Much hay has been made over the supposed apolitical nature of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise, with a bit of this hay coming directly from its developers’ mouths. Back in 2019, when the first rebooted Modern Warfare title came out, two top Infinity Ward devs looked a GameInformer reporter in the eye and said, “I don’t think it’s a political game.” You can hear the incredulousness in the reporter’s short reply: “Really?”
As Modern Warfare II muddles its way through critical circles, a lot of the writing about the game has returned to this question: is CoD MW as a franchise actually apolitical? Personally, I think it’s spent so long steeped in its own confused ideological stinkspace that it now innately generates a kind of toxic centrism. Ed Smith, writing at Polygon, Unwinnable and Bullet Points, has been weaving together a general theory that suggests a kind of truth or reality nullification field coming from the franchise. Smith’s Bullet Points colleague Reid McCarter has been going in – both at Bullet Points and GameInformer – on the game’s narrative messiness clashing with its just-so need to depict “modern warfare” as clean and surgical.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an anarchist (or any leftist, for that matter) looks at a piece of media or a current event and without a second thought reduces everything about it down to “this is why Individualism Is Bad.™” Well, far be it from me to disappoint on the delivery, but fuck me, I’ve played so much Call of Duty: Modern Warfare at this point, and I am compelled to genuinely conclude: part of the problem with the reboot series is that it is individualist as fuck. I don’t know if that creates the toxic centrism field or is actually generated by it, but it’s definitely a contributing factor.
First, a little compare-and-contrast. In the original MW trilogy, the big spectacle was essentially World War III between Russia and the West. It started out as a proxy war in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country and then pretty quickly refocused as “what if the Cold War went hot?” There were lots of big operatic battles between conventional armies. Interspersed among all of that was the individual narratives of Task Force 141, alternating between John “Soap” McTavish and John Price. We’d get the missions where we’d be sneaking around as the pair of SAS special operators, and we’d gain some insight into why they, personally, are fighting. Price’s dogged pursuit of Al-Asad, Zakhaev, Shepherd and finally Makarov ultimately define the series. It makes war simplistic, reinforcing a popular narrative at the time that if we could only just nab these few specific bad guys, we could end hostilities (or at the very least rapidly de-escalate them). Think the Most Wanted Iraqi deck of playing cards from the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. War-as-manhunt evolving into war-as-personal-vendetta.
The rebooted MW duology trades in the cartoonish, operatic narratives of its predecessors in favor of something even more goofy: basically every plot thread taking the form of Price’s personal vendettas. Every single thing is driven by some kind of individuating factor: the need to “take the gloves off” and “do what needs to be done;” the need to enact revenge for the death of an idolized comrade; the desire to personally liberate one’s homeland from an oppressive leader; the desire to build a relationship; the need to hide one’s personal culpability in a mistake that becomes a major international incident; the desire for more power and wealth. When everything in the narrative is not merely informed but completely overwhelmed by the personal, it begins to make sense why Jacob Minkoff and Taylor Kurosaki could sit in front of a reporter and say, straight-facedly, “I don’t think this is a political game.”
In order to maintain some kind of narrative cohesion, the modern Modern Warfare franchise has had to take on some elements of reality. Of course Kyle Garrick and John Price’s posturing as guys who “take the gloves off” and “get dirty while the world stays clean” traces directly back to David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine. Of course Farah Karim and the Urzik Liberation Force are modeled off the YPG and Rojava conflict. Of course Al-Qatala is ISIS, General Ghorbrani is Major General Soleimani, and the US-caused Highway of Death from the first Gulf War is Russian-caused in Urzikstan. Of course of course of course.
But none of it is political. Infinity Ward isn’t taking a side here, they swear. They just want to show players the passions that erupt in the fog of war. I guess.
The wildest shit that hit me as I was playing the first Modern Warfare was a kill screen I got in the middle of one of the missions, describing Al-Qatala and its purpose, its mission statement, its raison d’être, as it were. “Al-Qatala is a group of radical criminal anarchists who operate without regard for nation of origin or religion,” the screen said. What a doozy. Radical criminal anarchists! Operating without regard for nation or religion! That changes everything.
Right-wing religious fundamentalism, whether it is Christian, Jewish, Muslim or an expression of any other religion, places a fascist bent on faith. When a group like ISIS says they want to establish an “Islamic State,” it’s clear that they mean they want to create an authoritarian dictatorship with Muslim characteristics, just like when Marjorie Taylor-Greene comes out and declares herself to be a Christian nationalist who thinks the United States belongs to the Christian god, it most probably means she wants to establish a Christian theocracy. These are expressly political desires and motivations. And historically, this confluence of religion and politics – the desire to build a nation-state with religious tenets as its ironclad legal backbone – has borne an incredible amount of violence and conflict on a global scale over centuries. The War on Terrorism painted such a thin veneer of secularism over this dynamic that it’s not really worth mentioning, but we should linger on its results: increased surveillance, persecution and entrapment, especially of Muslim and broadly middle-eastern individuals and communities; a steady rise of “traditionalist” right-wing (including explicitly fascist) ideologies throughout the “west;” increased antisemitism across the board; tightening border policies in North America and Europe leading to worse so-called “migrant crises” and refugee disasters. To fight fascists of any sort, we mustn’t in the process become fascists ourselves. So of course that’s exactly what happened.
Understandably, this whole subject is maybe a bit touchy for a studio like Infinity Ward. No politics, remember? They don’t want to be accused of having a viewpoint on any of the things they portray, so even if the signifiers remain, we gotta rub all the serial numbers off them: make up a whole new country, remove any mention of specific groups’ politics (like lmao yo Infinity Ward, tell me what the YPG stands for ideologically real quick), get those hyper-individualist personal vendettas going, throw in some fun explosions, and hope nobody notices the seams.
“Radical criminal anarchists,” huh?
Al-Qatala is supposed to be the stand-in for ISIS, let’s be clear. But this reframing of them as anarchists is hilarious to me, because rather than establish them as an “apolitical” faction, Infinity Ward ends up Sweet-Bro-and-Hella-Jeffing its own ass down a flight of stairs as a cutout of Mikhail Bakunin’s head yells after them: “I fuckin warned you about states, bro! I told you!”
What Infinity Ward falls back into is probably its most poignantly-expressed truth: the aim of the state is to perpetuate itself. War is politics through other means. Bonnano: “All States, by the simple fact of their existence, are instruments of war.” We might frame a threat to the state as a threat to freedom, and saying so might even have a grain of truth to it: religious fascism, for example, is a danger to people’s freedom, i.e., their ability to live how they want to live. But whether a state is fascist in nature or an ostensible democratic republic, it must continue on. It must eliminate all threats to its status quo, no matter how nonsensical the conflict gets.
While Al-Qatala stands in for ISIS, and is alternately labeled anarchist, we never get a true read on their politics, because again, everything is flattened and individualized. Everyone’s motivations, “bad guy” or “good guy,” boil down to “this thing happened to me specifically and that’s why I fight.” What do they do besides operate as a foil to the Urzik Liberation Force? Are they seen as an occupying force in their community, or are they integrated within it? Do they practice mutual aid and community organization, or do they coerce their neighbors to do their bidding? Their name translates roughly to “The Killers.” Is that all they are, or what?
Of course the franchise has no answers. It thought it dodged the question altogether. Is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II apolitical? Fuck if it knows. Shut up, enjoy the explosions, buy a shitload of Little Caesar’s and Mountain Dew to get double XP for Warzone, and uh, don’t look too closely at the systems of domination in the background.