I’ve been historically pretty up-front about my disdain for Call of Duty. I’ve mentioned it multiple times directly as a game series that is emblematic of the industry’s wider problems, and I even wrote a whole post about how the upcoming release in the franchise (at time of writing) could get fucked. It is published by a company now most widely-known for its history of horrendous workplace abuses at every level of management, including CEO Bobby Kotick. It perpetuates some of the worst video game stereotypes, serves as glorified US military propaganda, and upholds a community built entirely on toxicity. I genuinely believe that the series’s legacy is one of the many dark stains on this industry and the so-called gaming community at large.
So the sensible follow-up question to this, keeping the title of this piece in mind, is: “well then why the fuck did you play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009), Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 (2011) and Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019)?” There are a couple reasons for this.
First, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is coming out in late October, and I’ve already committed to writing about it from an anarchist perspective. I want my writing on the game to be coherent and grounded in experience, not mere knee-jerk reaction, and so I felt it was necessary to at least play the game’s predecessor.
Second, over the past year I’ve been experimenting with more academically-tinged writing where I can, and for the purposes of really truly reckoning with Call of Duty‘s influence over time and through each individual game, I felt it was necessary for me to actually play the games themselves – not just watch a let’s-play, not just read about them, not just pop off on vibes alone. We might call this a use of the “participant-observation” method of qualitative research, but uh, I don’t think it’s really that deep. I’m also reading Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11 by Matthew Thomas Payne, and he does do some participant-observation of the series (but only the original series, and not the reboot).
Finally, did you know that Activision won a lawsuit against a company who claimed Call of Duty stole IP from them? Because the company didn’t actually play the game enough to be able to describe what IP was stolen? That’s pretty wild. I feel like I should at the barest of possible minimums do a better job at researching what I’m critiquing than a company trying to get money out of Activision and failing because they couldn’t be fucked to actually play the video game they claim stole from them. Let it never be said that No Escape has no standards; we have one standard.
So now that I’ve done this, what did I learn? What insights have I gained? What critical diamond have I uncovered by playing four video games in a row from the same series?
Mostly I was shocked to discover how fucking goofy CoD Modern Warfare was as a series – and is, I guess. Not tonally — every second of every game took itself lethally seriously — but in both idea and execution, every game was just a cartoon of what being a soldier is ostensibly like. Everyone was spewing these one-liners about duty and honor and brotherhood-in-arms constantly, every mission felt like it was being copy-pasted out of the same slender scenario book, and by the time I got to fuckin’ Modern Warfare 3 it was clear the devs were more focused on the multiplayer component. The infamous mission “No Russian,” where you play a CIA agent who participates in a terrorist massacre at an airport near Moscow, was less shocking and more cringey, like I could feel the writers holding a neon sign over the entire thing and going “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE APPALLED HERE.” And the same thing applies to every other moment where the operative word is shock: the nuclear attack in the first game, the chemical weapons attack in Paris and the final moment in the game in Modern Warfare 3, the Piccadilly Circus bombing in the remake — all moments where I could feel the intentional manipulation of my emotions in favor of whatever mass shooting I was supposed to do next.
Is the game US/western military propaganda? Broadly speaking, yes? But again it feels like a fucking cartoon. It’s like the Axis Powers Hetalia of first-person shooters. I came away with a better understanding of why the Proud Boys and Patriot Front shitheads cosplay as Tier 1 Operators than I did of how games interpellate players into hegemonic ideologies (though maybe these two things are the same).
Call of Duty is one of the original military-themed first-person shooters, part of the generation directly after Wolfenstein, and as such it is a very refined game, even in these older titles. The shooting felt like shooting in video games feels, the platonic ideal of the first-person shooter, so of course I didn’t have a terrible time playing these games, even as I was cringing at the overused military jargon and slang, even as I thought to myself how fucked up it was that the game was once again having me go into a place that is at best tangentially-related to the main story just so the devs could design some impoverished slums for my character to run-and-gun through, even as I watched the story narrow in scope from a broader international military conflict and everything that entailed to one guy with a bad handlebar mustache’s vendetta against another guy, even as I thought to myself I’d much rather be playing Destiny 2, at least there’s magic bullshit there to balance out the militarism.
As long as these games are being made video games as a medium will never move on. These games will never stop being made as long as capitalism exists and the state is there to defend it.
These aren’t all the things I learned while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but I’ve also learned not to kiss and tell with everything I know.
