Moral? Ethical? A conundrum for you...
Ok, let’s have a look at the issues about WoS that have nothing to do with the bit of code on the disk. The real biggie in my book is the game’s actual setting. Where do you start? Afghanistan. Yes, you read that correctly, someone has made a GAME based on the short and brutal Afghanistan conflict. You can call me over-sensitive, but this is just a little too recent history for my liking. Look a little further and arguably the catalyst for the Afghanistan campaign was the World Trade Centre attack where thousands died. Even more Afghans died in the brief war there, and someone has now made a game of it.
But it gets worse, not only do you play through the Afghan war, but you move on to the Iraq war too, the both of which are made to sound like some sort of sporting season on the box with, and I quote “…episodes in Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003”. Has it completely escaped GMX’s attention that soldiers and civilians are still dying everyday in both these countries? And they’ve made a game using this as the subject matter? To my mind this shows GMX has all the sensitivity of housebrick and to try and make money from a conflict in which people are currently dying is shocking.
Ok, you can argue that WW2 games are massively popular and I’ll even stand up and be counted as one of those who loves playing them, but there is a huge difference here. WW2 is finished, men and women who were on opposite sides during the war have met and become friends and time is a great healer. Many of the games about WW2 are either very arcade like as in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or are respectfully realistic as in IL2: Forgotten Battles or Call of Duty. But all of them are based on a war that finished nearly 50 years ago (this year in fact), no one is still dying because of World War 2, unlike “Iraq 2003”, as GMX so charmingly put it.
