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Iran Says U.S. Video Games Are CIA Propaganda


Is the CIA using video games as part of a propaganda campaign to indoctrinate Iranian youth? Iran thinks so.

Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine with Iranian heritage, was arrested as an American spy on a visit to Iran's capital last August. Hekmati allegedly confessed to being a spy in a video and was sentenced to death by Iranian officials on Monday.

Hekmati allegedly said in a confessional that he worked for DARPA, the R&D wing of the Department of Defense, after serving in the Marine Corps, the The New York Times reported. Following his time at DARPA, Hekmati said in the video he was hired by Kuma, a video game design company.

Kuma makes a number of different types of games, including a series of War on Terror-centric titles called "Kuma War." The games are released in small "episodes," featuring re-enactments of modern, real-world battles in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The games also let players jump into hypothetical "what-if" simulations, including a theoretical U.S. invasion of Iran:

Whether or not you think the game looks any good, it's certainly provocative material.

Hekmati's confessional allegedly called Kuma Games a front for the U.S. government, funded by the CIA, with the objective of convincing "the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable." The games were to be developed and distributed to young people across the Middle East in a digital propaganda effort to the win their support for U.S. campaigns abroad.

Darius Kazemi, a game developer also of Iranian background, tweeted an online listing from the U.S. government which shows Herkmati as a developer for Kuma and the "principal investigator" in a Department of Defense-bankrolled initiative to help soldiers learn a foreign language. The text of the listing suggests that Kuma's work for the Department of Defense was solely on an interactive language and culture training program and not a combat simulation.

Neither Kuma nor Keith Halper, the company's CEO, immediately responded to a request for comment.

The American military has used video games for public relations campaigns before. In 2002, the U.S. Army released America's Army, a first-person shooter developed to bolster recruitment levels. That game offers a "realistic" simulation of a soldier's life. The platform has been expanded to help train actual U.S. soldiers.

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