Dominic Girard from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sez,
It’s one thing for Iran to arrest an American and sentence him to death for being a spy. It’s a whole other thing when you say the spy made video games as propaganda for the CIA.
Yet that’s precisely one of the charges Iranian-American Amir Hekmati confessed to on Iranian television in December.
(Let’s remember that Iran routinely accuses foreigners of being spies, and there’s no way of knowing exactly what methods were used to get Hekmati to read out his confession).
Hekmati did once worked with Kuma Games – a New York based game developer. Iran believes Kuma Games are CIA propagandists, that the company makes video games to disseminate a pro-USA message internationally.
Some of Kuma Games’ offerings are playable scenarios of real-world events. You can be a rebel trying to track down Gadhafi in Libya. You can join Team Six and kill Osama bin Laden. You can also be a soldier inserted in Iran, trying to sabotage their nuclear weapons program.
But does that necessarily mean they’re a CIA front? This short CBC Radio documentary tries to sort out if the CIA would ever consider such an idea, and if it would even be worth the effort.
Day 6 Documentary: Propaganda Games