You know, I spend a lot of hours twisting myself into little knots to try and find nuanced takes for this site. I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but I really do try.
I don’t have to try when it comes to Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
For years we’ve watched Activision publish games that try their fucking hardest to recontextualize the US military and its wars. We watched them silently through the many, many iterations and retellings of the “safe” war, World War II. We watched with a little less nostalgic glee and a little more tension and discomfort – but just as much silence – as they retold the American story of “modern warfare.” And we even let them do a sci-fi fantasy space shooter.
Last year, when the publisher released Modern Warfare, a reimagining of the 2007 PS3/XB360 game of the same name, they swore up and down that the game had zero politics in it, no sir no ma’am, no politics to be found here. Jacob Geller proves this claim to be bullshit in my favorite essay of his from last year. But we all knew the claim was bullshit because it was a game where you play soldiers and spies from two of the countries with the largest locks on power in the world. It was just easier to ignore it when they came out with their battle royale nonsense.
But with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Activision and Infinity Ward are absolutely getting into politics, and their rightward bent was absolutely fucking predictable.
Call of Duty might be “beautifully”-laid-out propaganda in the style of Leni Riefenstahl but there’s no more denying that it’s propaganda. I don’t need to “wait and see” how this fucking video game twists Iran-Contra, the invasion of fucking Grenada, the funding of counterinsurgents in Afghanistan that directly led to 9/11 or the bombing of Libya in 1986. I especially don’t need to “wait and see” how this game is going to portray Ronald Fucking Reagan as some kind of progressive when he correctly refers to our character with their “classified” nonbinary pronouns.
Ronald Reagan condemned millions to die in the motherfucking AIDS crisis. He doesn’t get to be the Queer Ally In The Right Wing Shoosty Mans Video Game.
This game can get fucked well in advance of its release. I’d play Cyberpunk 2077 before I played this shit.
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