I spend so much time reading and posting online, that you'd think I would find time to update a blog regularly. Anyway, I said some stuff about Call of Duty to some people criticizing it (and FPS games in general) on Sociological Images, so what the heck, post it here in lieue of something else I have gotten worked up over lately.
Call of Duty 2, 4, and MW2 are all quite decent games as far as storytelling goes. The Modern Warfare games are Tom Clancy-ish and therefore not particularly deep, but they get the job done. In MW2, the mission immediately following the controversial airport mission – where you play a deep-cover CIA operative gunning down civilians as a member of a Russian nationalist terrorist group (yeah, I know) – is set in Arlington, VA and you end up moving through suburbia before defending your command post in a TGI Friday’s from Russian infantry who have set up positions within a neighboring gas station and Taco Bell. I felt, and still feel, that this mission (which leads to fighting set in the DC Mall area) is brilliant largely because it brings the combat to American soil.
We shouldn’t rail against the game industry for setting everything in a generic Middle Eastern nation and at the same time criticize one game for trying to remind players of the horrors of violence and war by actually putting them in the shoes of terrorists and making the violence more ‘real’ by putting it into a more familiar context. Not to mention the fact that the United States does not come off very well at all from its portrayal in MW2, when it’s revealed late in the game that the horrific terrorist attack that sparked WW3 was conceived of and executed by elements of the United States military.
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