Whose side are you on? It might be the Taliban's

The Taliban try to kill American troops every day.

That is reality. Can you handle it in a video game?

On Oct. 12 Electronic Arts, one of the world's biggest game publishers, is set to release a first-person combat title called Medal of Honor. Developed with advice from elite American special forces, the new game is set during Operation Anaconda, part of the Western war in Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

So far, so conventional. But in Medal of Honor's online multiplayer mode, in which teams of players battle over the Internet, one side in each match will be the Americans and the other side will play the role of Taliban fighters. And that -- at least to politicians in Britain, Canada and New Zealand among others -- is a problem.

As Liam Fox, the British defense secretary, said recently: "It's hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game. I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product."

The outrage is surely genuine (though there are no British, Canadian or New Zealand soldiers in the game) and the discomfort understandable. But those reactions are based on a misunderstanding of what video games are.

First, it is important to understand the critical difference between a game's single-player and multiplayer modes. In a single-player campaign you are the protagonist of a particular story with its own narrative progression. In Medal of Honor's main single-player campaign, for example, the player takes the role of various United States soldiers, looking to kill Islamic bad guys and accomplish various tactical objectives along the way. If such a game's stories end in inevitable failure, no one is going to want to play them. And that is why almost every single-player game, Medal of Honor included, sets the player as the "good guy," in this case as a heroic American soldier.

If Medal of Honor let you play as the Taliban throughout an entire single-player campaign, then we would have a real controversy on our hands. Imagine the reaction to a game that included a mission where you were cooperating with Al Qaeda during the siege of Tora Bora and had to protect Osama bin Laden while spiriting him to safety.

That is not what is going on here. Medal of Honor allows you to play as the Taliban only during multiplayer matches. In such matches there is no story -- and no presumption of success. And there is no sense of character development. The job is to match wits with the other humans on the other end of the Internet and defeat them through coordination, tactics and execution under pressure. The actual identities of the combatants are no more meaningful than the choice of black and white in a chess game. (The seminal multiplayer online game Counter-Strike, one of the most popular team-based combat simulators, sets its two sides as terrorists and counterterrorists, without any explicit political identification.)

So I see no reason or rationale to criticize Electronic Arts for remaining faithful to the actual conditions and reality of its game's setting.

Jeff Brown, the top spokesman for Electronic Arts, had it right when he told me this week: "Multiplayer is built on the same dynamic that ruled the cops-and-robbers game we played in our parents' backyard. Someone is the good guy. Someone is the bad guy. When the robbers won, it didn't mean those kids wanted to kill the police."

That is obvious, but Mr. Brown, perhaps inadvertently, pointed the way to a more subtle and broadly revealing thought about how we represent and humanize our real-life adversaries in popular culture when he invoked one of the classics of 20th-century literature. "I guess this is the same reaction that readers had when they opened 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and read about a squad of German infantrymen in World War I," he said.

Mr. Brown was probably trying to make the point that video games are held to a different, higher standard than books. That is true, but it brings to mind the fact that "All Quiet," both as a book and as a film, was quite important in helping to undemonize Germany in the interwar period. "All Quiet" helped establish the idea among Americans that the Germans were an essentially honorable foe and that all men at arms ultimately have more in common than politicians would have us believe.

Even the depredations of the Nazis have not entirely erased the concept that most German soldiers in both wars were patriots doing what they thought was right. After all, Germans have been playable in multiplayer World War II video games for years (though I have not seen a story- and character-driven single-player campaign set among the Axis).

That thought has found expression in games for many decades. The Avalon Hill classic PanzerBlitz helped reshape the board game business when it was introduced in 1970 as an evenhanded simulation of the Eastern Front. When, as a child, I played as a German commander in that game or as a Japanese World War II admiral in the war game Flat Top, should my parents and teachers have been concerned that I was turning into a fascist?

So what has appeared to prompt the defense ministers of three Commonwealth countries to blast Medal of Honor is their visceral reaction against the idea that the Taliban is human. The very concept that "their side" has soldiers (not thugs, criminals or terrorists, but soldiers) on an equal footing with "our" soldiers can be tough to swallow.

Is that fictional entertainment, or is that reality?