It will cost you a piece of yourself. It will cost nothing compared to everything you will save.
Gen. Shepherd’s briefing before “No Russian,” the airport massacre level, in Modern Warfare 2
The day after I finished the Modern Warfare 2 campaign, I went to move my car and ended up driving around Baltimore, listening to the entirety of President Obama’s eulogy at the Fort Hood memorial service. The most moving part came towards the end, when he named each victim and read short biographical anecdotes about them—their interests, their goals, their commitments. There is no spectacle, within the collective tragedy, when we zoom into the scene—only the value, honor, and decency of the individual remains, which are values Quintin Smith feels the __Call of Duty__ series abandoned with the Modern Warfare iteration. He writes, “I’m just very aware right now that the first Call of Duty promised an emotional depth to this series, and if all sight of that wasn’t lost when they chose to set footage of men dying to an Eminem single, it currently seems very distant.”
The series has always walked the line between war porn and tribute; and the series has marginally stuck to the latter. By making death vicious and sudden, Infinity Ward made players aware of what it meant to be a soldier on the field. The early iterations used set pieces such as Stalingrad or The Battle for Hill 400 to show you the improbability of survival—one minute you’re sniping a Nazi rush to take the hill, next minute you’re on the ground, your vision fading. The entirety of the experience “had the very important side effect of popping the top of your head off and making you realize that, holy s***, men actually did this.”. Therein lay the soul of the game—in the game’s ability to create an immersion and connection between the player and history on a visceral scale.
But running through the entire series and, most prominently in the Modern Warfare iteration, is a tendency to trivialize the cost of war by reducing it to spectacle. And when you reduce reality in such a way, you make it unreal. And I believe that anything that makes human pain and suffering unreal is poisonous.
The fun of the first Modern Warfare came from it being, as Jeff Cannata said it, “a Badass simulator.” Where death is your agent in the earlier games, you are now the agent of death. Human and global suffering is your entertainment. The first-person perspective complicates that issue even more. Reducing historical and global conflicts and misery so that they’re always about the player means ignoring the wider implications of the presented scenarios. When you die after a nuclear blast in Modern Warfare 1, it’s all about your death, while the annihilation of an entire city remains in the background.
The “No Russian” mission calls up similar problems. The day of the eulogy also being the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the level reminded me of this particular passage in Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut visits his World War II buddy to do research for a book about the Dresden firebombing, and to reminisce about their POW experience when their German captors made them dispose the corpses of German civilians after the attack. While they talk, the friend’s wife accuses Vonnegut of trying to write a book that sensationalizes war:
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!”
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
“I—I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
However, I don’t think either the first or second Modern Warfare are entirely about distorting the realities of war. In a game committed to spectacle, the “No Russian” mission is one of the most honest and raw displays of forced witness—it is the moment where I’m no longer the player to the game, but a person aware of the suffering of others. We are, as citizens of the world, culpable by ignoring suffering or by our ignorance of it. The game has shown me the bodies; and the game has taken me beyond the news footage of the airport’s exterior with casualty numbers scrolling at the bottom of the television. There are no numbers here—there are only people, as real as the reaction the game draws from every player.
The two iterations have consistently had such moments of honesty and emotional authenticity, including the first-person nuclear death in Modern Warfare 1. The scene acknowledges that people see in each other’s death only their own—we are selfish, and the only way we accept the impact and meaning of death is if it happens to us. And the game’s perspective allows this to happen. When I’m a gunner riding through the streets of an Afghan city during the beginning of an insurgent attack—the bullets ricocheting off the vehicles, the sound of bullets going past my ears, and the location of the shooters hidden by the urban sprawl—I blindly spray my mini-gun into the neighborhood, not in cold blood or complete negligence, but because I want to survive. No news story, no witness account can ever make me simultaneously empathize with a soldier’s experience and grieve for the innocent lives caught in the fight on such a personal, visceral, and interactive scale.
Both games, as much as they create and contribute to some players’ glib perceptions of war, are also reflections on how America’s perception of war has changed. If Modern Warfare 1 was the first post 9-11 we’ll-put-a-boot-up-your-ass huzzah then Modern Warfare 2, with its labyrinthine (and borderline incomprehensible) plot of military brass betrayal, is the first post post-9-11 game of our disillusionment and fatigue. Where can we go and what can we learn, as citizens of the world and as players, from the bodies piled up on the ground?
One story that stuck with me after the Fort Hood eulogy was the story of the woman who didn’t realize she was shot in the back, because she had been so committed to dragging the injured to safety. After hearing the story, and the eulogy, I was compelled to play “No Russian” again—the Fort Hood massacre changed the context of the level from that of a disturbing simulation to an inadvertent and urgent meditation on a real life tragedy. The elevator door opened, and Makarov’s men opened fire on the first group of civilians waiting at a security line. When I made it up the stairs I noticed for the first time, amidst the panic and gunfire, a man in a maroon sweater dragging an injured man to safety. Oblivious of the approaching shooters, I watched as one of the shooters gunned them down. I, immediately, turned to my right and saw another surprise in the bookstore—a man crouched by the registry tending to a dying victim, despite one of Makarov’s men walking up to gun them down. I felt completely powerless as I watched their murder. Yet, having seen those moments of courage, I realized the massacre itself no longer dictated the mission. Now, only those acts of courage dictated my perception and memory of both massacres.
Looking to acts of courage and goodness as a way to cope with our sorrow has become a tired platitude. But I have to admit it’s a platitude I find hope and comfort in. Sorrow is a selfish and narcissistic trick of relief that it wasn’t you who died. What we feel can never compare to the real impact of the individual loss, because that loss is removed from us through words and images. What gives me hope is that any one of us has the capacity to act as selflessly as these people, both real and unreal.
There is courage in the scripted code. That is what I choose to see.
