Friday, Electronic Arts announced that players will no longer be able to play as the Taliban in the multiplayer portion of their upcoming shooter, Medal of Honor, changing the name to “Opposing Force.”

What a crock.

I mean no disrespect to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines currently serving in the military. The depiction of warfare is a very sensitive subject, especially when it comes to video games.

But changing the name from Taliban to Opposing Force, as Medal of Honor executive producer Greg Goodritch announced in a statement on the game’s homepage, is really just a cheap cop out and an insult to anyone who has a brain and basic reasoning skills. The name change means nothing in the long run.

For those of you who have not been following along, let me bring you up to speed.

The latest installment in EA’s long-running Medal of Honor series takes place in the modern era, following in the footsteps of Activision’s Call of Duty series and EA’s Battlefield series (previous Medal of Honor titles took place during World War II). But unlike the fictionalized settings of Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor takes place in Afghanistan as players take the role of special forces and regular soldiers in that conflict.

This is not the first time an ongoing war has been portrayed in video game format. In 2008, the game Six Days in Fallujah, an incredibly accurate depiction of Operation Phantom Fury, in which U.S. and British soldiers fought in some of the heaviest urban combat since Vietnam on the streets of Fallujah in late 2004, was announced to be in development by Atomic Games.

The game’s producers touted the game as being the most realistic depiction of war, but it seemed to be too real for some. After an enormous amount of pressure, Konami announced in April 2009 that it was no longer publishing Six Days in Fallujah.

This seems to be the same problem Medal of Honor currently faces. In order to compete in a market oversaturated with first person shooters, most choose to go the route of realistic warfare. And if you’re going to make a game about Afghanistan, the circumstances demand that the enemy of the U.S. forces be the Taliban. “Most of us having been doing this since we were 7 — if someone’s the cop, someone’s gotta be the robber, someone’s gotta be the pirate and someone’s gotta be the alien,” Amanda Taggart of EA told Dave Thier of AOL News. “In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone’s gotta be the Taliban.”

But the pressure mounted on EA, culminating with the announcement by the U.S. military that the game will not be sold on base, although soldiers will still be allowed to play the game.

With all of this negative publicity, I understand why EA changed the name to Opposing Force. But nothing’s really changing, as confirmed by EA. The enemy is still going to look and talk like the Taliban. Even if they went the route of changing the name of the team to a fictional terrorist organization, like Al-Asad in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, that does not change the fact that you’re still killing U.S. soldiers as terrorists.

This whole episode does reveal a good deal about the human psyche and how we’re very prone to tribalism. After all, no one ever cares that it’s American soldiers killing terrorists, Nazis, Japanese soldiers; people who have hopes, dreams, fears, anxieties. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, our enemies are not just faceless demons who like running towards the deadly end of our weapons. And it’s easy for us to kill German and Japanese soldiers, especially because (1) that ended 65 years ago and (2) we won. Do we ever think it’s easy for German players to take the role of Dmitri in Call of Duty: World at War and kill wave after wave of Germans?

In the end, I feel that EA is really changing nothing with this. It’s window dressing; nothing about the gameplay is changing, so you will still be able to kill American soldiers. But we can rest easy; it’s not the Taliban, but Opposing Force.

Again, what a crock.