Ok, so, Electronic Arts is publishing the new Medal of Honor, with EA Los Angeles in charge of the single player, and DICE manning the multiplayer. The beta has started across all platforms (but I haven’t heard anything good about it), and the game should be out in October. Those are, more or less, the basics.
But EA consulted with U.S. Special Operations agents during development and have released a set of interviews with actual soldiers to promote the game. The result is the kind of jingoistic, “realistic” marketing that makes war games stick in the collective craw. I don’t doubt that EA and DICE actually consulted with soldiers, or that the guy being interviewed hasn’t served his country, but the whole spiel seems more than a little scripted — that little counter in the corner isn’t fooling anybody.
At one point, the interviewed soldier describes some Special Operations being carried about by “a single Tier 1 operator,” who “applies … damage to the bad guys.” One guy doing (massive!) damage to an enemy? I guess art imitates life (or vice versa), but there’s something unnerving about couching an ostensibly candid interview as a set of videogame platitudes. Of course, the implication of the video is that playing the new Medal of Honor will give you a taste of how rad it is to kill people for a living, which is kind of gross and weird in its own right.
If this kind of military-meets-games-meets-military confluence is interesting to you, I recommend Ed Halter’s From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. And this post is no longer about Medal of Honor, so, uhh, sorry about that.
