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The words Call of Duty are almost synonymous with online multiplayer at this point, and
so when last year’s Black Ops 4 was revealed to be online-only, the negative reaction was
honestly a little surprising—I always thought most players skipped the campaign.
When it was subsequently announced, however, that Infinity Ward was bringing back the single
player story for 2019’s game, I have to say I felt a subtle sense of… relief?
Comfort?
The release of Call of Duty has always marked the start of the holiday period for me, and
there’s a warmth—a familiarity—to sitting down with a four-to-five hour Bayhem explosion
fest.
Like I wanted from Ghost Recon Breakpoint last month, it’s a game you can totally
switch your brain off to and just ride the rollercoaster.
Except this year, Infinity Ward came back from their couple of years off apparently grizzled, confidently
titling their game Modern Warfare not only to evoke memories of the franchise’s glory
days, but also as a statement of intent.
This ain’t your grandad’s Call of Duty—this is war in the modern age, baby.
The game is operating on the notion that war really has changed from the good guys vs bad
guys approach of prior titles to something of a moral and geographical soup; where nations
and ideologies blur, and allegiances come and go at the unknowable whims of the shady
higher ups in the chain of command; you’re working with less than perfect intel; the
threat is harder to define, the fight is taken away from the battlefield to places more…
intimate; you have to consider bystanders and rules of engagement as a result.
It’s all in service of the question—how far are you willing to cross the line to get
what you need?
This game doesn’t just have a mature content warning for one mission, this whole game is
mature, it’s gritty.
It’s taking risks and carrying the heavy responsibility of handling this sensitive
subject matter with care in a way Call of Duty hasn’t really attempted before.
Except, when you look back… it kind of has.
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Thanks again to Skillshare for sponsoring the video and now back to discussing how Call
of Duty has at least attempted to take on heavier subject matter more subtly in the
past.
Take Call of Duty 4, for example, where the conflict reaches its logical conclusion—a
nuke goes off and as you control your soldier crawling around the scorched aftermath, you
come across a playground.
The echoes of children ring in the background as you slowly, painfully fade away.
For the time and considering where the Modern Warfare franchise ultimately found itself,
this seems like a remarkably sharp way for the series to hint at a wider point about
the innocent lives that get caught up in the crossfire of this action romp.
You’re not the only one killing, dying, surviving here.
In Modern Warfare, it’s like the developers took that playground and decided to model
their fictional nation of Urzikstan after a dang Toys R Us, with building blocks
and balls and bears presented so pristinely, placed so hyper-specifically in your direct
path in snipers nests or propped up watching a static TV, that it can only come across
heavy handed—the game flat out telling you “yeah, used to be kids here but now there
isn’t because of goddamn WAR” rather than letting you stumble into these instances,
come to those conclusions yourself.
It speaks to a larger lack of subtlety seen throughout Modern Warfare’s 5-6 hour campaign,
especially in its handling of children and other non-combatants as part of the New Battlefield
you find yourselves fighting on.
Not only is it perhaps a little tactless to litter your path forward with the bodies of
dead children or making it possible to shoot them (even if shooting them is an instant
game over), the game’s mechanics are constantly undermining whatever semblance of a point
they’re trying to make with this stuff.
While playing as a young Farrah, for example, it’s hard to tell whether the game wants
you to actually feel as powerless as a child would when, after sheepishly toying with a
gun, the game rewards me with an achievement called “Two Birds One Stone” as my sudden
crackshot takes both enemy soldiers down with one bullet—going from scared little kid
to Rambo in an instant, I guess.
It’s that kind of video game silliness—the fact you’re playing a game whose central
mechanics equip you to take out wave after wave of bad guys as efficiently as possible—that
make it hard to take the game particularly seriously when it suddenly applies this framework
to a child.
In a similar vein, when it comes to the potential threats in the homes you clear out, you never
get the chance to subdue these people non-lethally; the tension as they simultaneously plead with you not
to shoot, while also edging towards a suspicious object totally subsides when you realise the
only option is to shoot them dead (and if you don’t, someone else will).
They are an enemy—the scope of the mechanics available to you has deemed them so.
Your character never meaningfully reflects on the things you do during gameplay—in
terms of the larger story it might as well have never happened.
You don’t have to worry about the implications of killing as many people as you do.
And in the larger story moments where characters will ask if they went too far, “crossing
the line” is seemingly always justified—they were always reaching for that detonator, they
always give you that intel.
It makes me think about Spec Ops; a title that people point to as perhaps the game that
nailed the twisted morality at the heart of military conflict.
Arguably the reason that game was so hard-hitting was because it saw characters crossing that
line and crucially, messing up; having to deal with the horrifying cost of the fact
that they were wrong.
For all that Modern Warfare speaks of getting dirty so the world stays clean, the game is
a series of situations representing some really messed up stuff that it proceeds to deal with
in a remarkably black and white way—the ends always justify the means.
You might find yourself asking “did we need to emotionally torment that woman and child
to get that intel?”
And the game, with its short length and multiple characters and plot threads leaving little room for introspection,
seems to answer “who cares—you got it, didn’t you?”
It’s like a theme park version of Spec Ops—any nuance flies right by you as you focus on
the pure thrill of being guided through a Hollywood blockbuster.
You should know that any criticism I have here isn’t meant to come across as some
kind of “think of the children” shock and despair.
To be clear, I had a lot of fun with this dumb campaign.
Contrary to what you might think, I don’t believe that every game, every military-focused
action shooter needs to be some kind of deep dive into notions of imperialism or how religion,
political ideology or economic interests play into the narrative of conflict.
