents like yourself who will never, not in a million years, confess that having power like that is a rush, and that war, on a level so deeply wired in your brain that the words to confess it would come out as grunts anyway, is a need. The so-called insurgents feel it, the soldiers feel it...but only a few (paging Stephen D. Green) can admit it: it’s the elephant in the room. And the Old Men bank on it. They know that a couple of magic phrases like ‘Allah’ or ‘Jihad’ on the one side, or ‘Honor’ and ‘Duty’ on the other, are enough to dupe you all into duping yourselves into achieving their sinister goals for them.

You write: “I hear the frustration and anger behind your words.” If only I were still naïve enough to be either frustrated or angry, CPTMitch. I’m bored, really. There is, truly, nothing new under the sun. I was a kid during Vietnam and the arguments are no different now than they were then.

You’re still a ‘boy’ CPTMitch, because a man would have come back from all that with less rather than more certainty. You wouldn’t be spouting these clunking, rusty cliches...these bizarre sidetracks into Civil War lore, ferchrissakes, or riffs on Masada. You’re still smitten with war. You’ve either been lucky enough to miss seeing the worst sights over there...or you saw them and they didn’t bother you as much as they should have. There’s a third option of course: maybe you really didn’t serve at all. But I suspect it’s another more tragic variation, instead: what you saw and experienced was so awful that you’re in a state of shock and denial about it; you’ve lost the power of honest speech and it’s been replaced by The Script. Oh, and your all-encompasing need for approval.