Anybody can kill Osama bin Laden in Jeremy Alessi's online game, Bin Laden Raid.
Screengrab: Jason Schreier/Wired.com

There’s a faint buzz in the night air. Maybe it’s the chickens. Or the desert bugs. Or the gunshots.

I slowly, meticulously creep through the compound, instinctively firing my rifle every time I see something that looks bizarre or out of place. Eventually, I make my way to the third floor, where my main target is waiting: Osama bin Laden.

Boom. Head shot.

I’d venture that’s not exactly how the mission went down when U.S. special-ops forces killed the al-Qaida leader earlier this month, but it sure feels close.

It should: Bin Laden Raid developer Jeremy Alessi and his partners took painstaking steps to make sure that the online game, which re-creates the secret U.S. raid on bin Laden, is as accurate as possible.

“The layout itself is not factual, just logical from the information at the time,” Alessi told Wired.com in an e-mail about the game’s rapid development. The team used Google Earth to figure out the geography surrounding bin Laden’s compound, which is to scale in the game, and they created the inside of the infamous structure after perusing video footage released by news organizations and doing other research.

With bin Laden’s death dominating the headlines, the story of the lightning raid on the terrorist leader’s compound has already been immortalized in T-shirts, parody songs and Situation Room LOL pics. The videogame world has been no different: A French TV station created a Mario-style mockup of the news, while a modder named Fletch designed a Counter-Strike: Source map of bin Laden’s compound.

Bin Laden Raid might be the most straightforward and interactive recounting of the events in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The browser game is simple to play — after downloading the Unity Web Player plugin, if you don’t already have it installed. To engage the target, you simply move with your keyboard and fire with your mouse. The goal is to kill bin Laden, take out five of his associates and collect seven pieces of intelligence.

The game is also pretty clunky, which is understandable considering its short development time. As I crawled through the compound, I grew increasingly frustrated with how slowly my character walked. Enemies had no health bars and no personality traits — they were simply targets. There were no conversations, no witty one-liners. Just a cold and calculated mission.

It’s not a particularly fun game, but Alessi says that’s the point.

“Running through the sim gives a perspective that cannot be communicated any other way,” he says. “[Players] witness firsthand what was seen from the ground and perhaps a few similar thoughts are shared between the person who experienced the event for real and the person who just used the sim.”

During the week after bin Laden’s death, Alessi and his partners rushed to get the game out, designing and programming the entire project during a 25-hour marathon session. Speed was of the essence, Alessi says; the team had to be fast in order to stay relevant.

But what do we gain by playing? Can interactive media provide insight that traditional news outlets can’t?

A research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology is studying just that, creating what it calls “newsgames” in order to “persuade, inform and titillate.” The goal is to “make information interactive, re-create a historical event, put news content into a puzzle, teach journalism and build a community,” according to the Newsgames website.

While I can’t say I exited Bin Laden Raid with any new information or altered sense of perspective, it was interesting enough to leave me thinking. Not about bin Laden — about the potential uses of these “newsgames.” Could a videogame allow armies to crowdsource military strategy, Ender’s Game-style? Will interactive media cultivate new ideas and possibilities?

Alessi, who says he has been interested in the subject for several years, thinks so.

“We’re a long way from [real-world applications],” he says. “[But] I think that in due time this will lead to some powerful stuff. Real-world solutions will be developed from within the game…. Instead of opinions on Twitter and Facebook, we’ll create a platform with solutions.”