- Tango wrote:
- Even though I don't like the game itself not the idea, it's total bullshit. I would love a GOOD game where you can play as Terry's or Hamas and get to kill NATO troops.
This ban is no doubt only in the states I presume.
The ban itself yes, but there has been discussion of it happening in Britain, New Zealand, and Canada.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=British defense secretary Liam Fox has urged retailers not to stock the upcoming Medal of Honor game, saying that he is disgusted that the game allows players to be the Taliban.Anger at EA's Medal of Honor allowing players to assume the role of Taliban soldiers in the game's multiplayer has reached the upper echelons of the British government today, as Fox expressed his disgust for the game, and called upon British retailers to ban it from their shelves.
Fox said that he found it hard to believe that anyone in the country would want to buy such an "un-British" game, and that he was shocked that anyone would think that a game where you could be the Taliban was acceptable. "At the hands of the Taliban, children have lost fathers and wives have lost husbands," he said. "I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product." A spokesperson for EA said there that Medal of Honor was just a game, and merely reflected the fact that conflicts has two sides. She likened it to a game of cops and robbers, saying that somebody had to be the bad guy.
As I understand it, it would be illegal for the UK government to try to ban Medal of Honor itself, which is presumably why Fox is trying to guilt trip retailers into banning it for him. It's not hard to see why Fox is upset - EA knew this would be controversial when it was making the game - but it's still a little sad to see an elected official respond in such a knee-jerk manner.
The Escapist : News : UK Defense Secretary Calls for Medal of Honor Ban
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=New Zealand’s Minister of Defence, Wayne Mapp, has spoken out against Medal of Honor, which will allow players to control Taliban insurgents and fight against other players controlling coalition forces in its multiplayer mode."This game undermines the values of our nation, and the dedicated service of our men and women in uniform," said Mapp. “Terrorist acts have caused the deaths of several New Zealanders.
"Hundreds of New Zealand servicemen and women have put their lives on the line in Afghanistan to combat terrorism, and this month Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell died in action over there."
Mapp’s comments echo those of his English counterpart Liam Fox, who said to the BBC, "It's hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game.
"I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product."
The controversy around Medal of Honor is similar to the hysteria around Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, prior to its release late last year. That game included a level wherein players controlled a terrorist and could shoot civilians in an airport.
Medal of Honor is coming out on the 15th of October for Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3.
New Zealand minister condemns MOH - Gameplanet News
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=Why it's okay to wage joystick jihad - The Globe and Mail
Richard Poplak
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010 5:43PM EDT
Last updated on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010 6:37PM EDT
.The Chinook lands in a whirlwind of dust. A team of bearded, Ray-Banned Special Forces warriors sprint into a ramshackle town, weapons at the ready. We're in Afghanistan in the thick of the Taliban insurgency, and as we wave our H&K MP7s, we're wary of insurgents driving wildly in pickup trucks, trying to kill us before we kill them.
This is the hyper-violent, dust-mote-detailed world of Medal of Honor, a new video game set slap bang in the middle of the war on terror and due for release in October. It has a multiplayer function that allows you to join as the tattooed heroes of the Tier 1 Special Forces unit, or to don a virtual keffiyah and kick NATO butt as a member of the Taliban.
The game, in particular the I'm-A-Talib function, has sparked a Silicon Valley controversy, with big implications for Canadians jittery at the links between a faraway war and the new, homegrown terrorist threat bubbling in our nation's capital.
“ I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban. I'm sure most Canadians are uncomfortable and angry about this. ”
— Defence Minister Peter MacKaySince Pong first dropped, we've been warned that video games will deep-fry our brains and rot our morals. (Grand Theft Auto has, after all, alerted us to the fine art of beating on hookers.) But games and war have forever been linked. And Medal of Honor, like so many current battlefield video games, may provide insights into the Afghan conflict that we'd otherwise be blind to.
The controversy erupted this week, when publisher and developer Electronic Arts, a U.S.-based company with offices in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal, came under fire from Fox News for its heavily hyped title.
The station interviewed the grieving mother of a dead soldier, who very reasonably insisted that the war in Afghanistan is not a game, a fact her son's death irrevocably proves.
Her sentiment is shared by defence ministers the world over, including our own Peter MacKay, who blasted the game this week.
“The men and women of the Canadian Forces, our allies, aid workers and innocent Afghans are being shot at, and sometimes killed, by the Taliban. This is reality,” Mr. MacKay's statement said. “I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban. I'm sure most Canadians are uncomfortable and angry about this.”
