War As A Game

GameCore is a weekly column by CBSNews.com's William Vitka, Chad Chamberlain and Joey Arak that focuses on gamers and gaming.

Now, Black Hawk Down is moving to the Xbox and PS2. It isn't quite a port; it's more like a Special Edition of its PC counterpart and it will be hitting store shelves in May.

They've tightened the game up and added what they hope will be the largest ever Xbox Live multiplayer support, with 50 people running amok on the digital battlefield.

There is variety, a cascade of multi-player game types: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Flag Ball and King of the Hill.

If none of those are your bag, Black Hawk boasts a four-player split-screen cooperative mode on the Xbox. PS2 users are confined to a two-player split-screen.

The game covers Somalia's full 18-month campaign, reenacting it in 16 single-player missions. NovaLogic told us that it is "as accurate a retelling of the events as is possible."

The company says one of their goals is educating people about what really happened there. Army Ranger John Collett, who was there on the ground and Novalogic's technical adviser, told us the Pentagon did a poor job telling the American public about the good the U.S. soldiers did there. Worse, he says, was the "ridiculous misinformation" broadcast by CNN at the time.

Truth be told, Collett is more interesting than the game and I wanted to know more about his experience.

"No bull," I said.

John smiled as we shook hands and agreed, "No bull."

He had photos he took through the entire grueling guerrilla war and brought them out on his laptop.

In many of the pictures, we saw the evidence of violence. Snapshots showed the back of trucks and armored carriers that were laced with blood-red reminders of combat.

Chad and I looked at photos of his squad mates. John told us who made it back and who didn't.

He told us their names as we went from pictures of soldiers playing on the beach to pictures of bone shattered like porcelain.

There were times, John said, when our troops didn't have backup. Support "didn't show up until after Clinton had to go public," he told us.

"If it bleeds, it leads," was John's critique, justified sometimes, of the media. What he believes the media missed are his stories, meeting the people who live there, trading with locals and playing with children. We saw pictures of the toys he'd bought, souvenirs of the original humanitarian reasons for American intervention.

Rangers don't forget their own. The Special Operations Warrior Foundation is a non-profit organization that helps provide scholarships and educational counseling to children who have lost parents serving in Special Ops. To their credit, NovaLogic donates part of the proceeds from the sales of Black Hawk Down to the SOWF.

NovaLogic calls it "a bit of a mission."

They have a mission and I have figured out what's got its talons lodged in my mind. Happiness and horror, side by side.

War as a game and games as war. From smile to shrapnel.
By William Vitka