Last week, videogame software giant EA made a puzzling and unsettling announcement: Due to recurring complaints from a vocal minority of friends and relatives of fallen servicemen, the company would be removing any mention of the Taliban from their new game, a reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise that focuses on the war in Afghanistan, by re-naming the terror group simply the “Opposing Force.”
The decision came after a long period of refusal to compromise the developer’s vision for the game and naturally, resulted in some considerable Internet backlash. But it also raised this nagging question that keeps coming up again and again: Will videogames, especially those about war, ever be taken seriously?
To try and answer that, let’s take a look at another piece of media — a film — that greatly influenced how stories about war are told today:
Image: Dreamworks
Saving Private Ryan marked a considerable milestone in the way Hollywood directors portray human warfare. Gone were the winsome narratives that yield to traditional “heroes” of old as they overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, winning the day for the good guys. Over the years, we had realized our foolishness in implanting these romantic elements into an un-idealistic setting like war. So instead, we are immediately thrust into an unapologetic maelstrom of death: A gritty, hellish realism that charges forward at breakneck speed, not stopping for even a second to let a viewer to reconcile with the grisly death of that one character he might’ve been fond of.
And it was successful — It was successful because that’s exactly how war is, according to the countless World War II veterans who not only praised the film for its portrayal of these events, but also helped advise the filmmakers for accuracy during production. And just like Ryan, EA’s new Medal of Honor game, like prior titles in the franchise, has received advisement and approval from veterans of the conflict it seeks to depict.
So now we arrive at the heart of this quandary: Why can a film be a serious reflection of a historic armed conflict, but a videogame can not? I could discuss at length the disturbing social taboo that seems to engulf anything and everything having to do with 9/11 and the Taliban in most parts of the United States, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. The other half has to do with videogames and the disparity between what they are and what people think they are.
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