On Sun­day, Britain’s Defence Sec­re­tary Liam Fox called for the upcom­ing Medal of Honor game to be banned by retail­ers (BBC). Appar­ently he finds it “hard to believe any cit­i­zen of our coun­try would wish to buy such a thor­oughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remark­able lack of under­stand­ing of the peo­ple he is sup­posed to rep­re­sent. And since when has there been an expec­ta­tion that Amer­i­can games should be “British” anyway?

Appar­ently it is “shock­ing that some­one would think it accept­able to recre­ate the acts of the Tal­iban against British sol­diers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing between fic­tion and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Tal­iban. It’s called mul­ti­player. Would Mr Fox pre­fer that the mul­ti­player was Amer­i­cans shoot­ing Amer­i­cans? Because that’s just as morally dubi­ous, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politi­cians los­ing their shit about Coun­ter­strike because zomg half the play­ers are being ter­ror­ists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi sol­dier in multiplayer?

I won­der if the Defence Sec­re­tary ever got the chance to play Cops and Rob­bers as a kid, because, you know it’s no dif­fer­ent. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Rob­bers doesn’t glo­rify vio­lent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glo­rify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appre­ci­ated if you could please go back to get­ting our real sol­diers some MRAPs and some more heli­copters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!