Games have never really been seen as advertisements for pacifism. It’s a big call, we know, but true. In fact, the opposite is almost always the case. You’ve got your so-called ‘murder simulations’, you’ve got your US Army-funded and barely concealed recruitment game America’s Army, and you’ve got your massacre-chasing commentators decrying videogame violence at every turn. So when a popular game comes along that sets the player as both a British SAS operative and an American UMSC soldier in an 'anonymous' middle-eastern country (Iraq or Iran, depending on which military fantasy you feel most drawn to), it’s easy to write it off as another brainless shot at glorifying war.
The game, of course, is the wildly popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And let’s not beat around the bush - a title like that indicates a game akin to impaling oneself on a flagpole and singing a medley of Hail to the Chief and Rule Britannia while knitting your own entrails into the stars and stripes. The fact that it is an installment in a series that up until now has been solely set in the Second World War would also indicate an attempt at paralleling our current War on Terror (if we’re still using that phrase) and the Second World War - a war so popularly morally acceptable that it was coined ‘the Good War’ by historian Studs Terkel.
The reviews reflected this. “Unless you are an extremist whack-job, chances are you have an inherent hate for terrorists,” ran Gametrailers.com. Playing the game, it is easy to see how that kind of sentiment could be raised. But everything can be viewed in more than one way, including - perhaps even especially - videogames. In fact, to write the game off as anti-Middle-Eastern, pro-Western, even pro-war is a mistake. If ever there was such a thing as an anti-war shooter (which admittedly is a bit of an contradiction in terms), here it is.
Creepy cool or just plain creepy?
The game, as the name suggests, is a portrait of modern warfare, and not a pleasant one. This is a world of sanitized, abstract violence where killing someone means gazing down your sights at a figure small enough to be an ant and pulling the trigger. Contrasted against this is the very real, very frightening world of muscle men in balaclavas touting kalashnikovs in urban back-alleys. Much has been made of the cinematic qualities of the game, but little of its meaning. Indeed, the opening credits and the prologue of the game present a master class in contrast: you are the hostage of a terrorist group, moved through an unstable city seemingly at war with itself, to the place of your inevitable execution. One level later you are then a standard-issue SAS recruit, reporting for basic training at a distant ivory tower, preparing to right the wrongs of the world which we have just seen.
Is it a coincidence that the game came out in 2007, when in January that year an extensive BBC poll found that 73% of the global population disapproves of the war in Iraq? Call of Duty 4 implements a modern lexicon of mentally hard-wired images of middle-eastern warfare to great, and challenging effect. Executions are videotaped, unarmed hostages are tortured, night-vision sights gun down distant men. But there are little twists on all these familiar images. You are the executed, gazing down the lens of the camera. You are complicit in the execution of a hostage. The normally silent images of night-vision lit explosions are set to the startlingly gung-ho cheers and whoops of a helicopter pilot.
Do you really want to be here?
The game’s main antagonist, Imran Zakhaev, makes an impassioned plea, seemingly for the player to see things his way: “Our so-called leaders … destroyed our culture, our economies, our honour. Just as they laid waste to our countries, we shall lay waste to theirs.” This is not terrorism for terrorism’s sake, or because they ‘hate our way of life’. You may not agree with his conclusion to answer violence with violence, but you certainly don’t have to be an “extremist whack-job” to sympathise with his anger. This is revenge for perceived misdeeds. As one supporting British character notes of Chernobyl, “50,000 people used to live here. Now it’s a ghost town.”
The game even periodically presents quotes on the subject of war and violence (usually when you fail in the single player). Among them are Yassar Arafat: “Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a terrorist.” Bertrand Russel: “War does not determine who is right - only who is left.” Erasmus: “War is delightful to those who have not yet experienced it.” And what is Call of Duty 4 but an experience - and therefore, a potential deterrence - of war? Whatever Call of Duty 4 may be, it is certainly not an advertisement for actually being in the situations it places the player. The atmosphere is tense at the best of times. Nowhere is safe on the battlefield as bullets sing through even the densest wall. Even the best player must die multiple times - what of the real life soldier?
Furthermore, the main military characters - your comrades, your lifeline in the field - are plainly psychopathic. Captain Price is clearly and seriously damaged from his time in the military. Gaz is content to silently carry out the most dangerous and bloody orders Price can deal out. These characters do not belong in the normal world. You would not invite them home to meet your parents. Indeed, outside of the battlefield you probably wouldn’t see them anywhere, save perhaps the local bar, threatening the weakest-looking patron, or on a post-traumatic stress councilor's couch.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
And then there’s the bomb. If nothing else in the game can convince you that Call of Duty 4 is not your average war-loving shooter and actually has something to say, consider the bomb. At one point in the game, the player is placed in the shoes of a dying character after the detonation of a nuclear device. The player is forced to wrestle with the controls for several minutes while the unfortunate character attempts to move like a regular human being - their limbs and skin presumably fused together like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After several painful minutes, the character makes it out into the desolate Nuclear Winter and immediately dies.
This is experience so we don’t have to. This, the game says, is what the world should never come to. This is virtual, precautionary, and - hopefully - preventative experience. If not completely anti-war (admittedly, the success of the multiplayer relies on consequence-free violence), then it is at least wholly anti-nuclear war. There are no positives that can be read into the in-game detonation. By throwing out conventional controls and videogame storytelling, the game emphasises just how important it is that we never face the bomb in reality.
And here’s the revelation: it doesn’t matter that Call of Duty 4 has and probably will continue to be regarded as simply a bit of the old ultraviolence. As theorist Stuart Hall rightly pointed out in the 1970s, cultural meaning - such as that found in a videogame - does not function “like a tap on the kneecap.” It does not produce the same reaction in any two people. There are a myriad of possibilities of meaning, just as there are a myriad of possibilities for gamer experience. Indeed, as far back as 1580, Michel de Montaigne argued:
A heedy reader shall often discover in other men’s compositions perfections far different from the writer’s meaning, and such as haply he never dreamed of, and illustrateth them with richer senses and more excellent constructions.
So you’ll have to excuse us for going against the grain here. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - first-person shooter, war simulator, and likely anti-war shooter.
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