There is absolutely a place for that, just like there’s a place for vacant escapism.
And make no mistake, I think Modern Warfare is absolutely the latter.
And there is an aspect to this where I think that it should be treated as such; that trying
to take it seriously on its own terms is a futile act and that your time is probably
better spent just enjoying the rollercoaster.
I mean, the stuff where the writers and developers may have, however deliberately, pinned an
alleged US war crime on Russia… sure, maybe that warrants some concern, but the rest?
The bit where it’s getting you to survive waterboarding by dodging the water and pressing
shift to pay respects to breathing?
It’s so daft that to give it any thought feels like a legitimate waste of time.
If it takes seeing this to make someone think that waterboarding is maybe bad, then they
likely had other issues to begin with.
Essentially, to expect an actually thoughtful critique of military conflict from a Call
of Duty game (and getting annoyed when it doesn’t materialise), at this point feels
akin to getting riled up by the anatomical inaccuracies of Mortal Kombat.
You know, it’s a cartoon.
That said, it’s a bit bewildering when Modern Warfare goes so far out of its way to try
and question the methods of the western military and the seemingly arbitrary decisions taken
by its superiors that undermine whatever purpose your characters might have—said characters
come together for very real, personal reasons that just so happen to be of momentary convenience
to the US government and the second that stops being the case, your team gets shafted.
This is maybe the heaviest the devs have leaned in on the consequences of war, putting us
face to face with the collateral damage—literal babies have the potential to be caught in
your crossfire.
But rather than frame those consequences as reasons why we should try and avoid conflict
altogether, confront the powers that benefit from your characters’ exploitation, of make
some kind of point about how no side in any conflict is infallible, Modern Warfare instead
uses these consequences to motivate our protagonists’ supposedly righteous fight.
You know, for as much as the game talks about how all sides are as bad as each other here,
the Russians don’t seem to get game overs for killing innocents like you and your Band of Heroes at least do.
In this sense Modern Warfare acts as an extension of what I talked about with Ace Combat earlier
this year—the idea that an action-focused game about war that tries to accurately depict
its horrors is almost always going to feature some contradiction at its heart.
Even if you think you’re making some grand point, to gameify conflict and torture like
this, to reduce the failure state to “you didn’t click this thing on time, try again”
is going to either simplify these issues beyond the reality of the situation, or flat out
trivialise them.
But at the same time, despite the narrative director’s claims to the contrary, it’s
really hard to even view Modern Warfare as truly anti-war.
At best it views conflict as an inevitability, where we might as well try to ensure that
the victors are the capital G Good Guys, and at worst it revels in the process.
In its attempts to reground Modern Warfare, it ends up becoming exactly the kind of mindless
action I was expecting out of a game like Breakpoint.
Where that game managed to be broken and slapdash to the extent that it felt as genuinely hostile
to me as a game about being a soldier probably should, Modern Warfare doesn’t want you
thinking about the contradictions inherent to its campaign, it barely even wants you
stopping to look behind you half the time—you just keep going forward, clicking on the right
things in the right order to progress the movie, taking in the pretty explosions along
the way.
And what pretty explosions they are!
As the moonlight illuminates your silent treks through the forest, as the fireworks light
up the sky, it all feels positively next gen in how it steps everything up fidelity wise.
As a technical showpiece and a series of explosive set-pieces disconnected from reality, Modern
Warfare is a marvel.
But it’s also in these technicalities, rather than any big story moment, that the game begins
to realise that vision of a more complex take on war, whether intentional or not.
There was one moment in particular where I realised this.
It was when I was breaching a metal container, diving in and firing a shotgun.
It was a breach like any other in a Call of Duty game, except this time there was one
thing that had changed—the sound my gun made as I fired it.
Firing a gun in open air simply adds the usual dull cacophony of gunshots and explosions
that constitute the typical Call of Duty soundscape—you become numb to it after a while.
Firing it inside, however, in a big metal container, created reverberations so explosive
and abrasive that it actually jolted me—there was a second where I worried about goddamn
ricochet.
Firing a gun in a confined space like that was, dare I say, kind of scary.
It felt different.
And in many ways it is different.
As evidenced by the EQ presets that greet you as you open up the game, the improvements
made to audio seem just as important to the devs in bringing Call of Duty into a new era
as the graphical upgrades.
Perhaps it was a move fuelled merely by the team’s desire to get these firearms feeling
chunkier or sounding cool as heck, but for me the result of these upgrades was a bunch
of otherwise minor moments being punctuated by thoughts of “damn, guns are crazy.”
I imagined being a child and hearing these night-vision-goggled robot-looking dudes tearing
through my house and how terrifying the sounds of that would be, how those sonic scars would
stay with you like tinnitus; that, even with their rules of engagement that actively punish
them for shooting a child, no matter whether or not they’re doing the quote-unquote “right
thing”, it’s hard to think that these troops didn’t severely damage a few kids
along the way.
And with that, the act of firing a gun—the most rudimentary aspect of a Call of Duty
game—ended up feeling more morally ambiguous, inspiring more empathy than any amount of
the game’s trite set-pieces seemingly designed to say “really makes you think, huh?”
It leads me to believe that if Call of Duty actually wants to go down the route of questioning
the nature of conflict in the modern age, it’s the little details like this—the
sound of a bullet leaving the chamber—that need to be focused on.
Because when it comes to depicting the horrors of war in games, cutscenes are always going
to pale in comparison to imbuing your moment-to-moment interactions with the gravitas they deserve.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Modern Warfare.
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