Honor At Stake

I've tried not to rant about this.

I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything.  To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA.  Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.

And how I hate to have been disappointed.

The fracas started a couple months back.  A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches.  There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport.  From there, it just got worse.  Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news.  Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision.  Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."

Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor.  The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty.  I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision.  Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany.  But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy.  Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game.  Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation.  If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich.  And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round.  None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history.  By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban.  It's not paying them a compliment.  It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.

An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck.  For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising.  I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality.  He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try.  He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan.  Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force."  Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned.  It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force.  It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto.  If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy."  As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure.  Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in.  They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat.  They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game.  If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.

I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game."  Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have?  You have "cowboys and Indians."  You have "cops and robbers."  You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents.  Folks, that right there is a game.  Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region?  I would say not.  If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same.  Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering?  If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one.  I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree.  For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person.  As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.

The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking.  Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.