Medal of Honor Changing “Taliban” to “Opposing Force” in Multiplayer
Portraying a war while it’s still ongoing is a difficult, sensitive situation. We’ve heard about how games like Six Days in Fallujah, and the No Russian level of Modern Warfare 2 stir up all kinds of controversy, and how the disturbing, hyper-realistic events that take place in a war should be portrayed in those murder simulators that some of us base our lives around.
In these tense times for games based in real war settings, it’s difficult to gauge how the participants of said war will take certain elements of your narrative. For example, the recent news that EA would be removing the Taliban from the newest Medal of Honor game and renaming them “Opposing Force”.
I glanced over the headline at first at immediately thought they were just porting Gearbox’s Half-Life: Opposing Force instead of making a new MOH game, but that just sounds ridiculous.
According to Kotaku, before the name change was announced the Army & Air Force Exchange Services would pull the game from U.S. Military bases worldwide due to the “well-documented reports of depictions of Taliban fighters engaging American troops” that take place in the game. I wouldn’t think that reliving exactly what you’re doing (to a degree of theatrical extremity I’d assume, then again I’ve never been to war and compared it to a game) and then playing a simulation of it would be especially helpful for PTSD.
The Executive Producer of the game, Greg Goodrich stated that while the name change is being enacted, it won’t have any effect on the overall design of the game.
People getting bent out of shape just because the word “Taliban” is in a game is ridiculous. The only real change is that MoH is now just as generic as every other modern day shooter because everything has to be politically correct.
Well i do not think the game is generic or not simply based on how the teams are named.
Everyones gonna call them Taliban now anyway, no matter what the screenname is.
I don’t like any game which is based on a real conflict in the 20th or 21st centuries because there’s almost no clear “badies” (except in WW2). I don’t wanna play black opps because setting it in vietnam, killing people basically because they were refused a democratic election and I’m playing the side of the imperialist agresser invading. Yeay a game where I’m the nazi and I’ve also got the largest military force fighting against an outnumbered, undeveloped third world country that has been fighting various imperialist agressors for the last 20+ years starting with japan, then france, and now me. Fun replaying a war that caused 3 million civilian deaths :)
I fucking wish they would stop all this shock marketing crap. Its one thing when rockstar does it and its not actually offensive, but its just that 50+ year olds living in surburbia who find swearing a offensive are offended, its different when your belittling the lives of millions of people. At least with black opps they at least have the common courtesy to base it on shit that is over.
Why is this such a thing? Have we not been playing as terrorists in Counterstrike for like decades now?
btw, I know the beta was not really well received and Dan’s piece on it was pretty comprehensive, but this game still has me interested.