battletech wrote:I applaud you Nate on the tactful way you expressed your opinion on this matter.
Well, it originally WASN'T going to be tactful, but I'd rather not make more work for the mods.
Is he talking about that one game where it was in the beginning of the game and only in the beginning? An was it not optional too? If it is what I think it's about.
You're thinking of the "No Russian" scene in Modern Warfare 2. The outcry over that was that you were in an airport and had the opportunity to shoot and kill civilians. Despite the fact that you didn't have to shoot any civilians (the objective was merely to keep pace with the group), the level in question was made skippable in the final version, with no achievements tied to the level (and thus no penalty for skipping).
What rocklobster is talking about is the 2010 Medal of Honor game which was more or less loosely based on Operation Anaconda, which was an actual military operation in 2002 with the goal of destroying al-Qaeda/Taliban forces.
As most FPS games do, the game had a multiplayer option. That's what the complaint is about, is that there are two forces in multiplayer: the Coalition and the Opposing Forces. The Coalition is obviously based on US and other allied forces, and the Opposing Forces are based on the Taliban. Which means if you're the Opposing Forces side in multiplayer, you're playing as the Taliban.
Because of the pressure from military groups, the developers removed the word "Taliban" from multiplayer and replaced it with "Opposing Forces."
And that's the complaint is you're allowed to play as the bad guys and it's somehow insulting to the memory of people who died in the Afghanistan conflicts or whatever. But it's the same tune people have been saying about World War II shooters, or any other kind of war game. The only reason anyone is making a big deal about it now is because it's current, and it's an easy target for complaints since video games are still relatively new technology. It's still okay to pick on video games. It happened with radio, television, comic books, rock music, and it'll happen with whatever comes along next.
When this war is nothing but a memory, no one will even care, just like no one cares about board games. Remember Axis and Allies, the board game? You can play as the Axis powers in that game. You can play as Germany and even Japan if you have the Pacific version. Why does nobody complain about Axis and Allies? After all, the Axis forces in World War II killed many good soldiers, not to mention the reprehensible acts by Germany itself (which is of course outside the scope of the game, but does not change the fact that Germany did these things). Pearl Harbor was a pretty horrible thing, but nobody calls Axis and Allies: Pacific an insult to military members who were killed during that attack.
Why? Because board games are familiar. They're not new, they've been around for ages. Nobody picks on board games because everybody loves board games. But video games? They're the new kid, not fully accepted in society. On top of that, World War II was like 70 years ago, so it's less personal. There's hardly any WWII veterans around to complain about it, so it's not a big deal. And again, if this game was made 50 years in the future, no one would even care about it. They'd be like "So what?" But because it's fresh in people's minds, it's a big deal.
So there ya go.
