The Afghan War: The Video Game

Move over, Michael Herr. The new video game Medal of Honor goes where no game has gone before: Afghanistan. Actually, as Chris Suellentrop reports, recent games have recreated bits of the Afghan and Iraq Wars, but Medal of Honor does them one better. It begins by invoking 9/11, proceeds through familiar Afghan battle scenes like Bagram air base, and confronts you with faulty intel. Pashto is spoken. Audio recordings of real weapons crackle. “We want the player to feel, not like they’re in a movie, but like they’re in Afghanistan,” one of the game’s makers says. That may be going a bit far, but the level of detail is astounding. Suellentrop wonders whether video games are “successfully conveying an experience of war to audiences in a way that is at least as effective and affecting as the war stories told in literature or film.”