The discomfort of 'playing for the other team'

Continuing with the posts on avatars, there's yet another interesting post over on getluky.net dealing with "militainment" and people not wanting to play for the bad guys.

I’d never considered before that players might be switching to the US side in a video game due to ethical problems with playing “the enemy.” I began to wonder if he was alone, or if these moral problems with playing as enemy avatars could explain why there was such a built-in preference for the home teams.

Also discussed is a related problem Counterstrike tried to address while being sensitive to the aftermath of September 11, namely in the way of renaming teams & actions to be less reminiscent of terrorists and counter-terrorists.

When is a video game just a video game & when is it not?

Playing from the Other Side: the Discomfort of Militainment Avatars [getluky.net]