Call of war

 

 "Bravo 6 moving to the first floor"

"Is this game political?"

"No"

"Really?"

"No"

"We're just making games"

"That seems insane"

"It seems insane to get political to me"

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare released on

October

25, 2019, and sold $600 million dollars

Worth

of games in its first 3 days. That is, if

we're keeping track, roughly double the

amount Avengers: Endgame made in

North America

in the same amount of time.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the 9th

Call

of Duty game developed by Infinity Ward,

and

the 16th Call of Duty game released in

the

last 16 years.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the fourth

game in the Call of Duty series to be

called

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Unlike the the previous year's game,

"Black

Ops: Confusion About Roman Numerals,",

this4th Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has a

single-player

campaign, a redux of the first Call of Duty

Modern Warfare's campaign, with

similarly

named characters in totally new

situations.

(still with me?)

And if you followed Call of Duty: Modern

Warfare's

marketing, you'll know that Infinity Ward

wanted you to know that this

single-player

campaign was about modern warfare. It's

not your daddy's modern warfare, or the

modern warfare you played 12 years ag.

This

is a story about prOxy wars, about

non-state

actors and serious acts of terrorism.

"These are morally complex stories,

where

there is no black and white, or pure evil

or pure good. It's the gray in the middle

of all that, and finding your line is a hard

thing to determine" says narrative

director

Taylor Kurosaki.

This game deals with some capital-t

Themes.

Themes like: "Colonialism, occupation,

independence,

freedom" BUT. While this is a game

about

modern warfare, about colonialism, about

OcCupiedcountries, about the meaning of freedom,

there's

one thing it's not.

"ls this game political?" "no"

Hmm.

So to be fair, "is this thing political"

is a question that can be interpreted

many

different ways. And, to their credit, the

writers of Modern Warfare actually gave

us

a pretty direct explanation of what they

feel

their game would have to be, in order to

be

political.

"If you wanted a situation in which |

Would

say, yes it is a political story, I

would have to be teling a story about

specifically

the exact administrations and

governments

and events in our worlds today.."

So, there we go, a straightforward

definition

of what it means to them to have a

political

story. It would have to be specifically

about

the exact administrations and events in

Ourworld today. Now look. Everyone can

have an

opinion on this sort of thing, but I feel

like we can also recognize that this

definition

absurd. Let's list some stories that

ARE NOT political by this definition:

By this definition, Jacob Minkoff has

made

the idea of "political allegory" impossible.

There ain't room for metaphors in this

definition.

Either you're saying "Donald Trump told

me to do this, or your story is not

political.

There's the cynical way of taking this,

of course. It's all marketing language.

They know that gamers are sick of having

those

pesky SJW politics forced into their

games

about uhh, imperialism. A quick glance at

the comments on this Game Informer

video confirms

it- hundreds of people celebrating the

fact

that this game isn't political. The cynical

take is that these writers don't actually

care what they're saying, or the

publishers

have told them to "keep out of politics."

Whatever it takes, as long as it sells

copiesand keeps their fanbase happy.

But I think that they feel sincere. And

moreover,

even if they do have ulterior motives for

claiming apoliticism, this interpretation

paints a fascinating picture of Call of

Duty's

base assumptions about the military and

the

World we live in.

First things first though

The plot, in the broadest possible

strokes:

In a fictional middle-east country named

Urzikstan,

many forces are vying for control. There's

a hostile invasion from Russia, there's

a fictional terrorist group called Al-Qatal,

and there's the Urzik Militia. After terrorist

attacks in the non-fictional city of London

and the looming threat of chemical

weapons

by Russian forces, a number of SAS and

CIA

agents team up with members of the

Urzik Militia

to stop...to stop the bad guys.

I played the game like, 2 days ago, but

writing

out those 3 sentences was weirdly

difficult.And there's a good reason for that!

Modern

Warfare is a game about individuals. We

don't

spend time with the "Urzik Militia" really,

we spend time with Farah. She's a leader

in the group. She's absolutely committed

to her people. As a child, her father was

killed during a chemical weapon attack

by

Russian forces. She hates the invading

russians,

she hates chemical weapons, she hates

being

controlled. I remember her character far

more

than I remember exactly what she was

trying

to do.

Same with Captain John Price, a

mustachiợd

SAS captain who knows that doing the

right

thing often means getting his hands dirty,

but that'sa burden he's willing to take.Or CIA officer Alex, who empathizes so

strongly

with the Urzik militia's plight that he

literally leaves his post to go fight with

them. Or Hadir, Farah's brother, who fights

just as passionately for independence,

but

is put at odds with Farah and the rest of

the squad when he uses chemical

weapons against

Russian forces.

This focus on character over story is very

much Modern Warfare's intent, Ithink.

The

writers said many times that they wanted

you

to "empathize with the individual." This

is the story about the morally gray,

remember.

And you know what? That's fine! Wars,

especially

the proxy wars this story is ostensibly

about,

are fought by individuals. Including

freedom

fighters like Farah humanizes parts of a

conflict

we often think about only in broad

strokes.