
The latest installment of the popular Call of Duty series goes on sale tomorrow, and it’s expected to sell millions of copies within the first week. It’s been a while since a game has received so much pre-launch hype and scrutiny, and in fact, weeks before its release date, a leaked scene of the game found its way around the internet, garnering a great deal of controversy and outrage. Modern Warfare 2 splits with traditional First Person Shooter conventions in that it allows the player to embody a terrorist intentionally killing civilians. Almost without exception, a distinguishing characteristic of the FPS genre is its use of morally safe “Others” as enemies, – Nazis, terrorists, zombies, Nazi-zombies, aliens, insects, criminals, etc.. These are easy bad guys, and so nobody gets too upset when, for instance, gamers must shoot and kill thousands of Nazis throughout the course of a game. It seems to be a much different story when the player targets “innocents,” however.
During the opening scene, the user is given the option to play as a Russian terrorist, killing swarms of civilians in a Russian airport. Although the publisher, Activision, has taken the clip down with Prince-like efficiency, I’ve had a chance to view the clip and I must admit it is a bit disturbing. The player’s character (who is infiltrating a Russian ultra-nationalist group) is armed with an automatic weapon, capable of spraying crowds of cowering air travelers with dozens of bullets a second. As with most contemporary shooters, there is lots of blood to let you know you’ve hit your mark.
Ars Technica contributor Andrew Webster comments on the significance of this:
What made this scenario so shocking was that it wasn’t a cut-scene, instead the player was actually controlling the carnage, forced to shoot civilians to proceed. You, as the player, will be given the opportunity to put noncombatants in the crosshairs and pull the trigger.
This is perhaps unique to the genre. As gamers, we aren’t used to playing as the bad guys. Why have an opening scene like this? Why give a simulated, terrorist-centric massacre scene at all? Well, luckily for us Activision has given a few interviews about the scene, and released the following statement:
The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them. Players have the option of skipping over the scene…
And with another statement to game zine Kotaku, Activision defends the decision to include the scene, saying it is “designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.” This significant because we have a presumably independent, major game developer telling us they are intentionally attempting to convey a political message – I say “political” because as the cliché goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. It’s the prototypical rhetorical battle royale, with invaluable “hero” or “villain” connotations as the grand prize.
In the Ars Technica article quoted above, Webster interviews a Marine, Timothy Bertram, who has served overseas, and whose son recently finished two combat tours in Iraq. I think this is a fascinating perspective, and I think a wide scale survey of military personnel into the genre at large would be fruitful. But I digress. Bertram explains his position in the following excerpt:
“In the real world is this [terrorists killing civilians] far fetched?” he explained, “No, not at all.” “The question is,” he continued, “just because that is the way it is, do we need that in a video game? I don’t think so. In my opinion it dumbs down the absolute horror and viciousness of these tactics, and glorifies the acts. I personally have played some of GTA [Grand Theft Auto], but abandoned it after continually being forced to shoot police officers.”
This reaction is interesting but not surprising, especially in light of TMT – one of the reasons we like playing video games, I think, is because in them we escape the restriction and mundanity of everyday life, and often embody (or are immersed in) the role of hero, saving “our” good from “their” evil. They affirm worldviews which depict us as the inherent good guy. Moreover, the digital worlds mimic traditional immortality myths found in most major religions – once you die, there’s a waiting period of some sort (load screen), and then you are reborn once again (“load checkpoint”). Not only are we are playing out our cultural hero systems, so to speak, but these systems are depicted to us in an immortal world, so that the particular hero system conveyed is metonymically linked with rebirth, unendingness, the ability to try again. Thus, the hero system is doubly appealing, once for the symbolic immortality of living up to its mandates (self-esteem), and again for its association with the eternal.
Here, however, the player is an American killing innocent Russians (they still wouldn’t set the scene at LaGuardia, for instance); we’re usually conditioned to think that the good guys only kill those who deserve it, except for regrettable incidents of “collateral damage,” and so the player is placed into an unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable situation, acting in contradiction to culturally prescribed definitions of good and bad, innocent and guilty. In Beckerian terms, this Modern Warfare 2 scene may be uncomfortable to play because it means the player must act outside of the hero system, even though Activision’s press releases make it clear they are actually attempting to reinforce such systems. It will be interesting to see how it is received once its released en masse. Odds are most people won’t care, and it will simply be a new direction for the medium.
Another thing I should note, is that although this scene is controversial, Activision has hedged its bets a bit – this scene is “optional,” meaning the player does not have to play as a terrorist but can skip the scene. We don’t get this option any time else, when we’re not killing innocents, so it’s telling I think.
In an interview shortly before his death, Ernest Becker talks about WWII as “the last heroic war,” and lamenting the situation in Vietnam, notes that Americans are “in sore need of heroes.” Perhaps this is why there are so many WWII themed shooters, and so few Vietnam, or WWI themed shooters – the clear distinction of good and bad simply aren’t as pervasive in the cultural understanding of these conflicts. WWI was senseless and brutal, and largely based on now outdated notions of honor and injury; Vietnam of course is the first truly ambivalent war for the Americans, and divided the country significantly. Hitler, or the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks, on the other hand, are clearly responsible for murdering innocents and noncombatants, and so make for better enemies. Or this could be due to other factors, or may just be coincidence; we don’t have enough evidence to say yet.
I’ll be playing Modern Warfare 2 when I get the chance, (purely for research purposes of course), and I’m sure there’s much more to the game than this one scene. However, I think this is still a significant moment for the genre, and medium as a whole. It’s hard to say if other games will follow suit. I think eventually, like film and television before it, the video game will evolve to the point where their characters and stories are consistently multi-dimensional; on the other hand, maybe their simplistic representations and divisions are what make them so fun to play in the first place.