The Medal of Honor controversy

I’ve read the wiki and a few of the articles about the playing-as-the-Taliban controversy surrounding the Medal of Honor reboot. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any real gamer reaction, so here’s my unasked-for take on it. Gamers, if you start getting hassled by soccer moms, here’s a cheat sheet; parents and adults, I’m here to answer your questions. This is both a response to this particular instance and thoughts on every violent-multiplayer controversy ever, so feel free to generalize these ideas as appropriate.

Thesis: Guys, it’s only in multiplayer, which isn’t built for or experienced as realistic. Chill out – it’s more than a little insensitive, but no one’s going to learn to hate America through this.

The single-player campaign, which is usually the part that’s meant to feel realistic, has the player solely as NATO soldiers. The only time the player will be a Taliban insurgent is the multiplayer experience. The teams that players are split into during multiplayer are just Red vs. Blue, Shirts vs. Skin – almost no FPS games do anything to differentiate the sides beyond the characters’ outfits. It’d also be difficult for players to choose to play as an insurgent, because most games auto-sort players to keep teams evenly sized.

If someone were to believe he was playing as a qualitatively Taliban character, it’s only for a matter of time. Once something’s familiar, you stop noticing it and don’t ascribe importance to it. At the frantic speed of multiplayer games, I’d estimate that it’d be about three hours before players went from seeing Modern American Soldier vs. Afghani Insurgent with Turban to seeing Red vs. Blue.

Finally… look, realism has no place in multiplayer. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I think that the only reason that this game could go from being a bit insensitive (which I do believe it is) to being disturbing or blatantly disrespectful is if people have a reason to connect it to reality. In the multiplayer mode of Modern Warfare 2, an effective strategy was to run around a map with just a knife against other players armed with M-16s, and players respawn in seconds – there’s absolutely nothing in multiplayer that says “This is REAL.” Multiplayer is, almost invariably, a high-tech version of checkers or laser tag rather than an interactive storytelling experience.

Conclusion: Yeah, it’s a bit insensitive, but I also haven’t heard a substantive quote from the troops themselves about all of this, so I don’t think it’s much more than that. And if someone can’t maintain a separation between fiction and non-fiction, of course they shouldn’t play this. If your kids are too young to maintain it, of course they shouldn’t play this. And even if they can, do us all a favor and talk to little Johnny about how gay isn’t a synonym for stupid – this (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/, NSFW) is doubly true regarding kids who’re looking for a place to mouth off without consequences.