The Game of the Year that Wasn't: Medal of Honor

Afghanistan circa 1988

The Great Pashtun Hope
There was a lot of hype about EA's new Medal of Honor game.  It set series pre-sale records.  EA's stock price went up--before reviews of the game came out, at least. And there was the press-so-good-you-can't-buy-it controversy surround the ability to play as a Taliban "Opposing Force" player, modeled as accurately as possible on the current enemy of US Forces in Afghanistan. EA made much of its efforts to bring as much "reality" to the game as possible, widely publicizing its use of active duty special forces service members as consultants on the game. Early previews praised the games rendering of the Afghan theater and no-expense-spared sound effects and soundtrack.

Then the game was released.

To be fair, the reviews haven't been horrible. It has been holding steady at 75 on Metacritic, which is a fairly strong score.  Yet, every reviewer seems to lament the same foibles: short, unimpressive single player campaign, glitchy graphics and gameplay, simple AI, and definitely not as good in any way, shape, or form as its major First-Person-Shooter contemporaries such as Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare or Halo: Reach.

In general, I agree with these criticisms.  The campaign levels are at times claustrophobic and woefully dull.  I usually felt like I was playing a video game cross of Disney's Splash Mountain and whack-a-mole, forced to follow down a narrow mountain path shooting at predictable, cover and shoot enemies in the same manner over and over again. There were occasional graphical glitches and slow frame rates--especially during the helicopter stages.  While I certainly appreciated the tactical chatter my AI-controlled squadmates provided and their attempts at utilizing actual tactical movements, they were frequently dumb enough to walk right in front of my machine gun as I was firing down some canyon or into a valley of bad guys. That was ok though, because the one new thing I did learn about special forces in Afghanistan is that they are both invincible and carrying unlimited ammunition at all times. A game designed to be 'accurate' can't be wrong, right?

Colonel Trautman: I'm sorry I got you into this, Johnny.
Rambo: No you're not.
--Rambo III
This brings me to my biggest criticism of the game: It's not even remotely realistic enough.  In addition to all the US Forces in Afghanistan being super-soldiers, Afghanistan has no females, no children, no dogs--no civilians whatsoever. In the game, you and your squad-mates raid numerous villages, with the order to essentially shoot everything that moves.  Thanks to some mysterious force called "intel," you know there are "only bad guys" in these villages, and thus shooting everything that moves is the absolutely just thing to do. 


Likewise--and I'm mystified how the folks at EA could have included this in the wake of the infamous Wikileaks video--while operating as a helicopter gunner, you can essentially decimate entire villages with combinations of machine gun and rocket fire without so much as a mention of the potential for civilian casualties. Of course, this same "intel" is constantly being criticized by your squadmates for underestimating the number of opposing forces, the nationality of those forces, the location of those forces, and even the weather, but when it comes to identifying the civilian population of an entire province as being vacated, "intel" is spot on. 


By removing the moral challenges of the Afghan conflict from the narrative of the game, the folks at EA, Danger Close, et al, have abandoned the single most challenging aspect of the contemporary military conflict they wish to convey. I could handle the dumb AI, the campaign-on-rails level design, but given all the attention and promotion of the game's "realism" and tactical accuracy, far more effort should have been spent on creating a realistic Afghan operation. 


I think the game developers were at least tangentially aware of this as well. Somewhat lazily, they included a few moral conundrums in a few of the games cinematic scenes. In one scene an enlightened colonel is overruled by an aloof, far-away general (in civilian clothes?) over teleconference, leading to the massacre of an unknown number of Afghan allies. Likewise, in what is perhaps a nod to Lone Survivor, when your squad comes across a shepherd at the beginning of a level, they opt to knock him unconscious rather than shooting him.  Nice touches, perhaps, but they are completely removed from the gameplay itself, and the player has no opportunity to exercise their own decision making abilities at any point in the game, nor do the acts conveyed require any sort of moral reflection on why exactly this particular war is hell. 


Oddly enough, the game's insanely challenging and complex multi-player mode does a better job of conveying the challenges of modern war.  Other, human players allow for a more cunning, more' human' foe. All of a sudden, the Taliban "opposing force" players play with a degree of humanity that makes them understandable as human foes and the voice acting in this mode, alongside the explosions and gunfire, create an urgent, visceral experience far beyond what the single player campaign ever offers.


 "This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan."
--Rambo III
Danger Close and EA close the single player campaign with a several paragraph dedication to the men of the US Special Forces community.  It's an earnest, for some tear jerking, attempt at memorializing the figures featured in the game. And yet, and yet... The efforts the game designers took to humanize the special forces characters--closely rendered faces, great voice acting, humanizing pre-combat rituals of rubbing rabbit feet and chewing tobacco--only highlights by contrasts their inability to humanize the conflict itself. While there were moments--just moments--where I felt a recognition that I was playing/fighting in a scenario alongside what were the in-game equivalents of contemporary, human warfighters, I never felt that the enemies represented anything more human than Halo's Covenant aliens--perhaps even less so. Likewise, with an Afghanistan populated only by targets and target shooters, the gameplay itself removed any pretension of human conflict. 


What is left is at best a spiritual sequel to the Rambo films of the 1980's. Stallone wrote those films to memorialize the forgotten military heroes of a generation that largely tried to forget the conflicts that they fought in. Likewise, this game makes an effort, albeit a meek one, to bring to the popular fore the conflict that so few contemporary Americans have any connection to.  Yet, it isn't Stallone's films that offer anything near an accurate portrait of war or those that fight in them (later films such as Blackhawk Down, We Were Soldiers, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, Letter from Iwo Jima, etc all do a far better job), and because of this, much of the earnest sentiment is lost amongst the explosions and oiled set-pieces. All that one remembers is the visceral war porn that remains. 


I have higher hopes for a number of games that are coming out in the coming weeks, Fallout New Vegas and Fable III, to name a few. While these games do not purport to represent reality or contemporary conflict, I actually expect these games to feel more human, more provoking than Medal of Honor, a game that, by design, should have been so much more. 

Afghanistan circa 2005
(Apparently, all the women and children moved to Pakistan?)