Motherboard

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.

After all, this generation’s most successful war games, Halo and Gears of War, exist in worlds of pure fantasy. These games eschew the responsibility of tackling any real issues by hiding behind a veil of machismo as they send the player headlong into hyper-violent power trips. So to the non-gamer ‘everyman’ who only knows about war games from videos of kids freaking out on Youtube it almost makes sense that they would re-apply this stigma when looking at a game like Medal of Honor.

But even more confusing still — as a recent New York Times article points out — videogames about modern conflict are vastly more popular than the more recent Hollywood blockbusters they draw from. The Hurt Locker, for instance, grossed only about $16 million at the box office, whereas last year’s record-breaking Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 snatched $310 million within 24 hours of being on store shelves. Clearly people want war games, but are afraid when they start to transcend the realm of fiction and become simulations that might shed light on real, modern day affairs.

Martin Scorsese once said in an interview that the American filmmaker “has always been more interested in creating fiction than revealing reality.” It’s ironic that this quote seems now to be just as applicable to games as it is to film. A game about war has a lot more it can say than one would think, and it might wind up that people like Karen Meredith, the mother of a fallen soldier who accused EA of “turning war into a game,” might be missing the whole point.

As game designer and critic Ian Bogost points out in his article on Gamasutra, letting the player experience the sheer horror of the war, whether from American or Taliban eyes, might open the eyes of some players to the absurdity of the “good versus evil” portrait that our governments paints for us to justify these conflicts:

“[…] the pure anguish of the Afghan war may obliterate the very notion of “good guys” and “bad guys” in Afghanistan in the first place. A generous interpreter might hope for such a subtle reveal in the game, one that might send a knowing chill down the spines of its presumably sophisticated playership."

But by removing the Taliban’s name, EA and the rest of the team behind Medal of Honor have compromised any remaining potential they may have had to make a videogame which truly explores the issues behind an ongoing military conflict. ‘But why,’ you ask. ’It’s just a name, after all. Why should it matter?’ It matters because, in removing this element, EA has in a sense admitted that the war in Afghanistan is just a skin for what is yet another foray into the realm of fantasy.

In other words, if EA doesn’t take seriously the task of simulating the war in Afghanistan enough to keep the titles of the warring factions as the history books will remember them, then why, as players, should we? “And if the Afghan war in which the new Medal of Honor is set was one explicitly meant to drive the Taliban from their strongholds in Afghanistan,” Bogost asks, “why should it matter that the game is set in that nation in the present day at all? In short, how was this Medal of Honor title meant to be a game about this war in particular?”

If videogames are going to truly become to the 21st century what film was the 20th, they’re going to need to stick to their guns. We already know that games have the ability to give us new perspectives through simulating modern life. The only question now is when are they going to grow up and move boldly in whatever direction, however unpopular, they need to go.