Rainbow Six 'Inspires' F.E.A.R. Idiots

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We need to talk about those Forever Enduring Always Ready clowns down at Fort Stewart, GA, the ones who formed their own militia to fight back against the government. Instead, F.E.A.R. got paranoid about one of their own members and then killed him and his girlfriend. They got busted and Army Pfc. Michael Burnett has decided to cooperate with prosecutors to nail the rest of his crew.

Why do we care? It turns out that F.E.A.R. leader Pvt. Isaac Aguigui used a magazine article about the upcoming Ubisoft game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Patriots as his primary recruiting tool. Or at least, that's what the prosecutors say. We're not talking about the actual game, which won't be released until sometime next year. Not the game itself. An article describing the premise of the game. An article Aguigui believed could start a recruitment process he called "the awakening."

All of this raises some complicated questions. How are we supposed to buy into the premise of a video game that wants to exploit fear of domestic terrorism when actual domestic terrorists almost always turn out to be so incredibly dense? Did Aguigui's pitch make it sound like Tom Clancy was secretly revealing some high-quality intelligence hidden inside a video game?

This local news station's breathless report about Burnett's testimony and the group's connection to the game is worth watching just for the quotes from the guy who teaches video game programming at the local college:

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And here's the game's concept video that was floating around earlier this year:

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