The tight-rope walk of using historical settings in games, and the enemies that exist inside those settings, is a tricky one. One Joystiq writer, while watching game play from Call of Duty: World at War, was unable to continue viewing the game because of his feelings about the racial makeup of the enemy.

The writer describes his experience viewing the game as such: "It made me think about my grandmother, who as a little girl was shipped with her family from their farm in California to an internment camp in Arizona. It made me think of her brother and brothers-in-law who were drafted into the United States military and fought, with pride, in the war in Europe. It reminded me of the shame I felt as a child when teased. An inheritance of lingering hatred." He then says he won't view any more from the game, or play it. That's a very personal thing based on someone's life experiences, and I have no problem with it.

Then I read this, and my draw dropped. "I have a very personal problem with demonizing the Japanese. I don't feel that way about the Nazis. I draw a disconnect between Nazis and Germans as large as the divide between 'alien' and human. The Nazis have been transformed into monsters, which does not need to be justified in my gaming," he wrote.

That's an amazing sentence, and made me really think about how often the German people have been used as the bad guys in games. The Nazi party was just that, a political party. Saying there is a huge gulf between the German people and the Nazi characters would would be like saying it's okay to kill Republicans in a game, but you have issues with Americans being the bad guys. These two groups were never mutually exclusive, although they're also not interchangeable.

The Nazis weren't monsters, they were people who did terrible things. The party was huge, participation was nearly compulsory, and people tend to forget that not every German serving in the army worked in the camps. They were people, and they were not unique; studies show that more people than you think would be more than willing to kill if they were told it was okay by someone in authority. As with most noteworthy instances of history being made, it was normal people in extraordinary circumstances; there was nothing inherently evil about the way many German soldiers served. Unfortunately, the German people are now always portrayed as monsters, killers, empty-eyed targets in game after game. My son goes to a German language school, and it's not a rare thing for someone to crack a joke about World War II when they hear him speak the language.

We shudder at Nazi iconography because of the images we carry with us of the Holocaust and persecution from that time period, but even that reaction is limited and simplified. Germans and Catholics were sent to the camps too, remember. As were homosexuals and Romani.

The issue of creating bad guys in video games is an important one, and it's sad that conversations about World War II, the issues of responsibility and duty, and even the nature of evil get lost because we're all so comfortable turning the very human people who fought on both sides of that war into either heroes or villains. The one-note portrayal of German people isn't okay just because in your mind they're alien, and having a gut reaction when you see a people you more readily identify with act monstrously should give you more of an understanding that just because someone doesn't look like you, doesn't mean that they are any less human, or that they don't deserve to be placed in the proper place, within the proper context, of history.