Ok, let me start this off by saying I have nothing but respect and admiration for the American soldier (or sailor, marine, or airman, as the case may be).  I’m working on a Masters Degree in Military History, with my focus on American military history.  Reading about the experiences of American soldiers throughout history has provided me with about as much insight on their experience as one can get without actually being there (which I’ll admit leaves a tremendous gap in my knowledge that can only be filled by experiencing war first hand).  But this furor over the inclusion of the Taliban as the Opposing Force in the new Medal of Honor game is absolutely stupid.

We seem to have no problem with playing our enemies in past wars, or even fictional (but potentially real) conflicts.  No one complains that you play as the Nazis in Day of Defeat or the original Call of Duty games.  Hell, Company of Heroes even lets you play as the “Panzer Elite” (their clever camouflage for the SS) in a single player campaign.  More recently, Battlefield 2 allowed you to play as the Middle Eastern Coalition (who used the kind of equipment one would find in Iraqi arsenals pre-2003, at least for the most part) and COD4 simply labeled the enemy in their multiplayer “OpFor,” but again, this was just a disguise for an Al Qaeda-like group of terrorists.  So the problem isn’t that players are pretending to be Middle Eastern military forces or Muslim terrorists.  It’s simply the fact that we’re portraying a real conflict with an enemy that has a name we all recognize.

We seem to forget, however, that the Taliban was actually the legitimate government of Afghanistan when we helped the Northern Alliance kick them out.  Now, I know that depends heavily on your definition of “legitimate.”  Certainly most nations never recognized the Taliban as a government, which would probably make most people think that they weren’t legitimate.  However, when two sides fight a civil war, and one side conquers almost the entire country, including almost all of the infrastructure and major cities, I tend to consider them the winners.  And the winner is the recognized power in the land.  You can’t say that the Communists weren’t the legitimate rulers of Russia just because there were still some White Russians left at the end of the civil war.  The Reds won, they took over, and they ruled what became the Soviet Union.  The same thing happened with the Taliban.

Basically what people are really upset about is not that the game allows one team to play as bad guys (even when we played cops and robbers or cowboys and indians [yeah, weren't all that politically correct when we were 5], someone HAD to be the bad guy), but rather that it allows you play as bad guys we’re actually fighting right now.  I personally don’t understand why this is such a big problem that the game needs to be banned.  If people don’t want to play a game with that kind of scenario, then don’t buy it.  The game doesn’t encourage the killing of American soldiers, it’s just a big game of virtual cops and robbers.   If individuals have a hard time separating the fiction from the reality, then I’d seriously question their parental guidance when they were impressionable children.  And if they’re still children, they shouldn’t be playing games that ultra-violent anyway.  I’m positive its ESRB rating is going to end up being Mature.

Lest you think I'm a cold-hearted bastard, I cry every time I go to a military cemetery. Especially when I see one of these.

To the service men and women who are bothered by this, I can certainly see why you would be.  But this is supposed to be a nation of free speech and expression.  You’re certainly free to not buy the game.  Kotaku has reported that this game is being pulled from Gamestops on military bases around the world.  I think this is a little silly.  If soldiers didn’t want to play it because of content, they won’t buy it.  Therefore, Gamestops on military bases wouldn’t stock it because there is no market for it.  They’d devote shelf space to products they would actually move (it’s that whole free market thing).  I can also understand the parents of fallen soldiers being upset at this.  Again, don’t buy it.  But don’t try to tell ME what I can and can’t buy, like the Defense Minister of the UK.  I’ll make the decision on my own, thank you.