The gamer of Baghdad

For now, though, Iraqis as gamers are still trapped behind disconnected borders. "LAN cafes don't have Internet connections," says Zeyad. "Internet cafes don't allow software and games to be installed on their computers." But when the connection comes, he'll enter the lobbies of the world's multiplayer combat zones. "I'm looking forward to play mainly 'Unreal Tournament' and 'Empire Earth,' but it would be fun to try other games like 'Battlefield 1942,' 'Quake III,' 'Medal of Honor,' and 'Counter Strike.'"

I sometimes play the odd Unreal Tournament match online myself, and so I tell Zeyad to look for a player with the username "Coriolanus," when he can come on via the Internet.

"At local LAN cafes," Zeyad e-mails me, "I go by the handle 'Soul Reaper,' so I think I'll use the same."

Inshallah, the Soul Reaper will hunt down Coriolanus with a rocket launcher, and kill him again and again, as a way of announcing Iraq's arrival to the free world at play.

In my work as a journalist of the medium, I interviewed a fellow gamer who is also a Green Beret who once called down airstrikes on the Taliban in Kandahar. For an entirely unrelated assignment, a year later, I happened to meet another fellow gamer who is also an Air Force bomber pilot, and it turned out he unleashed some of those very bombs on Kandahar's Taliban -- and then last year, dropped more munitions on Saddam's forces in Iraq. That pilot flies an F15e -- the same jet that Zeyad of Iraq is more than familiar with, from his days of playing the Gulf War-era flight simulator of the same name. (Though Zeyad was more preoccupied with controlling Crash Bandicoot, when the real F15s returned over his family's house last year.) As a gamer, I have myself played with peers living throughout the E.U., from Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. (Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of its high-tech economy, Israel is the only Middle Eastern country with a sizable gaming community; but that, it seems, will change soon.)

The brotherhood of gamers crosses all borders, ignores all cultural, political and economic distinctions, and brings together some of the most technologically savvy of every nation into the same creative commons.

I think about the play-testers of the Mukhabarat, the men who once had to play through video games in search of potential anti-regime content. (In "Conflict: Desert Storm", for example, the end mission involves killing a general who looks suspiciously like the recently de-spider-holed leader.) I picture a middle-aged Baathist with a Playstation controller teetering on a voluminous gut, trying without success to maneuver his British commando into Saddam's lair before the Republican Guard can get a bead on him. Instead he's the one who keeps getting mercilessly snuffed. Maybe before this he manned Qusay's plastic shredders, or worked shifts at what his résumé tactfully describes as "despoiler of women's virtue." Now here he is, fumbling with a medium where cruelty counts for nothing, and the game kids of the Bab al-Sharj can own his ass with their eyes closed. (Down the halls of the Ministry of Information, he bellows, "How do I use this 'God mode'?!") Because he can't beat the game fairly, because it demands a proficiency he could never earn, and there are no means with which to torture its hard-edged causal logic into submission. In the very near future, he will be dead, or retired to the indignity of hawking diesel fuel to passing farmers and truckers outside town.

But even in the electrified neighborhoods of the Sunni Triangle, the game kids will be busy inside, applying their skills. And they will be in the game rooms and the Internet cafes springing up with just as much frequency, opening up new avenues of possibility. We will benefit from them as well, for in between death-match sessions, some of them will let us in on the news of an emerging Iraq that our own media cannot be troubled to keep pace with -- clicking through to new windows of opportunity which open up slowly, but with progress meters that steadily move in the right direction.

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