But, as everyone engaged in this debate knows, Medal of Honor detractors are butting up against freedom of speech laws. What's more, the argument against Medal depends on the assumption that those playing as Taliban will identify with the insurgents' point of view, thus legitimizing it.
Unsurprisingly, that's not a position Electronic Arts agrees with. “Most of us have been doing this since we were seven,” says the company's PR manager, Amanda Taggart. “Someone's gotta be the cop, and someone's gotta be the robber.”
Speaking from the position of a frequent playground ersatz robber, I can confirm that role-playing doesn't necessarily imply empathy and attachment. There is, after all, no appreciable evidence suggesting that children who play Indians are likely to grow up as advocates for Indians' rights.
During World War II, British kids played at Jerries in blitzed-out London neighbourhoods, processing fears that otherwise would have gone unarticulated. I've gamed with teenagers in Old Sana'a, Yemen, and Ramallah, in the West Bank, who see nothing wrong with playing the American hero in Counter-Strike, despite their rabidly anti-American views. As the academic and video game nut Ed Halter puts it, “Gametime and wartime have never been far removed. As long as humans have waged war, they've played at it.”
The venerable Medal of Honor franchise is part of a long line of war-themed video games. The first iteration, released in 1999, had a Second World War theme and took cinematic cues from Saving Private Ryan and HBO's Band of Brothers, with artful lighting and an emphasis on veracity and research, all married to the wartime tribulations of square-jawed heroes.
The game's selling point, though, was its obsessive detail. The DreamWorks Interactive developers pored over maps and documents, and consulted with veterans, trying to render D-Day with blood-soaked verisimilitude. It felt, at the time (the graphics have since staled), as if the dust had been blown off the history books, and the Second World War was once again thrust into living rooms to be debated, lived.
The same OCD-like focus has been employed in the making of the Medal reboot. Real Tier 1 soldiers were brought in as contributors, and in the promotional material, they insist that the experience is as good as being there, minus the inconvenience of having your brains blown out.
“It's the human side that they're bringing to the soldier,” says one Auto-Tuned Tier 1 warrior on the game's website, his voice and face disguised. “[They're] bringing back respect.”
Perhaps. But some of us may find this close interaction with U.S. military operatives troubling, especially after viewing the Linkin Park music video/trailer, in which bearded, tattooed Tier 1 soldiers, along with members of the band, shoot their way through Anytown, Afghanistan. It hews uncomfortably close to a recruitment video. Indeed, despite all the supposed veracity, Medal of Honor is a stunningly rendered, awesomely bloody, gorgeously choreographed extended action sequence.
As disquieting as this may be, it's nothing new: Game developers and the military have long been bedfellows. There is the Kuma War series, whose tagline, “Stop watching the news and get in the game,” suggests the pointlessness of sanitized mainstream news when Kuma takes you onto painstakingly re-created, gore-soaked battlefields.
For their part, the U.S. Marines have an 18-year history of creating games for recruitment and battlefield training purposes; their America's Army: Special Forces was so well-regarded that Hezbollah countered by developing its own version, called Special Force, heavily promoted in the ubiquitous gaming shops in south Beirut.
Military games, in one of those information-age ironies, have even been used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers back from battle.
When it comes to pop culture, however, one never knows where the line will be drawn. With military games, it was the recent Six Days in Fallujah. The game depicts, in detail, the 2004 campaign that claimed over 6,000 lives and transformed a once-flourishing city into a bloody parking lot. What outraged veterans' advocacy groups, such as the Gold Star Mothers Club, was not only the speed with which Fallujah became rock-'em sock-'em entertainment, but the fact that developers Atomic Games, in their quest for accuracy, used Iraqi insurgents as consultants on the project.
“We question how anyone can trivialize a war that continues to kill and maim members of the military and Iraqi civilians to this day,” the Gold Star Mothers Club said in a statement. The game still hasn't made it to the shelves.
The question becomes one of ethics. Do enemy combatants deserve a say in the development of video games in which they play a starring role? Should they help make game developers rich?
But beyond these considerations, playing games is how we deal with war, how we conquer our subconscious terror of battle. Conversely, it is how we become better warriors. It doesn't help relatives of soldiers and civilians who have died at the hands of the Taliban. And it doesn't provide succour for Canadians who must once again consider the links between Afghanistan and the homegrown terror threat on their doorstep.
Richard Poplak is the author of The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World.
