Until now, whenever game publisher Activision's marketing department has touted Call of Duty's "realism" or "historical accuracy", what they've actually meant is an "aesthetic likeness to real things".
Call of Duty is painstakingly concerned that tanks and guns resemble their real-life counterparts. Artists spend years pouring over rifles, measuring barrels, recreating the exact way light reflects off an M4 carbine.
Modern Warfare’s campaign strikes a different tone compared to prior games in the series.
But the consequences of these tanks and guns — the reality of what people actually do with them — matters less. (This is, after all, the series that parachuted loot crates onto the beaches of Normandy.) The intent is to build a rollercoaster and then use the trappings of war as set dressing; an outsider's inside memory, a collage of beaches and deserts and mortars and sniper rifles. History, the real world, is a playground, not a script.
(For the record, I believe there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach. War and entertainment have been inseparable for thousands of years, and if you take issue with war video games generally, and not just specific examples, then you should also take issue with The Illiad and Inglorious Basterds.)
This time around, though, there's a new element to the "realism" claim. The recently released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare features a story mode that is uncomfortable. It's ugly, gruesome, occasionally horrific, and quite often unpleasant to play. Deliberately so. I've never had less "fun" with a CoD campaign.
But perhaps that's a good thing.
An about-face on a decade of neglecting the human cost of conflict (or doing it so ham-fistedly it spawns memes like “Press ‘F’ to pay respects”), Modern Warfare is extremely enthusiastic about shoving civilians down your scopes. They're everywhere, standing in the way and innocently dirtying-up clean shots, or ratcheting the tension as potential threats on the dusty streets of fictional Urzikstan; a place where "the bad guys look like the good guys," as a soldier casually remarks.
In a scene set in Piccadilly Circus a mother grasps a child to her waist as a terrorist walks towards her and detonates his explosive vest; in another, a child weeps over the body of a woman you've just shot in self-defence. This is not a sanitised, bloodless war. This is not a rollercoaster.
Modern Warfare is still US-centric and jingoistic, but it isn’t uncritical.
Gone are the bombastic setpieces — the motorbike chases and the exploding space stations — replaced by the jade hue of night-vision raids on terrorist compounds and interactive being-waterboarded minigames.
Every time you start up the campaign it asks you to accept a mature content warning. It's understandable. This is a game that depicts, from a first-person perspective: suicide bombings, lifeless bodies buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, dead children, and torture.
But why? What's the underlying point of depicting the horror not just the sanitised heroism? Well, Modern Warfare seems conflicted. Is it still jingoistic militarism? Yes, and no. This is still a world where guns solve every problem and the good guys need to "get their hands dirty"; a line uttered right after information is extracted from a captive terrorist by threatening to shoot his family. The takeaway being that good guys do bad things, but bad guys do worse things.
But this doesn't quite cover it either. Politically, Modern Warfare is extremely convenient to our epoch. The Russians are unquestionably the baddies; sadistic villains committing countless atrocities during their occupation of Urzikstan. During a flashback you control a young girl as a barbaric Russian commando raids your family home, stalking you room to room. It's a monstrous depiction, creepier than anything to emerge from the Cold War; the scene plays out like Alien or Resident Evil. To hammer the point further, it's contrasted with an SAS raid on a terrorist home in which a British hero, Captain Price, pointedly tells a soldier to look after a child found inside. We care, they don't.
Similarly, during a cutscene between missions, a real-life American war crime known as "The Highway of Death" is casually passed off as a Russian one. "Realism" only extends so far.
But to counter all the "oorahs!" there's also a creeping sense of self-awareness. Eventually a "good" Russian, Nikolai, emerges to help balance the ledger (he doesn't, but at least they tried). General Barkov, the big baddie, is a "stain on my country", Nikolai explains.
More telling is the treatment of the Urzikstan insurgents, a clear analogue for the real-life Kurds. Led by Farah, the girl from the home-raid flashback sequence now grown into a fearsome freedom fighter, they're the force the game wants us to cheer. Towards the end, despite decades of working as "US assets" in the Middle East, US Military Brass declares the insurgents a terrorist organisation, abandoning them to their fate.
The elite troops on the ground are furious at this, so it's easy to read it as mere "soldiers are wise, bureaucrats get in the way" libertarianism. However, it's also Call of Duty explicitly admitting that maybe, just maybe, US military intervention in the Middle East doesn't always make things better. That the mighty war machine does, on occasion, make mistakes and that Middle Eastern lives are lost as a result.
I said before I've never enjoyed playing a CoD campaign less. That's true. The flipside is I've also never agonised or thought about one more. For a game about chemical weapons, proxy wars, terrorism and torture… I think that might be a good thing.
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