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So what has appeared to prompt the defense ministers of three Commonwealth countries to blast Medal of Honor is their visceral reaction against the idea that the Taliban is human. When, as a child, I played as a German commander in that game or as a Japanese World War II admiral in the war game Flat Top, should my parents and teachers have been concerned that I was turning into a fascist? The Avalon Hill classic PanzerBlitz helped reshape the board game business when it was introduced in 1970 as an evenhanded simulation of the Eastern Front.

That thought has found expression in games for many decades. After all, Germans have been playable in multiplayer World War II video games for years (though I have not seen a story- and character-driven single-player campaign set among the Axis). “I guess this is the same reaction that readers had when they opened ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and read about a squad of German infantrymen in World War I,” he said.Įven the depredations of the Nazis have not entirely erased the concept that most German soldiers in both wars were patriots doing what they thought was right. Brown, perhaps inadvertently, pointed the way to a more subtle and broadly revealing thought about how we represent and humanize our real-life adversaries in popular culture when he invoked one of the classics of 20th-century literature. When the robbers won, it didn’t mean those kids wanted to kill the police.” Jeff Brown, the top spokesman for Electronic Arts, had it right when he told me this week: “Multiplayer is built on the same dynamic that ruled the cops-and-robbers game we played in our parents’ backyard. So I see no reason or rationale to criticize Electronic Arts for remaining faithful to the actual conditions and reality of its game’s setting. (The seminal multiplayer online game Counter-Strike, one of the most popular team-based combat simulators, sets its two sides as terrorists and counterterrorists, without any explicit political identification.) The actual identities of the combatants are no more meaningful than the choice of black and white in a chess game.

The job is to match wits with the other humans on the other end of the Internet and defeat them through coordination, tactics and execution under pressure. And there is no sense of character development. In such matches there is no story - and no presumption of success. Medal of Honor allows you to play as the Taliban only during multiplayer matches. Imagine the reaction to a game that included a mission where you were cooperating with Al Qaeda during the siege of Tora Bora and had to protect Osama bin Laden while spiriting him to safety. If Medal of Honor let you play as the Taliban throughout an entire single-player campaign, then we would have a real controversy on our hands. And that is why almost every single-player game, Medal of Honor included, sets the player as the “good guy,” in this case as a heroic American soldier.

If such a game’s stories end in inevitable failure, no one is going to want to play them. In Medal of Honor’s main single-player campaign, for example, the player takes the role of various United States soldiers, looking to kill Islamic bad guys and accomplish various tactical objectives along the way.

In a single-player campaign you are the protagonist of a particular story with its own narrative progression. But those reactions are based on a misunderstanding of what video games are.įirst, it is important to understand the critical difference between a game’s single-player and multiplayer modes. The outrage is surely genuine (though there are no British, Canadian or New Zealand soldiers in the game) and the discomfort understandable.