I play plenty of board wargames and have played plenty of computer wargames. I don't lose any sleep or wring my hands over playing the Nazis in a WWII game, the Romans in an ancients game, or just about anyone else. It's a game and I am only recreating/simulating the military (and maybe economic) aspects of these conflicts. I am not engaging in a Holocaust, perpetuating the slavery of blacks in the South, or conducting a Roman genocide and enslavement.
I have also happily nuked the US when playing computer games like DEFCON (I mean, Ally Sheedy wanted to nuke Vegas, right?) and been happy when an Allied invasion of Europe gets pushed back into the sea when playing as the Germans. I didn't think twice about playing a Distant Plain and removing Coalition cubes, even though I served in Afghanistan and lost a few friends there.
But a couple of games have given me some qualms:
Labyrinth. I have never played it. Admittedly, the CDG mechanic or subject matter doesn't excite me; but I am also very disturbed by one of the Jihadist victories: to nuke a US city. I couldn't celebrate a win that way. Maybe it's just too personal, or the terror of a real WMD plot in a US city is too real, as most of the US worldview for about 10 years after 9/11 was driven by a "never again" mantra and a real fear of a nuclear-armed terrorist.
Skies Above the Reich. I own this game and believe it's a great game. I have played the campaign and celebrated the destruction of US B-17s. But I do have qualms about it and don't know if I'll play it again. There is something about it that disturbs me celebrating the destruction of a B-17, and the likely death of at least some of the crew of 10. (My grandfather was in the Army in WWII; I had an uncle flying in the Pacific; so I don't have any family ties to the strategic bombing of Germany.)
Maybe the videos and images of B-17s falling out of the skies, or the famous one of the B-17 missing a wing, have made too much of an impression on me. And I was at the Pima Air Museum in Tucson last week, checking out the B-17 and admiring the tight quarters, imagining the sound of flak exploding outside while FWs attacked from every direction.
I guess that nearly every other wargame I have is much more abstract. You flip a counter when a US division loses a step--that does mean the death of any individual, but the aggregate effects of the loss of cohesion and material. In Wing Leader, the counters represent a flight of aircraft, not an individual aircraft. Still, it never bothered me trying to destroy Shermans in WWII tactical games, or sink US ships in other games.
My thoughts on this aren't exactly rational and I struggle to articulate them--here, or to myself.
Are there any games that you shy away from for similar reasons?