I welcome this kind of footage, even if it's only a cutscene. You know why? Because we've been idealizing our own military for far too long.
Let's make a game about a young man growing up in Afghanistan. His mother was killed by rioting militants, his sister was raped by some random man who had the "right" to take advantage of her, and his father recently died trying to defend his country against Americans searching for Osama bin Laden. Now that he's of age, he decides to fight back against America for the damage it has caused him.
Tell me, is this any better or worse than the same view of an American soldier fighting unnamed Middle Eastern terrorists?
I know the media, the religious zealots, and the over-protective parents don't see it this way, but as a gamer, I do. It actually bothers me that I'm always playing the heroic American soldier whose genocide is justified because they are "the enemy". Why can't I play as the other side? Why are they somehow evil?
That's one of the things I liked best about CounterStrike. There was no story, no morale imperative, no obvious overtone that "we are right", it was just one group of people vs. another: terrorists vs. counter-terrorists. Each had their own weapons, their own reasons, and their own goals. It didn't matter to me which team I played, because I could always understand why one side would fight the other.
So why do we insist on pretending that the Americans are the good guys? It doesn't matter if it's WWI, WWII, or some imaginary WWIII -- it's always the Americans vs. the Russians, the Germans, or the unnamed Middle Easterners. Frankly, there are more people in the world than Americans. I'm a Canadian, and despite our integral part in WWI, WWII, and even America's fight with Afghanistan, you never see anything about the courageous Canadians who sacrificed their lives to fight somebody else's war. What about the poor Afghan people who were slaughtered because Bush was looking for some invisible spectre supposedly hiding in their country? What about the Jews and Germans alike who died trying to defend their country, even while it was being lead by a dictator who wanted them dead?
The world isn't black and white and there isn't always a right and wrong side. If parents and the media want to freak out about a single cutscene that shows the player acting as a Middle Eastern terrorist, maybe they should take a look at their own government and military, who are glorified as they terrorize millions of people in foreign countries.
If the whole purpose of this cutscene was to make the player "sick" to give them a motivation to kill the ragheads, then it's deplorable, not because it shows Middle Eastern people killing Americans, but because it's just another piece of propaganda to incite racial hatred.
If they think it's offensive to see footage of "terrorists" bombing an American airport, let's show them footage of Americans bombing Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of people and permanently damaging millions more. Killing innocent civilians is always offensive, no matter whose side they are on.
