The True Cost of War: Modern Warfare 2 and the Leaked Scene (spoilers).

Spoiler warning:  I’ll be discussing the leaked footage in some depth.

 

While the leaked Modern Warfare 2 footage has become the most talked about game story in recent days, I felt a need to post a preemptive defense of the scene – even though the majority of what I’ve read online has been mostly reasonable (I should note that fellow Bitmobber Emilio R Zapata has also touched upon the leaked footage in an earlier post as has Cody Winn in his post).

Given that Activision has essentially sent DMCA notices to anyone hosting the video, I’ll describe it in brief.  The level opens in an airport and you, as a terrorist, must shoot your way through the crowds of civilians and security personnel that stand in your way.  Since this scene is supposedly taken from the beginning of the game and lacks any context, we simply don’t know why this terrorist act was committed – just that it was and that you have to take part in it.

I can understand some of the gut reactions to the video.  In an article for the Telegraph, Tom Hoggins writes “Isn’t allowing the player to gleefully launch explosive devices into crowds of fleeing people overstepping the boundaries of what this scene is trying to achieve?”  Hoggins acknowledges that he isn’t able to judge the scene without seeing it in context, but I believe the fact that this scene was able to disturb him and many, many others means that it has achieved its aim.

When playing First Person Shooters and games in general, we are often desensitized to the violence and general atrocities that we commit over and over again.  The recent special, Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe, poked fun at this video of a player swooning over the sniper rifle in FEAR 2:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heESJvq0dmQ 425×344]

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t presume to be above this general malaise that most gamers feel when sitting in front of their monitors smiling smugly when the perfect head shot is executed.  I enjoy “shooting things in the face” as much as anyone else.

But once in a while, I want to believe that games can be more than just an excuse to enact violence on others in the context of a virtual battlefield and Infinity Ward doesn’t disappoint.  In the first Modern Warfare, the developers were able to create what I believe is the first anti-war message that I’ve played in a western developed “AAA” video game.  I won’t get into it here, but I did write about it over a year ago on my blog. 

When I wrote that post, I honestly believed that they achieved the impossible – they were able to make people think without being didactic.  With this new scene in Modern Warfare 2, they’ve done it yet again.  Even watching the video is horrifying, as it serves as a reminder to the impending sense of doom I felt in the pit of my stomach when I watched films such as Schlinder’s List or United 93.  I can only imagine what playing it will be like.  Will I have the willpower to shoot countless civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?  Or will I simply become an observer and shoot only when I need to?

Let’s break it down a little and see why the video is able to illicit these emotions from me and from others around the world. 

First and foremost, the scene is set in a contemporary context that we all understand.  The victims aren’t aliens on a space ship or elves in a magical forest – they are regular people, just like you or me.  You can’t distance yourself from what you are seeing because you can identify with being in an airport line trying to mind your own business.  And even if you’ve never been to an airport, at the very least it’s less foreign than New Mombasa or The Shire.

Second and most importantly, the scene gives you agency when you least want it.  While there are countless films and TV shows that depicts acts of violence and terrorism, here you are put into the shoes of a terrorist and are forced to pull the trigger yourself.  A question I’ve asked myself about shows like CSI is that would the show be as popular as it is if a real person had to die each week for there to be a new episode?  We’ve become complacent with acts of violence in our fiction because we are necessarily distanced through the act of reading.  We’re just observers, so we have no culpability in what happens… so if this week’s episode of Law and Order features a woman being raped, we feel perfectly fine treating her rape as our entertainment.  It’s not like we are the ones victimizing the woman on the show, right?

Games are able to bridge the distance between the action on screen (or on paper) and the reader.   I have to assume that the rest of Modern Warfare 2 hinges on this terrorist event – perhaps the SAS or the USMC has to track down the mastermind who enacted this terrorist plot and assassinate him.  But there has to be an act of terrorism before you can go kill terrorists.  It’s a part of the fiction that we usually take for granted and this scene forces you to acknowledge that something horrible has happened in order for you to start having “fun”.

That’s the genius of this scene.  It’s able to capture the sickening nature of terrorism and make you feel horrified at the same time.  While you wouldn’t blink an eye at killing random Arabs or Russians (as you did in the first game), there is a moment of hesitation when you have to kill Mary Sue and countless other unarmed civilians.

In his article “See No Evil” for the Escapist, Emanuel Maiberg muses that “the one [assumption about games set in World War 2] that irks me most is the representation of the Germans as evil without ever mentioning the Holocaust”.  And it’s true.  We’ve killed countless Nazis in the forests of Bastogne, on the beaches of Normandy and on the streets of Stalingrad but not one single World War 2 shooter has ever had a level that takes place in Auschwitz (or in the case of games set in the Pacific campaign, Nanking). 

We seem to forget that there is a real human cost in war and Modern Warfare 2 tries to rectify that problem.  You need evil for there to be good.  It’s an inescapable fact of life.  Without the rapist, Law and Order‘s Mariska Hargitay wouldn’t have a case to solve and without your act of terrorism in Modern Warfare 2, you wouldn’t have a war to fight.

My only concern with this scene is that Activision PR has since confirmed that this scene is completely optional and can be skipped.  I think everyone should be forced to play this scene at least once – just as you are forced to watch people die in concentration camps before you are able to feel “good” about Oskar Schindler saving his Jews in Schindler’s List.  

For what it’s worth though, I now have even more respect for the people at Infinity Ward.  During the summer, we saw Atomic Games fail at trying to create a “realistic” game about the battle of Fallujah.  They just didn’t have the track record to make a controversial game and after the backlash from the public and the press, the project fell apart and the company is on life support. 

Infinity Ward could have gotten away with making a generic war game that featured lots of pretty explosions and zero controversy.  There’s nothing wrong with that and Michael Bay has gotten rich doing just that.  Instead, they chose to push boundaries and to test the limits of what we as gamers find “acceptable” in our games. 

A cynic might suggest that they are simply courting controversy in order to get coverage.  I, on the other hand, sincerely believe that they are taking responsibility as one of the biggest game developers in the world to push the medium forward. People who argue that games are unimportant, ephemeral distractions for children won’t be able to make that claim any more.

And that’s a good thing for all of us.