Playing the Enemy

Is playing a certain character in a certain setting important to making a game great or is a great game always great regardless of the setting?

I was thinking about race, nationality, gender - anything that can be used as a discriminating factor. I've been on the Geekbox forums topic called ethnicity and race (link here) in games but I wanted to take it further. What if nationality and religion was involved? What if there was a game the level of a Call of Duty 4 where you played as a terrorist?

The single player story might go like this. You are a regular middle class Arab in some Mid Eastern country. While leaving the apartment you live in, several missiles strike your building and the surrounding neighborhood. Some of your family, friends and wife are dead due to this attack and the reasoning to the bombing was the Western nations found out that a terrorist leader was suspected in living in the building you lived in. In a dramatic scene of seeing your wife and kids dead, you declare jihad on the western world. During the game, you join a terrorist cell and perform missions (similar to the SAS parts in CoD4). With a couple of more people, you attack army bases and defend your city against a war with the Westerners. The final scene is when you are told to infiltrate the Western army HQ to take out the general of this operation. You manage to reach the room wit h the general but run out of bullets and soldiers surround you. You reveal to them you carry explosives around your body and show you have a triggering device. End with a white flash of light.

What if the gameplay, graphics and drama are at par or even superior to the 1st Modern Warfare game? Will this game where you play a terrorist change your mind that it's a great game regardless of who you play? Or will the setting be too disturbing that even buying the game (assuming you are a Westerner) cannot even be justified?

How about if the game had no "human" characters but still had the same story? What if you're an ordinary green alien when a missile blows up your home and you found out that the brown aliens did it. You join with the green martian army to fight the brown aliens. Full of drama and action yet you aren't playing a human. Will that change the perspective again of the player?

I think that games in a certain setting will definitely affect people. Just as a movie, say a slasher horror flick, you might notice how dumb the characters are and not be able to fight of some guy in a mask with a small knife. How about another movie where you thought that it would end a certain way but it doesn't so you end up hating the movie cause of how it played out. How about where the main character of a movie is so annoying but all other characters are so good you still end up liking the movie even if the protagonist isn't worth mentioning.

I think games should be similar in a way that we get to play the "enemy". How would it feel as a zombie to always get killed by the hero? There should be zombie rights on the fair treatment of undead humans. Joking aside, we shouldn't bash away at a game for it's setting or the characters we play. There should be games where we play the "bad guy". Playing a regular soldier in the Nazi army should be no different from the Allied side. The soldiers were merely being told to do their job, defend their own families and their freedom. We do get the occasional play the "bad guy" game in Overlord, Evil Genius and Dungeon Master (funny how they are all sort of strategy games). Why aren't there realistic games - shooters and action games where you play someone who isn't morally sound or other realistic games where the supposed bad guy is just a victim by the threads of fate. There are certainly non-realistic games - Prototype and in open world RPGs - Fallout, one can play a morally depraved character. Also, why aren't games showing the morally gray areas. It seems it's always good or bad.