Former Marine reminds us Medal of Honor is just a video game

In his Medal of Honor review, Joystiq's Andrew Yoon writes: "Recalling the terminology, remembering the technology and feeling the burden of the mission, the campaign is a true learning experience -- one that I didn't expect, but ultimately enjoyed." This statement is a testament to EA and Danger Close's ability to successfully execute the so-called "historical fiction" element that was so key to the game's design and marketing. Andrew hadn't learned to be a soldier, but he was drawn into the "perceived realism" much in the way that any celebrated war movie or book has sucked in its consumers. Certainly, games' ascent into the high art of "realism" has rasied some issues for a medium commonly associated with kids stuff.

If you're concerned that war (video) games are becoming too real, especially for the kids who get their hands on them one way or another, give former U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer Benjamin Busch's editorial on NPR a read. "The game cannot train its players to be actual skilled special operations soldiers, nor is it likely to lure anyone into Islamic fundamentalism," Busch writes of Medal of Honor. "It can grant neither heroism nor martyrdom. What it does do is make modern war into participatory cinema. That is its business."

Busch's problem with Medal of Honor is in its depiction of the War in Afghanistan -- a war that's obviously going on "right now." He believes that it "equates the war with the leisure of games" (perhaps distorting how best for a civilian, including those considering enlistment, to understand war), and he argues that, despite "the fully articulated violence," Medal of Honor can't possibly emulate the reality of combat. "There is a truth common to all, and that is that playing war in any medium is not combat, and for a gamer, it's not even political. It's just sedentary adventurism in need of a subject."

"The power of controlling your situation, to be able to stop the war and rest, is something that our soldiers are quietly desperate for. For those who patrol the valleys of Helmand, it is a way to impose limits on the uncertainty of war and the constancy of vulnerability," Busch reminds us. "A video game can produce no wounds and take no friends away."

Update: Busch has contributed his own follow-up comment (re-posted in full below) to this post in which he stresses that his essay is primarily a response to "the fact that Medal of Honor, a video war game based in Afghanistan during our current war there, has been banned from sale on US military bases as well as those of several allied nations."

On Joystiq, we've covered the apparent reason for the ban -- the game's usage of the "Taliban" multiplayer team -- extensively, including the initial controversy, the replacement name and Danger Close's explanation. We intentionally avoided retracing the issue in the original version of this post and angled our report on Busch's editorial to, somewhat sarcastically (given our audience), emphasize his "truth" that video games are just games (not to suggest they don't affect our understanding of and relationship to non-virtual experiences). Using Busch's own keen analogy, "playing" as the Taliban in a versus game is not conceptually different than one group having to represent the Germans in World War II-imagined recreation.

Obviously, this point is evident to most, if not all of our readership, so this post was more of a farcical shot in the dark aimed at, in Danger Close's words, "an older generation that doesn't understand games," whose reactions have led to the ban of the sale of Medal of Honor at military bases. While we would never discredit those reactions as not genuine, we would agree, as Busch outlines below, that there is a larger political strategy in play to which the ban is tied. While the government's policies concerning war go beyond the scope of Joystiq's coverage, we do encourage you to read Busch's addendum below.

Benjamin Busch's comment: