chimera: Maybe you could stop referring to soldiers and/or their families as "stupid" long enough to realize there are other points of view besides your own. While it may be hard to see the logic in EA's rationale on this, ****bagging the soldiers or families that have lost loved ones in this *fresh* conflict will not win you any cool points.
Stop and really think about the tone and perspective of your post. Rinse, and repeat.
None of the soldiers are saying this. It's the families of the fallen soldiers that in their grief just want everyone to feel their pain, and looking for a way to do it.
The fact is that the soldiers use games like this to train themselves, and probably do have games where they play as the Taliban, because they want to see the logic and mindset that goes on on their side, so they can then get an advantage on them in the real world.
The problem is that the families are using their grief as an excuse to censor art. They're not looking at it from any reasonable view that games have been made of every other war or conflict where thousands more of American soldiers have fallen, with the "opposing force" being represented, and played as what they are. I'm sorry, but that is the epitome of stupid.
In the war on terrorism even civilians that have never set food in Afganistan are members of the conflict, because the Taliban and terrorists see us as such. The families of the fallen have no more right to deny us playing as the Taliban, than I do sitting in my parents basement, because any day a terrorist could decide to take a crop duster and fill it full of anthrax and blanket the east coast with it to kill us all. If I want to create, and or play a game as the Taliban to get into that mindset to understand it, understand how to stop it, or survive it, some woman who lost her son shouldn't have the right to stop me.
The real problem is that her stating "my life is not a game" is an insult to games and gamers. A much worse one than me calling her stupid. It's a fundamental degradation of games, as is EA's decision to change the game, and neither of them understanding what 3d fps games, or really what they should be called, "simulations".
The fact is the terrorists that destroyed the towers used games to learn to fly. We should be able to use games to understand them, and how to destroy them just as well. Degrading Call of Duty and saying it's just a game, as she and EA have done, is not only just sad and stupid, but possibly rises even to the level of evil when you consider that it could get more people killed when they could have used this game to save lives by representing it for what it is, and making it as real to life as possible.
