> But obviously the game designers couldn't have players
> identifying with the terrorist team or having fun blowing up Yankee
> soldiers
But Valve did just that in Half Life (1998), a fine game which also became a bestseller and one of the first 3D game classics. In the role of Gordon Freeman, you literally battle your way through US military death squads, sent to kill off the survivors of a science experiment gone catastrophically wrong.
What's amazing is the way game designers can achieve critical fame and commercial fortune with narratives which ought, on the face of it, to send the neocons and petro-fundies into fits of screaming rage. I suspect it has something to do with aesthetic form - videogames are transnational to their very core, and are somehow able to elude the ideological and commercial censorship which polices most other mass media.
I should add that none of this is a license to to discount the importance of other mass media - the urgent need for progressive writers, musicians, plays, films and TV shows, and the ongoing fight for a truly diverse and democratic media system.
-- DRR